August 21, 2009> 11:50 AM
never repay injury with injury
I prayed the Midmorning Prayer, Terce, this morning and the reading was from Romans 12. I love Romans 12. I started writing a rule based on that chapter of Scripture once upon a time. I'm not finished with it yet and have not thrown it away. It will be implemented at some point. Anyway, Romans 12 is one of those little sections where the whole life we're living as Christians is synopsized very well. This little section (a consolidated quote) is one of the most ignored, I believe. We rationalize the hell out of it until it has no more power. It might as well have been written with invisible ink. Just how else can you read or interpret this? However we do it, the Word keeps coming back around, as it was spoken...
Never repay injury with injury. For it is written: " 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord." "But if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink." Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good. -Romans 12: 17a, 19b, 20a, 21
You really can't get away from what this says, what He says to us about how to live in His Life. And how is it that we allow ourselves to be "conquered by evil" here? Partly, I think, by turning by turning evil into good, by thinking and acting in ways not commensurate with God's Life and Nature. Sure, we're really unable, in ourselves, to do what's written there, but we're supposed to be rending ourselves open to allow God to change all that, all that hating of the enemy, all that desiring to return injury for injury. It all feels so just and right to us, but it's just our broken nature exerting itself. If we keep repainting it and calling it something different, it will never die, and all that broken mess will continue to infect everything around us instead of the Kingdom of God infecting us and the whole world.
August 21, 2009
> 11:50 AM
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