Jesus and the Spirit of Life

Romans 7:21 - 8:6

The Spirit of Life -- Where Jesus' Life Meets Ours
Today is Pentecost (fifty days after Passover/Easter) the feast of Weeks. Acts 2 stamps it forever as the day of the coming of the Holy Spirit, the new beginning, the "power from on high" that Jesus promised. Jesus' new resurrection life, so startling to his disciples, now began to invade their own lives as the Spirit of God became part of them. Jesus was not calling people to be generally 'more spiritual.' He poured out God's own Spirit, new life, new power, that brought Jesus' work to fulfillment and changed everything.
The New Testament is filled with this. Luke tells the story in Acts. John describes Jesus anticipating the coming of the Paraclete/Advocate. Paul focuses on the Spirit in Rom 8. The Spirit is the presence of the one God, given to us, continuing God's work in Jesus.

We have Met the Enemy, and He is Us!

Romans 7:6-25

Who are We in the Story We're in?
We want to be heroes in our own story. We like victory. But sometimes it's not so simple. Oliver Hazard Perry's naval victory over the British on Lake Erie, 1813: "We have met the enemy and he is ours!" Echoed in a Pogo cartoon of 1971 (2nd Earth day, Vietnam war): "We have met the enemy and he is us." Paul's analysis of the human situation is closer to Pogo than Perry. But also more complex than either. God steps into that complexity.
This text poses challenging questions. It starts from us "released from the law" to live "in the new way of the Spirit." That raises serious questions about the whole story of scripture and the Law of Moses. What are you saying? Is God's Law sin!? If it's good, did it bring about evil, even death? Paul writes to a community of Jewish and Gentile believers, but only the Jews in their identity share as he does in Israel's story and in the Law/Torah.

Mary of Nazareth & Her (Un)Ladylike Faith

Scriptures Readings on Mary:

Matthew 1:16
... and Jacob was the father of Joseph, 
the husband of Mary, 
of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Christ.

Luke 1:27
The virgin's name was Mary. The angel came to her and said, "Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!"

Luke 1:35
The angel answered her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High 
will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy--the Son of God. 

Dead Law and Living Spirit

Romans 6:20 - 7:6

Recognizing Life and Death
Paul is leading us readers/believers to reflect on a deep level what has happened to us in the event of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. We might say, 'Nothing happened to me personally. I wasn't there.' Paul responds, 'But you were!' Because of who Jesus is, as both God and us and Israel's Messiah, he calls into himself every person who trusts/ believes in him to share in his death and resurrection/eternal life and in his Spirit.
But its hard to get our minds around this experience. We're still living very ordinary life.
We are like Israel after the Exodus, idealizing Egypt compared with hardships faced in freedom. We romanticize the 'freedom' of the destructive life called 'sin.'

God's Grace and the Choices We Make

Romans 6:12-23

You’re Alive and Free! – Act that way!
Paul, a Roman citizen raised in a Greek city with a strong identity as a Jew, called as an emissary by Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, but both crucified and the embodiment of God. He watched the Good New of what God has done in Jesus do astonishing things in the lives of both Jews and pagans, but he knows that the transformation is a real challenge. It means new identity, new creation, death and resurrection. Not easy! The change is personal and communal. Easy to ignore, dilute with other beliefs, turn into religion.

Laura and Ira Hays Communion Meditation

Ten years ago, while Joe and Laura Hays were serving the Manhattan Church of Christ as ministers of Christ Church for Brookyn, their son Ira was born without a diaphragm. Ira was in and out of the hospital for more than a year, and it was a very difficult time for the Hays family.

Laura and Ira returned to MCOC to deliver the powerful communion meditation on hope, grace, and thankfulness.

Baptism and a New Reality for Everyday Living

Romans 6:1-19 

From What God Does, to What We Do
Paul has announced the Good News of Jesus in marketplaces and synagogues many times. He knows that people often find it hard to grasp the impact of it for their lives. Or they resist its meaning. Thus the questions (6:1,15). OK, sounds like God’s done a good job. It’s a level I’m not used to dealing with. Why don’t I just continue as is and let God do it? In church history, the reformation so emphasized faith over against the works practices of medieval Catholicism, that sometimes any sort of human freedom/action was seen as dangerous. All was predestined. In reaction, some said the Gospel is only human reform... 

United with Jesus for New Life

Romans 5:15 - 6:8

And Death Shall have No Dominion 
Paul is unfolding the meaning of what God has done in Jesus – what happened in his death and resurrection. The event is there. The God of the universe has intervened. For us the challenge is to grasp what he has done and experience its full effect. We understand the event through the great biblical narrative from creation to Abraham, Moses, David... Also our experience of our human situation – suffering, brokenness, alienation, violence.

