Alister McGrath: The Resurrection: a Bridge Between Two Worlds

From Christianity Today online.

Those good faithful Christian people taught me that the Resurrection enabled believers to do more than think. It helped them to cope with the sorrows, ambiguity, and pain of life. They hadn’t read Pannenberg. But they had immersed themselves in the New Testament and absorbed its fundamental message of hope. They knew that, even though they walked through the valley of the shadow of death, God was with them. So they kept walking through the wilderness of this world, knowing God was by their side. They knew that Christ’s resurrection was the firm foundation for their hope that all who trusted in him would finally rise with him and be with him in the New Jerusalem. So they faced suffering with dignity and serenity, knowing that those who suffer with Christ will be glorified with him.

Read it all.

Anglican Curmudgeon: House of Bishops Votes for Liturgical Anarchy

As most of you who pay attention to this kind of stuff probably already know, the Episcopal Church has voted to ratify the use of same-sex blessing rites. It is utterly heart-breaking and gut-wrenching to watch. A.S. Haley, aka The Anglican Curmudgeon, offers a succinct analysis of what TEC has done.

From the Curmudgeon’s blog:

And now to the important question: Why have our Bishops, the “keepers of our faith,” voted for liturgical anarchy?

Aye, and there’s the rub. Consider the following simple exercise in mathematics. (Or skip to the bottom line, if you don’t like math.)

As of 2011, there are 311.6 million people in the United States (Google it). Of these, 75.2%, or just about 234.3 million, are 18 years or older.

The latest and best estimate, based on five separate studies, is that there are just about 4 million adults in the United States who identify themselves as gay or lesbian. That number represents 1.7% of the adult population of 234.3 million.

According to the latest ECUSA statistics (2010), an average of just 657,831 attended Episcopal churches on Sunday. (That number will be some 40-50,000 less by now, but use it anyway, even though it also includes young persons under 18.)

If the percentage of gays and lesbians going to ECUSA Sunday services matches their percentage in the adult U.S. population, then there would be about 11,230 of them in church on Sundays. Of that number, available statistics show that approximately half are in some kind of relationship that has existed for more than four years, but only fifteen percent have been in relationships of twelve years or longer.

Say, of those longer-term, committed relationships, that every one of them who were both church-going Episcopalians wanted to have their unions “blessed” in a church ceremony. That’s 1,684 committed Episcopalians, or 842 potential pairs that are candidates for Episcopal blessings.

Eight hundred and forty-two couples. And for them, our Bishops sacrificed our Church’s traditions, its Book of Common Prayer, and its very integrity.

Maybe they did it for non-Episcopalian gay couples, too, in the forlorn belief that it would add to the number of Episcopalians. So call it 2,000 — call it 3,000; it does not matter. The number is minuscule, any way you slice it. The Church is losing ten times that many members every year.

And for them, our Bishops decided to lead our Church over the cliff, and let the rest of us be hanged.

Now do you see what they did today?

Read it all.

Professor Rob Gagnon: Time for a Change of Leadership at Exodus?

Be forewarned. This is not for the hurried reader. The body of Dr. Gagnon’s paper is 25 pages long. He does not do anything half-heartedly and that is one of the reasons I admire him so much as a scholar. Dr. Gagnon does not suffer fools lightly precisely because he has taken the time to do the hard exegetical work and he expects those who disagree with him to do likewise. Sadly most do not, and many do not to the point of embarrassment.

But if you care at all about your relationship with God in Christ–not to mention the fate of those who are not in Christ, surely the most important concern  of all!–and how far astray our culture has gotten from understanding the basic Christian tenets of grace, repentance, and sanctification, please do grab a cup of coffee, a pen and paper to write down questions/challenges, and read on.

Having read most of Professor Gagnon’s stuff over the years, I have noticed a change in the tone of his writing. He is still an exquisite, brilliant, and thorough scholar, thanks be to God! But in this piece he is becoming more and more a pastor in what he has to say, never a bad thing in my opinion. Make no mistake. Dr. Gagnon has some hard, hard things to say and for us to hear. And any self-professed Christian will necessarily be challenged by what he says. Why? Because Dr. Gagnon speaks the truth in love.

