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.”