Sunday’s Lectionary reading from 1 Thessalonians is a set of instructions about living which in this translation come at you staccato…
“5:16 Rejoice always,
5:17 pray without ceasing,
5:18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
5:19 Do not quench the Spirit.”
…and so on. Not always much explanation or nuance there, but maybe it’s just important to do these things rather than devoting too much time to understanding them. If Advent is a time of preparation, it’s also a time to re-examine our lives. Are we taking these injunctions seriously, even if we do want to take some care just how we do them? For instance “rejoice always” might be a bit insensitive at funerals – surely it’s part of Christian solidarity to weep with those who weep. And yet somewhere deep inside we cling to the notion that God is indeed good.
What about the quenching the Spirit thing? Some people have quite specific and maybe unsettling ideas about what that means. Is everyone who gets worked up in the name of Christ really praying for something we should all be praying for? There are parts of the Christian world that are more like the prophets of Baal. OTOH, maybe you can sometimes get an intuition that the Spirit’s being quenched somewhere. I love the URC and its conciliar polity – all those meetings: but in my more cynical moments it feels to me as if the elders’ meeting is designed to be a Spirit-quenching engine.
Good walk this morning in the calm, with small patches of snow by the trail, and more still hanging around on the hills.
Living God show us when
it’s time time stop waffling on about living right
and just do it.