9-11-17 - Forgiveness Without End

In last week’s gospel passage, we explored what happens when one member of the community is wounded by another. Jesus laid out a process of confrontation leading to resolution, either reconciliation or separation. Peter must have been thinking ahead, for he realized it wasn’t enough to be able to address conflict… if what Jesus had been saying all along meant anything, reconciliation would have to include forgiveness. How far was that supposed to go?

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Here is this week's gospel passage.)

Sometimes it’s translated “seventy times seven.” I once wrote a short story called “The 489th Wrong,” about a religious woman who finally reaches that number of times she feels she’s forgiven her husband, and thinks she can stop (wrong!). But it’s not about the math. Seven is one of those infinite numbers, so Jesus is basically saying, “As many times as needed.” There is no end to the number of times Christ-followers are called to forgive.

The deeper the wound, the more forgiveness costs us. I see forgiveness as “giving for.” Someone has taken something from you; they owe it, and you pay yourself for them – in effect, you lose twice. Why do that? Because it cancels the debt, clears the field, resets the clock, frees you and the other person. That’s one reason.

The other, as we’ll see from the parable Jesus uses to illustrate his point, is that while we’re busy trying to decide whether or not to forgive someone, somebody else may be wrestling with forgiving us. And even if we’ve offended no one on earth, chances are we’ve done, said or thought something that makes us less than who God intended us to be, and therefore we need God’s forgiveness. When we think about how many times we ask God to forgive us, often for the same darn thing, we’re more inclined to cut each other some slack, as the great hymn “Forgive our sins” reminds us.

Is there someone whom you have been unable to forgive?
A resentment that sits there within you? Chances are that wound remains unhealed, and gets reopened periodically, either by that person or by similar feelings.
What feelings come up when you think about forgiving that person, releasing that debt?

If you don’t yet feel ready to forgive, might you be willing to let God do it? That’s one way to pray toward forgiveness, by praying, “Lord, I can’t forgive this person… but if you want to, I guess it’s okay.” Just praying that will shift the landscape a bit, generate some space, and the Holy Spirit will work with whatever space we give. If you're willing to go a little further, pray, "And if you want me to, please give me a desire to forgive..." That's another opening.

Our “forgiveness muscles” need to be exercised just like everything else in us. On this anniversary of one of the worst wounds inflicted upon our nation in recent times, we have yet another opportunity to flex those muscles. No one is beyond the reach of God's forgiveness, and as we grow in faith, we are able, by his power, to forgive even terrorists. 

9-8-17 - Jesus Here Now

Sometimes I wish Jesus would show up and set a few things straight in this messed up world of ours – if people would pay more attention than they did the first time around. But that idle wish misses a big ol’ point: He is here. He said he would be. It’s up to us to discern him and to make him known.

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,” is a promise. A promise of presence. To unfold that promise, though, requires a few actions from us.

First, we have to be able to distinguish between flesh and spirit. Jesus said that fleshly reality was limited, and that spiritual reality was never-ending. Jesus’ enfleshed presence was time-and-space-limited, 33 years or so, give or take, in one region of the world. His presence in a resurrection body lasted about 40 days. His spiritual presence is eternal, and still going strong among those who believe in his promise.

The other article of faith we need to affirm is the idea of Jesus living in us. I take the promises of baptism at face value - the promise is that we are united with Christ, made a new creation, given a new heart and a new spirit – his spirit. So Paul wrote, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This filling with his spirit is not an “invasion of the body snatchers” thing. Rather, his spirit joined with mine brings forth a new person, that most true “Kate” (fill in your name) that can possibly be.

If Christ dwells in us, abides in us, then he is real in us. And when we gather with others in whom Christ lives, his presence becomes even stronger and more real. By believing and joining together, we make Christ present in our world, not just a suggestion of presence, but fully here, spiritually speaking. (We supply the flesh and blood.)

How might it change our lives and ministries if we brought this reality more fully to our consciousness? If, when we gathered together, we knew Jesus was among us, and we spoke and acted and prayed like we knew we were in the presence of the all-powerful God? If, when we went out in ministry, we made sure we went in teams of at least two, so that the power of Christ’s presence would fill and empower our work in his name? Don’t get me wrong – Christ is present in us when we’re alone. But he said when two or three of us – our more – gathered in his name, he would be in our midst.

Where do you think it would be great if Jesus showed up this weekend? What place, person, situation? Do you have any idea how you might bring him there, with a few others?

Going deeper… where do you think he might want to go? You might get quiet in prayer and ask him: “Jesus, where do you want me to take you today, to make you known?”

I can’t wait to hear how those prayers turn out. I do know the world needs a lot more Jesus, and we’re just the ones to help make that happen.

9-7-17 - Pre-Blessed Prayers

Some promises are dangerous, offering more than can seemingly be delivered. This statement of Jesus’ strikes me that way: “Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.” Anything? If even just two of us agree?

