Sermon Notes 18th Pentecost

18th Pentecost (Proper 19A)
September 14, 2008

Preaching on forgiveness is like fishing in a bucket.
• Really a no brainer.
• Very popular topic.
To check this idea I searched for books on the topic
on Amazon(dot)com.
Quite a treasure trove of titles.
Choosing Forgiveness: Your Journey to Freedom
Forgive to Live: How Forgiveness can Save Your Lifeto name just two.

Something I noticed is that many treat forgiveness
as the path to personal psychological wellness.
It is about us getting over the emotional wounds
that inhibit a rich and happy life.
Forgiveness becomes primarily therapeutic.
Kind of a “Dr. Philization” of a core concept of the Xn life.

Now, there is nothing wrong
with finding an inner healing in the act of forgiveness.
I have spoken over the years with too many people
scarred from stored up resentments and anger.

But to focus almost entirely on this aspect
is to miss the heart of what the New Testament means when it speaks of forgiveness.

For Jesus forgiveness is an action
that finds it source in the abundance of mercy
in the heart of Θ,
and finds full expression in reconciling the estranged and restoring community in justice and peace under Θ.
It is primarily outward and communal,
and secondarily inward and emotional.
We might define forgiveness as

an encounter between the injured and the injurer in which the truth of the injury is made known, responsibility is taken, and a new beginning is offered.
-sermon, Proper 19 September 2002

This sense of forgiveness is evident
in today’s Gospel reading.

The reading comes from an important section of Matthew’s Gospel
• Jesus teaches disciples about the nature of Θ’s kingdom & the role of the disciples in this new action of Θ
• Not a kingdom of power and domination
• A reign of mercy, restoring broken relationships btwn us & God, and between people estranged from one another.

The purpose of being God’s people, the church,
is not our own spiritual growth,
but to live as a people of the kingdom
that the world may hope
in the promise of the Lord.
Thus, how we live together,
dealing with conflict,
seeking reconciliation,
is a testimony to what God is doing
thru the death and resurrection of Jesus XP.

After all Jesus’ admonitions to the disciples,
Peter now interjects
& asks if there are any limits
to this action of mercy:
"Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?"

The answer Jesus gives,
both in his quick response to the question
(“77 times or 7x70”)
and the following parable,
signifies that there is no limit to forgiveness.

Indeed, at the heart of the kingdom
is this incredible overabundance of mercy.
The parable speaks of an outrageously forgiving King, having forgiven a debt of what amounts
to millions of dollars,
while the servant, the recipient of mercy
refusing to extend forgiveness for a paltry sum.

The social reality created by the action of the King
is that of redemption and reconciliation.
It is now to be the nature of the web of relationships
in the realm.
But the servant refuses to live in that reality.

So we as the people of God,
we are to live in the new reality
created by the grace of Jesus XP.
In XP God forgives the manifold injustices and sins
of human history,
as well as our own sins and injustices.
Not to extend such mercy with one another
is to choose exile from the Kingdom of grace.
It is to say “I do not want to live in your kingdom.”

When I was a kid I had an aquarium in my bedroom.
I remember that I had one fish
that against all common sense
would jump out of the tank when the top was off. One day when I wasn’t watching it jumped out,
and that was the end of it.

To be in the Kingdom is to be a fish
swimming in an ocean of divine mercy.
(Remember how the prophets describe
the coming Kingdom
“the earth shall be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.”)
To refuse the work of forgiveness
is to cast ourselves up on the beach,
unable to move,
unable to thrive,
unable to live.

This is not to say that forgiveness is easy work,
especially as the full result is to be the renewal
of relationship and community.
And certainly there are plenty of hard situations
where reconciliation is difficult or impossible.
• We would not ask the abused to instigate reconciliation with the abuser which might well result in further injury and pain.
• And certainly we cannot restore a relationship with someone who has died.
Yet I believe these hard cases must still be considered within the wider context of what Jesus means
by the mercy of the Lord and the Kingdom of God.
& we trust in XP to accomplish the reconciliation
that is beyond us,
and hope in the restoration promised
through the power of ’ resurrection.