Paul has been taking us through Abraham (Israel’s story) and Adam (all humanity’s story) to help us re-imagine who we (Romans, New Yorkers) are in the light of what God has done....

God’s Gift of Life in Jesus

Romans 5:6-17

Out of Death – Into Life
Today is a focused concentration of all Christian faith. It marks its distinct character. All flows first from events announced as “Good News,” Gospel – actions of God in his world. Thus deeply miraculous! Not in the common idea of a distant god breaking into the orderly laws of nature to do something strange. But the Creator of that wonderful order, who also pervades it, working within it to show a deeper reality than we ordinarily perceive. 

Jesus’ Death and the Love of God

Romans 5:1-11

A Week of Death and Life – All comes Together 
This is Palm Sunday. In a.d. 30 (1,985 years ago), it was just a work day, crowds were pouring into Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus approached the city. Every action of ‘the prophet’ meant something. He begins the week that changed the world. Events happened – ordinary, wonderful, horrific, impossible – irony, paradox, multiple layers of meaning...

Deep Peace from Trust in God

Romans 4:20 - 5:5

The Story of God Connecting our Lives to His
The world is always in pain. Some is just part of a world with sharp edges, earthquakes, disease, gravity. Most pain is created or magnified by us humans, from personal hurts to global structures. In the Bible is the long, ongoing narrative of God taking human life seriously and leading us out of self-inflicted pain and into God’s own eternal life.

Paul shows how God unites righteousness and faith in his own actions by reaching out to a human, Abraham, in making promises that establish a right relationship across worlds (God – human) and by faithfully fulfilling the promises. In response, Abraham is called to faith/trust  in God’s promise that God counts as righteousness and begins a personal journey and one across generations with God. 

Faith in the God who Gives Life

Romans 4:13-25

What is God Doing? What Sort of God is He?
We might think, ‘Why so much about Abraham? Tell us about Jesus!’ Paul knows that if Jesus is cut off from Scripture and Israel, nothing about him makes sense or has any power. It is because of all that God has done from Abraham through Israel to Jesus that we can see what is at stake in the events of the Gospel. Events require context to manifest meaning. 

From Abraham's Faith to Ours Today

Romans 3:28 - 4:12

Back to the Scriptures...Questioning Old Assumptions
Who am I? What's the story within which my life has its meaning? Paul is helping Jews, Romans, Greeks, others in Rome to see how what has happened in Jesus opens a window into the reality of God that shows their life and the world in a new light. Part of that is that Jesus' life is both surprising and anticipated. He lives within a great story of God's faithfulness that he now calls both his fellow Jews and all peoples into. Because it is God's story it is vast enough for all people to be themselves, Romans, Jews, Chinese, Africans. But God shows its unity by narrowing the story down to a single point, a person: Jesus. From that one, the event explodes out for all the world. Jesus' own disciples were astonished.

Faith in One Living God

Romans 3:21-31

Can I really trust God?
The OT scriptures are the story of one God, creator of the world and all people, a living, involved God who cares about his creatures, all that destroys life and the hope that life can be renewed, healed, made right. The very center of scripture is the affirmation that God is one. That must mean God belongs as much to all nations as to Jews. Yes, God working through Israel's long history, narrowing it down ultimately to the messiah embodying Israel and the whole world.

“Lord, Please Open Our Eyes!”

Matthew 20:17-34

What Do You Want Me to Do for You?
Jesus nears Jerusalem and the final confrontation. In Mt, this is last teaching before he arrives. Mt tries to help us to see Jesus in his depth and reality, no simplistic cliché, and through Jesus to see the real world of God, his grace, challenge, radical difference from our ways of thinking, seeing. The last two episodes Mt tells are requests to Jesus. One from a mother for her sons about Jesus’ kingdom. The other from blind beggars at Jericho. Jesus focuses on “What do you want?” Mt wants us to think about them and Jesus’ responses.

God's Kingdom and the Strange Employer

Matthew 19:28-20:19

A Story with the Wrong Ending
Mt is describing the final stages of Jesus’ ministry as he is nearing Jerusalem and the final confrontation in the temple. In these sections Jesus says something that leaves his hearers (disciples) wondering – like that camel going through a needle’s eye: it’s hard for those ‘blessed’ with money to be saved (19:24). Here he tells a parable about the Kingdom of heaven – a wonderful example of the challenging way Jesus’ parables work...

Squeezing Through the Needle's Eye

Matthew 19:16-30

What just went wrong?
We are looking at a section of Mt in which people listen to Jesus’ teaching and are agog, wide-eyed, at what he says. This is one of the most striking because of the incident and the famous image that Jesus creates. A man comes to Jesus, a young man, devout and honorable, wealthy. He seeks Jesus’ instruction. He goes away grieving. What happened?