Spiritual Journeys: Weekly Messages from St. Peter's Episcopal Church

Love is the law. And we sin when we stop acting in love. God is waiting

"Ever since I first started to reflect on this story as a younger man, I haven't thought about Jesus words as a rebuke to Thomas so much as a comfort to me, 'Blessed are those who have not seen yet have come to believe.' Brothers and sisters in Christ, that's us. We have not seen the physical risen Jesus. We did not travel with him for three years during his ministry, hear his teachings, be confounded by his parables in real time, or witness his miraculous acts as he touched lepers, blind, crippled. We have these stories transmitted down through the ages in the scriptures. And we believe them. And our lives are transformed as a result of that. You and I, based on these stories, and the way they touch our hearts. We seek to know God's will for us. We seek to follow Jesus the best way that we know how, being his hands and feet and heart in the world around us. We seek to be a vessel for the Holy Spirit to be at work in our lives and in the community."

Beloved, this is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It's just the beginning. And it's a story we are still writing. That verbal ellipse that Mark left at the real ending of his gospel is our invitation. It's our invitation to continue this story of transformation, of grace, of hearts and minds changed because they come to know how much God loves them because Jesus showed us how much God loves us.

God's love continues, just as it has begun, and continues to pour into the world through the presence of the Holy Spirit. We know this in the story of Jesus' life and death and what will be his resurrection because we're people of faith. He gives us salvation, a path to forgiveness once and for all, a promise that he will come again, a model. A path to living a life of kindness and concern. A life which continues the love command. "Love one another as I have loved you."

By admitting our own vulnerability, we can understand and have compassion for the vulnerability of each other. And we can allow God to enter that tender space and heal us all.

Your personal covenant with God in Jesus Christ. What does that sound like? What does it feel like? What actions exactly are you committing to in your new covenant? What do you pledge as one of God's people? How will you witness in your own personal story of faith? What is God's protection in your life? Will the personal covenant you make to see Jesus more? Will it help you to see Jesus more clearly? As the song says, "Know him more dearly." The hour is here and that's the charge.

As people who love God, as people who received the grace of that love, we have done nothing to earn it. We can do nothing to lose it. This is grace. Our call is to be so filled up with this love and so transformed by this love that indeed, when we go back out into that world that God loves so much, that love overflows from us into this world, that this world can indeed be the dream.

"Stop trying to sit at the tables that Jesus flipped." I think we can agree that every person deserves to know the radically generous, inclusive, expansive love of God. We can start by embracing the way of Jesus, and live into our own superpower and our own deep human connection. We'll need to change and grow and even break things open. But I know we can do it because we are going to do it together.

"For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation."

Perhaps making a discipline of delight is just what we need to snap us out of the trance of doom, despair. Or just plain old crankiness. Imagine delight as a string on your finger. A reminder of God's mercy and goodness toward us and toward all living creatures. A reminder that we are made to delight in God as God delights in us.