The problem with the incestuous man was that the grace of God, which not only brought forgiveness of sins but also empowered a transformed life, had become “empty” (Gk. ken?) in him: “in vain, ineffective, for nothing, wasted.” Why? His life was given over to an egregious form of sexual immorality: incest (here of an adult- consensual sort). This was all the evidence that Paul needed to deduce an absence of a sufficiently transformed life and a severely truncated (or possibly non-existent) faith. There was now a real danger that the grace poured into the incestuous man’s life was becoming “empty, for nothing, in vain.”

The problem with the incestuous man was that the grace of God, which not only brought forgiveness of sins but also empowered a transformed life, had become “empty” (Gk. ken?) in him: “in vain, ineffective, for nothing, wasted.” Why? His life was given over to an egregious form of sexual immorality: incest (here of an adult- consensual sort). This was all the evidence that Paul needed to deduce an absence of a sufficiently transformed life and a severely truncated (or possibly non-existent) faith. There was now a real danger that the grace poured into the incestuous man’s life was becoming “empty, for nothing, in vain.”

So please do read it all and listen if you have ears to hear.

From the Archives: Putting on Jesus’ Yoke

Fr. Kevin is on vacation today (isn’t he always?). Sermon delivered on Sunday, July 3, 2011 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Zechariah 9.9-12; Psalm 145.8-15; Romans 7.12-25a; Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last week we looked at an early story in the biblical account of God’s rescue plan for his broken and fallen people and creation. In the story of Abraham’s testing, we saw that not only did Abraham pass the test, but so did God. God provided an extreme opportunity for Abraham to trust God and we saw that God did indeed demonstrate his trustworthiness by staying Abraham’s hand right before he was ready to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.

Today, I want to look briefly at another component of the story of God’s unfolding rescue plan. It’s a significant component and critical if we want to understand God’s overall plan. Like the testing of Abraham it requires our faith and trust in God’s great love and mercy toward us. It is the account of how God has rescued us from the clutches of the sin that enslaves us and will ultimately destroy us without God’s gracious intervention on our behalf in Jesus.

In today’s Epistle lesson, the apostle Paul lays out a pretty nasty picture of the human condition and I suspect everyone in this room can relate to what Paul is saying. Has anybody besides me ever gotten extremely frustrated when you end up having to confess the same sins over and over to God? Have you ever resolved to make improvements in your life and conduct only to find yourself falling back into old and unwanted patterns? If you are like me, you may look at your repeated failures and start to wonder if you really do love God. I mean after all, if we really love God as we profess, why do we keep falling back into our old patterns of disobedience? Why do we continue to do the bad when we really want to do good? And what is all this stuff about God’s law actually exposing the problem of human sin and the evil it causes to be worse than we ever imagined? If we care at all about our relationship with God, about our present standing and future destiny with him, and if we care at all about being a faithful witness for Jesus, this is more than a little worrisome. In fact, it can make us fall into despair and just plain wear us out. It seems that Paul has just delivered a devastating critique of the human condition that leaves us perplexed and weighed down without offering us any real solutions.

But it is precisely when we fall into this state of consternation and despair that we need to pay closer attention to what Paul is really telling us because he is letting us in on the essential strategy of God’s rescue plan that reaches its climax in Jesus Christ. We’ll have to wait until we get into Romans 8 to look at this more fully but for now it will help us to look carefully at what Paul is really saying about the human condition and how God plans to deal with sin and evil.

There have been oceans of ink spilled over who this miserable “I” is in today’s passage from Romans. Was Paul really talking about himself? If so, it isn’t exactly a resounding endorsement of his apostleship. How can anybody as badly flawed as Paul possibly be an apostle of Christ? Or was Paul talking about his pre-Christian experience? I don’t have time (and you likely don’t have the patience for me) to unpack all the arguments. Suffice it to say here that I am persuaded that Paul is really talking about Israel when he is talking about the miserable “I”.

Beginning in Romans 4, Paul has talked about how God’s rescue plan has unfolded and reached its climax in Jesus. In today’s lesson it is critical for us to hear what Paul is and is not saying about the human condition and the root problem of sin, and how God deals with it. Paul is not blaming Israel for being part of the problem. Neither is he is blaming the Torah, God’s Law given to his people Israel. He is blaming the sin that is in us. As Adam and Eve discovered when they rebelled against God in the garden and as every one of us have discovered ever since, it is sin that is the problem, not human beings. It is sin that has spoiled God’s good creation. It is sin that makes us want to put ourselves over God (or at least make ourselves equal to God), and it is sin that has caused our terrible alienation from God and threatens to land us in permanent exile from him if something radical is not done about it. And of course when we find ourselves exiled from the Source and Author of all life we can expect nothing but death.

