Romans 5:1-5

We are in an age that needs comfort. Companies are changing, communities are changing, technology and ways that we even speak with each other are changing. There is wonderful opportunity, but the many changes give our hearts moments when we wish we could have a mother’s hug.

 I hope your mother was a hugging mother. There is nothing quite as satisfying during illness or crisis as that comforting touch.  Many fathers try to give a note of bravery when they hug, but many mothers hug to tell you that they understand.

 One way we know that people want hugs is the amount of stuffed animals that are sold. Children have always loved stuffed animals, but adults have learned how good they are for comfort when humans are out of reach or they have not found their way to God.

They are selling stuffed animals in all sizes now. The ones I have here are big enough for the largest arms.  One person said “ its like holding a newborn. I held the puppy, stroked it, sat it beside me. I slept with it. I talked to it. Let's face it sometimes there is no one there to listen. Sometimes people don't want to hear what you want to say or need to say. Sometimes we keep things bottled up inside because there is no one to listen. It's not about caring because there were a lot of people around who "cared" but they weren't ready to "hear".

 Friends, if you are not feeling like you can get comfort, then that throws off your judgment. When we are scared or angry of hurt, it changes how we see life. Simple problems become bigger and our pessimism colors even our reading of Scripture. And so that is our service today – the comfort that God offers through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. God answers a universal human need to be held and comforted. Once we feel that security, it changes our perspective and even our understanding of the Scriptures themselves.

 The scientific age gave us a respect for facts and downplayed the role of the Holy Spirit. We understood the Ephesian people who said in Acts 19, “We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Spirit.” One of the gifts of the charismatic movement in the last forty years was to remind Christians that our faith is not reciting from a book of rules, but living a holy story.

 The Book of Romans itself is a wonderful source. In our day the church is caught up with who to accept in it and how to understand the Bible. But the Roman church was caught up with an ethnic problem – whether Gentiles could be admitted to the church and whether their membership would give them full rights to leadership or some other level where they could fear and follow God from another worship area.

 Paul affirms that we all have access to peace because of the work of God. There is no work that we can perform by which some of us get better access to peace. There is no accident of birth that puts us in the slightly better group to gain peace. The peace that we can know is through the work of God in Christ.

 That new peace brings comfort that the Bible refers to sometimes in the feminine form. Acts 7:35 speaks that “wisdom is vindicated by her children.” Proverbs 8 speaks of the role of wisdom and her voice. When we accept the gift of peace from God, there is a work of the Holy Spirit like a mother’s arms that starts to comfort and strengthen us. We get the new sense that no matter what the day brings, it will be all right. Romans says that our challenges plus the gift of God start to bubble up as endurance and hope and that hope makes all the difference.

 This process of faith is receiving the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. And that is so necessary for life and even for our understanding of the Scriptures. Proverbs 8 is a lengthy description of all that wisdom provides.

 We need wisdom for our own lives. Every day we are presented with decisions that we need to make. How can we figure out what God wants and make the right choice? We turn to the scriptures, but even reading the scriptures requires understanding. One guy faced a difficult situation so he threw open the Bible and determined to obey the first verse he read. Unhappily the verse was Matthew 27:5 ‘Judas went and hanged himself.’ Badly shaken, he decided that he must have held the Bible incorrectly and he would try again. This time he turned to Luke 10:37 ‘Where Jesus said, Go and do likewise.’ The guy checked to see what translation he was using and decided to try one last time. At his funeral, they mentioned that he was found with his Bible open to John 13:27, ‘what you are going to do, do quickly.’

 I knew a man who was famous for always having his interlinear Bible nearby so that he could check the original Greek or Hebrew. And I somewhat envied him because he could quote chapter and verse. But he could not be trusted as a church leader because he offended everyone around him. And as you heard his story, one part that I now remember was that his home life as a child was a wreck. He had not known the arms of a mother as a child and he had not seen that he needed the arms of God the mother, God as wisdom as an adult.

 Pastors need to feel forgiven. In this coming year, I will have preached here 500 times. So some of you have heard me on basic issues of faith like the seven lifesaving stories of God, topics of Christian character such as stewardship, and subjects of social justice like homosexuality and war. The quality of these messages is partially dependent on my spiritual gift for preaching, partially dependent on my preparation, but also very dependent on the extent to which I have accepted the forgiveness of God and peace in my own life. The choice of topics, the choice of perspective, my ability to see where we are going as a church and how you may feel are so dependent on God as Wisdom visiting my own heart.

 Many of you listen to radio evangelists or hear other pastors and sometimes we are not all preaching the same application even though we are appealing to the same Bible. I think that the difference is whether God as Wisdom has visited our own hearts as ministers of the gospel.

 And wisdom is so important as leaders guide our own church and the larger church. The history of Christian faith has largely been one where the Bible is first misinterpreted and then slowly corrected by the gift of the Holy Spirit bringing wisdom. Christians used the Bible to support the Inquisition, torturing people to confess their sins. We used the Bible to command women to be silent, support slavery, give a theological base to apartheid. President Bush’s support for the war gets a large boost from some Christians. At Annual Conference this week, we struggled with ordination of gay people.

 The good news is that God does not seem to give up on the church. The Spirit of Wisdom breaks through. The bad news for a particular society is that if the church takes too long such as in Europe, the larger society rejects the church altogether. Europe still has not recovered from the religious wars of the 1700s.

 If you are searching for more in your own life today, perhaps you have already made a commitment to Jesus Christ, but you still feel steps are missing. Why not ask God this morning as you come for communion to grant you peace, wisdom and hope through the Holy Spirit. Romans 5:5, Hope does not disappoint us.’ Imagine Wisdom with her arms outstretched waiting to hold and comfort you so that you can make good decisions with confidence in the days ahead.