Week of 2 Epiphany, Tuesday

Back to the basics

Today we get a short course in the basics about God, a useful corrective to some of the misguided venom spewed by people like Pat Robertson lately.

In the letter to the Hebrews, we read that not all of us are as mature in Christ as we think. "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food" (Heb. 5:12).

In the Gospel of John, we get the milk we need -- "God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" (John 3:16-17). There's a reason this is the single most popular memory verse in Sunday School.

The God we believe in has definitively revealed that his purpose is love, love so extreme that it will go to any length to reach us. "For I am convinced," writes Paul, " that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:38).

Though some of us "by this time ought to be teachers," too many of us still subscribe to the notion that God condemns, hates, harms, reviles, punishes. None of these is true. If we believe these things, we clearly are not ready for solid food, because "solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained to distinguish good from evil" (Heb. 5:14).

What we experience as God's judgment and condemnation is the sight of our petty hate and jealousy in the face of God's overwhelming love, the reality of our evil deeds in the face of God's pure goodness, the darkness of our sin in the face of God's eternal light.

We are convicted by the Holy Spirit because it is self-evident that we have not met Love with love.

So let's get back to basics, and be sure we drink the recommended daily allowance of milk -- which in the Episcopal Church means the Daily Office or Daily Devotions with their readings from Scripture -- so that our faculties are trained to recognize and respond to God's gracious, relentless love.