The issue, then, is what God is doing about sin and the evil it causes so that our relationship with God can be restored and his creation properly healed. Paul hints at the solution  here by telling us that through the Law, God has drawn out sin in his people. In Romans 8 Paul reveals the rest of God’s strategy. God does this so that he can take on the drawn-out sin fully in Israel’s chosen representative, Jesus the Messiah, and condemn sin in the flesh (our fallen nature, not our skin) once and for all. If sin has been condemned fully in Jesus’ death on the cross, there is now no condemnation for those of us in Christ as Paul will argue in Romans 8.

If you really understand and believe this, there inevitably comes a sense of release, relief, and thanksgiving, often immediately. God has condemned the sin in each of us by becoming human, taking it on himself, and bearing the just punishment of his own holy wrath. This means that we no longer have to worry about or fear God’s punishment and wrath because he has already dealt with the problem of sin himself. No wonder Jesus invites us in today’s Gospel lesson to come to him when we are weary and take on his yoke! He has done the impossible for us. He has suffered and died for us so that our exile from God might be ended forever. In doing so, Jesus has shown us the very heart of God. How can we not love and adore a God like this who has infinite mercy and compassion for his fallen and beleaguered creatures?

Yes it’s true that Jesus demands our all if we choose to follow him but that doesn’t make his yoke heavy because in Jesus we see the tender compassion and mercy of God for his sinful and wayward people. We didn’t ask God to act on our behalf to deal decisively with the root problem of sin and the evil it causes. We didn’t even want him to act on our behalf because many of us don’t think that sin’s a problem in the first place. That’s what makes the cross such a scandalous thing for unbelievers because the cross stands as God’s powerful and eternal testimony to the hopelessness and futility of self-help and self-improvement (cf. 1 Corinthians 1.18-26).

But sin is a problem and it’s a deadly one. And here again we remember that God’s symbol of justice is the cross. He has condemned sin and dealt with it himself, taking us off the hook. This doesn’t mean we have a license to sin. Quite the opposite in fact. But our new life in Christ is powered by God’s Spirit and he will help us deal with the sin that remains in all of us. This is a lifelong process and is often quite gradual and messy. In fact, sin will not be entirely done with us until our bodies die (cf. Romans 6.7; 1 Corinthians 15).

But that is not the point that Paul is making here. Neither is that the point of the Gospel. We no longer have to worry about God’s condemnation or wrath when we put our whole hope and trust in Jesus because in Jesus, God has dealt decisively with the evil that has the potential to keep us separated from God and lead to our permanent death. The only possible response to this massive love demonstrated for us in Jesus is to show God our profound thanks by living changed lives, lives animated and powered by God’s Spirit living in us.

This is God’s rescue plan reaching its climax in Jesus. This is what God has done about sin and death for us. This is why we should be eager and willing to put on Christ’s yoke because when we do, we can be sure that there is now no condemnation for those who are in him. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you have done. You can enjoy immediate reconciliation and peace with God because what God has done for you in Jesus.

So what difference does this all make besides the obvious that I’ve just talked about? This wonderful gift with which God has blessed us will immediately turn us outward and help us focus on our relationship with God and other people. We are painfully aware that those who have not given their lives to Jesus remain under God’s wrath and this knowledge more than anything else should be a compelling reason for us to want to share the Good News of Jesus with others. I’m not talking about standing on street corners and warning people that they are going to hell if they don’t repent and believe in Jesus. Neither am I suggesting that we focus on calling people miserable sinners, especially because we are right there amongst them with our own individual baggage of sin. If my experience is representative, people don’t like to be told the obvious and most folks can relate to the miserable “I” that we read about in Paul’s letter today.