Is this a promise with a back-door clause – is it so unlikely that two people on earth would ever fully agree about any request, God has an automatic out? No, let’s assume Jesus was being straightforward. That might leave us doubting God, knowing that we have prayed for outcomes with many people in whole-hearted agreement as to their desirability, without seeing them come to pass. Exhibit A are prayers for healing that are not visibly answered.

This is one of those bible verses that cannot be separated from the one that follows. It only accords with both faith and experience when seen in tandem with this: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (This Sunday's gospel is here.)

Ah, now we’re not only talking about human agreement. We’re talking about being gathered as the Body of Christ, in his very presence. To pray in Jesus’ name is to pray as Christ; to pray from inside, as it were; to invoke the power that his very name makes known. To pray in Jesus’ name is to pray in agreement with him, and thus to pray with perfect faith. Our own is far from perfect, but Jesus’ is 100%. When we pray with Jesus, not only to Jesus, we have all the faith we need.

So why are some of our prayers not answered as we desire? Perhaps we weren’t quite praying in Christ. Maybe we were bringing forward our desires and seeking God's blessing upon them, like a pie at the county fair. “Here, isn’t this one pretty?” Sometimes that yields answers we recognize. But our prayers feel more effective when we pray what Jesus is already praying for; his prayers come pre-blessed.

What are some of those “unanswered prayers” in your life? I think most of us have some, and they often put distance between us and God. Call one to mind today.
Have you ever asked God what God thinks about that prayer? Ever discussed it with Jesus? Ever paid attention to the Spirit in you when you pray about that?

We might even try asking God: "What is your desire for me in this area?" We might be surprised at how God answers us. We might have to stay still for a time, and attend to what words or images or songs arise in us, now or later.

Prayer isn’t about getting what we want; it’s about deepening a relationship, one that will last forever. We need to speak our desires - that's just good communicating, being real. But the more we cultivate intimacy with Jesus, the more we’ll find ourselves truly praying in his name, his will, his mind, his heart.

And sometimes, as Garth Brooks reminds us, there are reasons we only discover later for what feel like Unanswered Prayers.

9-6-17 - Free To Set Free

Do we want this much power? Several times Jesus sets the authority to offer or withhold forgiveness into a cosmic framework, saying that what we do in this world is mirrored in the heavenly realm. 

“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Yikes.

Maybe Jesus teaches this process of confrontation and reconciliation because there are such cosmic consequences to ignoring conflict and pain. When we bury our hurts, sweep our conflicts under the rug, not only do we stay bound, we keep the perpetrators of hurts bound to us. No one is free.

I believe that what God wants most for us is freedom. I have seen the process of healing and forgiving result in amazing freedom for people, huge releasing of energy and giftedness, new ability to see, to hope, to live. As I reflect on this, I keep thinking of stories of survivors of sexual abuse and trauma. (The next two paragraphs contain nothing explicit, but if this is a sensitive area for you, read with care.)

I once prayed for months with a woman who had endured sexual abuse throughout her life – people who have been victimized as children often suffer similar abuse in adulthood. This woman saw herself more as victim than survivor, and harmed herself as well. One time I said something about moving toward forgiveness. She turned on me in fury and said, “They told me in my support group that I don’t ever have to forgive!” I backed down, thinking, “That is true – but then will you ever be free?” Forgiveness cannot be rushed, but to close ourselves to it leaves us bound to people who have hurt us.

Years later I met another woman. She and her two sisters had been sexually abused throughout childhood by her father and grandfather, who were still alive and in the family. She had done the excruciating work of addressing those wounds and moving toward healing, and had come to forgive her abusers. She did not trust or get close to them, and worked to ensure the safety of children in the family system, but over time she released the awful burden of their crimes. And then she was no longer psychically connected to them – forgiveness meant freedom from them. Her sisters refused to do this work; one was deeply alcoholic and the other suicidal. As brutal as it is to work at healing from trauma, it is a movement toward freedom, and life.

Many of us have not experienced trauma this severe – but we might feel bound in some way by a hurt we have suffered or anger we continue to hold. Usually the anger is justified; it can still be corrosive over time. Today, we might let some of those stuck places come up in our mind, and pray about forgiving people who have hurt us, or ask forgiveness of those whom we have hurt. If we ask the Spirit to show us those things, they often emerge from the muck.

Inner healing is a powerful process of bringing the love of God to bear on our emotional wounds. I have witnessed tremendous transformation result from the healing of memories and specific areas of woundedness. (If you want to know more about this process, please contact me.)

As we release that healing stream of God’s love and power to soak into hidden wounds and resentments, life returns to parched places, and old knots become unwound so that peace can flood in. “It is for freedom that Christ has made us free,” Paul wrote. Jesus has won for us freedom to release ourselves and others. Let’s set the captives free.

