Showing posts with label Romans 8. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romans 8. Show all posts

Sunday, January 31, 2016

4th Epiphany 2016, Heal the Earth

4th Epiphany
John 5: 1-18

Christ Heals at the Pool of Bethesda
Some time later, there was a Jewish feast, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem, near the Sheep’s Gate, a pool, called Bethesda in Hebrew, which is surrounded by 5 covered porches. Here lay a great many invalids, the blind, the lame [crippled], the weak [withered], waiting for the water to begin moving. For from time to time a powerful angel of the Lord descended into the pool and stirred up the waters. The first one in the pool after such a disturbance would be cured of whatever ailment he had.

And there was a certain man there who had been an invalid for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and became aware that he had been ill for so long, he asked him,
“Do you want [have the will] to become whole?”

The invalid answered him, “Lord [Sir], I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Rise up, take up your pallet, and walk.”  At once the man was healed and picked up his pallet and walked.
               
However it was the Sabbath on that day. Therefore the Jewish leaders said to
Picking up the Pallet
the man who was healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your pallet.”

But he replied, “The man who healed me said to me, “take up your pallet and walk!”

And they asked him, “Who is the man who said to you ‘take it up and walk’?”

But the one who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away, as there was a crowd in the place.

Later, Jesus found him in the Temple and said to him, “Take to heart what I say: Behold, you have become whole. Sin no more, lest your destiny bring you something worse.”

The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that Jesus was the one who had healed him. That is why they persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him, because he did these things on the Sabbath.

Then he himself countered them with the words, “Until now my Father has worked, and from now on I also work.”

Then they sought all the more to kill him, because not only had he broken the Sabbath, but also because he had called God his own Father and had set himself equal to God.



4th Epiphany
January 31, 2016
John 5: 1-18

Originally God’s creation was filled with an abundance of life, overflowing with healing, strengthening powers. Crowds could bathe in healing waters, for a thousand angels lived in them. But by the time Christ walked the earth, the healing forces of nature had worn down. The pool at Bethesda was only attended, intermittently, by one angel, enough healing force for one person at a time. And sadly, often without help, those most in need were unable to avail themselves. 

Christ came to initiate a new form of healing. He healed the man directly, lending him the creative power of His word. He healed from His I AM power, from Self to self.

Christ still walks the earth; we just don’t see Him. He can still heal, but it is now we human beings who are his instruments, His hands, his speaking. And now, 2,000 years later, what is called for is not only the healing of ourselves and of other human beings. What is becoming more and more necessary is that we find ways of healing the earth.

As St. Paul says, “…all around us creation waits with great longing that the sons and daughters of God shall begin to shine forth in humankind. Creation itself and therefore everything in it is full of longing for the future….”* It is now we who are to give life to the earth; we who are to heals its wounds; we who are to redeem the damage we have done to her.

How do we give life and healing? With God’s help, through our time and attention; through the power of the creative word our prayers, through our loving devotion to her well-being and our sacrifices on her behalf. Teresa of Avila** said, that even when we ourselves feel wounded, God helps.

…God is always there….  He kneels
over this earth like
a divine medic,
and His love thaws
the holy in us.

*Romans 8: 19 -21


** St. Teresa of Avila ~ When the Holy Thaws, in Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West --versions by Daniel Ladinsky)

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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

