Two more of Peterson’s poems on the Beatitudes:

IV. The Lucky Hungry
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness”

Unfeathered unbelief would fall
Through the layered fullness of thermal
Updrafts like a rock; this red-tailed
Hawk drifts and slides, unhurried
Though hungry, lazily scornful
Of easy meals off carrion junk,
Expertly waiting elusive provisioned
Prey: a visible emptiness
Above an invisible plenitude.
The sun paints the Japanese
Fantail copper, etching
Feathers against the big sky
To my eye’s delight, and blesses
The better-sighted bird with a shaft
Of light that targets a rattler
In a Genesis-destined death.

V. The Lucky Merciful
“Blessed are the merciful”
A billion years of pummeling surf,
Shipwrecking seachanges and Jonah storms
Made ungiving, unforgiving granite
Into this analgesic beach:
Washed by sea-swell rhythms of mercy,
Merciful relief from city
Concrete. Uncondemned, discalceate,
I’m ankle deep in Assateague sands,
Awake to rich designs of compassion
Patterned in the pillowing dunes.
Sandpipers and gulls in skittering,
Precise formation devoutly attend
My salt and holy solitude,
Then feed and fly along the moving,
Imprecise ebb- and rip-tide
Border dividing care from death.

Eugene Peterson, Theology Today

More from Romans 13:  The law we must obey; the debt we should accumulate:  LOVE.

“Don’t run up debts, except for the huge debt of love you owe each other. When you love others, you complete what the law has been after all along. The law code—don’t sleep with another person’s spouse, don’t take someone’s life, don’t take what isn’t yours, don’t always be wanting what you don’t have, and any other “don’t” you can think of—finally adds up to this: Love other people as well as you do yourself. You can’t go wrong when you love others. When you add up everything in the law code, the sum total is love.”  Romans 13:8-10, The Message

Love is the word for a relationship between people.  Christian love is the kid of love in which I am concerned for others and do what needs to be done to make their lives complete.  The GReek word for this is agape. It is giving-love.  It’s this love that the Bible is concerned with when it tells us to ‘love others’ (Matthew 22:39).  This is the love Paul uses as the key to making our ethical decisions.  If we put this love in the driver’s seat, we’ll be able to make decisions that will produce a Christian life that’s pleasing to God.  We see this new love in Jesus.  By looking at him, we can find out just how love shapes ethical decisions.  Jesus, it would seem, was oblivious to rules and regulations in his decision making.  His question was always, “How can I act so that this person becomes the person God wants him to be?”  Eugene Peterson, Conversations: The Message Bible and Its Translator

I love Eugene Peterson’s Conversations, which integrates The Message Bible and commentaries and devotions from Peterson.

Today I continue the examination of Romans 12 with his thoughts on worship:

“Here’s a basic tension:  We keep trying to confine worship to the sanctuary — to preaching, prayers, and parish announcements, to religious experiences.  But God is commanding us to extend it to home, work, neighborhood, and leisure.  Worship is the style of life in which our bodies become living sacrifices offered up before God.

People have different skills, different strengths, different sensibilities.  God has given us one another so that we may have a shared life.  None of us can live the abundant life as hermits.  Nor can we live to the glory of God if we carefully pick whom we’re willing to associate with.  All who live are God’s creation and parts of the body of Christ.  We’re members of one another.  We exist in a family, together, not alone.

And here’s how God wants us to live in such a family:  worshipfully.

Life is full of financial inequities, and worship involves a generous response to the economic needs of others.  This reverses the natural inclinations of all of us.  We sometimes convince ourselves that everything we have has come from our own hard work and achievements.  And with pride we then hold on to it all, and in moments of good, we’ll dole out a little to church or to charity.

But worship is meant to be more complete than that:  It’s the offering of our total economic selves to the glory and service of God.  It means a liberal and generous assessment of other people’s needs in relation to our own.  Income and earning capacity is God’s gift to us, too — and must be part of offering our lives.”

This is a great devotion from Peterson.  I’ll stop here and offer some more tomorrow.  But between now and then it seems like a good idea to reflect on the hard challenge put before us — how do we view our gifts, and how do we view our giving?

I know — I’m supposed to write about at least one of the two most relevant topics of the day — the National Championship or the Snow in the South.  I figure you can go just about anywhere else on the web or Facebook to read about those today, and I want to talk about a climate condition that affects some of us this time of year, what Eugene Peterson calls in the Message translation, “the continuous, low-lying black cloud.”

Do you ever struggle with condemnation?  Do you hear voices (your own or an unidentified one) in your head challenging your decisions or calling you stupid or worse?  You may not be schizophrenic.  You may be suffering from the condition discussed in Romans 7 and 8 — the inability to do what is right and the pursuant condemnation.  Romans 8:1 in traditional translations says, “There is therefore now, no condemnation in Christ Jesus!”  Eugene Peterson puts it like this:

“With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved.  Those who  enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.  A new power is in operation.  The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.”

