hatred

The Spirit’s Sacred Shrine

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By Linda Rex
January 17, 2021, 2nd SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY—Lately I have been appalled at the variety of correspondence, social media postings, and conversations I have been exposed to which have been filled with hate, condemnation and denigration toward other human beings. Some of these have pointedly referred to people of different races or skin color as being subhuman. Some have accused people with opposing opinions as being instruments of Satan.

I can’t help but be reminded of how Jesus was portrayed by those who opposed him. Sadly, it was those who were the most religious who resisted and condemned him, especially since Jesus often included and loved those who were cast aside by the society of his day. Because the leaders of his people could not bring themselves to believe the miracles Jesus did were a work of the Spirit, they attributed them to the work of Satan instead. Jesus told these men that they were in danger, for they were blaspheming the Spirit of God by attributing the power of the Spirit to the devil. I hear echoing in my mind the words of the apostle Paul: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12 NASB). So often we turn against one another, not realizing that this is the way the evil one works. He is an expert at “divide and conquer”, and often uses it to attempt to destroy the good things God is doing in this world by creating division, suspicion, resentment, prejudice, and hatred between people.

And we often participate in Satan’s efforts by focusing on our differences and our flaws, turning against one another and seeking to harm one another. Speaking the truth and resisting evil are important tasks for God’s people. But they must always be done in the humility of recognizing and repenting of our own flaws. They must be done from the sacrificial position of laying down our own lives and preferences. Truth must be spoken and evil resisted only from a heart filled with God’s love, for we are created to live in other-centered love with God and one another. And these things must be done only in an effort to bless, not to curse, for Christ became a curse for all so that all might receive God’s blessings.

This Sunday Psalm 139:1–6, 13–18 is often read, where we learn that God is present everywhere and at all times, knowing exactly what we are doing or are planning to do, what we are going to say before we say it, and what is going on in our minds and hearts. The psalmist reminds us that the God who is over all things is present with us in all things. This means that no part of our lives is lived separately from the God who created all and who sustains it by the word of his power. This is the God who made every human unique, like the snowflakes in the winter—each has his or her own shape and beauty, and is meant to be treasured and treated with dignity.

God went even further than this when he created human beings. He gave us the God-imaging capacity for relationship—intimate relationship or fellowship with God and with one another. God meant for us to live in other-centered love. As the Trinity teaches us, the Father and Son who love one another in the Spirit, are love—to intimately know the Father, Son, and Spirit is to know what it means to truly love and be loved.

God gave humans—Adam and Eve first, and then others to follow—the sexual union to teach us what it means to live in a covenant relationship with one another. Just as God joined himself to human beings in a covenant relationship—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the nation of Israel, and ultimately, the church which is the body of Christ—a couple are joined to one another in covenant marriage. It is within this covenant marriage that God meant the sexual union to take place. Jesus says that any other sexual relation is a violation of this union and communion.

The apostle Paul also pointed out that the body of Christ, the church, was united with Christ individually and collectively. This is why sex outside of the covenant relation of marriage is a sin and a violation against the Spirit. When we are united with Christ, the Triune God takes up residence within us by the Spirit. There is a uniting of what is human with what is divine. Why, Paul asks, would you take what is united with God and unite it with a prostitute or with someone who is not your covenant partner? God is present with us in every moment, in every intimate relationship we may have. We do not want our intimate and sexual relationships to be a violation of our covenant with God or our spouse, do we?

This is what we struggle with as human beings—and Paul holds our face to the mirror in this: our bodies do not belong to us—they belong to God. God has purchased our bodies by offering Christ’s body on the cross for us. He paid the ultimate price for each of us in the loss of his Son. This means that each and every human being is of enormous value, no matter who they are. Each person belongs to God and is to be respected and cared for as we would respect and care for Christ. No human being, no matter their color, gender, background, shape, or size, or even their mental state, belongs to us to be used and abused as we please. No human body, not even our own, belongs to us to be used and abused however we wish. Each person is created in the image of God and is called into relationship with God through Jesus in the Spirit, and has been given incredible worth as a dwelling place of the Triune God.