When we do engage in the deep mercy of God,
& share the forgiveness of the Risen XP,
the possibility of reconciliation
that passes all understanding
breaks into our divided world.

Certainly we all remember the power of the photos
of John Paul II meeting with his would-be assassin. But there are other icons of mercy to celebrate as well.

As Korea continues to face the painful division
of their nation,
and try to envision reconciliation
in the midst of decades of violence and hate, the church recalls the story of Pastor Son Yang-Won.

Pastor Son was a leader among Korean Xns
when he was imprisoned by the Japanese for refusing to worship in a Shinto shrine in fealty to the Emperor.
In 1948 his two sons were sharing their Xn faith
with Communist rioters during an insurrection
and were both shot to death.
Pastor Son publicly forgave the shooter,
petitioned for the death penalty to be commuted,
and then adopted the murderer as his own child.
In time Pastor Son would give his own life for the Gospel.

He will always be remembered not only as a martyr,
but also as the image of the abundant mercy of God.

The way of forgiveness is a difficult road.
And while we will discover healing for our wounded souls, the gift we offer in the work of reconciliation
is no only for ourselves, but for the world.
We forgive with abundance
that all may know the Kingdom manifested thru
the grace of our Lord Jesus XP,
the love of God,
and the deep fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

AMEN.

A Welcome to the New Guy

Well, I blogged again, as evidenced by the post below. It is owed largely to the Alta Californian calling me out.

A welcome to him!

"What If?": Constantine and the Problem of Counter-Factual Consciousness

Currently bouncing in my backseat is Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941, which details a series of decisions made beginning with England’s decision not to sue for peace with the Nazis and finishing with the decision that results in the Wansee Conference of January 1942. Along with a fascinating discussion of the decision making processes of the democracies and the dictatorships, Kershaw finishes each chapter with a brief foray into counter-factual history: What if Hitler had decided not to invade the Soviet Union? What if Churchill’s War Cabinet decided to seek terms from the Nazis? While addressing such questions, Kershaw does so only tentatively, and without projecting the results of other options outside of the briefest of timeframes. He, in fact, raises the problem of counter-factual history within the introductory chapter of the book. He writes:

This is not counter-factual or virtual history of the type which makes an intellectual guessing game of looking into some distant future and projecting what might have happened had some event not taken place. There are always too many variables in play to make this a fruitful line of enquiry, however fascinating the speculation. Nevertheless, it could fairly be claimed that historians implicitly operate with short term counter-factuals in terms of alternatives to immediate important occurrences or developments. Otherwise, they are unable fully to ascertain the significance of what actually did take place. So the alternatives discussed here are not advanced as long-term projections or musings on ‘what ifs’, but as realistic short term, but different, possible outcomes to what was in fact decided. Putting it another way, assessing the options behind a particular decision helps to clarify why, exactly, the actual decision was taken. (Fateful Choices, p. 6)

While counter-factual history is often quite enjoyable to entertain, Kershaw’s comments are well-taken. The historian who opines that if the British had been victorious at the American Revolution, then our forces would have come into World War I more quickly to more completely defeat the Germans, and thus preclude the rise of Hitler is playing with too many variables to have any credibility.

I raise this because it seems that a certain strand of contemporary theological thought is grounded in a counter-factual historical consciousness that wants to ask “what if the church had not capitulated to Constantine and the beginning of ‘Christendom’?” Or perhaps it is better stated, since the interlocutors have such a vested interest in the issue “Only if the church had not capitulated!” The result is a wistful and romantic longing for a church history that never occurred, and forces the theologian to posit a fall from ecclesiological grace from which we must recover. (I hope to write more on the thought of an ecclesiastical fall in another post.) Evidence of such thinking is to be found in theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas and Emerging Church writer Alan Hirsch. (Hirsch, who’s The Forgotten Ways I am also reading, does it with a superficial reading of church history.)

