Living in the Spirit
June 15, 2018
Scripture Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:6-17
Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade others; but we ourselves are well known to God, and I hope that we are also well known to your consciences. We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you an opportunity to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast in outward appearance and not in the heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! –2 Corinthians 5:11-17
I call it cleaning our mental (spiritual?) filters. We take in information, cultural norms, and beliefs recording them in our minds as shortcuts to our ways of being. They are helpful when we do not have to stop and think of each step in every process before we complete it. A good example is when a courtesy such as “Thank you” comes out of our mouths automatically on cue. We may not remember the repeated reminders our parents used to instill such a reaction in our bank of automatic responses.
Occasionally we need to clean those filters. We need to consider two possibilities that would call us to clean our filters. First our original inputs may need to be updated with new understandings, and second, we may have cluttered our filters with ways of the world that are inconsistent with the ways of Christ.
In the first half of the 19th century, some of my ancestors were taught Manifest Destiny* which held that the United States was destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. Spreading democracy and capitalism does not in and of itself sound like a bad thing. Doing it at the expense of nations of indigenous people was alien to the recognition that all people are created in the image of God and we are called to love, want the very best for, all our neighbors.
Dust of what was common five generations ago about how we treated persons of other colors remain in our memory banks having been passed down from parent to child. While we most likely would feel uncomfortable if we were suddenly swept back in time to share in a discussion with our relatives in 1845 about their attitudes toward persons of color, we may still carry some residuals from their influence. Finding those particles of prejudice and clearing them from our filters is necessary in our successfully fulfilling our call to be the Body of Christ in the world today.
Prayer: Lord, gift us with the intentionality we need with your help to clean our spiritual filters. Amen.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights are reserved.