Multiplying forgiveness

Once again we come to the end of the week. Tomorrow, being Sunday, will be our regular Sabbath from this daily enterprise. Then, for the next week, Greg Steele will be writing the daily devotional thoughts and I will be forwarding them on to you. Greg has kindly consented to give me a break so that I can prepare for the board meeting next week, and rethink exactly how I want to continue with the devotional thought project. I think that it has some value. I know that some of you do, too, but also probably a few of you wish I would spend my time doing something else. I’m open to suggestions. I do think that maintaining a spiritual focus in our work is job one.

Now today’s thoughts.

To My Mother
by Wendell Berry

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

An imaginary dialogue
(You’ll have to guess who the speakers are)

Forgive.
OK, I will.

Forgive. Forgive.
Why should I? I already did.
I know; do it anyway.

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
But they’re not even saying that they’re sorry!
Do you confess everything to me?
. . .
I guess that would be a “no.” Forgive.
OK.

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
Isn’t this solution just a bit simplistic?
It appears to be working in our relationship.
. . . Sometimes I just don’t know how to answer you.
Try saying, “Yes.”
Yes.

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
This has got to stop; they’re not repenting.
So how are you coming along with your . . .
OK, OK, let’s not go there. I’ll try . . .
Do you want me to try, or to forgive?

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.
OK, I get that this is the seventy times seven thing, but
do you not see what this is doing to me?
Yes, I do.
But this is abusive.
It is my job to deal with impenitent abuse, not yours;
do you think you can cure abuse with abuse?
But this is killing me.
Do you really want to go there? It has already killed me.
You’re sounding pretty healthy now.
I will forgive the sarcasm and note that perhaps my good health
is connected to my ability to forgive.
It’s just that you don’t sound too broken up to me.
Every time a soul rebels against my Father it breaks my heart.
I understand.
I don’t mean this in a mean way, but there is no way
that you ever have, that you ever will understand
the depth or breadth or intensity of the pain in
the heart of God.
I’m sorry. It’s just that this is so painful.
Growth can be painful.
What does that mean?
Forgiveness is one of the disciplines that shapes
your character with the virtue of forgiving,
And shapes you into an image of me.
I will do what I can.
And I will help.

------
Jesus, forgive me for putting my words into your mouth,
but for millennia, my sisters and brothers have done this;
imagining what you might say, thinking about how
the conversation would go.
We search for answers knowing that you are the Truth.
May we know you well enough to speak the truth, to
speak a word of peace, on your behalf.
May that word of peace always imitate
Your grace and your forgiveness.

Show grace, discover peace.

Ron

Remember to forget

Today, a poem to bring the word of the day to us.

“Forgetfulness”
by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

“Forget” is an important, if not often used word in the Bible.
Moses, as he preaches his way through Deuteronomy,
seems to be very concerned:

Concerned that we don’t forget the things that we have seen,
Concerned that we don’t forget the covenant with the Lord,
Concerned that we don’t forget the Lord who gave it,
Concerned that we will forget God by not keeping his commandments,
Concerned that we will forget God and serve other gods,
Concerned that we will forget the times that we have provoked God to wrath.

God is too important to forget.
God’s covenant faithfulness is too powerful to forget.
God’s generosity in blessing would make one ungrateful to forget.
God’s commandments provide protection to us
that it is in our best interest not to forget.
God with a capital G is to be remembered,
while gods with a little g need to be forgotten.
Then, at the end of his sermon, Moses gives the children of Israel
an odd little command:
he tells them to not forget to forget the Amalekites.
I’m serious.

Here it is:

“Therefore when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies on every hand, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget" (Dt 25:19).

So how do you remember if you’ve kept the instructions of Moses?
If you remember, have you forgotten what you were supposed to forget?
At first this question may seem absurd, and even frivolous.
But it’s not.
Let me explain.

Being human means that six things happen in our lives most every day:
1 - We do good things to other people,
2 - They do good things to us,
3 - Other people do good things to other people;
4 - We do bad things to other people,
5 - They do bad things to us,
6 - Other people do bad things to other people.

Now, certain things seem immediately and intuitively obvious:

We would like to wipe 4, 5, and 6 off the list.
Sometimes people think they’re doing 2 or 3 and yet they’re really doing 5 or 6.
Sometimes we think that we are doing 1, but really what we’re up to is number 4.

Since, to quote Novalee Nation, “we've all got meanness in us,” sometimes we even do 4-6 on purpose.
These six things are all part of being human.