In our gospel passage for this Sunday, Jesus tells Nathanael, who had never met him before, that he had seen him under the fig tree. There was something Jesus knew about Nathanael by spiritual insight as God in human flesh that he could not have known otherwise. This is reminiscent of what we talked about in Psalm 139—we cannot escape the perusal and notice of our Maker and Lord. God never meant for human beings to live apart from relationship with him. We were created to be a part of a union and communion which in the new heavens and new earth will include every member of the Bride of Christ.

This Bride is made up of many members, of all people groups around the world. Individually and collectively, she has a worth and dignity that is priceless, for her bridegroom, the Lord Jesus, laid down his life for her. Every human being is meant to be a part of her—our role is to remind each and every person of this and to welcome them in, not to abuse, exclude, condemn, or reject them. As Christ taught us, we are to reach out to those in need, comfort those who mourn, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who abuse us—for each and every person has been given the dignity of being a fit dwelling place of the living God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit.

Dear God, thank you for giving each of us such worth and value! Thank you for including us in your life and love through Jesus in the Spirit. Thank you for noticing us—for seeing us when we believe we are invisible. Lord, wash away all of our divisions, our prejudices, our hatred, and our feelings of superiority. Grant us instead the humility of a true understanding of who we are as those who are equals and temples of your presence, through Jesus and by your Spirit. Amen.

“O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; | You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, | And are intimately acquainted with all my ways.” Psalm 139:1–3 NASB

“You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is good for you. And even though ‘I am allowed to do anything,’ I must not become a slave to anything….In our union with him we are one spirit with the Lord. Flee fornication. Every sexual sin is a violation of the sacredness of the human body and scars the conscience of the individual like no other sin does. Do you not realize that your body by design is the sacred shrine of the spirit of God; he echoes God within you. Your body does not even belong to you in the first place. You are bought and paid for, spirit, soul and body. All of you are his. Live your life conscious of the enormous price with which God has valued you. Your whole being belongs to him and exhibits him. You are his address; you are his real estate.” 1 Corinthians 6:12, 17–20 MB

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The Scandal of God’s Compassion

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By Linda Rex

September 20, 2020, Proper 20—Historically, we as human beings have nearly always been good at getting upset when people don’t get what we think they deserve. Some of us take such difficulties as a challenge to ensure that such people do get what they deserve, while others of us either ignore or explain away their offenses, or spend our time complaining and feeling sorry for ourselves instead.

The reading for this Sunday from the Old Testament is the passage where the Israelites began to complain to Moses that they didn’t have any decent food anymore. They even would have preferred to go back into slavery in Egypt just to have something good to eat now and then. Here God had just done a great deliverance for them in bringing them safely through the Red Sea and now they were complaining because they were having to struggle a little.

God’s compassion was not appreciated nor was it understood by them. That he was tenderly seeing to their every need didn’t seem to make a difference—when things weren’t how they wanted them to be, they made a big stink about it and made life really hard for Moses. God would constantly have to remind them about who he was—their Provider, Protector, and Deliverer. In this instance, he gave them quail that evening, and in the morning began to provide them with bread from heaven, manna.

What we need to be reminded of, daily it seems, is just who God is. Do we believe he is the God who is compassionate, gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and full of lovingkindness? These are ways in which God describes himself (Ex. 34:6-7), along with being just and full of truth. How does this impact the way we look at ourselves and others? What are our expectations of God, especially when it comes to how he deals with other people and uncomfortable situations?

Another passage from this weekend is from the book of Jonah. Rather than obeying God’s instruction to warn Nineveh of their impending destruction and their need to repent, this prophet took a ship going the opposite direction. He knew God was compassionate and forgiving, and didn’t want to risk that he might forgive this enemy of his people.

Jonah’s prejudice and hatred toward others of a different people group prevented him from simple obedience. And God did not allow him to continue in his path of resistance to God’s compassion and grace—he even used a large sea creature and a plant to get his point across to Jonah. He reminded the prophet that he should have been just as compassionate as God was in wanting to see the Ninevites not be destroyed—Jonah needed an attitude adjustment about wanting to God annihilate them. He needed to repent and have a change of heart.

Jesus tells a parable about the kingdom of heaven in which a landowner who owns a vineyard goes to find laborers to help gather in the harvest. He agreed with this first group of laborers to pay a day’s wage. Later in the day, he hired other laborers, agreeing to give them what was right. All the way up to about an hour before quitting time, he hired people to help with the harvest.

