You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
I always feel a little more powerful when I know someone who can hook me up to things I need or people I should know. And I love being that person for others. Connections are how we get ahead. So imagine how excited Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth were when their "homie" became a religious sensation, known not only for his wisdom but for his amazing miracles and works of power. This was the ultimate connection, someone who channeled the power of God! And he was one of them!
Then imagine their disappointment when he indicated he was unlikely to exercise much power in his own town: He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
He cited a few examples of prophets of old who were unable to address the needs of their own communities, yet could help outsiders. And man, did they not want to hear that. Their response was violent, probably more intense than if a stranger had said he couldn’t help them. No one expects too much from a stranger. But one of your own? You should be his first priority. How dare Jesus say he was not accepted there, that his powers would be somehow inhibited?
I find in their angry response an invitation for us to examine our own hearts when it comes to Jesus. I dare say anyone who has ever prayed fervently for something has experienced some disappointment in the outcome. If that disappointment is acute, or experienced too often, we can find ourselves angry. And since the church does not offer many outlets for expressing negative emotions about God, that anger can become pushed down and calcify into a polite estrangement. We don’t try to push Jesus off a cliff, but we may push him out of our lives, stop trusting or asking or hanging out with him.
If this has been your experience, it’s good to recognize that, and begin to process it in prayer and maybe in pastoral conversation. Not for nothing is the rite of repentance in our tradition called “Reconciliation.” The greatest damage done when we turn away from God is to that relationship itself.
God is always, like the father in Jesus’ story about the prodigal son, out there in the road waiting for us to return. Can we walk back to that place, walk back through the hurt we encountered, the anger we experienced, the loss we suffered? Is our relationship with God worth it to us?
We don’t need to seek out connections; we are already hooked into the most powerful network in the universe, the power and love that flow from the throne of God. If that connection needs strengthening, let’s put our time and energy into repairing that breach. The arms of love await us.
© Kate Heichler, 2025. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
Showing posts with label reconciliation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reconciliation. Show all posts
9-5-23 - Exclusion?
You can listen to this reflection here.
We love to talk about how inclusive church should be. But In this week’s gospel passage, Jesus suggests conditions for exclusion. He lays out a process for dealing with conflict in the community of faith, by which someone who has inflicted hurt might participate in repentance and reconciliation. He also provides a contingency for those occasions when the offending party is unable or unwilling to be reconciled: “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
On the face of it, this approach seems realistic, if harsh. If trust has been breached in the community, and attempts at repair have failed, perhaps wholeness can only be gained by isolating the offender. No doubt this teaching gave rise to the practice of shunning and excommunication in some Christian groups. Separating an offender from the community at large can be an act of punishment or protection or both. It is also an act of aggression, even if warranted, as in the case of an abusive spouse or parent whose presence in the community would make it impossible for the survivor to remain there.
I wonder, though, if Jesus meant something else entirely. The way Jesus treated Gentiles and tax collectors was to eat with them and heal them, invite them to repent and to join his community. The people he seemed to have no desire to be in relationship with were the "holy men," the religious leaders. Is Jesus inviting us to go deeper into reconciliation than is comfortable? Is he suggesting we open ourselves to the Other who has hurt us, to see her wounds and distorted perceptions, reach across the divide with love that has the power to transform?
That is an intriguing read of this passage. As a strategy, it leaves room for growth, where distancing and isolating offenders does not. I knew a church in which a seeker was found to have been viewing internet pornography involving minors. He complied with law enforcement when discovered, entering willingly into the justice process and into therapy, hoping to find deliverance from this compulsive behavior. But people in the church were unwilling to have him around except under very stringent guidelines – rules so strict they ensured he could never become part of that otherwise loving community in which he might have found healing and transformation. I felt safety for all could have been ensured without this degree of exclusion – but we’ll never know. He did not stay long under these strictures, and neither he nor his wife continued their exploration of the Christian life. And some members of that church missed an opportunity to expand their capacity to love the sinner – and so to experience God’s love more fully.
Of course, each situation demands its own discernment. Reaching out must be accompanied by true honesty, within safe boundaries for those hurt. In the Truth Commissions set up in South Africa during the dismantling of apartheid, reconciliation was forged not by burying grievances, but by bringing them into the light, speaking them in truth and clarity, with the perpetrators there to hear the effects of their actions and invited to repent. Healing for victims can happen without the repentance of perpetrators, but when you have both, there is ground for deeper engagement, deeper community.
Is there someone you have shut out of your life or community because of harm they have caused? Can you imagine reconciliation on any level? If so, pray for a vision of how. If not, can you pray for that person to be healed and even blessed? When someone is blessed, she is much less able to hurt.
We love to talk about how inclusive church should be. But In this week’s gospel passage, Jesus suggests conditions for exclusion. He lays out a process for dealing with conflict in the community of faith, by which someone who has inflicted hurt might participate in repentance and reconciliation. He also provides a contingency for those occasions when the offending party is unable or unwilling to be reconciled: “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
On the face of it, this approach seems realistic, if harsh. If trust has been breached in the community, and attempts at repair have failed, perhaps wholeness can only be gained by isolating the offender. No doubt this teaching gave rise to the practice of shunning and excommunication in some Christian groups. Separating an offender from the community at large can be an act of punishment or protection or both. It is also an act of aggression, even if warranted, as in the case of an abusive spouse or parent whose presence in the community would make it impossible for the survivor to remain there.