The Amalekites were humans who had done some bad things to the children of Israel.
Things so bad that you wouldn’t want to talk about them in front of the children.
Moses told the children of Israel to forget that the Amalekites even existed, to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”
Somebody wrote it down so that the children of Israel wouldn’t forget the command to forget. Ironic, hunh.

Ironic because it points out the extreme difficulty of forgetting when
someone inflicts a trauma on us.
Ironic because it also points out the dangers of trying to bury the memory
in our subconscious as well.
So what were the children of Israel supposed to do with their pain
and their memories of it?
What are we supposed to do with our pain and our memories of it?

We can’t, and we shouldn’t, forget the pain caused by other people.
We can’t, and we shouldn’t, forget the other people.

We can and we should wipe out the power of that pain over our life. And, until they repent and repair the relationship, we should wipe out the power of those other people in our life.
Absolutely.

That doesn’t mean that we forget those other people.
That doesn’t mean that stop praying for those other people.
It might even help if we can love those other people,
because then we can start loving ourselves again.
Especially when we’re supposed to be a part of the same family.

“It takes two to tango,” our dads may have told us
as we tried to blame the fight on our sister or our brother.
And we believed it, because much of the time it is true.

So when we hate somebody else for something they have done to us
there remains a little nagging voice, whispering in our ear, that says,
“There might be, you know, just one half of one ten thousandth of a part
of possibility that I might have, possibly, contributed to the problem.”

So, maybe, just maybe, to be mad at,
or to hate somebody for something they have done
causes some of that anger, or loathing, or hate to stick to ourselves.
Which just kills us. Much worse than it affects anybody else.
Does that mean that we shouldn’t me mad, or angry, or even furious at someone
who wrongs us?
Absolutely not.

Pull out your Bible. Turn to Psalms.
It is full of psalms called laments.
Laments are songs where the children of God have been getting mugged by the “others”.
The children of God get tired of it, so they cry out to God.
Unfiltered. Uncensored. Unafraid. Inspired.
Here is a small sample:

"Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers; seek out their wickedness until you find none” (Ps 10:15).

“The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and his soul hates the lover of violence. On the wicked he will rain coals of fire and sulfur; a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup” (Ps 11:5-6).

“May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that makes great boasts, those who say, ‘With our tongues we will prevail; our lips are our own — who is our master?’” (Ps 12:3-4).

Notice that the children of God are not asking God to let them break arms,
rain coals, and cut off lips.
They’re asking God to do it.
They want God to “cry ‘Havoc’ and let loose the dogs of war.”
This is an extreme variant of number 6.
And then they do an amazing thing: they leave it up to God to do,
or not to do, what they have asked.

First, they describe in great detail exactly how they feel about their pain
to the Creator of the Universe,
then they describe in graphic detail the kind of pain
they want their enemies to experience,
and then they let it go.
Probably not after one lament;
maybe not even after one hundred.

But as long as they’ve got a hold on the pain and anger,
it has a hold on them.
As long as we have a hold on it,
it has a hold on us.
We can’t stop the memories in the present of the power of pain in our past,
But the pain will stop when we stop giving the memories of our past
power over the present.

Forget the Amalekites; God has removed us from their power.
Forget the Amalekites; God has dealt with them,
or is going to, soon, and very soon.
Forget the Amalekites.

I know that this sounds simplistic.
Perhaps it is; but perhaps sometimes we just make the answers too complex.
We tend to think that our problems are too complex for simple solutions.
And that may be.
Yet sometimes the truth is that we just have to keep doing the simple thing
until it finally works.
Sooner or later the children of God have to decide:

Decide to go gather straw and begin making brick again, or
start picking grapes, grapes in clusters as big as a man.
Decide to parse out every violation of the Law they have ever done, or
praise God for the grace that saved them from that indictment.
Decide to bathe in the river of wrongs done by the Pharaoh in Egypt
and themselves in the desert, or
cross the river and wipe out the power of the past
by embracing God’s power in the present.

What do we need to decide?

Our Father is trying to awaken us out of our nightmare to show us that
he has disposed of our monsters, chased off our fears.
Now we need to recognize his face, remember his strength,
see where we’re at, and decide to forget the monsters.
Remember to forget.

Grace, grace gives peace,

Ron

Yes and no

"No” is a simple word, and it is such a safe word.
“No” involves no apparent risk.
“No” does not make us vulnerable.
“No” does not even require us to listen.

