We are often presumptuous about our faith and what it means for our lives. We think that what we know and how we interpret scripture is always the right way. We need look at the recent ructions within the Anglican Church of Australia to see how true this is. It is presumptuous of us to believe that what we interpret is the absolute truth in terms of what God is trying to impart to us through those very scriptures. It is assuming an all powerful knowledge of impossible power to understand the writer, the receiver and the intention as well as the context in which everything is written. Just looking at the very brief letter that is called Philemon calls many of our presumptions into question let alone our understanding of our own lives. Slavery is not so much a thing of the past, as we are well aware, yet we presume that this is the case when we read things like Philemon. Yet, the release from slavery is something that comes with the knowledge of Christ in our lives for we are too often slaves to our own perpetuation of tradition, interpretation, thought and wants.
No matter who we are the story in Jerimiah (18.1-11) shows us how we should begin to look at what we are doing in the name of Christ and God. We are the clay that the potter moulds into the pattern that is required for the time and the day. If we think we are the directors of our journey in faith and that what we suggest is the correct way then we have truly forgotten this lesson. It is not ourselves that lay the path that we follow in faith but God and when we attempt to achieve things in God's name we need to be well aware that God requires of us a discernment of his will. This is particularly important when we consider our own lives within the parish community and context that we inhabit. A context that is fraught with possibility and with potential for God's working. We are so filled with our own thinking that we neglect the need to prepare, discern and plan (Lk. 14.28-30) along with God rather than neglect God's presence. We can see this happening in the broader church but we often are blind to our own inability to do the same as we are reliant on our own choices and thought processes.
We always find it almost impossible to understand when God calls us into something new. It often takes something much more then one person suggesting a new thing for anything to begin. The reason being is that we are so often caught up with what we have done in the past and what we are doing in the present. It takes a lot of discernment to understand the pull of God into a ministry that is new and in some ways undetermined. We like someone to say to us this is what you need to do and often we look to those who lead to be the well from which our ministry develops. However, we are all called by God and often times it is not from leadership that the new ministry develops but rather from something that we have already discerned as being the way forward. We just lack the courage and the discernment to push forward with what God is calling us into as we are too often sitting with complacency and comfort in the present. None of us likes the upheaval that comes with God's call because make no mistake our lives are disrupted by the indwelling of God's Spirit as we are guided and directed into new pathways. However, we are to a large extent bound to fulfil God's wishes through our covenanted vows and promises made at baptism.
In coming to Christ and following Christ we are freed from our own needs and responses as we become tied to Christ's death on the cross. Our freedom and slavery is bound by the cross as we are bound to Christ's guidance and direction in life to bring into being God's promises of love, peace and community. We open ourselves up to God so that we build a firm foundation upon which we raise an edifice of love that overcomes all our own boundaries and distinctions and yet remain constrained by the slavery of the yoke of love that frees us from our own biases. We are clay in God's hands and serve Christ as slaves to the cross of our redemption.
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