In 2007 the text for the year at St John's Seven Kings was about looking for the new thing that God is already doing. This year our text for the year provides one answer to that search and question:
“All of creation waits with eager longing for God to reveal his children.” Romans 8.19
In this verse Paul writes that all of creation is waiting for God to reveal us, “his children.” We are the new thing that God is doing in the world and for which all of creation is waiting.
Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, has explained this well in his book Simply Christian:
“Here’s the context: God’s whole creation is groaning in labour pains, says Paul, waiting for the new world to be born from its womb … God himself is groaning from within the heart of the world, because God himself, by the Spirit, dwells in our hearts as we resonate with the pain of the world … This is the strange, new getting-in-touch-with-the-living-God, who is doing a new thing, who has come to the heart of the world in Jesus precisely because all is not well … and it needs to be put right , who now comes by his Spirit to the place where the world is in pain … in order that, in and through us – those who pray in Christ and in the Spirit – groaning of all creation may come before the Father himself, the heart-searcher (8.28), the one who works all things together for good for those who love him (8.28). This is what it means to be “conformed to the image of his Son” (8.29). This is what it means, within the present age, to share his glory (8.18, 30).”
This explains, Wright says, “why specifically Christian prayer makes the sense it does within the world where heaven and earth belong together.” “Christian prayer is at its most characteristic when we find ourselves caught up in the overlap of the ages, part of the creation that aches for new birth.”
Our prayer is needed, Paul writes. All of creation is waiting for us. Rowan Williams brings our texts for 2007 and 2008 together when he writes, in Tokens of Trust, that:
“God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct … We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in. It isn’t a process we can manipulate … All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.”
In 2008 I pray that our prayers and actions shape situations in our lives, church, community and world so that God can come more directly in and signs of the new world that (in God’s timing) is waiting to be born can be created through us and in us.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Al Green - People Get Ready.
No comments:
Post a Comment