“No” can dismiss without discussion - ask any child.
“No” has its place, but it tends to stray out of bounds.
“No” spoken enough times can be painful to the heart of a child.
“No” from the lips of our beloved can create such an aching distance.
“No” can be fiercely inappropriate when spoken
into the ears of a parent, or into the ears of God.

“Yes” is the polar opposite to “No.”
“Yes” is such a beautiful word, short yet sweet,
unsophisticated yet profound.
Yet “Yes” can be risky and dangerous.
“Yes” can make things very complicated.
“Yes” can make living and thinking difficult,
and complex, and rich.
To speak “Yes” and mean it is to be vulnerable.
To live up to “Yes” is to be a keeper of promises.
To act on “Yes” is to love.

Paul agrees:

For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you,
Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not "Yes and No";
but in him it is always "Yes."
For in him every one of God's promises is a "Yes."
For this reason it is through him that we say the "Amen,"
to the glory of God.

2 Co 1:19-21 NRSV

A Prayer: Yes

You are the God who is simple, direct, clear with us and for us.
You have committed yourself to us.
You have said yes to us in creation,
yes to us in our birth,
yes to us in our baptism,
yes to us in our awakening this day.

But we are of another kind,
more accustomed to “perhaps, maybe, we’ll see,”
left in wonderment and ambiguity.
We live our lives not back to your yes,
but out of our endless “perhaps.”
So we pray for your mercy this day that we may live yes back to you,
yes with our time,
yes with our money,
yes with our sexuality,
yes with our strength and with our weakness,
yes to our neighbor,
yes and no longer “perhaps."
In the name of your enfleshed yes to us,
even Jesus who is our yes into your future. Amen.
- Walter Brueggemann

Consider the power of the godly use of the word “Yes” in your life today.

Will you?

Ron

Spiritual food

Toward the end of one of the most intriguing narratives in the gospel of John, Jesus speaks some curious words. Although exhausted, he has been talking with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well at Sychar while his disciples go into town to buy some food. This shopping trip takes a while, so the disciples expect Jesus to be as famished as they are when they return to the well:

. . . . . . the disciples were urging him, "Rabbi, eat something."

But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about."
So the disciples said to one another, "Surely no one has brought him something to eat?"
Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”
Jn 4:31-34

Now, even though Jesus confuses the disciples, John makes it obvious to us that the Father must have filled Jesus with some sort of spiritual food. This idea of “spiritual filling” makes us think about the words from Jesus’ sermon:

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” - Mt 5:6

Consider the wisdom of Gregory of Nyssa as he explains these words of Jesus. Hear how the virtue that makes up righteousness can satisfy us:

To me, this saying seems to mean that none of the things pursued for the sake of pleasure in this life satisfies those who pursue them . . . Are not all pleasures that are accomplished through the body fleeting, since they do not remain for long with those who have attained them? . . . Only the pursuit of virtue that is planted with us is firm and lasting. For a person who aims his life straight at the higher things—such as prudence, temperance, [or] piety toward the divine—does not in those virtuous actions obtain transitory and unstable enjoyment but enjoyment that is firm, enduring, and extends to all of one’s life.

Why is this so? Because one can always do these things and there is no time throughout our lives that produces a satiety of doing good. For prudence, purity, unchangeableness in every good, and avoidance of the bad can be done at all times. As long as one longs for virtue, one’s enjoyment grow through its practice. For those who give themselves over to improper desires, even if their soul is always attentive to licentiousness, the pleasure does not last indefinitely. Satiety puts a stop to the gluttonous enjoyment of food and when thirst is quenched, so is the pleasure of drink. It is the same with other things; once the desire for please has been quenched by its satisfaction, a certain interval of time must pass before the desire for pleasure is again called forth.

On the other hand, when the possession of virtue is firmly established within someone, it is not limited by time or satiety. It always provides those who live by it a pure, ever-new, and flourishing experience of its own good things. . . . The possession of virtue follows the desire for virtue, and this ingrained goodness brings unceasing enjoyment to the soul. . . . Virtue is both the work of those who live uprightly and the reward for virtuous deeds.

On the Beatitudes, 4

To hunger or thirst after righteousness is to desire virtue. To desire a particular virtue is to value it, which is the first step toward possessing it. The practice of a specific connected discipline begins to develop the virtue in us. Such practice requires us to displace the opposing vice, as well as the connected fears. After we practice the virtue long enough for it to become a habit, we acquire a taste for it, a taste that can be satisfied by more of the same. Gregory explains this to us, and Jesus demonstrates.

