Life in the Spirit

This week three kinds of Bible readings greet us. First is the story of how Jacob, the ancestor of all Israel, got his first two wives. The second is one of the Apostle Paul’s closely reasoned arguments from his letter to the Romans. And last is a series of short parables from Jesus, each beginning with “the kingdom of heaven is like…” Three passages from continuous readings of three books of the Bible, so it’s not surprising that they don’t intersect with one another but rather seem to run parallel.

I’m not going to spend time with Jacob. To make sense of his story I’d have to supply a lot of background before getting to the point. Suffice it to say that summarizing it as “how he got his first two wives” shows what kind of “family values” are in the Bible.

Paul is worth the hard work of understanding, especially the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans, often described as “Life in the Spirit.” Last week we saw how all “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” – a claim that always astonishes me, that not just we, but everything that exists, await redemption through Jesus Christ.

Yet Paul well knows that though redemption is promised, it has not fully arrived. The yearning for it is so deep that we cannot find words to express it. Here the Spirit helps us, for God, too, knows that deep yearning, and wordlessly speaks it in our hearts. That Spirit brings us comfort, hope, and patience.

And it brought Paul the conviction that nothing can separate us from God’s love. He ends this section with a Spirit-filled expression of great power. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Nothing. Nada. Nothing in creation can separate us from the love of God.

The power of that love, the all-encompassing nature of that love, Jesus shows us in a few short parables. What starts out as small as a seed becomes mighty; it fills everything like yeast in dough; it’s worth paying any price to get. Yet it is possible to reject God’s love. Why anyone would do that is beyond me, but God does give us the awful freedom to walk the other way. The end result as described by Jesus is sobering.

This Sunday I will be baptizing a three-month-old infant. Talk about a mustard seed! Through water and the Holy Spirit she will be raised to a new life of grace. She will be sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. When she yearns too deeply for words, the Spirit will intercede with God for her. Those are promises we are all given at baptism. It takes a lifetime to learn their truth – that nothing in all creation will ever separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.

[Pentecost 6: Genesis 29:15-28; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52.]