Chaos, Hope, and Meaningful Action

 Preached at Silverton Friends Church

Jan. 11, 2026

I’ve been saddened and dismayed by current events, and the chaos unleashed on the world, disruptions to long-held friendships between individuals and nations, violations of norms, and disregard for human dignity. Given the disorder of our external social and political world, the disruptions to family and friend relationships, the sense of powerlessness for the individual, it is no wonder that we have often internalized the mess, adding it to whatever there is of disorder in our inner selves. Our emotions rise up and can manifest as fear, anger, or sorrow, even as we continue to live in this beautiful world. Our systems and order are crumbling out of our control, and we fear the unknown. This chaos makes our worlds completely unpredictable.

Often we attempt to control chaos by finding someone or something to blame for it. We like to know cause and effect, so that we can, we believe, erase negative effects by removing known causes. And for religious people, disorder is more than distasteful; it undermines the structures by which we understand the world.

Power that works beyond our control and violates our expectations introduces chaos. Even our inner worlds are “like the ocean, mysterious and dark,” to quote a song by Bob Dylan. And the inner worlds of other people are not available to us to know directly; we mostly observe their actions and feel our feelings. Though we can inch toward some kind of understanding of another person, what they will do next is not entirely predictable, even if we’ve been married 50 years.

The “Chaos Theory” article in Wikipedia had this surprisingly profound comment: “What is clear is that the world is chaotic and outside of our control, beyond a certain threshold, and that our place in the world hinges in some ways upon our readiness to accept this.” God give us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

You’ve probably heard of the butterfly effect, a popular way to refer to the ideas in chaos theory.  To oversimplify to what I can understand and express, many natural systems show sensitive dependence on initial conditions. So, for instance, the weather is notoriously unpredictable over any length of time longer than a week because weather events are sensitive to initial conditions, and we can’t keep track of those.  So we use statistics and almanacs and watch how thick the squirrels’ fur is. 

 

My daughter gave me Mavis Staples’s new album, Sad and Beautiful World.  This whole album has been speaking to my heart, beginning with the title.  Both sadness and joy, as well as the perception of beauty, are rooted in the individual’s perception, rather than being essential attributes of some thing or event outside us. 

I want to encourage us to approach chaos with curiosity and interest, rather than fear and anger. God is not afraid of chaos, having shown that it has a place from the beginning of creation.

In human mythologies, darkness, the ocean, and the eternal feminine are often associated with chaos, and this is certainly the case with the creation narrative of Genesis 1.  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, And darkness was on the face of the deep. All of these are ways of saying, the beginning of God’s creating was chaos.

And then, the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, like a hen brooding over an egg. ( A feminine image, to be sure.) And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, calling the light Day and the darkness Night.

It is crucial to notice that God doesn’t call the night evil, even though the darkness (from a human perspective) is prone to chaos.

Next, God separates the air from the watery expanse, calling it the sky or heaven. Then, God gathers the waters together and allows the dry land to emerge, calling the waters Seas and the land Earth, and God saw both as good.

It is crucial to notice that God doesn’t consider the mysterious dark ocean evil, though its power and unpredictability make humans consider it chaotic.

Indeed, the Voice from the Whirlwind in Job asserts, “I shut in the sea, clothed it in clouds, and swaddled it in darkness….Tell me if you know where light dwells, and where darkness has a place…everything under heaven is mine.” Job responds: “I’ve been speaking about things I don’t understand. I have heard of you, but now I see you and I melt away and find comfort in being only dust and ashes.” (For reference see Genesis 18:27, where Abraham says, “I have taken upon me to speak with the Lord, I which am but dust and ashes.”)

As Christopher Linkiewicz writes in The Philosophy of Chaos: From Chaos Theory to Existentialism (medium.com), “It is in the nature of thinking that we never have all the information…we rarely even approach a complete picture of anything…Errors can, will be, and must be made in our calculations.” The lovely Wikipedia article on chaos theory continues, “Small changes in initial conditions can lead to unpredictable outcomes challenging traditional views of causality and order.” 

We know so little and actually control even less. How then shall we go about our daily lives? 

