Matthew 18: 15-20
15 “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. 16 But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ 17 If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
18 “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be[e] loosed in heaven.
19 “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”
On Being Forgiving
A very dangerous passage which could lead us to the worst of all sin - spiritual pride and self-righteousness. Need to approach this passage with a deep sensitivity to our own “faults” and an equally deep awareness of the grace of God who forgives me for my secret as well as my confessed sins.
We are not given permission to be piously judging and condemning; we are reminded to be accountable to each other and not be indifferent about that which causes disharmony in our lives and relationships. Love is the fulfilling of the law, as Paul says.
These words are easy to misinterpret. So dangerous it would almost be better if they had been lost and we didn’t have to deal with them. They seem to give us a power and authority we dare not exercise. A power and authority which runs contrary to the spirit and will of Christ. A lot of bad has happened because of these words.
What ever else we do with them we must interpret them in the light of the strong and clear call to be forgiving rather than condemning which echoes throughout the Gospels. This means we don’t make things black and white; rather we struggle to work at the dynamic of reconciliation and do not settle for anything less. We remember how often forgiveness is necessary - not 3 times but 77 times! We are not into controlling people but in setting them free to live in the grace of a loving God.
Nothing makes any sense in the words of our Gospel UNLESS...unless there is something to the power of love to overcome all things.Then, maybe, just maybe, it is possible that all things do work together for good for those who dare to love. Love in the sense of deeply and genuinely wanting the best for all. This is the ideal of Christian love.
The challenge is to help a person find his/her truth and live in it. It is the challenge of tough love. Love enough even to cut them off...kick them out...not to destroy them but to help them come to their truth and want back in again. Want to be loved again. This is the format of AA - and it works!
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Sunday, August 24, 2014
August 31, 2014 12th of Pentecost
Matthew 16:21-26
21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”
23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.
28 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
“Life Without Limits?”
The challenge for all of us is not only to try figure out what God’s will really is;
it is also to be willing to suffer rather then lose our integrity. The secret of life is that it has to be lost to be found; it has to dare suffer to be real and have integrity.
As a poet once said, “Life is a sum of habits disturbed by a few thoughts.”
When we try make it be easy we lose what it really is - as Henry James has said -
“Life is effort, unremittingly repeated.” It is not without limits.
Life without limits, without a purpose beyond having it bigger and better; without struggle, commitment to something beyond my own happiness and economic security; without denial, without the struggle which comes in loosing oneself in being an instrument of love in a world of hate; life without integrity and responsibility, servant hood and compassion is no life at all! It is indeed very thin!
“Get Behind Me Satan”
Peter had the best of intentions at heart when he tried to talk Jesus out of the way of suffering. He had no intention of being an evil temptation.
Peter wanted suffering eliminated from Jesus life. We all would like to see the same.
Suffering is so costly; it hurts so much, demands so much, takes so much.
Helmut Thielicke has said the problem for Americans is that we don’t know how to deal with suffering. We regard it as something “which is fundamental inadmissible, distressing, embarrassing, and not to be endured.”
What Peter and we do not understand is that suffering belongs to the very nature of this world and to the very nature of Jesus - the suffering servant who emptied himself.
To be caught up with the will of God is to take on suffering as a part of loving. The only way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate love. Love makes sense out of and gives meaning to life, even suffering.
“...life without any kind of suffering would be no life at all; it would be a form of death. Life - the life of the spirit like the life of the body- depends in some mysterious way upon the struggle to be...suffering-as-struggle belongs...to life’s foundational basis and goodness...A pain free life would be a life-less life.
We suffer because we are human and out of our suffering comes our capacity for compassion. For ‘suffering integrates us into life and makes us more fully and truly ‘alive’.”
Douglas John Hall, “God And Human Suffering”, pp. 57-66
I
21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”
23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.
28 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
“Life Without Limits?”
The challenge for all of us is not only to try figure out what God’s will really is;
it is also to be willing to suffer rather then lose our integrity. The secret of life is that it has to be lost to be found; it has to dare suffer to be real and have integrity.
As a poet once said, “Life is a sum of habits disturbed by a few thoughts.”
When we try make it be easy we lose what it really is - as Henry James has said -
“Life is effort, unremittingly repeated.” It is not without limits.
Life without limits, without a purpose beyond having it bigger and better; without struggle, commitment to something beyond my own happiness and economic security; without denial, without the struggle which comes in loosing oneself in being an instrument of love in a world of hate; life without integrity and responsibility, servant hood and compassion is no life at all! It is indeed very thin!
“Get Behind Me Satan”
Peter had the best of intentions at heart when he tried to talk Jesus out of the way of suffering. He had no intention of being an evil temptation.
Peter wanted suffering eliminated from Jesus life. We all would like to see the same.
Suffering is so costly; it hurts so much, demands so much, takes so much.
Helmut Thielicke has said the problem for Americans is that we don’t know how to deal with suffering. We regard it as something “which is fundamental inadmissible, distressing, embarrassing, and not to be endured.”
What Peter and we do not understand is that suffering belongs to the very nature of this world and to the very nature of Jesus - the suffering servant who emptied himself.