I wonder, though, if Jesus meant something else entirely. The way Jesus treated Gentiles and tax collectors was to eat with them and heal them, invite them to repent and to join his community. The people he seemed to have no desire to be in relationship with were the "holy men," the religious leaders. Is Jesus inviting us to go deeper into reconciliation than is comfortable? Is he suggesting we open ourselves to the Other who has hurt us, to see her wounds and distorted perceptions, reach across the divide with love that has the power to transform?
That is an intriguing read of this passage. As a strategy, it leaves room for growth, where distancing and isolating offenders does not. I knew a church in which a seeker was found to have been viewing internet pornography involving minors. He complied with law enforcement when discovered, entering willingly into the justice process and into therapy, hoping to find deliverance from this compulsive behavior. But people in the church were unwilling to have him around except under very stringent guidelines – rules so strict they ensured he could never become part of that otherwise loving community in which he might have found healing and transformation. I felt safety for all could have been ensured without this degree of exclusion – but we’ll never know. He did not stay long under these strictures, and neither he nor his wife continued their exploration of the Christian life. And some members of that church missed an opportunity to expand their capacity to love the sinner – and so to experience God’s love more fully.
Of course, each situation demands its own discernment. Reaching out must be accompanied by true honesty, within safe boundaries for those hurt. In the Truth Commissions set up in South Africa during the dismantling of apartheid, reconciliation was forged not by burying grievances, but by bringing them into the light, speaking them in truth and clarity, with the perpetrators there to hear the effects of their actions and invited to repent. Healing for victims can happen without the repentance of perpetrators, but when you have both, there is ground for deeper engagement, deeper community.
Is there someone you have shut out of your life or community because of harm they have caused? Can you imagine reconciliation on any level? If so, pray for a vision of how. If not, can you pray for that person to be healed and even blessed? When someone is blessed, she is much less able to hurt.
None of this is easy, nor simple. Yet it is at the heart of the Good News which we are called to live.
5-20-22 - Healing of Nations
You can listen to this reflection here.
We move now from the healing of persons to the healing of the nations; from the pool of healing in our Gospel story to the healing river mentioned in the end of Revelation:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
What a beautiful picture of the new heavens and the new earth, picking up on the vision of a restoring river in Ezekiel 47, which also had fruit trees on each bank, their leaves for healing. In the new vision the healing has been broadened to the healing of the nations. This resonates with a theme in our reading from Acts as well:
...Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
Does the healing power of Christ extend to nations? There is only one way to find out. Perhaps we feel feeble in our prayers for peace and an end to brutal invasion, terror and starvation, oppression and exploitation, because the needs are so vast, the pain so entrenched. It is hard to see dramatic outcomes to such prayers. The bigger the wound, the more complex the condition, the longer it can take to heal it – but our prayers do not go unheard. Maybe through our prayers we strengthen peace-makers. Maybe our prayers influence people in authority, or grass-roots activists. Maybe circumstances change. We don’t know – we only know that the healing stream that flows through and around us is intended for the whole world.
Maybe each day we should comb the news for one name in a conflict-ridden area, one name that leaps out at us, and make it our task to pray for that person to be fully blessed. Who knows?
When Paul and his companions acted on his vision and traveled to Macedonia, they found a river there, by which there was a place of prayer. And there they met a woman named Lydia, who was brought to faith in Jesus Christ through Paul’s words, and she and her whole household were baptized. No one would have expected that – but strangers now became family in faith. Who knows what fruit came of that encounter – generations of Christ-followers, perhaps.
We don’t know where the healing stream is to flow, but It is up to us to be water-carriers, bearing that water of life to every place and person in need of it. In the end, all nations will be healed, and God will reign.
We move now from the healing of persons to the healing of the nations; from the pool of healing in our Gospel story to the healing river mentioned in the end of Revelation:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
What a beautiful picture of the new heavens and the new earth, picking up on the vision of a restoring river in Ezekiel 47, which also had fruit trees on each bank, their leaves for healing. In the new vision the healing has been broadened to the healing of the nations. This resonates with a theme in our reading from Acts as well:
...Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
Does the healing power of Christ extend to nations? There is only one way to find out. Perhaps we feel feeble in our prayers for peace and an end to brutal invasion, terror and starvation, oppression and exploitation, because the needs are so vast, the pain so entrenched. It is hard to see dramatic outcomes to such prayers. The bigger the wound, the more complex the condition, the longer it can take to heal it – but our prayers do not go unheard. Maybe through our prayers we strengthen peace-makers. Maybe our prayers influence people in authority, or grass-roots activists. Maybe circumstances change. We don’t know – we only know that the healing stream that flows through and around us is intended for the whole world.
