Romans 5:1-8
Proper 6 (11) - Year A
We can focus on G*D's putting everything on the line of Jesus' death and try to figure out how to talk about this in the sacrificial milieu of Paul's time or in some other imagery of participation from our own time. Trying to define G*D too closely has run into some difficulties.
Perhaps this year it would be more helpful to look at the work of the Holy Spirit to help us recognize and reshape the generosity of G*D toward us that we might have a passion for the patience it takes to help others identify the generosity of G*D in their lives. Through this radical patience our character is made like G*D's as G*D waited for us to recognize the generosity offered us. So, together, we are in alert expectancy for the critical mass and energy necessary to transform this wobbly old world into a new heaven and earth.
Isn't it better to be so expectant of more glory than it is to try figuring out how G*D of the first part ("Father") authorized God of the second part ("Son") to pull a sacrificial switcheroo?
May your heart be filled with the patience to imitate the character of G*D and respond with hope to the generosity of love.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/june2002.html
Behind the model of spiritual growth moving from suffering to endurance to character to hope lies the question of what comes before suffering.
Do we choose to suffer or do we choose to live in what we consider fullness? I am not convinced that starting with suffering leads so directly to hope. I ascribe to an understanding that living fully leads to hope. The suffering stuff needs to be dealt with, should it arise, without it claiming center stage.
One of the lost pictures of what it means to be created in the image of GOD is the gift of choice, even such a counter-intuitive choice as choosing to "prove" love. Basically this means we choose to take any consequence of full living, of focusing on well-being of self and others that is not limited by the scary and arbitrary limits of suffering and death.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/june2005.html
It has taken us five chapters to get to a reference to G*D's love. Without going back over how it might be read back into the first four chapters, it is this relationship that gives the perspective to find, somewhere in the midst of whatever kind of suffering we are experiencing, a gift of hope. In some sense it is the engine behind our finding that hope lives in us, regardless.
This same love is an energizing factor encouraging us to risk suffering and all that it entails. It is in this sense that there can be a great positive behind any resultant suffering.
All too often, without engaging our thoughts and experiences, it is all too easy to doctrinally stop with a great emphasis upon suffering, as if, in and of itself, it proved something.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/june2005.html