Lent
March 21, 2019
Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.
Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, ‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.’ We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. –1 Corinthians 10:1-8
Would that the cause and effects of our lives were as black and white as Paul suggests. They are not. He is expressing the hindsight of a few thousand years. We do not even learn from that history and thus history repeats itself. How do we escape the desire for evil? How do we learn from our mistakes? How do we escape the rationalization that we are the one who can dance with evil and come out unscathed? How do we pass that knowledge to others and coming generations? How do we build a kingdom ruled by love where evil’s power is no longer alluring, and its energies are refocused to good?
Perhaps we do need to become like little children* in our spiritual development. Infants learn from their mistakes rarely rapidly. They may miss their mouths many times but when they finally taste the food and find that it is good, that knowledge is recorded, and they soon no longer miss the mark. They also learn interactions with others quickly. Making it very important that parents react to them in ways that encourage independence while assuring loving support in the progress.
In like matter we learn of God’s abiding love and wisdom through a process of nurture and growth in a world full of distractions and tempting shortcuts in navigate the world about us. Our goals in life are impacted by those distractions and shortcuts. If we are hungry and have no food, we are more likely to do anything to survive. If we feel unloved like we do not belong, we are apt to search for love in all the wrong places.
As followers of Christ we are called to love God and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We learn to love ourselves when we accept in every fiber of our being that God loves us, created us, and that in God’s creation God identified us as good. Such love enables us to love all of God’s children even those who do not yet understand how much God loves them. Our job is to nurture that understanding.
Prayer: Lord, free me from the distractions of evil and empower me to be a sharer of your love. Amen.
*Derived from Matthew 18:2-4