Kingdom building
June 15, 2019
Scripture Reading: John 16:12-15
‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
Jesus understood grief. I wonder if that is just apart of being all-knowing as God or from experiencing grief in his humanness or both. Joseph had apparently died between Jesus’ visit at the age of 12 to the temple and the beginning of his ministry. The loss of John the Baptist was surely deep felt. Grief has a numbing affect until humans become strong enough to deal with loss. I think the 40 days after the Resurrection was a similar time for the Disciples. They had lost Jesus, then he returned, then they lost his immediate presence again. It took time for them to recover from the shock of all of that to be able to accept the Holy Spirit.
Cultures experience loss that they must grieve and then let go. Several years ago, I attended a training workshop on how to help staff transition to new ways of working. It even suggested holding a mock funeral to help people accept the reality of the new. When I started working for the State Department of Human Services, we kept a handwritten file of alphabetized cards color-coded by type of case in five-draw filing cabinets. We transitioned to digital information in the early 1970’s but it was not until probably 1980 or so that we gave up those cards. Most staff stopped using them after a year or so of digital records.
Hanging on to negative culture forces hurt societies and can cripple them from progressing. Racism, misogyny, and other forms of denigrating people and discriminating against them is holding our society back from gaining all the wealth of worth in each person God created. The time has come to let the old ways go and to welcome the Holy Spirit’s guidance to becoming one in Christ.
Prayer: Lord, help us to see what we are clinging to that is holding back the full realization of your Kingdom. Free us from our bigotry and send all that wasted energy into building a new and better world. Amen.
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.