Maybe each day we should comb the news for one name in a conflict-ridden area, one name that leaps out at us, and make it our task to pray for that person to be fully blessed. Who knows?
When Paul and his companions acted on his vision and traveled to Macedonia, they found a river there, by which there was a place of prayer. And there they met a woman named Lydia, who was brought to faith in Jesus Christ through Paul’s words, and she and her whole household were baptized. No one would have expected that – but strangers now became family in faith. Who knows what fruit came of that encounter – generations of Christ-followers, perhaps.
We don’t know where the healing stream is to flow, but It is up to us to be water-carriers, bearing that water of life to every place and person in need of it. In the end, all nations will be healed, and God will reign.
7-16-21 - He Is Our Peace
You can listen to this reflection here.
At week's end, let’s skip to the epistle reading appointed for Sunday, from Paul’s beautiful letter to the church at Ephesus. This section discusses reconciliation between two factions of Christians who were estranged and becoming more so. Anyone concerned about the alarming divides in American Christianity will note the parallels.
The primary tension afflicting the earliest churches, according to what we read in the book of Acts and Paul’s letters, was between those Jewish Christians who came to faith through Jesus’ Jewish disciples in Judea, and the growing number of Greek and Roman “Gentile” Christians converted through the missionary journeys of Paul and his associates. Paul tried to navigate the conflicts, getting the Jerusalem leadership to back off their demand that Gentile believers be circumcised before baptism, and encouraging the Gentile churches to give generously toward those afflicted by the famine in Judea. But tensions remained; Christ’s body has never in human history been truly one.
In this letter, Paul addresses Gentile believers tired of being considered “not quite Christians” by the Jerusalem factions. He reminds them that they were once outsiders, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” In light of their new status, he wants them to seek reconciliation with those who would exclude them, and stay rooted in Christ. “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
Can we be reconciled with Christians who seem to ignore so much that Christ did, said and taught? Who ignore his command to welcome the stranger and love the enemy, who uphold the sanctity of unborn life but dismiss the life-threatening violence and poverty afflicting so many already born? How can we be reconciled in Christ if some don’t seem to worship the same Lord we meet in the New Testament? Here’s a place to start:
So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.
We all have access to the Father in the Spirit, and so we all have the same access to the truth. What each does with it remains a matter of choice, and it is up to God to reveal and to judge. We are called to bear witness to the truth we encounter in the Gospels, and the Truth we have met in the living person of Jesus Christ. The answer is draw near to Christ, if not to all those who claim to follow him.
Paul ends with this stirring reminder: So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.
If we make it our intention to base our life in faith on Christ Jesus himself; if we make it our desire to grow together spiritually into a place where God can be known on earth, a temple, a dwelling place, we will have a firm foundation on which to stand in relationship to those who seem to distort Christianity We can disagree without condemning, remembering the thousands around us who are thirsty for God, who are rightly repelled by our conflicts. Let's get busy introducing them to Jesus, our peace.
At week's end, let’s skip to the epistle reading appointed for Sunday, from Paul’s beautiful letter to the church at Ephesus. This section discusses reconciliation between two factions of Christians who were estranged and becoming more so. Anyone concerned about the alarming divides in American Christianity will note the parallels.
The primary tension afflicting the earliest churches, according to what we read in the book of Acts and Paul’s letters, was between those Jewish Christians who came to faith through Jesus’ Jewish disciples in Judea, and the growing number of Greek and Roman “Gentile” Christians converted through the missionary journeys of Paul and his associates. Paul tried to navigate the conflicts, getting the Jerusalem leadership to back off their demand that Gentile believers be circumcised before baptism, and encouraging the Gentile churches to give generously toward those afflicted by the famine in Judea. But tensions remained; Christ’s body has never in human history been truly one.
In this letter, Paul addresses Gentile believers tired of being considered “not quite Christians” by the Jerusalem factions. He reminds them that they were once outsiders, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” In light of their new status, he wants them to seek reconciliation with those who would exclude them, and stay rooted in Christ. “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
Can we be reconciled with Christians who seem to ignore so much that Christ did, said and taught? Who ignore his command to welcome the stranger and love the enemy, who uphold the sanctity of unborn life but dismiss the life-threatening violence and poverty afflicting so many already born? How can we be reconciled in Christ if some don’t seem to worship the same Lord we meet in the New Testament? Here’s a place to start:
So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.
We all have access to the Father in the Spirit, and so we all have the same access to the truth. What each does with it remains a matter of choice, and it is up to God to reveal and to judge. We are called to bear witness to the truth we encounter in the Gospels, and the Truth we have met in the living person of Jesus Christ. The answer is draw near to Christ, if not to all those who claim to follow him.
Paul ends with this stirring reminder: So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.
If we make it our intention to base our life in faith on Christ Jesus himself; if we make it our desire to grow together spiritually into a place where God can be known on earth, a temple, a dwelling place, we will have a firm foundation on which to stand in relationship to those who seem to distort Christianity We can disagree without condemning, remembering the thousands around us who are thirsty for God, who are rightly repelled by our conflicts. Let's get busy introducing them to Jesus, our peace.
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