Reflection for Friday, Feb 8, 2008

My first daily reflection assignment is Romans 1:18-32 (God's Wrath Against Mankind), and as I wrote to Beth in an earlier email, it is a difficult selection for me to reflect upon. On a historical note, one interesting aspect of the Christian faith in the United States in the past one-hundred years is a greater degree of personalization of religion. That is not to say that scripture and the tenets of Christianity can be used to justify anything for anyone, but for a human being to accept everything they hear and read, every human interpretation of God's word, and accept it as the only way is probably unfairly excluding a lot of the richness of life, of human experience, and of the Divine. When I read this particular section of Romans about the revealing of the wrath of God to all the "wicked" and "sinful" people, it clashes with my personal feeling, as a Christian, of God's love.

When we come together as citizens, neighbors, and Christians at First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, we are not coming together as wrathful people looking to annihilate people who, according to this passage are evil. We come together out of love, desire for peace, and the fellowship of the goodness of God's word. While much of the book of Romans (The Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Romans) does exclaim faith in terms of God's love, I am bothered that passages such as God's wrath have been used throughout history and could still be used now to justify hurting and even killing people, inflaming prejudices, and inciting wars based upon their belief that their wrath is God's wrath and whatever they think is "wicked" must be destroyed. We must be mindful of the time in which Paul was writing his Epistle to the Romans, a time when Antisemitism was growing as a schism evolved over the the Jesus, the Messiah or Jesus, the Prophet. Paul was still subject to the social constructs of his time.

If nothing else, a passage like this makes me reinforce my appreciation that there are churches and Christian groups today that are accepting and loving of people because they accept an accepting and loving God. We are blessed to have such a place, blessed to be with such people and I am truly thankful for that.
By Breisen Miller