If, for example, we desire the virtue of peacemaking (Mt 6:10), then not only must we give up anger (or sarcasm, impatience, or incaution), we must also put aside our fear and avoidance of conflict in order to come close enough to bring reconciliation. When God uses us to make peace enough times, he fills us with the joy of knowing that we are truly behaving like children of God. That joy will overflow into the lives of other people. Remember the woman at the well? Jesus told her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." Jn 4:13-15

If you would be filled, prayerfully hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Grace, peace, and love,

Ron

Confessing our vices

A prayer to challenge us, and a scripture to give us comfort.

Prayer of Confession - Our Vices and Virtues

O Father, we know that all of us have sinned
and fallen short of your glory.
We confess that we know personally the hatred which divides
nation from nation, race from race, sisters from brothers.
We admit that even though our words or thoughts
may conceal hate, our actions give us away.
Father forgive.
We realize that the covetousness of people and nations
to possess what is not their own is not distant from us,
but has taken up residence in our heart as well.
Father forgive.
We own up to stockpiles of the greed which exploits
the work of human hands, and lays waste to the earth,
Father forgive.
We concede that our bottomless hunger has sharpened the pangs of
our envy of the welfare and happiness of others.
Father forgive.
We acknowledge our deafness, our indifference to the plight
of the imprisoned, the homeless, the refugee,
Father forgive.
We allow our eyes to lead us into the lust which dishonors the bodies
of men, women and children,
Father forgive.
We confess the pride which leads to trust in ourselves and not in you,
Father forgive.

[Selah – a turning]

Father, help us to swallow our pride and fill our throats with your praise;
Correct our vision from lust to the discernment of beauty and truth;
Open our ears to your calling to forsake our indifference,
and embrace a passion that tunes our ears
to hear the cries of the oppressed for justice;
Refine our taste with your goodness that we may satisfy our hunger
With contentment instead of deepening it with envy;
Liquidate our greed to make room in our lives for
the conservation of our planet’s resources;
O Lord, in your mercy
Hear our prayer.
Remove the dross of covetousness from our hearts and shape us
into vessels of blessing for others;
Train our minds to purge hatred from our thoughts
And fill the gap with love for others before our waywardness
replaces it with something worse.
Help us empty ourselves of evil, Father,
so that you may fill us with that which is good.

Continue your work of conversion in us, Father.
O Lord, in your mercy

Hear our prayer.

Through your Spirit, shape us to conform to the image of Jesus;
In the name of your perfect imager we petition you,

Amen.

Enlighten us with your word, O Lord.

See, a king will reign in righteousness,
and princes will rule with justice.

Each will be like a hiding place from the wind,
a covert from the tempest,
like streams of water in a dry place,
like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.
Then the eyes of those who have sight will not be closed,
and the ears of those who have hearing will listen,

The minds of the rash will have good judgment,
and the tongues of stammerers will speak readily and distinctly.
A fool will no longer be called noble,
nor a villain said to be honorable.

For fools speak folly,
and their minds plot iniquity:
to practice ungodliness,
to utter error concerning the Lord,
to leave the craving of the hungry unsatisfied,
and to deprive the thirsty of drink.

The villainies of villains are evil;
they devise wicked devices
to ruin the poor with lying words,
even when the plea of the needy is right.
But those who are noble plan noble things,
and by noble things they stand.

- Isa 32:1-8 NRSV

Grace and peace,

Ron

Live by the Spirit

Our character is made up of virtues and vices.
The events of the day, and our disposition toward the Spirit,
tend to lean us toward either our virtues or vices.
If we yield our body and soul to chasing physical desires,
then we will become more animal than truly human.
If we live by the Spirit, practicing spiritual disciplines with our body and soul,
then God can work in us to replace our vices with virtues,
and shape our character to conform more closely
to that of Jesus Christ.

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.
For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit,
and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh;
for these are opposed to each other,
to prevent you from doing what you want.

But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.
Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness,
idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions,
envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.
I am warning you, as I warned you before:
those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.
And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.
Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another
Galatians 5:16-26 (NRSV)

Here is a prayer to turn our minds to the virtues:

Teach me, O God, so to use all the circumstances of my life today
that they may bring forth in me the fruits of holiness
rather than the fruits of sin.
Let me use disappointments as material for patience;
Let me use success as material for thankfulness;
Let me use suspense as material for perseverance;
Let me use danger as material for courage;
Let me use reproach as material for longsuffering;
Let me use praise as material for humility;
Let me use pleasure as material for temperance;
Let me use pains as material for endurance.
John Baillie

I pray for you two of the great virtues:

Grace and peace,

Ron