When it came time to pay these people, he began with those he hired last. Giving each of them a day’s wage, he paid the last, the next to the last, and on down the line until those he hired first. These hot and exhausted workers he gave the same amount as he gave the people he hired last—a day’s wage. This infuriated them.

The problem wasn’t in what the landowner did, though, but in their expectations. They believed that since they had worked the longest, they should have received the most. Those who worked a short period of time didn’t expect to get paid as much as they did, but they no doubt, appreciated the benefit they received. Here is the crux of the story—the day’s wage which each person received was a result of the landowner’s kindness and compassion, not due to their diligent performance.

For the kingdom of heaven comes to us not due to our adequate performance as people doing good deeds, but solely as a gift from God. The wages of sin is death, we read, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus (Rom. 6:23). Once again, we need to move away from our debit/credit thinking about the kingdom of God into the place of God’s generosity and compassion. We need to not be scandalized by God’s compassionate inclusion of all of humanity in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and ascension, including those people who we believe don’t deserve God’s grace.

As image-bearers of the God who is compassionate, gracious and slow to anger, we are called to reflect his nature. We are to have the same compassion for those around us as God has for us. What he did for the 120,000 persons who lived in the city of Nineveh, God wants to do even more so for every human being who has ever lived. In Christ, we find that grace and salvation are available to each person. By faith in Christ each can participate in the fellowship of the Father and Son in the Spirit both now and forever.

Jesus was always stepping on toes with his discussion of doing good to those who do us wrong, praying for those who persecute us, and caring for those whom society considers untouchable and unworthy. His scandalous compassion put him at the same table with sinners, touching the leprous and unclean, and raising the dead. What we see in Jesus, God plants in us by the Spirit—we open our hearts up to the compassion for others that comes from God himself. Why should we resist the Spirit’s longing to care for those who are lost and broken, bound by evil and sin?

Perhaps we should take some time in quiet contemplation of the nature of our compassionate and gracious God. And in doing so, invite him to change our heart towards those who are in need of his grace. How can we pray for them, help them, speak loving truth into their lives? In what way would God want us to express his compassion and concern for them?

Thank you, Abba, that you are compassionate, gracious, and understanding. Thank you, Jesus, that you know what it means to be human, to struggle as we do against temptation and the sin which so easily distracts us from loving you and the other people in our lives. Grant us the grace to let you be the God you are and to stop trying to form you into our own image. Form us instead more fully into Christlikeness through Jesus and by your Spirit. Amen.

“The LORD is gracious and merciful;
Slow to anger and great in lovingkindness.” Psalm 145:8 NASB

“Then the LORD said, ‘You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?’” Jonah 3:10–11 NASB

See also Matthew 20:1-16, Exodus 16:2–15, Jonah 3:10–4:11.

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Running from Relationship

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by Linda Rex

Do you ever get the feeling you would like to leave everything and everyone behind and go hide in a forest somewhere where no one can find you? Sometimes we can get so sick of all the human drama in our lives, we would prefer to live the rest of our lives alone on some island out in the Pacific. Indeed, especially for us introverts, being left all alone with just our thoughts and our personal pursuits may sound a lot like heaven.

However well-intentioned our escape from humanity may be, we cannot escape the reality we were created for loving relationship with God and each other. Often the struggle is not with the relationship part of this, but in that we have to do relationship with other people who may be difficult and hard to understand. We may struggle with knowing how to communicate well, or with understanding what to do in certain social situations. These things don’t come naturally to everyone. Some of us really wrestle with the daily necessity to interact with other human beings.

On top of that, we often experience relational hurts, both as children and as adults. Those hurts we receive as children directly affect our ability to form and retain healthy attachments with others as adults. Extremely unhealthy relationships affect our response to healthy ones, whether we realize it or not. What we do to one another as human beings has consequences in our ability to live in loving relationship with one another the way God created us to.

I remember years ago talking with my pastor after services and telling him he scared me. He would really get into proving his point in his sermon and half scare me to death because he would raise his voice while doing it. In the environment of a tiny congregation, it felt as though he was yelling right at me.

I realized after a while the problem wasn’t with him raising his voice to emphasize a point—that can be a necessary part of preaching. The problem was with me—it created a flashback to the times in my marriage when I was yelled at and things were thrown when I didn’t measure up to a certain someone’s expectations. I could not cope with the raised voice in church because I related it to the intense emotional dumping I had experienced in the past in my significant relationship.