I think that recognizing the limits of our knowledge, our understanding, and our ability to control anything can be paralyzing or it can be freeing.  I want to speak in favor of freedom.  Indeed, every positive action we take is energized by hope and faith, and can be grounded in love.

Surprisingly, this chaotic mystery makes openings we did not expect for our small daily actions to have an effect we could not have expected. Each positive action may be the initial condition for untold and unforeseeable positive events.

Forty years ago, I heard Bill Vaswig preach, and I actually remember something he said.  Bill was the founder of a ministry dedicated to emotional and physical healing, a Lutheran evangelist, and a founding member of Renovaré. What he said was this: when you pray and ask the Holy Spirit for guidance, take some time to listen, and then do what comes to you, simple as it may be.  Essentially, why ask if we’re not going to listen for an answer and do what comes to us?

I’ve tried this, and, to be honest, it introduces an unpredictability into my life that isn’t very comfortable and can be embarrassing.  I’ve prayed out loud for a stranger on the street, prayed out loud for healing among strangers and for lost causes. Since no one rose from a sick bed or from the dead, these prayers were humbling to me, though I don’t regret them. I do not know, in a universe where chaos theory pertains, what these tiny acts of attempted obedience may have set in motion somewhere in time.  But I can see that these little efforts to listen and obey have changed me in ways I can hardly know and cannot describe.

I also know that my inner self is not by itself a reliable guide, since I barely know my inner ocean and can often act out of self-interest or herd mentality.  Thus it is useful to have external advice as well.  Jesus and the Jewish law said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This requires some imagination to live by.  What am I doing to my neighbor? Would I do this to myself? And what am I doing to myself? Would I do this to my neighbor? In Romans 12, St. Paul beseeches us to give our bodies to God as a living sacrifice, embracing transformation rather than conformity.  This is what transformation looks like.

Think realistically of ourselves

Recognize our connection to others, what Paul calls being members of each other, as part of Christ’s Body

Use the gifts we have, make space for the gifts others have

Love others without hypocrisy

Be kindly affectionate to each other

Give to those in need and be hospitable

Rejoice with those who rejoice

Weep with those who weep

Give preference and honor to each other

Associate with the humble

Don’t puff ourselves up

Be diligent, fervent, hopeful, patient

Continue steadfastly in prayer

As much as is up to us, live peaceably with all

Give our hungry enemies food

Give our thirsty enemies water

Bless those who persecute us

Don’t repay evil for evil

Don’t avenge ourselves

Abhor what is evil

Show our respect for good things

Cling to what is good

These are externals by which we can measure our internal promptings.  As retired psychotherapist James Finley (Center for Action and Contemplation contributor) says, “What is the most loving thing for me to do in this moment?” Or as George MacDonald says, “It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about—what to do next. No one can do the second thing, one can do only the first thing.” (David Elginbrod) And as he encourages us, “God sits in that chamber of our being in which the candle of our consciousness goes out in darkness, and sends forth from thence wonderful gifts into the light of that understanding which is His candle. Our hope lies …in the wisdom wherein we live and move and have our being.” (“The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture,” A Dish of Orts, 1867). 

Thanks be to God who is not afraid of the dark and has provided for both order and disorder. May our prayers and small daily actions move the world’s systems toward love.

Let’s end by celebrating our finiteness and our freedom to choose love. Listen to this excerpt from Psalm 104 (NKJV):

O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all.

The earth is full of Your possessions—

This great and wide sea,

In which are innumerable teeming things,

Living things both small and great.

There the ships sail about;

There is that Leviathan

Which you have made to play there.

These all wait for You,

That You may give them their food in due season.

What You give them they gather in;

You open Your hand and they are filled with good.

You hide Your face, they are troubled;

You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

You send forth Your Spirit, they are created;

And You renew the face of the earth.

May the glory of the Lord endure forever;

May the Lord rejoice in His works.

He looks on the earth, and it trembles;

He touches the hills, and they smoke.

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;

I will sing praise to  my God while I have my being.

May my meditation be sweet to Him; 

I will be glad in the Lord.

