The Way of Love - Learn


I love our Anglican sensibility of not “checking our brains at the door” of the Church.  We are called to bring all of ourselves, including our minds, into our relationship with God.  In fact, God gave humans the ability to reason and learn, which makes us different and special among all of God’s creatures.  We have used the knowledge we have gained since Creation began to bring us to where we are today, with all the modern conveniences of technology, health care and lots of other things that Jesus never talked about!

Human’s ability to learn is innate – we start from the moment we are born interacting with our environment and learning how to get our needs meet.  We cry and someone takes cares of us – awesome!  We learn to use our physical bodies and develop language – all forms of learning.  But how to do we learn about God and develop a relationship with our Creator? 

The Church’s hope is that parents will bring their children up in the Church, surrounded by the ritual and stories of old, so that it is almost absorbed into a person’s consciousness. In the baptismal service we ask parents, god-parents and the entire community if they will raise the child in the life of Christ, and we all respond that we will, but it takes a lot of effort to actually live into that commitment.  We need to bring the child to worship on a regular basis, read Bible stories, model prayer and be an example as a Christian in the world, loving our neighbors especially when it is hard.

We must be careful not to fall into the gnostic idea that we can know God through study alone.  While intense study of the Scriptures and other theological ideas is a great academic practice, it does not develop faith.  We cannot study our way into belief! Faith is a gift from God that can be nurtured and developed by study and reflection, but faith cannot be achieve by intense mental exercise!

As faithful disciple of Jesus Christ, we must learn from his example of how to live in this world.  It is not easy, as we see from his own life (he was killed for what he believed!), but it is the best way to live.  We learn from the scriptures as well as from our rituals and activities within the church, such as prayer, which I will reflect on in next week’s blog.

Perhaps the most important thing we need to learn is who Jesus Christ is to us.  In our Lenten journey, that is a great question to ask and articulate a response. For example, if I say, “Jesus Christ is my Redeemer” that is a good first step, but what do I mean by the term “Redeemer?”  I’m not going to give the answer away just yet!  That is something we can learn!

Let us continue to walk the way of love by learning our faith through study and practice, just like we learn everything else.  If it is important, we will make the time to do it well.

With Lenten Blessings,
Rev. Valerie+

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