Peterson gives a great illustration to explain how Jesus frees us from condemnation.  Suppose you are building a house, he says.  You don’t really know what you’re doing but you gather the materials and the blueprints and you begin building by yourself.  Things go along fine for a while but then you realize there’s a lot you don’t know and something doesn’t look quite right about the house.

Well-meaning neighbors come by and tell you ‘That wall is leaning’ or ‘Do you think you should really put the door there?’  You begin to feel anxiety and doubt.  With every new comment, you start to feel more like giving up.  But none of the neighbors offers to help.

Then someone different shows up.  This person rolls up his sleeves and goes to work beside us.

“In this second instance, the presence of a skilled helper doesn’t mean that we don’t make any more mistakes, nor does it mean we no longer feel any tension between what the house ouht to be and our particular work on it.  What it does mean is that we’re transformed in our attitude because we have someone who comes alongside us instead of remaining aloof.  And when he comes, he comes not as a building inspector, but as a construction worker.

And that, of course, is what Paul’s experience was with the coming of Jesus Christ into his life.  Paul, in essence, asks, ‘Who will do something besides increase my sense of failure and condemn me for being such a poor workman?”  (7:24)

The answer? Jesus.  He will deliver us. He will come into the disarray of lumber in our lives and work beside us. He doesn’t stand over us urging better behavior and making us look up references in books.  It’s so much better than that.  He’s living in us, working with us.  And that should encourage all of us!”

Incarnation means “In-flesh” and refers to the fact that God became flesh and “moved into the neighborhood” of this earth.  Read John 1: 14- 18 in The Message translation and listen to what Eugene Peterson has to say about the Incarnation:

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.

¹⁵John pointed him out and called, “This is the One! The One I told you was coming after me but in fact was ahead of me. He has always been ahead of me, has always had the first word.”

We all live off his generous bounty,
gift after gift after gift.
We got the basics from Moses,
and then this exuberant giving and receiving,
This endless knowing and understanding—
all this came through Jesus, the Messiah.
No one has ever seen God,
not so much as a glimpse.
This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,
who exists at the very heart of the Father,
has made him plain as day.”

“‘No one has ever seen God’ (verse 18) but we do see his glory,the bright splendor that marks God’s presence.  We saw it at Sinai, in the tabernacle. We saw it in Jerusalem, at the Temple. But most of all, we saw it in Jesus.

So when John tells us that Jesus, the flesh and blood Jesus that everyone can see ‘moved into the neighborhood’ (verse 14), he clearly means us to understand that Jesus is the new Tabernacle and Temple of the Hebrew people.  But what’s so striking is that Jesus isn’t like an architectural structure waiting for us to come to him.  Instead, he comes to us.

Do you want to see God present among you?  Do you want to come into the presence of God and worship him?  Here he’s making himself at home among you:  Jesus — pitching his tent, building his home, and moving into the neighborhood.

YOUR neighborhood!”  Eugene Peterson, Conversations:  The Message Bible with Its Translator

Continuing the thoughts on hope of the last week…
“Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!” Romans 15:133, The Message

and this devotional from Peterson:
“Hope on the Line”
“Every day I put hope on the line. I don’t know one thing about the future. I don’t know what the next hour will hold. There may be sickness, personal, or world catastrophe. Before this day is over I may have to deal with death, pain, loss, rejection. I don’t know what the future holds for me, for those whom I love, for my nation, for this world. Still, despite my ignorance and surrounded by tinny optimists and cowardly pessimists, I say that God will accomplish his will and cheerfully persist in living in the hope that nothing separates me from Christ’s love.
God’s strong name is our help, the same God who made heaven and earth. Psalm 124:8″
From Eugene Peterson, Living the Message

“Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it’s not as if they don’t know better. They know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!” Romans 1:28-32, The Message

That doesn’t sound like very good news at all. Sin is frightening in the way it can run out of control. But there may be some good news to be found: Listen to Eugene Peterson:
“Sin isn’t a skeleton in the closet that we surround with restrictions to keep it in its place. It’s a defective relationship with God. If we aren’t convinced of the nature of that defect in our lives it’s unlikely we will accept the remedy for that defect.

The failure to treat God as God, to honor him and thank him, Paul calls Sin, with a capital S, from which all lowercase sins ultimately proceed. If we, having read Paul’s gospel, were to still think that sin is sensuality or vice or crudeness or any of the bad things we do, we would have missed his point completely. Paul wants us to understand that all those things are derivative. Sin, he asserts, is that original rebellion against God, that basic act of leaving him, that foundational failure to treat him as the Almighty.

This disaffection from God, called Sin, is humanity’s despair. But when Paul writes of it, it’s anything but despair, for by tracing our sins to their source, he prepares us for the solution. That solution has nothing to do with self-help and everything to do with a Savior.”