Living with Hope

Preached via Zoom 12-13-2020 at Wayside Friends Church

I recently endured a day and a half of significant unhappiness having to do with the COVID plague and its effects on my important relationships. At this time, I thought, I'll have to call my pastors and tell them I'm not qualified to speak about living with hope. Then I went for a walk with my dog up behind a city park where I saw a natural crucifix and looked out over my home town and the surrounding mountains and, when I got home, I felt better.

And I thought, "Going for a walk is an example of living with hope." You see, I know that my chronic tendencies to anxiety, depression, migraine, and fibromyalgia are all lessened by simple exercise. In fact, even "bicycling" on my Wii Fit helps me. I do these things I know to be good for me out of hope, an anticipation of something positive. 

Emily Dickinson, famously reclusive, probably a migraine sufferer, with a distantly polite relationship with God, wrote this about hope:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers - 

That perches in the soul - 

And sings the tune without the words - 

And never stops - at all - 

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - 

And sore must be the storm - 

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm - 

I've heard it in the chillest land - 

And on the strangest Sea - 

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

This poem describes hope as a bird within us, constantly singing its tune through storm, cold, isolation--a bird that lives without being fed. Hope is a grace in this picture, a gift. Hope is associated with the human desires for happiness and comfort and security. Any action we take towards those goals for ourselves or others is an action based in hope, including the action of writing a poem.

The author of Hebrews envisioned hope as an anchor, which has become a common Christian symbol for hope (my paraphrase follows):

Because we human beings are flesh and blood, Jesus also himself became flesh an blood; so that by dying himself, he might destroy the accuser who has the power of death, the devil; And thus deliver his human family who through fear of death were all their lifetime living in chains...It was right for him to be made like us, his family, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. Because he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to help them that are tempted. (Hebrews 2:14-18)

We have a high priest who can be touched with the feeling of our weaknesses, who has been tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, so that we may find mercy and grace to help in time of need. (Heb. 4:15-16)

Though he were a Son, Jesus learned obedience through suffering, and being made complete, became the author of eternal salvation for all who obey him. (Heb. 5:8-9)

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast. (Heb. 6:19)

The Old Testament Hebrew words translated as hope in the King James Version have metaphors in their souls: cord (signifying attachment); pool (signifying gathering together, like raindrops); hurrying toward refuge, running to safety; waiting; and even digging out or exploring. Hope is both steady and active.

It is meaningful to me that a word search for hope in the Old Testament shows clusters in the Book of Job, in Psalms, and in Lamentations.  Hope's song, as Emily Dickinsons aid, is sweetest in the storm. In the book of Job, we often see Job's comforters assert that we get to hope for good when we have been good, quid pro quo.  Job's suffering gives the lie to this idea (which he may himself have shared when things were good). He lies on his ash heap, scraping his skin with shards of pottery, and says what he thinks is true instead, that God has mysteriously abandoned him despite his being a good man, and that even so, "Though God slay me, yet will I trust him." This is a statement of Job's faith, and his ongoing argument with God is a sign of his stubborn hope.

I had a serious bout of depression in my mid-30s, and during that time was asked to share from the pulpit at my church a passage of scripture I found meaningful.  I read the following: "Cursed be the day I was born, and cursed be the person who brought the news of my birth to my father..why did I ever leave the womb to see misery and woe, to spend my days in shame!" (Jer. 20:14, 15, 18). Suffice it to say I was not invited to share for quite a while after that. But a student of mine who also knew depression expressed to me that it gave her comfort to hear those words. For those who don't know, Jeremiah had many reasons for his dismay: he lived as a prophet among people who insisted on ignoring his words, even throwing him into a dry well to die.  He saw his country and city conquered by the armies of Babylon, and he himself was an unwilling immigrant to Egypt with the refugees, even though he told them that emigrating would end in disaster.  His words were written on a scroll that the king read and burned. No wonder he wished he had not been born. But even so, he acted with hope. He bought land he would never live on, he and his scribe rewrote his scroll, he continued talking with God about his life. And he wrote these famous words, more famous than his words of dismay: "But this do I call to mind, therefore I have hope; the kindness of the Lord has not ended, God's mercies are not spent. They are renewed every morning--ample is your grace! 'The Lord is my portion,' I say with full heart; therefore will I hope in God." (Lamentations 3:21-24)

Living with hope includes speaking honestly to God and about our experiences. We do this, even when we are angry or despondent, because we have hope that God will show up. And God does show up, not to answer our existential questions, but to be present, as in the last chapters of Job.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, wrote many celebratory poems about the beauty in nature and his faith in God; he also wrote this poem, found among his Terrible Sonnets, written from a place of severe depression:

"Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist--slack they may be--these last strands of man

In me, or, most weary, cry, I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be."

