Week 3: June 14-20

I found the poem for June 14 very comforting, especially these lines:

That thou who know’st the light-born answer sought
Know’st too the dark where the doubt lies entrenched—
Know’st with what seemings I am sore perplexed,
And that with thee I wait, nor needs my soul be vexed.

None of us live a faith life free of doubt, free of questions, free of fear.  One of the wonderful things about Christianity, and the doctrine of the Incarnation in particular, is that we have a God who not only knows and understands us in our perplexity but has joined us in our perplexity by actually becoming human.  Jesus Christ, the definition of Chalcedon put it, is “like us in all things except sin”; and this includes human emotions like fear and doubt.  The one who prayed and wept at Gethsemane and felt abandoned on the cross joins us in our praying and weeping and feelings of abandonment.

The remainder of the poems for this week discuss a variety of means (rather harsh means, I might add—weariness, fear, madness, unrest, hunger) that God might use to reach human beings, to bring them to faith and teach them to be good—in other words, to sanctify them, to make them holy.   Sanctification can be an uncomfortable topic for Lutherans.  If we are saved entirely by grace through faith, apart from any merit we possess or work we do, is it not dangerous for us to speak of our own holiness, or of progressing toward higher spiritual levels?  And yet we do wish to grow in faith and in righteousness; to do better today than we did yesterday, and better tomorrow than we did today.  But are we not, as Christians, already complete—already, to paraphrase Luther’s explanation to the 3rd article of the Apostles Creed in the Small Catechism, “called through the gospel, enlightened with the Spirit’s gifts, sanctified, and kept in the true faith”?  We are.  And yet we never, as long as we are on earth, fully live into that reality; but perhaps we can come closer.  A seminary friend of mine speaks of “becoming what we are.”  We are called, enlightened, sanctified already; but we also become these things more and more, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18—

"And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

I would never want to assert to another person that their suffering is God’s way of teaching them.  But I would want to be open to the possibility for myself, and hopefully, as I grow as a pastor, to help others to be open to that possibility.

Next week: Sanctification, continued.  The love of God; the love aspired to by our Old Soul.  Forgiveness.