Instead we go out in the context of our daily lives and ask the Spirit to help us bring Christ’s love to bear on folks in ways that he can use to get those whom he calls to ask us why we do what we do. Praise and thanksgiving are always best offered through action and when we really understand what God has done for us, it will show in our very being. As folks get to know us (and we them), some will want to know our secret. That is how (and when) we share our faith and our love—by living changed lives, by patiently developing real relationships with folks in our lives, and through loving service to everyone, especially to the least, the lost, and the most undeserving. Our actions in and for Christ will always speak louder than our words.

In sum, we have looked at God’s strategy for dealing with the vexing problem of sin and evil. God has used the Law to draw out sin entirely and expose it so that he can condemn it in himself and bring healing to his fallen creatures and creation. This is Good News because it means there is now no condemnation for those who are in Jesus. And this cannot help but change you if you really understand and believe what God has done for you. This, in turn, will open you up to the power and Presence of God’s Spirit so that you will be equipped to bring the amazing love of Christ to bear on his broken people and world. And that, folks, is a complete package for living your life with meaning, purpose, and power. It also means having a sure and certain hope that our future is secured by this awesome God of ours, which is Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

CT: Os Guinness on What Freedom in the Balance Looks Like

From Christianity Today online.

A fascinating interview with Guinness (Os, not the beer) on his perceptions of the United States and its future. He is spot-on for the most part, especially in his arguments about freedom and the fact that he uses historical analysis and awareness to drive his conclusions.

What role can churches play in sustaining freedom and this American experiment, and not become merely instruments of the government or culture?

Which, of course, we must not become. Back in the 1830s, Tocqueville said religion is the first of the American institutions. At the same time, he said pastors were not involved in politics. They taught the Word, and their people were the salt and the light in society. The heavy politicization of the pulpit in the last 30 years is actually a sign of weakness of the church, not a sign of strength. In other words, we need a revival in the church first, including preaching. We need churches attending to what it is to be the church of Christ, and following the way of Christ, which will include notions like calling. And if that’s healthy, then Christians will be the salt and light in society.

Anything else you want to say to clarify what you’re driving at in the book?

It’s not in the book, but I have a daily passionate sense that we are rather like Augustine in a transition period. He had the privilege and weighty responsibility to live at the end of 800 years of Roman dominance; he gave an analysis and a vision of the church that was a bridge into the Dark Ages. So we’re seeing the division and decline of the West. We’re seeing the relative or maybe absolute decline of American power. And we’re seeing the deep captivity of the church in the Western world. So we’re in an extraordinary moment, and we have to be so faithful in our analysis and faithful in our vision. We may see a revival or a new Dark Ages, or a muddling through somewhere in between. I hope it will be said that our generation was as faithful in this grand transitional moment as Augustine was in his.

Read the whole Q&A.

CT: Do the Church Fathers, the Founding Fathers, and Catholic Saints Really Go Together?

From Christianity Today online.

America’s Roman Catholic bishops just completed the “Fortnight for Freedom,” a two-week period intended to “support a great national campaign of teaching and witness for religious liberty.” As evangelical and Catholic leaders have spent the past year opposing the Obama administration’s so-called contraceptive mandate, the timing, motives, and agenda driving the “Fortnight for Freedom” have prompted widespread commentary. Rather than scrutinizing the Fortnight’s agenda, Protestants could examine deeper questions than what took place on the surface.

It’s important to consider the Fortnight’s placement on the calendar—the significance of the Fortnight’s dates, June 21 to July 4—to understand the nature of religious freedom and the relationship between what to some mixes like oil and water: the Christian tradition and American liberty.

It’s worth considering whether the church fathers and the founding fathers enjoy a deeper conceptual affinity—precisely around the meaning and foundations of religious freedom—than many people (including perhaps the bishops) have noticed.

An interesting article, and one with which I disagree on a few points, most notably that our conscience must be our ultimate arbiter of matters pertaining to church and state. Overall, it is nigh impossible to reconcile orthodox Christianity with its sworn enemy, the Enlightenment. I do agree, however, that religious beliefs should never be forced on anyone. Like any healthy relationship, our relationship with God must be entered and maintained freely.

Read it all and see what you think.

Should Churches Display the American Flag in Their Sanctuaries?

From Christianity Today online.

An interesting discussion from three different perspectives, especially since we have just finished celebrating our nation’s birthday. Notice the underlying but unspoken tension regarding the sacred concept, at least for Americans, of the separation of church and state. None of the authors considers the possibility of theocracy, the idea of God’s rule on earth as in heaven.