Hopkins describes himself as a rope he is thinking about destroying, but he chooses not to do so. The repeated word "not" becomes his act of hope--not despair, not untwist, not choose not to be. For some, waking up still alive is living with hope.  And Hopkins points out to himself that he can make choices that derive from hope. A schizophrenic acquaintance of mine learned to talk back to his destructive voices, an act of hope: "Barry don't want to do that," he would say about some act of self-harm.  When I was on my walk (see opening story), I said to myself, "Your feelings are not despair, but self-pity." Thinking that through was an act of hope. And even self-pity is somewhat hopeful, though neither comfortable nor attractive. One hopes that there will be some improvement, that a better moment will arrive. Meanwhile, as Hopkins wrote, "Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind."

St. Paul writes that faith, hope and love abide, endure. Love hopes all things--hoping for the best for our world; hoping for the best for our enemies.  Hope is not just a feeling, but it also inspires and requires actions. Planting a seed is hopeful--watering and weeding and fertilizing and bracing and protecting--all necessary acts of hope. Reconciling is an act of hope--forgiving and compromising and empathizing--all necessary components for reconciliation. These are hopeful action we can move towards.

Despair is corrosive, like pouring acid on the soul. Contempt is also corrosive, like pouring acid on someone else's soul. Both attitudes reject hope; hope for oneself and hope for others. I recently wrote a protest letter to the members of the Supreme Court, and as an act of hopefulness, sent it to all of them, not just the ones I think are sympathetic. Who am I to limit the possibility of change for even those I see as foreclosed to necessary mercies for human beings? I don't see everything.

T.S. Eliot write in "East Coker," one of The Four Quartets: The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

Humility makes it possible to live with hope.

And I would be wrong to ignore the teaching of the resurrection of the dead as our basis for hope. When St. Paul writes of hope, it is most often in the context of the hope of the resurrection. He grounds his whole experience of Jesus on his encounter with the resurrected Christ.

"We do not mourn," he writes, "as do those who have no hope." Our notions of what the resurrection of the dead entails are often sentimental and perhaps inaccurate, but the fact remains that when Jesus was about to die, he told his followers, "I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come again to receive you unto myself" (John 14:2-3).  Believing this makes it possible to work towards loving our neighbors in the here and now. The resurrected Christ was happy to fix breakfast for his frightened followers. 

Whatever scarcities surround us presently, whatever weaknesses or sorrows inhabit our souls, we have a future hope that all tears will be dried and all wounds healed. Let us live with this hope.

Losing Faith, Faithlessness, and Keeping Faith: Jesus and Peter

I have fallen in love with really only one car in my lifetime, a 1975 Alfa Romeo Spyder, lemon yellow with a black rag top. I knew it was old when I bought it, and I could see that the top was rag in more than just the name, but I had such loving expectations of driving with the top down, my senses fully engaged, the pleasure of feeling close to the road. I wouldn’t let anyone else drive it.

Some 10 or more years later I sold it, glad to get out of it most of my initial payment for it. I had put perhaps 3000 miles on it, and I don’t want to remember how much in repairs and tune-ups. The nice Bulgarian man on SE Foster in Portland who repaired it for me raced Alfas and told me they ran best on half jet fuel. Maybe so. But I now am driving a 2018 Honda CR-V with an extended warranty because I lost faith in old cars as transportation and I don’t have the patience to make them work as investments. I want a car I can rely on to get me where I want to go without letting me down.

