Saturday, July 30, 2022

First Day of Lambeth Bible Study, July 30, 2022


Today for our bible study we met in small groups. My group includes: Bath and Wells, Burundi, Philippines, Saskatchewan, Kenya, and Trinidad and Tobago. What a gift to have a diverse group which began with laughter and joy.

We will meet together every day. I am the conveyor of mine.

My thoughts, and my thoughts only, coming from our passage from I Peter 1.13-16.

Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

I Peter, as a whole, is the theme for our time together. 

This particular passage spoke to me of Holiness. Be holy as God is holy. A passage that comes from the beginning of scripture and passes through to the whole of creation and kinship theology to the end.

The notion of Holiness has often been connected to the Trinity unified - God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit - united in holiness by God’s perfect love. The meaning here for me is the notion that I cannot be holy alone. First, holiness begins with God, God’s perfect love, and proceeds into creation. Second, the community is bound together by God’s spirit and perfect love first, that this holiness of shared life is in fact born from the perfect love of the Holy Spirit itself. It is not my love or even my ‘likes’ that bind us - it is God’s perfect love of the Holy spirit. Finally, it is our total witness of collective individuals that proceeds outwards in God’s love.

This holiness of being gathered together in God’s holy mutual love by the binding of the Holy Spirit removes our unity from how we (our minds and bodies) feel. This binding is also knit together by Christ’s’ s cross that saves all - even in our brokenness. Finally, we are made one by our shared creation of body by God. This is important and deep theology.

Only after, in baptism, giving ourselves up to this Holy God of love may we move into living our apologetics. In other words, our evangelism of the world begins first with our acceptance of God’s love in action, and proceeds from there. Then, our bodies (actions, words, life lived) become our witness the greater truth. We work and aspire towards this Holiness of God. Be holy as your God is holy.

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Quotes

  • "Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • "Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer." Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • "Perfection, in a Christian sense, means becoming mature enough to give ourselves to others." Kathleen Norris
  • "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." John Wesley
  • "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." G. K. Chesterton
  • "One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans." C. S. Lewis
  • "When we say, 'I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,' we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the church seldom asks us for forgiveness." Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
  • "Christians are hard to tolerate; I don't know how Jesus does it." Bono
  • "It's too easy to get caught in our little church subcultures, and the result is that the only younger people we might know are Christians who are already inside the church." Dan Kimball