Now, I suppose if I had been raised in a family where emotional dumping was the natural course of human interaction, I might have known how to deal with it, or at least how to cope with it. But in my experience, family members kept things to themselves and did not have emotional outbursts. We were a family of introverted nerds, so communicating with others was always a challenge for all of us, with the possible exception of my mother.

In my family’s way of looking at life, we would have all been healthier and happier if we could each have had an acreage in the country where we didn’t have to interact with our neighbors, or worry about property lines or stray pets, or all the other annoying factors involved in human interactions. In fact, in many ways, in our effort to have any relationships with others at all, we avoided any real interaction with anyone.

What I’m trying to say is, we can live in relationship with others while at the same time not really having any real heart-to-heart, authentic, transparent interactions with them. We can have such effective walls in our hearts and minds we don’t allow anyone to really get close to us and find out the truth of who we really are inside. These protective walls are what we create in our effort to survive in a world where people hurt people, and they are magnified by an understanding and belief in a God who is critical and condemning rather than loving and forgiving.

Healing from these kinds of wounds takes time, and can require a wealth of healthy experiences with people who build us up rather than tear us down. Sometimes we need to spend time with a qualified counselor who can walk with us through our wounds and enable us to find the healing which is available for us in Jesus Christ. In other words, the best way to heal from relational wounds is within the context of healthy relationships—with our kind, loving, and forgiving God and with other kind, loving, and forgiving human beings.

I have found over the years God grows us up as his children by placing us in situations where we are forced to learn how to deal with difficult people. And he does this, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the one who is being difficult. It is in our relationships with one another that we come to see ourselves more clearly.

God’s design in creating us in his image was for us to reflect the image of God to one another. When I’m interacting with another human being, it is an opportunity for each of us to experience in a real and personal way what it looks like and feels like to live in the relationship of love and grace which exists within the Father, Son, Spirit relations in the Godhead. When we fail to live in outgoing concern, compassion, understanding and grace with one another, we fail to reflect the nature of the God who created us in his image. The Light we are to reflect is diminished, and we walk in darkness instead of in the light.

There is no room for hatred of another human being in God’s economy. That irritating ungodly person who is so annoying is our brother or sister who was also made in God’s image to reflect God’s likeness. That person is also a beloved child of God for whom Christ lived, died, rose again and sent his Spirit. That person we wish would go away and just jump off a cliff in the process, is someone God loves just as much as he loves you and me.

Part of the problem with isolationist Christianity is the neglect of the reality we were intended to love one another by rubbing up against one another relationally in such a way Christ is formed more perfectly in each of us and we experience the reality of God’s infinite love and grace in the process. If the divine Word was willing to set aside the privileges of divinity to enter into our human darkness as Jesus Christ to take on our humanity and experience all the negative consequences of such an act, how can we deny this to our brother and sister human beings?

Indeed, we can forget in the midst of all the struggles we are going through today in our world the example forged for us by Jesus Christ. The path through relational healing is often through the crucifixion—it will be painful and difficult and will include dying in some way. Dealing with unpleasant and difficult, and even toxic people requires being willing to die to our preferences, and being willing to suffer uncomfortable conversations and situations. We may need to stand to and oppose those who are doing evil. We may need to tell someone the truth about their abuse or addiction and force them to get help with it. We may need to draw some boundary lines in our relationships and enforce them, lovingly and graciously.

But this is what it means to love, to truly love one another. Exposing the love and grace of God at the heart of all true relationship is a challenge. It is also a process—a journey we take in relationship with the God who created us, and who loves us and who has, in advance, forgiven us for all our failures and shortcomings. Instead of running from relationship, may we take a bold step today and begin looking for safe, caring, respectful people to begin the process of relational healing with. And may we turn to Christ for the grace and power to learn to love and be loved as God intended.

Thank you, Father, for creating us in such a way we are meant for relationship with you and one another. Grant us the grace to open ourselves up to new relationships and to heal our brokenness within the context of healthy relationships. Teach us how to love the unlovely, and to forgive the unforgiveable, while at the same time calling others deeper into loving relationship with ourselves and with you. We know all of this is possible only in through our Lord Jesus Christ in whose Name by whose Spirit we pray. Amen.

“On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining. The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him.” 1 John 2:8–10 NASB

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