9-5-17 - Exclusion?

We love to talk about how inclusive church should be. But In our gospel passage this week, 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 feel safe.

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 which ensured he could never become part of that otherwise loving community in which he might have found healing and transformation. I believe 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. I think of 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.

Think of 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. But I believe it is the Good News which we are called to live.

9-4-17 - Conflict

Conflict is a fact of life – or at least a fact of human nature. Wherever two or three are gathered, there are likely to be four or five competing desires (sometimes within one person.) We don’t all see things the same way; each has her own lens borne of her own history and circumstances and brain chemistry. We don’t all want or feel we need the same things; inevitably one person’s want gets in the way of some other good, as, say, a desire for untrammeled speed will compromise the safety of others.

Christian communities are not immune to conflict. In fact, they are often conflict incubators, since people come to them hoping for the idyllic family they never had, dragging along their thwarted, dysfunctional baggage. Conflict within a church family is a given. It’s what we do with it that makes the difference. As my friend Peter likes to say, “Conflict doesn’t kill churches. Suppressed conflict kills churches.”

Jesus knew that the community of his followers would include hurt and conflict – witness the infighting among his disciples while he was yet with them. So he laid out a process for dealing with it: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.”

Jesus’ teaching makes great psychological sense. First, we are to show the courage and respect to speak privately to the person who’s hurt us. Don’t triangulate conflicts by talking to a third person before sharing your feelings honestly with the first. How many conflicts could be quickly deflated by this simple step – and yet, many of us have been conditioned not to confront people, so we let it escalate.

If that conversation goes nowhere because the other person isn’t open to hearing how you feel, bring in that third or fourth person – but in the presence of the one who’s hurt you, not behind his back. Now it becomes a community issue, and out in the light. And if that doesn’t work, Jesus says to bring your grievance before the whole community. What happens when we do that? We model openness and vulnerability and transparency. We’ve invited prayer for ourselves and the person who has hurt us. We’ve offered our wound for healing, and opened ourselves to the transforming power of love. Can this get messy? Sure it can. But it’s not nearly as toxic as a conflict that is allowed to fester.

Can you think of a time when you were hurt by someone in your community of faith? Were you able to articulate it? Did you speak of it to others before you spoke to that person? Did you distance yourself from that person or the community? Have you forgiven?

If the memory is still painful, that's a sign that it remains unhealed – and that is something to invite the Holy Spirit into. It’s never too late to forgive and be set free, even if the person who hurt you is no longer in your life.

This teaching assumes relationship and intimacy within the Body of Christ. Many of our congregations are far from that. Maybe that’s where we start – by getting close enough that hurts can happen. And loving enough to forgive and heal.

9-1-17 - Checkin' It Twice

I lean toward the “grace and love” aspects of God as the Scriptures and Jesus describe God’s Realm. Give me eight “parables of the prodigal” for any one “be warned, judgment is coming” passage. Yet, as much as Jesus described God’s Kingdom as a place of unexpected mercy and reordered rankings, he did not shy away from the judgment to come. So he ends this teaching about taking up your cross with the reminder that there will be a reckoning:

“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done."

That "repay everyone for what has been done” bit sounds ominous to me. I tend to assume, mostly for neurotic reasons, that the Judgment will go badly for me. Maybe you share that instinct; it is what I call “original shame.” It drives Santa Claus theology – “He’s makin’ a list, checkin’ it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice…”

Only it’s not Santa who’s coming to town, but the Son of Man with his angels in the glory of his Father. Who of us can stand before such a entourage? Saint Paul didn’t think he could. 

“Wretched man that I am,” he wrote in Romans, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
And then he answered his own question: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

The great, audacious claim of Christian faith is that the One who comes to judge is the same One who has delivered us from the power of sin and shame. United with Christ, we need fear no reckoning. As Paul goes on to say, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Wow.

No condemnation. And as we breathe that in, and allow this union with Christ to be realized in us, we find ourselves making God-ward choices, moving with the power and love of the Holy Spirit. And then we start to be able to see where Christ is in the world around us.

Our passage ends on a cryptic note. Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
No one quite knows what that means – the next event in Matthew’s Gospel is the Transfiguration, where Peter, James and John see Jesus in his divine glory for a moment. Is that what he meant? Or did he mean the spiritual vision that allows us to see the Son of Man coming all the time?

How does that sentence, “He will repay everyone for what has been done” sit with you?
Do you assume blessing? Then you are already blessed.
Do you assume condemnation or trial? Then spend some time today with Paul’s promise of grace and love, let it work in.

And pray to be so filled with the Holy Spirit that you have the spiritual vision to see what the world does not: the Son of Man coming in his glorious reign, once upon a time, for all time - and right now.