In addition to being in trouble for never doing any work, and for the work they do being meaningless, a few of them are also in trouble for other things, including but not limited to, their primary residence. Senators in this great nation have been under fire for not living where they claim to live. Oh, sure, they claim to live in Saskatchewan, or Prince Edward Island, but they have health care cards, drivers licenses, condos in Ontario, which is where they actually live. That's the primary residence.
Why am I bringing this up? No, this isn't a Political Blog, as much as it may seem like one sometimes. No, this is about God, as usual, and about God's word. In his word, in the Gospel reading for Sunday, we heard Jesus say 'If you abide in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.' Simple enough to hear, obviously, but hard to work through. It's hard to work through because it has in it the notion of abiding. Abiding in the same way the senators are supposed to. You wouldn't think much of senators, and we don't, who claim a primary residence in one location but who never go there, and certainly don't live there. In that same way, the disciples of Christ (which hopefully include you), are supposed to abide in God's word, knowing the truth. But most of us abide in God's word the same way that the senators abide in Saskatchewan, which is that they have it as a residence on paper, but never go there. They assumed that it was enough to have it, and to never deal with it ever again. As we as Christians do too. We assume that if we read God's word once, that we would never have to go over it again. We don't feel as though we actually have to abide there, if we have it as our primary residence on paper. In other words, we say that this is the most important thing in the universe to us, but we spend zero time actually living in it.
But Jesus says if we abide in his word, that we will know the truth, and the truth will set us free. Why do we have to abide in God's word? If it doesn't change, then why do we need to live in it as opposed to reading it once and then moving on with our lives? Well, consider for a moment the phenomenon known as Groundhog day. No, not the day, the movie.
he spoke about the meaning of this movie, and what it was actually about, and the desire of people to find their own religious, spiritual tradition in it. Buddhists love it, Catholics love it, because they all think it's about them and their own spiritual journey. But Ramis said that the closest thing to it being about something is about the reading of the Torah in the temple, that the Torah readings are always the same, they don't change year to year, it's the same thing every time, and yet as the readings are the same, you yourself are different, and you change.
Now, this is why it is so vital for us to abide in God's word, to live in it. Not because we're going to find something different in the scriptures, we aren't. There's nothing new in there. The Bible will be the same yesterday, today and forever. Nothing new there. It's not because the Bible is new, but because we are. We are new. We are different. We have changed. The word of God doesn't change, but we change, and it will speak to us differently as different moments, which we will lose if we just glance at it once, and then move on with our lives. If the last time you seriously engaged with the scriptures was when you were a child, or when you were in confirmation class, or anything like that, then you're missing out on what God has to say to you as a grown person, at this stage in your life. To put in in a real world way that you can understand, think about the greatness that is Calvin and Hobbes. The comic strip, not the Philosophers.
When I was young, I read Calvin and Hobbes. I loved it. It was fantastic. And then I didn't read it anymore. I moved onto other things (mainly mountaineering books now), and promptly forgot about it. But all of a sudden, I found Calvin and Hobbes again, and I saw it in a whole new light. When I was a child, I identified with Calvin. Now that I'm grown up, and have children of my own, I identify with Calvin's parents!
How did that happen? The words didn't change, the drawings have been the same always, but I changed. I had new experiences, and so going back to the material means that it affects me in new ways. If that's the way with Calvin and Hobbes, how much more it is with the Holy Scriptures? How much more is it with God's word, and what he has promised to share with us?
In that way, if we only encounter God's word as Children, then we are missing out on something incredibly important. St. Paul tells us that when he was a child, he thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. Now that he is a man, he put childish things away. When you were a child, God spoke to you like a child. He told you what you needed to know then. You knew that the whole world was in his hands, that Jesus loved you, that you knew, that there was a floody floody and all that. But now that you're grown, those answers, that relationship may not satisfy you anymore.
If that's the case, then you may not have encountered God's word lately. If it seems childish, that's likely because you either haven't encountered it since you were a child, or have dealt with it as a child. It's time to put childish things away, and to view it like a grownup. It's time to learn the truth, and to have the truth set you free.
The great gift of the Reformation was that Luther took the scriptures, and put them in a language that everyone could understand. He took the Bible, and made it so that we could hear it in our own language. It wouldn't do us much good to try to abide, to live in a word that we couldn't understand, that we could never work out what it meant. But once Luther had given us the scriptures in our language, had made it so we could hear, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, once that had happened, we could know the truth. We could know that we have sinned. We have done what we didn't want to do, we have avoided doing what we want to do, we have served ourselves and not our neighbors nor our family. We have thought too much about what we want, and have broken relationships in our wake. But we hear from God's word that we have a source for hope. Hope even in the face of death. There is no such thing as too late, no such thing as too far gone, or too broken, that's the work of Christ. You learn from his word not just that you are in bondage, in slavery to sin, but also that he earnestly desires to set you free. That's his work that he came to do, to put you right, to restore you to God and to each other.
The child's version of these stories are to tell you that God loves you. The adult version is to tell you that he loves you to death.
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