Losing faith in a car that I loved was sad, but it does not compare with losing faith in people, in churches, perhaps even in God. When something or someone disappoints us deeply, abandons us, or rejects us, or just quits returning our calls, our souls are wounded and we lose faith.

I want to approach the topic of losing faith in God as gently and carefully as possible. I highly value honesty, and I believe with all my heart that God does, too. So the best first step when we lose faith in God is to say so to God. “I have lost faith in you.” And then to explain to ourselves and God what that means.

Numbness

It might mean that we don’t feel emotionally connected to God. We are numb. Perhaps we see that others do express a strong sense of emotional connection to God, and we come to church and the songs are all about strong emotions with regard to God, and we can’t in honesty join in. “Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly.” Or “I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you, O my soul, rejoice.”  Or people share how God has lifted their hearts into joy or how a deep sense of peace has flooded their anxious spirits, and we just can’t relate. Our souls are troubled, our souls are exhausted, and our souls are numb. We feel so alone.

As anyone will tell you, this is a normal stage of life, one in which it is wise to sit quietly in your soul until it lifts, and if it does not lift, to seek professional help from a doctor or a counselor. Take care of yourself as if you were someone you love. See that you get good food, enough sleep, some outdoor time each day, moderate exercise. Do something you like to do. Keep yourself alive. These are acts of kindness that count as acts of faith. And, every now and then, write a letter to God.  There are Psalms and other passages of the Bible that are just this kind of letter to God.

Disappointed Expectations

Losing faith may mean that we become afraid that God is not who or what we wanted God to be.  Perhaps we expected God to be our loving and protective Father, and we experienced abuse and abandonment. What good Father would let those things happen? Perhaps we expected God to execute justice on evildoers, and instead we watched them prosper and ascend to power and prestige. What just judge allows the wicked to win? Perhaps we expected the compassionate Savior of the world to alleviate suffering and we watched horrific news stories of famine and disease or the illness of someone we love. In the book of Job, Job himself says to God, “I am a good person, and you’ve treated me worse than you treat the truly evil. What’s wrong with you?” Job teaches us that God welcomes honesty from humans. Job is angry for pages and pages, and God, while never settling Job’s questions, does show up and tell Job’s preachy friends to be quiet and listen to Job.

I myself have said to God, “If I claimed to be someone’s father, I’d never let this kind of stuff happen…” I had a friend tell me at a crucial period of my own life that I needed to forgive God for not measuring up to my expectations. I did come to a place of accepting that in a universe where God accepts human free will, a lot of suffering will ensue, and that God suffers with us and may in fact, through the work of Jesus, bear some of that suffering for us. This does not answer all my objections to the way the universe runs, but I can remain on speaking terms with God.

When we are fearful and angry about the way God runs the universe, we can still choose to do our best to make this world as livable as possible. In other words, we can still work at loving our neighbors, and these acts of love are acts of faith. 

Projected Faithlessness

Finally, I want to talk about when we are ourselves faithless, when we betray our relationship with God. There are some spectacular examples of this in the Bible, of course, in Judas and Peter, but I think we fall in and out of faithfulness every day. Indeed, there are times when we oppose God’s way of being in the world because it is so counter to our ideas of what will actually work to bring about God’s kingdom on earth.  And I think, when we are faithless, we tend to project that onto God and consider that God has broken faith with us as well.

It is common for us, looking back, to think that we would not have been as dull and dense as the disciples and the other followers of Jesus. We think we would have understood more of what Jesus was saying and been in greater sympathy with what Jesus revealed about God and how God works with humans and in human history.  

Jesus, the beloved Son of God, said, “I do nothing on my own, only what I hear from my Father. So you can know that when you see me, you’ve seen God. This is how God is and what God does and how God does it.” Right away, we can see from the life of Jesus that God doesn’t deliver by some sort of formula. It’s not a matter of us “getting it right” or “doing enough” or “following the rules” and then God comes through predictably. Jesus did miracles, yes, but not all the miracles possible to do on earth. He brought some dead people back to life, but not all the dead people who died while he was here. He stilled one storm. He fed two crowds of hungry people and provided wine for one wedding. Yes, these were amazing acts, and they were not enough to set the entire world at ease and at peace. And Jesus said, “I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Well, you know the disciples immediately thought that meant he would free them from Rome but instead he freed them from the law, from sin, from judgment. He set them free to love God and to love their neighbors, and that really wasn’t what they’d wanted.

