Meditation - essential for wellness and growth - Kathryn Holleque

• Grace
• The Journey
• His Yoke
• The Counterforce
• Letter to the task force on the church and human sexuality

Grace

"...since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus..." -Romans 3:23-24

Legalism, moralism, and personal piety can sound so good to us. We like to think that by getting our act together, somehow we will make ourselves acceptable to God. We like being in control. We like to think we can make it on our own by being good. The problem is, we can't do it, and we need to stop pretending that we can. When our faith begins with us instead of God, we have a mighty burden to carry. The law of God demands perfection. When we depend on our own moral conduct, on our own goodness and righteousness, we are doomed to fail because we will always be guilty under the law. The illusion that God accepts us because we are basically pretty nice folks is perhaps the worst sin of all. We have no righteousness, of our own, but we seem to have trouble admitting that. Gerhard Forde, in his book Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life, speaks of this difficulty we have with sin and our need for grace.

When Jesus Christ and his forgiving love occupy the center of our faith, we are no longer weighed down. We can be honest about who we really are. We can acknowledge our fallen nature and our commonality with all of human kind. We can confess our pain, our weakness, our suffering, our selfishness, our indifference and apathy, our insensitivity, our rejection and ridicule of others, our impatience, our self-centeredness, our pride, our loneliness -- all of this and more. We cannot make it on our own because of sin. We need God, like it or not. And He is there for us with His grace. The forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ pursues us and has the power to change us and help us grow in our faith.

Help us to begin with you, O God, and not ourselves. Let your love and forgiveness work in our hearts so that we may respond to your will, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Journey

I like the book The Downward Ascent written by Edna Hong. In it, we are confronted with our need for forgiveness and the grace of God which speaks to that need. She writes:

Spiritual energy, activity, and eloquence do not come from ecstasy, but from a humbly grateful heart. Forgiveness of sins is what Christ's death upon the cross is all about. The purpose of Lent is to arouse. To arouse the sense of sin. To arouse the sense of guilt for sin. To arouse the humble contrition for the guilt of sin that makes forgiveness possible. To arouse the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. To arouse or to motivate the works of love and the work of justice that one does out of gratitude for the forgiveness of one's sins.

To say it again - this time, backward: There is no motivation for works of love without a sense of gratitude, no sense of gratitude without forgiveness, no forgiveness without contrition, no contrition without a sense of guilt, no sense of guilt without a sense of sin.

O God, show us our need for You. By your grace, free us from the burden of our guilt through your forgiveness. Give us thankful hearts to live our lives in new ways, responding to the love you have shown us through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Amen.

His Yoke

Christ asks us to come to him for rest. His yoke is easy because it points the way to the gospel. We are no longer under the burden of the law, trying to make ourselves acceptable to God. The good news of the gospel isn't what we should do in order to be saved, but on what God has already done for us in Jesus Christ. The emphasis is on Him and not on us: his love, his mercy, his grace, his forgiveness, his acceptance. We did not choose Him. He chose us. May He help us to surrender to Him and embrace His will in gratitude.

O God, you have not promised that life would be easy, but you have promised to be with us. Help us to respond to your saving grace. Lead us out into the world, so that we may live for others and participate in their suffering, not because we're supposed to but because we want to, through Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Counterforce

In his devotional book, The Word for Every Day, Alvin Rogness writes:

The Bible speaks of us as fallen creatures, and theologians talk about original sin. There is in each of us a perverse twist that makes us use people instead of help them, that makes us feel sorry for ourselves instead of for others, that makes us envy, instead of enjoy, another's good fortune, that makes us enlarge on someone's faults instead of excusing them.... There is within us, however, a counterforce, the gospel...

O God, you know our weakness. Help us to be what we are meant to be, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Letter to the Task Force

Dear Members of the Task Force:

I do not support the response from my congregation countering the ELCA First Draft on The Church and Human Sexuality. While those who drafted the response are sincere, I reject the premise from which they approached their study and am saddened that so many Lutherans, including pastors, seem to find their security in the Bible instead of in God.

To me, it is idolatrous to assert that we are people of the Book and that the Bible is our foundation. Rather, I believe that we are people of God and that Jesus Christ, "the word become flesh", is our foundation. Making this profound distinction is essential to my faith and to my understanding of what it is to bear the name, Christian.

Reducing Christianity to a bunch of rules and regulations and using the Bible primarily as an authoritarian guide for living does not define faith, but rather restricts spiritual growth and prevents us from responding in loving ways to other people. It can also generate self-righteous pride when we follow the "rules" and create feelings of despair with no hope when we do not.

Through Jesus Christ, God calls us to a new way of living in faith and in relationship with Him and each other. We are now forgiven sinners, called beyond the "rules" to a higher standard of responding in creative and courageous ways to His love. There will never be a prescription for how we are to do this. In a given situation, two people might respond differently, according to their faith and their relationship with God through Christ. "What" we do or don't do is not the important issue. "Why" is the key. Likewise, "how" the bible is used is a critical question that merits serious discussion among congregations alongside the various approaches one can take to interpret scripture.

Standards are important, rules necessary, for the order of society. But the Church in Christ is not here to provide neat little specific answers to troubling, divisive, and difficult issues of the day. The answer we need to be reminded of every day is that He loves us, forgives us, saves us by His grace, and will not abandon us. What we do and don't do becomes a response to these assurances in faith, trusting that He will use us in loving ways to care for His people and to challenge society to do the same.

Kathryn Holleque
Our Savior's Lutheran Church
Valley City, North Dakota