“Hand cleaning is your professional responsibility” the
hospital sign announced, prompting Epidemiologist Donald Goldman to caution
hospital patients not to worry about speaking up, or of “offending” health-care
providers. Shorthanded and harried hospital personnel sometimes get so busy
they neglect to wash their hands. Goldman further suggested that if the
computer industry could institute clean rooms, “health care should do no less.”
Dean of Nursing Students at Georgetown University, Elaine Larson, concurred.
Frequent hand washing contributes to clean health-care
facilities and to healthy bodies. There is also that spiritual hygiene that cleanses
the human heart and builds healthy human relationships and wholesome communities
in which to live. We awoke this very morning to discover that a twenty-one
year-old Confederate ideologue shot and killed nine black Christians during a
Bible Study in one of America’s oldest black churches.
America’s lack of moral and spiritual hygiene is
reflected in the fact that President Obama has been circumstantially forced to
speak to the nation following more than a dozen mass shootings since he took
office. The gospel of Christ speaks to this moral dilemma of humanity--and it
is far more than just an unresolved community issue--by telling us how to
experience ethical metamorphosis, something that no agency of government can do and no other social agency or Advocacy Group is able to resolve.
Paul, the first century Christian Apostle to the non-Jewish
world, experienced just such a moral transformation. He was en route to
Damascus to further harass, terrorize, and imprison the Followers of the Way, as Christians were then known.
He was, however, confronted by a
surprisingly supra-natural confrontation by Jesus as the Risen Christ, while
travelling to Damascus--extraordinarily unexpected.
Saul experienced a moral reformation—a metamorphosis so
complete that although he went into his cocoon as Saul, the arrogant Jewish Pharisee
and murderous terrorist; he came out of his cocoon as Paul the Christian
Apostle to the Gentiles, author of a classic definition of love, and beautiful
as a Monarch Butterfly (cf. I Cor. 13).
Saul’s transition to Christian Apostleship as Paul prompted
him to initiate a whole new approach to issues of personal faith—"the just shall
live by faith." As a result, everywhere he went he challenged everybody that
would listen to strive for life’s highest and best, by the grace of God. He
urged audiences to discover God for themselves and learn how life with Jesus transforms one’s
personhood, perspectives, customs and habits, and even one’s very life.
Paul’s metamorphosis enabled him to mentor people in
responding to life in ways that reflect Christ’s claims upon their lives and
ours. He argued that “rightness” (meaning righteousness) becomes a reality in
our lives as we become obedient “from the heart to that form of teaching to
which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you [we] became
slaves of righteousness” (Romans
6:17-19, NASV).
As the Maestro of this eternal symphony that we call
life, Jesus Christ offers to tune the strings of our life-instrument, empower
us to walk lovingly with Him, and direct us in walking wisely with others in and out of the church (cf. Col. 4:5). He
alone transforms the cacophony of pain and broken relationships that we have
composed as our expressions of life; he alone can re-configure our efforts into the
beautiful harmony of meaningful interdependent relationships and raise our
lives above the slavery of self-indulgence and sin.
The Church of Jesus Christ, by its very presence,
proclaims the possibilities of conversion (personal metamorphosis). It alone
offers possibilities of a united community made up of one humanity that is no
longer Jew and Gentile, slave or free, (“having put to death the enmity”, Eph.
2:16 NASV).
And when the church is lives by the Manual that brought
it into existence (Bible), it reconfigures social living and models human
community as God intended it to be lived. This is the major theme of the NT
Book of Ephesians as Paul described it.
We can deny the existence of God, but HE will not be
denied or ignored. When we ignore HIM, we do it to the moral destruction of
all that is meaningful and worthwhile in
life. In other words, we break ourselves on his rules
.
And right now, our global community is doing a good job
of destroying itself with wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, poverty, and you
can finish my sentence.
From Warner’s World, this is walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com.
praying, “Father, forgive us for our violent ways. . .”
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