3rd Advent 2010, God With Us

3rd Advent 2010
Romans 8:15-39
translation by James Langbecker

You have not become victim to the spirit of slavery, so to become victim to the power of fear. You have received the spirit of sonship. When we say, “Our Father”, it is the Spirit itself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. When his passion and death think in us, then also his revelation.
I have considered that the sufferings of this age are not worthy to be compared with the revelation that will be opened to us.
Creation itself is eagerly awaiting the revelation of the sons of God, for the creation was caught up in the forces of decline, not for its own sake, but for the sake of man’s evolution, which is not hopeless, but full of hope.
And even the creation will one day be freed from its subjection to the forces of decline, and will share in the freedom attained by the children of God through their spiritual activity.
        Through spirit knowledge we know that the whole creation in its distress suffers the pains of unfulfilled birth, and not creation alone, but we ourselves, having in our human nature the first fruits of the spirit, we groan as we eagerly await our entry into full sonship, that the sickness of sin of the bodily nature of mankind be healed.
For in this hope is our life destined for eternity. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he already sees? But as we hope for what we do not yet see, we eagerly await it.
In this manner the spirit supports us also in our weaknesses. When we do not know how to speak to God in prayer, the spirit supports us inwardly in wordless prayer of feeling will. And he who can see into human hearts knows that the spirit speaks in a divine way in those who keep themselves whole.
We can be sure that everything works for good for those who love God, who are called by his destiny-ordering will.
Because those whose destiny he knew in spirit worlds, their destiny he ordered in harmony with the image of his Son, the first-born among many brothers.
Christ, Hans Memling
        And those whom he chose according to their destiny, he also called to spirit-awakening; and those whom he called to spirit-awakening, he also gave the spirit’s self-justification and self-revelation.
What remains to be said?
If God be for us, what power can succeed against us? He, who did not spare his own Son, but gave him forth on behalf of us all, will he not freely give us all we need through this Son? Who can condemn those in whom the self-evidence of the spirit is given by God?
It is Christ-Jesus, who died, yea, and who is risen, who has become the fulfiller of the fatherly deeds of the Ground of the World, who is the true Representative of Man before God.
Who shall separate us from the uniting power of Christ’s love? Shall difficulty or distress, persecution or famine, lack of clothing, danger or attack?
As it is written:
            To come to you we must die all day long;
            We are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered. (Psalm 44:22)
We will fully triumph over all these trials through him who unites his being with our being through love.
For I am confident that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor archai, nor things present, nor things to come, nor spirit-powers,  nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ-Jesus, our Lord.


3rd Advent
December 12, 2010
Romans 8, 15-39

Sons and daughters, just by virtue of being their parents’ children, stand to inherit their parents’ estate. They have the hope and expectation of an inheritance simply by virtue of having been born into the family. At the same time, by virtue of having been born, they may also be ‘inheriting’ much else: family dynamics to be lived and grappled with, inherited characteristics of temperament and bodily health.

The family of man has inherited many characteristics from our first parents, Adam and Eve. Being part of the human family means grappling with illusion and sorrow, with illness, and ultimately with death itself. We were created in Paradise, but have been making a sorry mess of things since.

God saw that mankind’s God-given inheritance was depleted, ravaged by deep debts we could never hope to repay. The inheritance was in ruins. And so He decided to rebuild the estate by creating the possibility of a new ancestor. Thus He sent His own Son, Christ, to become a new Adam for us. The new body we are to inherit is the resurrection body, the light body of Christ. It is a body we are to inherit when we make ourselves available to take it in. Taking in Christ’s body makes us members of a new kind of human family. Taking in Christ’s body, His blood, strengthens our own light bodies. We begin to shine, to radiate His goodness and love out into the world.

And the world rejoices. It rejoices because the shining of the Sons and Daughters of the Spirit gives promise of release to all of creation; for all has fallen into darkness and bondage with us. All of creation rejoices in the hope and promise of its own inheritance from the sons and daughters of God. For what we will be able to give creation some day is its freedom. As the poet Nelly Sachs says:

All lands are ready to rise
from the map.
To shake off their skin of stars
to tie the blue bundles of their seas
on their backs
to set their mountains with fiery roots
as caps on their smoking hair...[1]


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[1] Nelly Sachs, from “And No One Knows How to Go On”, in O The Chimneys, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1967... Tranlated from the German by Michael Hamburger, Christopher Holme, Ruth and Matthew Mead, and Michael Roloff...