As soon as Peter identified Jesus as the Christ, or the one sent by God to be the king, Jesus turned right around and started talking about how he was going to be arrested and crucified. (Matthew 16, Mark 8) Peter took him aside and rebuked him for talking like that.  And Jesus turned around and looked at the followers, and then rebuked Peter right back, calling him his adversary. “You strive for the things all humans strive for, not what God strives for. You could trip me up.” I’m guessing that Jesus could turn to me every day of my life and say this to me at least once.

Later, on the final evening before his crucifixion, Jesus told his followers that he was about to be betrayed by one of them, and that he would be tortured and killed. (Luke 22) And they went right on to argue about who would have the highest position in the new kingdom Jesus would be setting up. They could not even hear what Jesus was telling them. It did not compute that the one God sent to save them would do so by dying rather than by killing their enemies.  I don’t think we are different from them. Jesus tells us that whoever would be greatest needs to serve all the rest, and we go on worrying about who is eligible to be on elders or chair a committee. Jesus tells us that no one can bear fruit who doesn’t die first, and we just do not hear him.

Jesus Prays for Us

So, in our faithlessness, where is the hope?  I find it in what Jesus says to Peter. I’ll paraphrase a bit, the way I hear it, “My dear friend Peter, you have no idea of how shallow your faith is, how quickly you will let fear overrule your brave intentions. In fact, in the next few hours, you will publicly say you don’t know me 3 times. You have been my adversary in the past, and you will be again. This adversarial spirit will sift you like wheat. You will see how much of your professed faithfulness is worthless. But I have prayed for you that the light of your faith will not be completely put out.”

See this? Jesus has prayed for Peter. Jesus has prayed for me. Jesus has prayed for you. In all our small and large betrayals of faith, all the ways we have proven that God cannot trust us to see rightly and do the right thing, Jesus has prayed for us. Jesus is praying for us right now. Each time I betray the first commandment to love God wholeheartedly, Jesus is praying for me. Each time I violate the commandment to love my neighbor as I love myself, Jesus is praying for me. Each time I treat myself worse than dirt, Jesus is praying for me.

St. Paul says, “Who is it that judges us? It is even Christ who died, who is now risen, and is at the right hand of God, It is Christ who intercedes for us” (Romans 8:34).  Jesus Christ is judge and advocate.

“If anyone sin, we have an advocate, an intercessor, with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous,” writes St John in 1John 2:1. This is an intercessor who prays entirely according to the will of the Father. They are on the same page with regard to us. Jesus is praying that the light of our faith will not go completely out and his Father is on board with granting that prayer.

Keeping Faith

And then Jesus says to Peter and us, “And when you have turned back toward me again, strengthen your brothers and sisters. That’s what you’re here for.”

If we judge God’s trustworthiness, God’s faithfulness, by our own, we will find it very hard to trust in God.  If we judge God’s trustworthiness, God’s faithfulness, by the actions of Jesus Christ on our behalf and his continual prayers for us in our weakness, we have the space to pause and turn again to strengthen our brothers and sisters, to love our neighbors. 

It’s not every day I can end a sermon with a slightly modified quotation from Neil Diamond ("Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show"):

Brothers and sisters
Now you got yourself two good hands
And when your brother or sister is troubled,
You gotta reach out your one hand for them
'Cause that's what it's there for
And when your heart is troubled,
You gotta reach out your other hand
Reach it out to Jesus up there
'Cause that's what he's there for

Take my hand in yours Walk with me this day
In my heart I know We will never stray
Hallelujah

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Romans 7 and 8: Making Freedom a Habit, Relying on God's Love

A Friends (Quaker) Perspective on Romans and Galatians

Provided several years ago for Illuminate, an adult Sunday School curriculum published by Barclay Press, a Friends publishing house

Lesson 6

Romans 7:1-8, 21-25

Paul is honest about the distance that can exist between the eternal truth that we are free from slavery to sin and the daily experience of choosing good over evil in our actions. The habitual forces of selfishness, self-preservation, and self-promotion, all at others’ expense, are hard to resist on a daily basis.