Read it all and see what you think.

Faith in the Trenches

Sermon preached on Sunday, Trinity 4B, July 1, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 1.17-27; Psalm 130.1-8; 2 Corinthians 8.7-15; Mark 5.21-42.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I was a young man, and until quite recently, whenever I read stories like the ones from Mark’s gospel lesson, I read them with a mixture of hope and despair, not unlike the main characters in the story. On the one hand, I took real comfort and hope in knowing that Jesus has the power to heal. If he could heal others of what ailed them, like he did in today’s gospel lesson, he could surely heal me and my loved ones if we became seriously ill. But therein was the rub. If Jesus could and did heal some, why didn’t he heal everyone? Surely for every person like the woman with a chronic disease that Jesus healed or who had a dead child that he raised, there were literally countless others whom he could have helped. But Jesus only healed a relatively small portion of folks that we know of, and he only raised three people from the dead—Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7.11-17), and his friend Lazarus (John 11.38-44)—again, at least of which we have a record. What’s up with that? And what was even more troublesome for me, why doesn’t the risen and ascended Lord not heal everyone who calls upon him? He certainly is in the position to do so. But we all know folks for whom we prayed to get healed and it didn’t happen. My daughter lost her faith over this very issue. When my dad got sick, she prayed that grandpa would get better. But grandpa died and she checked out. So this morning I want us to look briefly at the dynamics of faith and what we can do on our end to strengthen it so that we (and our faith) can withstand the trials and temptations of life.

To start with, these questions I’ve just raised, urgent and relevant as they might be to us, completely miss the point Mark is making and if we understand what it is Mark wants us to see, it can help us face the unanswerable questions that surround the mystery of healing with which we all must deal. Ultimately none of us can answer the “why” questions about who gets healed and who doesn’t. The book of Job makes that abundantly clear while reminding us that sickness and healing are not necessarily tied to how good or bad we are. Some bad people apparently escape suffering while some good people are afflicted with terrible diseases and none of us knows why God allows that. But again, that is not what Mark (and almost all of the biblical writers for that matter) want us to think about. Mark is not telling us that Jesus is some kind of a one man medical show and miracle healer, although healing was definitely part of Jesus’ ministry. No, what Mark wants us to see is that in these stories, we see God himself fulfilling his promise to his people to come and live among them as their Messiah to bring about his healing and liberation from sin and evil so that he might eventually do likewise for the entire world.

These mighty acts of healing and raising the dead are meant to be sign-posts on the road for us pointing and guiding us to God’s intended destination for us. Mark and the other gospel writers want us to look at Jesus’ mighty acts of power and see that they point to his death and resurrection, Jesus’ ultimate acts of healing and redemption. As Paul reminds us, on the cross, God has defeated decisively evil and the powers behind it (Colossians 2.15). That victory has not been fully consummated, but evil, sin, and death have been conquered by the blood of the Lamb and we are freed from the grasp of evil by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And of course, in Jesus’ mighty resurrection, God has given us a foretaste of the day when the dimensions of heaven and earth are fused together, the living and the dead in Christ will get new resurrection bodies, and the victory over evil and death will be consummated forever. God’s promised new creation will bring about the complete and ultimate healing of God’s people that we all long for and to which Jesus’ mighty acts of power like we read about in today’s gospel lesson point. To read stories like these in any other way misses the point Mark and the other gospel writers want us to see and can only serve to diminish our faith, hope, trust, and love in the One who can turn our fear into faith and give us what we need to live life with meaning, purpose, and power, irrespective of our physical or emotional state.

But what does that look like? Take David in today’s OT lesson for example. David’s faith did not protect him from all that can go wrong in life. After the Lord afflicted Saul with an evil spirit, Saul spent the rest of his life trying to kill David so that David wouldn’t take his place. But of course we know that Samuel had already anointed David and David’s kingship was a foregone conclusion because God willed it. But even after relentless persecution, David refused to diss Saul in his lament because Saul was God’s anointed king and David’s faith knew better than to bring dishonor to God’s anointed, even in death, and even if that person was his relentless enemy who wanted to kill him (cf. also 1 Samuel 24.1-7 for a rather earthy story).

