Pentecost (81)
  1. God’s newly reconstituted Israel occurs in and around Jesus to include both Jew and Gentile, not by ethnic association but by faith and water (baptism) and blood (atonement and Eucharist).
  2. Here we have the other major theme within Romans: God will have mercy on whom He has mercy, and He will have compassion on whom He has compassion
  3. The lifeblood of Christ is the treasury that defines personal worth – your worth, my worth. Preach that; the price tag on your soul.
  4. It is that love, finally, which comes back again and again, not as an afterthought, but as the underlying theme of the entire section.
  5. The Earth itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed, just like our spirits in Holy Baptism, just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection.
  6. Our passage from Romans steers us between these two dangerous misconceptions: The mythical monster Scylla of believing the body to be evil on the one shore, and the beast Charybdis of believing the body constitutes all there is on the other.
  7. Paul has gone through all this explanation to belabor the point: The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ changes everything.
  8. St. Paul asserts the baptized have died in Christ but this death then makes them free to live unto Christ. Complicated? Yes, a little. Let us try to clarify things a bit.
  9. The lordship of sin and its reign have been deposed by Jesus Christ. Nothing can stand to oppose those who are in Him.
  10. This is the unique love of God. Where does it come from? It does not arise from the qualities of the person who is loved. It simply comes from God Himself.
  11. If God was going to save the world, and reclaim His global kingdom, then the exiling, the confusion, the ignorance and scattering had to be ended. Pentecost signals this dramatic reversal in a spectacular way.
  12. The epistle text from Colossians 1 declares how the great drama of redemption and human history ends.
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