But while I am not an historian, I do find myself asking if the early Christians who did accept first the cessation of imperial Roman hostility to Christianity in the Edict of Milan, followed by the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the empire under Theodosius (not Constantine!) in 392, might have made other decisions at that time. Are we not anachronistically projecting back an American understanding of the separation of church and state that would have made little sense to those early Christians? Are we suggesting that in 313 when Rome begins to tolerate the exercise of the Faith that the church would respectfully refuse such toleration in favor of continued martyrdom? Do we expect that they would read the Lord’s call to make disciples of all nations in a modern American fashion that they would preach to individuals from many ethnicities, or rather they would understand the term “nation” in a more political sense? Would they not see the conversion of the empire in a positive light?

Alan Hirsch cites Rodney Stark to the effect that Constantine “destroyed [Christianity’s] most attractive and dynamic aspects” (The Forgotten Ways, p. 60). Yet, can we imagine with any coherence an alternate history? Yes, of course Christians did not always respond the most faithfully to the warp and woof of historical change. But God also seems to have responded by raising up reformers and movements to recall the church to its vocation: Benedict, Francis, Dante, Catherine, Thomas More, and the like.

My challenge is that we might get over our counter-factual historical consciousness and look at our heritage neither dismissively as would Hauerwas and Hirsch, nor romantically, but realistically, learning from our errors while still seeing evidence of the Lord of history leading his people in season and out of season.

Where do we get the time?

Check out the video linked here:
Where do we get the time?

Posted using ShareThis

I stumbled upon this today and found it very interesting in what it suggests for liturgy and ecclesial practice today. The idea of media shifting from consumption (TV) to a "triathalon" of consumption, production, and sharing, or rather looking at media in a more participative mode than simply receptive should have profound implications for how we "do church."

Hat tip to Quo Vadis

New Apostles' Creed

Morning Meditation, June 4

“A man is only perfectly a man when he consents to live as a son of God.”
-Thomas Merton
No Man is an Island

The operative term here is “consents.” It is always the temptation to race ahead to asking how one lives as a son of God; how I am to accomplish this feat of being God’s child? But it begins not with action. Rather it is consent to the divine action already done on my behalf. It is submission. It is yielding to the work of the Spirit. “Let it be unto me according to thy word.” It is interior abandonment. Thus it is born not in anguish and effort but in peace.

To begin with my effort is to stir up my passions to hurl myself toward my goal. To begin with consent is to find what the Eastern Christians call apatheia, a deep reservoir of peace and love that empowers us.

Icons of the Consenting Heart:
“Let it be unto me…”
“Not my will, but thine be done.
“In manus tuus, Domine…”

Hey Kids! Catch the Theological Error!

Rather like the games in kids’ magazines where they have to spot the errors, I offer this from the Episcopal seminary on the West Coast, Church Divinity School of the Pacific. In a recent fund raising appeal leaflet they have the following slogan:

Challenging the mind
Nurturing the Spirit
Engaging the world

Did you catch it?

It is the uppercase ‘S’ with which Spirit is rendered that has me scratching my head.

Just what “Spirit” do they have in mind here? Is this the Holy Spirit? If so, then how can CDSP be said to “nurture” the Spirit? Does the seminary exist to nurture God? If so, then I have a concern about their understanding about the immutability of God.

Or perhaps they have become a Process Theology school. While troubling, at least that might be theologically coherent.

Or maybe they are thinking the human spirit. That could conceivably be within the purview of the seminary. But then why the uppercase here but not for “mind” or “world.” Is there some sort of divinization of the human spirit at work here.

It is either sloppiness, non-Christian theology, or both.

In any event, they will not be receiving a pledge from me for money.

A Continuing Challenge to the Church