03.19.

2017 Lent 3

Trust in Gods Love

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, You bid Your

faithful people to cleanse their hearts, and
prepare with joy for the Paschal feast; that,
fervent in prayer and in works of mercy, and
renewed by Your Word, they may come to the
fullness of grace which You have prepared for
those who love you. Amen.

I would like for us to look into Pauls Epistle to the

Church at Rome this morning but before we do
that lets take a quick peek into Johns Gospel
concerning the Samaritan woman.

This is a very familiar story the encounter

between Jesus and the woman at the well. But
how did it become so familiar how did we even
come to know this story at all, since no
newspaper, video recordings, email, face book or
the like even existed in the first century?

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A clue comes at the end of the passage: Many
Samaritans from that city believed in Jesus
because of the womans testimony.
The womans testimony.

Like these Samaritans, we know all we can know

about the earthly Jesus because people like the
disciples and the woman at the well told others
about their face to face in-counter with the one we
call Christ. Those whom they told also told others
who then told others, and so on down the
centuries until the story came to us, here, in this
place. The passing of the Good News from one
generation to another links us to the Jesus of
history. And without history there is no
tomorrow.

Our Saviour, by teaching one poor woman, spread

knowledge to a whole town and that town
spread knowledge to a county and so on and so
on thru out the world and down the centuries
to this very congregation.

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So we are linked to Jesus and the early church
through word and sacrament carried across 2,000
years of actions. But there is more to this
connection with Christ Jesus more of a
fundamentally personal nature, as St Paul
illustrates in his epistle.

We cannot know Jesus the way the disciples and

woman at the well did we can, however, know
and experience the risen Christ as Paul
experienced Him. St Paul never met Jesus in the
flesh yet he is the primary teacher of the fact
that we can know Christ just as certainly as the
disciples but in a non-physical way.

Knowing the risen Christ through the passed-

down story of Jesus is most effective if we, too,
come to know Christ as alive within us and
among us feeling Gods Spirit dwelling there.

Todays portion of the Epistle helps us understand

this as Paul begins by stating, Since we are
justified by faith, we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ.
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Peace in this context means a lack of enmity or an
absence of conflict that is, peace is unity with
God that we gain through our Lord Jesus Christ.

The peaceful unity with God that we experience in

and from Christ is found in following Christ as
Paul did and as must all, who could not know
the human Jesus. This involves a restoring of the
oneness that we, by virtue of our God-created
nature, can have. It is a unity of God with us and
us with all people - a unity of person and person
community and community rightful
relationships in Gods over-arching presence.

Of course, nothing is clearer than the fact that

human beings consistently live out of peace in
conflict with God and one another. Though we
turn from God again and again and sin against
one another and still we have access to ultimate
unity with God.

Paul explained how this peaceful unity comes

about. Most importantly, He makes it clear that
the process cannot be initiated by us
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it begins only with God with God loving us
despite our unworthiness despite our failure to
love as God loves us despite discord and conflict
with other people. Despite all this God forgives
us and loves us unconditionally.

That means, He accepts us for who we are or who

we pertain to be for what we do or have done or
left undone for what we believe or have doubts
for how we behave, our life style.
He loves us unconditionally.

Paul says it simply: God proves His love for us in

that while we still were sinners, Christ died for
us. Enmity with God is cast aside by Gods
forgiving action which allows Christians to
accept what God offers and live into what our
Creed defines as the Mission of the Church
which is to restore all people unity with God and
each other in Christ.

For Paul and the early Church, the key to

understanding Gods love and forgiveness was
revealed by Jesus death on the Cross.
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The proof of Gods love is Christs complete
obedience to God despite the sinful act that led to
His death - Dying on the Cross. We, the human
race, murdered the Son of God and we all share
in that act and yet, God loves us
unconditionally.

Jesus, the victim, forgives His enemies. This self-

less death overpowers us brings us to our knees
and leads us to accept Gods love and
forgiveness. Believers see pure love in His death
and cannot resist its compelling power to follow in
His way. We begin to realize that Jesus makes us
the most precious of creatures worth dying for
even though we dont deserve it.

God initiates the peace and unity and asks only

our trust in His love and repentance from
rebelling against His love asks only that we
accept the love turn from our sin and reform
our lives. We dont deserve the love and
forgiveness, we cannot earn Gods love and
forgiveness, but by accepting it we are freed from
bondage by such faith.
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God provides the love we provide repentance
and renewal born from above becoming unified
with God and others.

Paul and other theologians have throughout the

centuries struggled to explain how Christs death
accomplished this peace and reconciliation. All
attempts to do so, in fact, have proved
unsuccessful, or at best, are incomplete.

However, what is much more important is that

Paul and the early Church knew, above all, that
Gods decisive action in history lay in Jesus death
on the Cross that this action was absolutely
essential to understanding the reality of God
Gods forgiveness and the possibility of new life
through accepting Gods love.

For Christians, Jesus death forms the singular

focus on what God was doing through His life,
death, resurrection, and the birth of the Church
You..From the earliest days, the cross came to
stand for everything distinctively Christian

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it symbolizes both human sin and Gods all-giving
love. It symbolizes both human sinfulness and
human freedom from spiritual death, reconciling
us to God, reuniting us with God and one
another.

We are inheritors of the primitive Churchs

experience of the new reality of Christ-still-alive
and of new life in the Spirit that was viewed
through the lens of the Cross. And now in our
day, we too, can experience in the life of the
Church the new community of love no less than
did Blessed Paul and the first Christians.

Today is two days after the celebration of St

Patrick, being the patron Saint of my ancestral
home of Ireland. He was born in Wales, and when
a raiding party came from Ireland to capture
slaves, Patrick was among the captured. He spent
several years in Ireland as a slave, until one day
he managed to escape. He joined the church, was
priested, and rose to the elevation of bishop. He
returned to Ireland the very land that enslaved
him - a land full of druids and pagans
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non-believers. Patrick was the only Christ follower
amongst them the only Christian.

He took their symbol of eternal life a circle and

put a cross through it to show how Christ also
offered them eternal life. He also took the three
leaf clover and showed how it symbolized the
Trinity God the Father, God the Son, God the
Holy Spirit. St Patrick Christianized Ireland
single-handedly. He showed the reality of God
and the living Body of Christ to non-believers.

What we call the Body of Christ, a living, flesh-

and-blood reality, enables us to know Christ as a
personal experience and not just a handed-down
story. We are the continuation of the early
community of believers within which everything
about Christ happened. In this dynamic
community, created around a living and present
Lord . . . love is revealed, the Spirit is given, and
faith and hope are found.

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While it is in and through the Church that the
risen Christ is known, no body of Christian
believers acts in the full image of the loving God,
divided and conflicted as we are. And yet, the
Church is our only link with the historic
community that emerged from the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus. It is the only expression of
Christ that we have and even in its
incompleteness, we, in our time, carry forward the
new life of the Spirit of God.

We can say to the woman at the well: It is no

longer because of what you said that we believe,
for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that
this is truly the Saviour of the world.
Amen.

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