Standing on the Eve of Anticipation

Those of you who closely follow this blog may know that the particular church body tradition that I come from is fairly liturgical.  That is, we follow a somewhat standard "order" to how we do things.  While this is evident in your typical Lutheran worship service, it also is found in how we structure the themes we observe throughout the year. 

This coming Sunday marks a "new year" for our church calendar.  As we begin approaching Christmas, we take the four weeks (or, more specifically, the four Sundays) prior to Christmas to remember that God had promised the sending of Jesus for centuries.  This season is called Advent, as God made known His coming into the world, which happened when Jesus was conceived and then born as an infant.

That means that, for many Christians including our tradition, that we stand on the eve of anticipation.  Our new year in God is about to begin.  Our focus will be on the way that God prepared for the sending of His Son.  God long spoke through those called prophets, who not only faithfully spoke God's Word to the people of their time, but in doing so, often spoke that word which would tell of the coming of Jesus.  And now, God speaks to us through those same prophets, but now has added the strong voice of His very own Son.

So, Christians, happy new year!  As we get ready for Advent, may this new church year bring God's hope flowing abundantly into your life as He pours a new life into you through His Spirit.

Comic Relief

Our humorous sheep, as we prepare to observe Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Church year.

Humorous Sheep

Here they are, getting us ready for this coming Sunday with their words of wisdom in a gentle way.



By the way, our reading for Sunday that this is based upon is Mark 12:38-44.

Love and Forgiveness

I've often heard that the most important factor in what Jesus has done for us is that He won forgiveness for us.  The reality is, there is a lot of truth to that statement.  Without the forgiveness of Jesus, we simply cannot stand in the presence of God the Father and hope to have a word of welcome.  God's holiness and our sin simply cannot coexist.  We need the forgiveness that Jesus obtained for us at such a high cost.

And yet, as a Lutheran, I'm often drawn back to some of the confessions of faith that we cling to. In one of those, we have the writers of those Lutheran documents contrasting the writers of the Catholic Church of the day, especially over a verse that comes at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, the "love" chapter of Paul's letter.  That last verse says that these three remain: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.

The Lutheran writers, clinging to faith as the means by which we have assurance of God's forgiveness of us, highlight the importance of faith in that.  The Catholic writers highlight the importance of love, especially actions of love done on the part of human beings.  (As an aside, these are important, but as the rest of the Scriptures make pretty clear, our greatest actions of love still don't make us right with God, a point the Lutherans wanted to emphasize.)

As I have grown more experienced in ministry, I have started to see this in a bit of a different light.  I honestly do think that, in some respects, those involved in the dispute kind of "talked past" each other.  In some ways, when we look at these three, and then also at the role of forgiveness, there seems to be a bit of an apples and oranges thing going on here.

The forgiveness of Jesus is vital to restoring our relationship with God.  However, what moved God to even want to restore that relationship?  Love, specifically, God's love for fallen, sinful humanity.  Love is vitally important, not as the means by which God restored us, but as the motivation that drove God to forgive us.  Our faith then clings to what God has told us that He did in Jesus, with His love for us as the motivation.  Our faith looks to that, and then, as God's Spirit does His work, inspires us toward that same kind of love toward others.

As you read through that paragraph, you perhaps can see why it's impossible to actually "rank" one thing higher than the other.  They are all different parts of something that is necessary.  At the back of it all, though, is the fact that God does it because of His great love for us.  That love inspires the work of forgiveness in Jesus, which we then cling to in faith.  It sounds a bit like a process, even though it takes place constantly in the life of a believer.

I can't say why this has been on my mind lately, other than that I think there is a life application to be made from it.  We usually don't forgive someone that we don't have a relationship with.  Love tends to be the driving force behind our forgiveness.  Let me use the example of a husband and wife for a moment.  Love is the prevalent thing in the relationship.  That love is what drives forgiveness when it is called for in the relationship.  If the forgiveness is absent, you can question the presence of love.  Yet, forgiveness is not all that is there to the relationship.  But the reason that the couple can continue is because they believe (put their faith in) the fact that the other has forgiven them.  The forgiveness is vital, but not the driving force.  Love is the driving force.

As I said, this is kind of thinking out loud, and I think I also need more time to flesh it out more.