SORELY HINDERED BY OUR SINS
Dear Friends in Christ:
On my first Sunday back home after my sabbatical, I was struck by some very familiar words from the collect for the Third Sunday of Advent: because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us.
In both Hebrew and Greek there are words that are translated as sin that could also be translated as missing the mark. Our sins are what keep us, hinder us, from hitting the mark, the goal of being fully human, of becoming the incredible people that God has created us to be. It was Irenaeus in the 2nd century who said that the glory of God is people fully alive, and I believe that it is only God’s bountiful grace and mercy that can overcome all that keeps us from being fully alive.
To be fully alive is to be living in right relationship with God and with one another. We are created in the image of God, created to be reflections of God’s nature. Through the centuries, people have suggested what it is about the nature of God that we are called to reflect – for example God’s creativity or God’s compassion. I would suggest, and there is only an awkward word for it, God’s relationality.
At the heart of the Christian understanding of God is the challenging and paradoxical idea of the Trinity, of the unity and diversity of God, of the Persons of the Trinity in relationship with one another. And although God needed no other relationships, God chose to be in relationship with creation, and in a particularly intimate relationship with humankind. It seems to me that one of the inescapable messages on the Bible is that God only wants to be God in relationship with us.
The Bible is a love story, the story of how the One who created all things – including us – has been wooing humankind for millennia. And when human beings refuse to hear God’s love songs, God keeps right on singing, finding new words and melodies to break through our stubborn resistance. Not content to sing from a distance, God chose to become one with us in our humanity, so the love song could be sung, lived out in Jesus. And that same love song is being sung through the Spirit in us, in our lives as we let that same Spirit make us fully alive.
As we begin a new year of grace, a year that will be, as all are, challenging both in ways that we anticipate and ways that we cannot imagine, I pray that each and all of us will be so open to the bountiful grace and mercy of God, to the moving of the Spirit, that we might become more fully alive and reflect God’s glory in the darkness of this world.
Your elder brother,
Daniel