I know good folks who believe in holiness and freedom from slavery to sin who cannot admit that they make mistakes in human relationships. The result tends to be that they place the fault for the mistakes in the other person.

Paul’s honesty helps us here. We know Paul is set apart, purified, cleaned up (i.e., sanctified), and yet he describes difficulties in making his freedom from sin operational. Note that Paul split up from Barnabas because of “irreconcilable differences” over John Mark’s fitness for ministry (Acts 15:37-40).

We often respond almost reflexively, and when we kick out, we hit someone else. Yet there is a better way to live, modeled by Jesus, who did what he saw our Father doing and what our Father told him to do. The only way I know to change my behavior is to slow myself down so I can see the opportunity to choose differently from my habits. Paul thanks God for Jesus Christ the rescuer, who pulls us along with him and into him. Despite the difficulty we have learning to live free from sin, our inclusion in Jesus’s death and resurrection sets us free from condemnation.

Lesson 7

Romans 8:1-11

This passage comes directly after Romans 7, in which Paul attributes to Jesus the victory over sin and the death that ensues from sin; he asserts that we are no longer under judgment at all. This sets us free to live under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the source of the abundant life Jesus came to give us. Because Jesus and we are identified in his death and resurrection, we live outside the law.

Paul has spent a lot of time explaining that we are saved through faith in the promise God made that we can live at peace with God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We aren’t saved through doing but through trusting. So this isn’t a sudden shift to another legalistic way of earning salvation, this reference to the law of the Spirit. Instead, what Jesus does for us is move us from a moral universe of “have to” into one of “want to.”  We are no longer afraid of God because Jesus has “oned” us to God. Jesus sets us right, and therefore we can take the risk of listening to the Spirit and doing what we hear to do on a daily basis.

It’s like the difference between fulfilling an assignment in school to write a paper on space travel and falling in love with exploring “the final frontier” and doing what you can to become an astronaut. Or the difference between being a tourist and deciding to emigrate. Or the difference between babysitting and having a baby. Jesus makes it attractive for us to turn to God and run in God’s direction rather than running away.

Walking according to the Spirit is just the same thing as putting the Kingdom of God first. Don’t unite yourself to the concerns of this world’s systems; instead, unite yourself to the concerns of God that the Spirit of God will make clear to you each day. As Jesus said, no one can serve two masters.

Lesson 8

Romans 8:28-39

In between Lesson 7 and this one is Paul’s teaching that reminds us of Romans 7. We are set free from sin and death, free to do the right thing that God tells us to do; and yet we find ourselves fighting against old habits of selfishness, etc. Who will deliver us?  Jesus. Paul refers to our having the early signs or “first fruits” of the Spirit, but groaning inwardly for the redemption of our bodies. Like Abraham, we are saved in hope, which by definition we do not see, and we wait for its fulfillment with patience.

I love the thought that the Spirit translates our prayers and entreats God for us because of our weakness. We can therefore pray for and about anything, knowing that God will answer the prayers in the right way to advance the Kingdom. We can sit in silence before God, knowing that the Spirit is groaning for and with us.

When we love God, which Jesus makes possible, nothing can hurt us. In fact, God makes all things work to our good. God, who sees us coming from a long way off and runs to meet us, has purposed to shape us into the kind of child Jesus is so that everyone can see the family resemblance. He plans to put us right and make us what we ought to be and then brag on us.

Loving God is easy when we realize how God loves us. God wants to give us everything, God sets us right side up, God makes Jesus our judge, Jesus who prays for us all the time. Whatever hardship we face does not come because God has quit loving us. No power can separate us from God’s love.

I am so hopeful that this trust in the work of Jesus will free you and me to go boldly wherever God calls us to go without fearing that we will get it wrong. Of course we will often miss the bull’s eye or fail at perfect obedience, but Jesus is our redeemer, our guarantee, our intercessor and our judge. We could not be in kinder or more precisely healing hands.