4th Sunday after Easter 6.5.07
Is there life on the new planet they have discovered 20 light years from earth? I hope not, for their sake!
Life is too much trouble, is it not? At least that is what we tend to say, taking a look around us on this very troubled planet.
But it is not meant to be so. The epistle today (James) reminds us that only what is good comes from the hand of God – only good, and every good.
Somehow we manage to make much heavier weather of life than God meant it to be.
It is all because we have rebelled, goaded on by the father of lies, and in the darkness which sin brings upon us, we declare there can be no God, no purpose to life.
The denial of God in theory follows from the the denial of God in practice.
In this Easter season we are reminded of the reasons for our joy. Life is a precious gift, and we should be glad to be alive.
If we had just taken God at His word we would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble, but it is still not too late to reclaim this basic simplicity of taking life as a gift from the hands of a loving Father, and using this gift as He means it to be used.
So we repent of our sins, we get our lives back in order; we get rid of all the false attachments and rebellious attitudes. We clean up our act.
We apologise for making the earth such an unpleasant place to live, and we re-instate Jesus Christ as King, promising to do things His way from now on.
It is only our sin that makes this seem difficult or unlikely. If we would turn from our sin we discover a new clarity, a breathtaking simplicity – God is right after all. It has always been so.
His creation is good, and would run perfectly if only we obeyed Him!
So we set about recovering what we have lost. We will struggle to cast off our sins, but we will keep that central and all-important focus, that God is good and only what is good comes from His hands.
If He lets us suffer, that also is part of His goodness because He is forcing us to turn back to Him.
We turn back to Him in prayer. God is a God of infinite power and love, and is just waiting for our prayer to exert that love on all the parts of His creation.
We might ask, why doesn’t He just do that anyway? Because part of the gift of life was that we would be stewards of His creation. He is waiting for us to reclaim this role. If we turn to Him He will act; if not, He will not, at least not as directly.
A large part of the process is just to relax and fully enter His presence. We tend to pray only on the surface, not getting into the prayer, because too much distracted, or resenting the need to pray, or lacking in faith etc.
If we can cultivate the habit, keep the vision of His goodness, and just let the power flow. This would happen if we stayed at it long enough. That father of lies will be trying to discourage us, but we are too smart for that.
So, life is good. If we heed this message from St James we will see that it gets better still.
(I hope those people on the other planet have done better than us).
