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All anyone truly has is the love of God in Jesus Christ and that love is everything, more than enough.

Why discuss potentially controversial topics in church?

4 reasons:

📖1) To educate the Church in light of the Gospel – in other words, to examine real-life, important issues in light of the teachings of Jesus, and together ask what then we can do with the Spirit’s help. Anything less is to undermine the total Lordship of Christ in our lives, and put an arbitrary limit on our discipleship.

🤝2) To encourage the faithful – there will always be pressure to conform to the world’s ways of thinking, doing, being in regards to controversial topics. Speaking about them openly with Christ at the center allows us to encourage one another to be conformed to Christ.

🌐3) To engage the world – our witness and worship is public. Speaking truth and bringing the Gospel to bear on controversial and important topics is an important way to proclaim Christ’s engagement with and sovereignty over all things.

🕊4) To entrust ourselves to the Holy Spirit – when confront controversy openly together, in a spirit of truth, charity, and clarity, we are acting in faith that the Holy Spirit will indeed guide us into all truth and keep the Church of Christ together—not because we agree about everything, but because we are united in the love of Christ.

When we are found in Christ, his light becomes our light. His Spirit becomes our Spirit. We partake of the exact same divine nature as we are filled with the fullness of God the Holy Spirit.

In last Sunday’s sermon, I tried to work out the distinction between capability (raw power) and credibility (real authority), and to communicate the transforming power and authenticity of Jesus’ divine love.

The point is: while we can’t always trust every earthly authority and power has a corrupting effect on fallen humanity, the Good News is that God in Christ is always trustworthy.

You can trust his love for you and for the world.

Helpful

In truth, then, God became a man and provided another beginning (ἀρχή), a second nativity (γένεσις), for human nature, which, through the vehicle of suffering, ends in the pleasure of the life to come.

St. Maximus the Confessor

“Moderation or the middle ground is not always the loci of righteousness.”

• Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black

I am deeply saddened that some think what happened yesterday at the Capitol is in any way after the pattern of Christ.

There is no biblical justification for what we have just witnessed as a nation.

The kind of rhetoric we are hearing that emboldens and not-even-so-subtly condones violence is deeply immoral.

It is disturbing to see such blatant evil so widely accepted and even celebrated.

Meanwhile the pandemic continues to ravage our state.

So I was grateful to be with my church family yesterday evening, masked and socially distanced, but nevertheless together. We gathered in worship to celebrate the light of Epiphany, Jesus Christ himself, come to give true and lasting peace to all those that will receive it.

We prayed this prayer for times of social conflict or distress from the Book of Common Prayer together, and I commend it to you:

Increase, O God, the spirit of neighborliness among us, that in peril we may uphold one another, in suffering tend to one another, and in homelessness, loneliness, or exile befriend one another. Grant us brave and enduring hearts that we may strengthen one another, until the disciplines and testing of these days are ended, and you again give peace in our time; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

To this prayer I add: Come, Lord Jesus.

2020 brought much about the Church in America into the light.

Turns out, we’re even worse off than we perhaps thought in terms of our continued tolerance and even embrace of various “isms” at odds with Christianity: racism, sexism, classism, nationalism, consumerism, and anti-intellectualism stand out to me.

As I see it, the above mentioned ideologies are far worse and more immediate compromises of the Church’s faithfulness than the mostly vaguely defined “cultural Marxism” and “Critical Race Theory.” (Nevertheless these are certainly not exempt from robust evaluation in light of the Gospel.)

That said, now that these things are out in the open, the discussion has deepened.

This can be the beginning of justice and change and healing.

Yes, it is hard, painful. Discouraging, even humiliating sometimes.

But we can say with confidence that the Spirit of Truth is at work in his people.

As we open ourselves to his leading, we will leave our previously held commitments to self-advancement and self-preservation behind.

As we keep our eyes focused on the Jesus presented to us by the Gospel of witness of the Church throughout the centuries, his image will become more clear in us and through us.

As we persevere through the discomfort of revelation and transformation, we’ll find comfort and strength and satisfaction in the promise of a prize much greater than the power that’s so intoxicatingly difficult to let go of in the present.

As our desire for union with God in Christ is renewed, all things contrary to him will fall away, because the fulfilment of this desire is the promise guaranteed by the Resurrection.

The gates of the “isms” will not prevail against the Church of God.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

This Advent, those of us that claim the Name of Christ have an opportunity to–like John the Baptizer—point beyond ourselves, and cry out with joy and urgency the true story of God come to us in Jesus…

…The true account of God come to us in the flesh, his miraculous birth, his perfect life, his sacrificial death, his vindicating Resurrection, and his Kingly ascension…

…The true gift of God come to us now in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in and among us…

…The true testimony of God come to us in the preaching of word, in the sacraments, and in the fellowship of the saints….

…The true and only lasting hope of Christ coming again to finally renew all things.