And as Mark makes clear in his sandwiched story today, faith isn’t always as clear-cut or straightforward as we might prefer. Jairus surely came to Jesus out of desperation, not admiration. He had reached the end of his rope and was forced to turn to this itinerate preacher who increasingly was gaining a bad reputation among the religious movers and shakers in his community, not to mention old king Herod. But desperation sometimes causes us to do strange things and by God’s grace, Jairus reached out to the One who truly had the power to heal the sick and raise the dead, even though Jairus didn’t know that beforehand. There is nothing clean and neat about this story and we can relate because there is usually nothing clean and neat about our lives when we reach out in desperation and faith to Jesus to help us! But the point is that Jairus reached out in faith to Jesus, even if his faith wasn’t pure, and Jesus responded.

Or consider the woman with the chronic bleeding problem. In faith, fear, and trembling she reached out to literally touch Jesus so that he would heal her. She too was at the end of her rope, but unlike Jairus, she likely wasn’t concerned about her reputation because her illness already had shot that to pieces. Touching this woman meant that people would be unclean for a day and that was a colossal pain in the neck for those who did, which made the woman a social outcast and pariah. In reaching out in the midst of this frenzied crowd to touch Jesus, the woman literally risked her neck to be healed. Her faith was mixed with fear, but even in the midst of the chaos of her life and the crowd, Jesus responded to that faith, just like he does in ours. Where are you in this these stories?

So what do we do with the lessons from today’s gospel? In a few moments we are going to baptize another person into new life in Christ and his body, the Church, with all its hopes and challenges. As Patrick grows up, he will do so in an increasingly uncertain and chaotic world, and his faith will surely be challenged, just like ours is today. How do we help Patrick grow in his faith so that it will be strong enough to survive the fiery darts of the Evil One and all that is hostile and opposed to Christ and his people? As we have seen, first, we must learn the biblical story of how God fulfilled his promise to right all the wrongs that human sin and rebellion have caused so that we understand as best we can how God works and where God is taking us. That can only come from doing the hard work of reading, studying, and praying through the Bible over a lifetime, both individually and together, so that the needless despair that afflicted me as a young man won’t afflict him (or any of you). For example, I read the Bible now fundamentally differently than I did five years ago, primarily because of the amount of reading I do and the enormous influence Bishop Tom Wright’s commentaries have had on me so that I have stopped asking questions of the text that they were never designed to answer. That means that Patrick and all the rest of us have a lot of work and study to do over our lifetime and how we respond to that will be indicative of how important our faith and relationship with Jesus is.

Second, we also have seen that faith is not always straightforward and that’s OK because God’s power is greater than our faltering and incomplete faith. God can and does use our brokenness and the chaos of our lives to bring good and order to us, just like he did with folks in the Bible and countless others. Check out the story of Abraham if you don’t believe me. Today’s gospel stories remind us that even if we are hanging on by our toenails in the midst of fear and desperation, God will always respond to our cries for help. The more we know him and are familiar with how he normally operates, the better prepared we are to see his hand at work in our lives. This, of course, means that in addition to knowing the biblical story of salvation, we all need to be part of a community of faith so that we can love and support each other, even as we put up with each other’s foibles and brokenness.

Last, our hope in Jesus is rooted in his death and resurrection, in what God has done for us on the cross and what he has promised us in the new creation. This makes weekly worship essential because in worship we hear the word read and preached, and we partake in the sacrament of holy communion, which is a tangible sign and foretaste of God’s promised future. We ignore this great gift at our own peril because we need to be reminded constantly of what God has in store for those of us who are in Christ. It has always been true of God’s people (cf. Numbers 14), it will be true of Patrick in his life, and it is true of us.

Faith, of course, is a gift from God. We can do nothing to earn it. But like all gifts, faith requires our effort to cultivate and develop it with the help of the Spirit. We cannot become a great musician or athlete (or whatever) without the inherent gift. But that gift will never blossom to its fullest without our efforts to develop it and that means a lifetime commitment to the disciplines I have just mentioned and more. It’s hard work, but we engage in it because we love the Lord and believe that his power working in us is greater than our own weaknesses and all that can go wrong in this life. And of course as we grow in our faith in and through the power of the Spirit, we discover we have an ever deepening understanding that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.