God's Creative Love
I was working on a sermon and was thinking of using a quote from Dr. Martin Luther regarding the theology of the cross as compared with the theology of glory. This took me to the Heidelberg Disputation, thesis 21. But while I was there I got distracted – as I am wont to do – and just read through all of the theses.
The one I’d like to share with you, today, is one that I ended up placing in this next weekend’s sermon. It’s not about the contrast between the theologies mentioned above. It’s…well, I think I’ll let thesis 28 speak for itself. “The love of God does not find its object but rather creates it. Human love starts with the object.”
It’s not that God loves you because you’re special, which is how we often work with each other. It’s instead the truth that you’re special because God loves you.
Ash Wednesday 2021
While living in Colorado and employing a wood burning stove to heat our home I learned that a damp cloth, or paper towel, wiped through the cool ashes could be used to clean the charred glass of the stove. It worked wonderfully. The ashes had a cleansing quality.
May that be our experience in this Ash Wednesday as the ashes are traced on our foreheads and we are called to repentance with the reminder “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
Here is another reflection for the day. It is from an Ash Wednesday sermon by St. Augustine.
St. Augustine of Hippo: Live always in this fashion, O Christian; if you do not wish to sink into the mire of this earth, do not come down from the cross.
A Timely Timeless Quote
I ran across these words in my devotion last Thursday. The COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest in society have brought about a great unease in many and I pray these words can provide both perspective and hope.
“Can this really be what life is about as the media insist? This interminable soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, whose old discarded sets and props litter the earth? Surely not…
Whatever may happen, however seemingly inimical to it may be the world’s going and those who preside over the world’s affairs, the truth of the Incarnation remains intact and inviolate…The world’s way of responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair. On the one hand, some new policy or discovery is confidently expected to put everything to rights: a new fuel, a new drug, détente, world government. On the other, some disaster is as confidently expected to provide our undoing. Capitalism will break down. Fuel will run out. Plutonium will lay us low. Atomic waste will kill us off.
In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians, we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll into the dust and every earthly kingdom must sometime flounder, whereas we acknowledge a king men did not crown and cannot dethrone, as we are citizens of a city of God they did not build and cannot destroy. Thus, the apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, living in a society as depraved and dissolute as ours. Their games, like our television, specialized in spectacles of violence and eroticism. Paul exhorted them to be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in God’s work, to concern themselves with the things that are unseen, for the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal…Now in the breakdown of Christendom, there are the same requirements and the same possibilities to eschew the fantasy of a disintegrating world and seek the reality of what is not seen and eternal, the reality of Christ.”
These words were published forty-one years ago in Malcom Muggeridge’s “The End of Christendom.” Perhaps the word “détente” and the phrase “atomic waste”, among others, gave its age away, but they still seem to fit our age.
So, too, does the victory of Christ Jesus, God incarnate. His suffering, death, and resurrection for our forgiveness and life is ever timely and timeless! Confide and reside in Him.
“33 I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).