Is it time for the United States to get an amicable divorce? Are there irreconcilable differences between the Red States and the Blue States? As a blue-stater, I’m sick & tired of the carping about the President, Affordable Health Care, and regulations which make our life together safer and more equitable. Culturally, I believe that the Common Good exceeds individual liberties. Religiously, I believe that salvation demands justice and righteousness as a result of personal faith. And so I think that the United States should give the dissenters opportunity to refuse federal regulations about education, relief for the poor, accessibility for the disabled and other human services. In return, if such states wish smaller government, let them build their own roads and bridges, airports and medical outlets. The following has little to do with this rant — or does it??
Many of us on Sunday will hear Jeremiah bemoaning God’s call: “I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me…for the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.” (20:7-8) Those who attempt to speak God’s word against idols often feel as though they’re from Mars: they just don’t fit in. Yet if the ones whom God has called do NOT speak up, “then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” (v.9) Those who recognize a disconnect between God’s Righteousness and life as it is cannot hold it in, despite being considered an alien.
Don’t shun the Letter to the Romans because it’s deep and often dark. Though wordy and seemingly twisted, Paul documents the wrestling of the Divine with the Human — even admitting his own conundrums about living the Holy Life. Here in the 6th chapter, he says that “we have been buried with [Christ] by baptism into death(!), so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life….So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (verses 4 and 11) We’re to read “sin” as a state of brokenness or separation from God, more than our cherished portfolio of individual evils. This New Life gives us a heightened awareness of the imperfections all around. Dare we name them??
“Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.” (Jesus, according to Matthew 10:26) This can be pretty rough: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (v.34) Thus there will be a Great Divide: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (v.39) Pretty direct, huh?
This is surely the Sunday to sing “A Mighty Fortress is Our God”! Luther’s poetry can be our pep-song: “And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us….Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; the body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still; his kingdom is forever.”
God Bless Us, Every One Horace Brown King
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