To be caught up with the will of God is to take on suffering as a part of loving. The only way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate love. Love makes sense out of and gives meaning to life, even suffering.
“...life without any kind of suffering would be no life at all; it would be a form of death. Life - the life of the spirit like the life of the body- depends in some mysterious way upon the struggle to be...suffering-as-struggle belongs...to life’s foundational basis and goodness...A pain free life would be a life-less life.
We suffer because we are human and out of our suffering comes our capacity for compassion. For ‘suffering integrates us into life and makes us more fully and truly ‘alive’.”
Douglas John Hall, “God And Human Suffering”, pp. 57-66
I
Sunday, August 17, 2014
August 24, 2014 11th of Pentecost
Matthew 16:13-20
13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
“Saying More Then We Know”
“The genius of the poet is that he says more than he knows.”
The genius of faith is that it says more than it knows - always!
God is unsearchable and incomprehensible; grace goes beyond human understanding and logic. Faith is believing more then we can ever know.
Peter was saying more then he knew when he confessed Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
The words came strangely to his lips from beyond his own understanding. It is so also with us, as Luther wrote long ago: “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him...”
Faith is not having all the answers to the riddle of life; not never having to doubt again; or be perplexed about things; or afraid; or confused; or ever having to feel lost again. It is not a magical formula which takes away all the hurt, pain, and fear out of life.
Faith is the God given capacity to hope when all looks hopeless; laugh when much is heavy; dance when there is little reason to dance; pray when God seems far away and not tuned in. It is the God given capacity to list all the reasons why there is no God, and yet...and yet believe in God!
“Faith is a power and passion in authority among the power and passions of life.
P. T. Forsythe
It is the sure and certain hope that God is for is, not against us. No matter what!
“What If...
What if what is really important is not what we think about Jesus but what Jesus thinks about us? What if what is really important is that we let Jesus tell us who God is and who we are in God’s eyes, and let God love us with a love which will not let us go, let us down, let us off - ever!
What if the main point of it all is not that we love God but that God loves us!
How incredible this truth is!
Faith is not our doing! It is God’s doing in us.
It is more important to be doing the works of God then to be talking about them.
Our challenge is not to figure out who is saved and who isn’t. Our challenge is to let the great and precious promises of God not only live in our hearts but live in our world through us. To be who we say we are - the people of God who live by grace and want to pass it on.
13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
“Saying More Then We Know”
“The genius of the poet is that he says more than he knows.”
The genius of faith is that it says more than it knows - always!
God is unsearchable and incomprehensible; grace goes beyond human understanding and logic. Faith is believing more then we can ever know.
Peter was saying more then he knew when he confessed Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
The words came strangely to his lips from beyond his own understanding. It is so also with us, as Luther wrote long ago: “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to him...”
Faith is not having all the answers to the riddle of life; not never having to doubt again; or be perplexed about things; or afraid; or confused; or ever having to feel lost again. It is not a magical formula which takes away all the hurt, pain, and fear out of life.
Faith is the God given capacity to hope when all looks hopeless; laugh when much is heavy; dance when there is little reason to dance; pray when God seems far away and not tuned in. It is the God given capacity to list all the reasons why there is no God, and yet...and yet believe in God!
“Faith is a power and passion in authority among the power and passions of life.
P. T. Forsythe
It is the sure and certain hope that God is for is, not against us. No matter what!
“What If...
What if what is really important is not what we think about Jesus but what Jesus thinks about us? What if what is really important is that we let Jesus tell us who God is and who we are in God’s eyes, and let God love us with a love which will not let us go, let us down, let us off - ever!
What if the main point of it all is not that we love God but that God loves us!
How incredible this truth is!
Faith is not our doing! It is God’s doing in us.
It is more important to be doing the works of God then to be talking about them.
Our challenge is not to figure out who is saved and who isn’t. Our challenge is to let the great and precious promises of God not only live in our hearts but live in our world through us. To be who we say we are - the people of God who live by grace and want to pass it on.
Monday, August 11, 2014
August 17, 2014 10th of Pentecost
Matthew 15:21-28
21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
“Great Is Your Faith”
The Canaanite woman wanted something of the goodness of God’s grace in her life too. She persisted until she got it. She took the rebuke, came back for more, and hung in there until Jesus could only do what he came to do - bless her.
It is often our vulnerability, our deep needs, which lead us into the arms of a loving, gracious God. It is also our persistence - our faith which will not give up - which sees the worst in life redeemed and turned into blessing.
Expect to have something of the goodness of God’s grace in your life - and don’t give up until it happens!
“A God Of Grace”
There are no favorites with God. God loves all equally much. He is a God of grace. It sounds like Jesus is saying there are favorites, but he isn’t. He is identifying his ministry- he is not excluding anyone.
The miracle here is not just the healing; her faith is a miracle.
God’s grace comes to us in Word and Sacrament. AND in acts of kindness, compassion, and friendship experienced and shared in the human experience.
i.e. Don Quixote: When he looked at that cheap and gaudy woman through the spectacles of his grace, he saw a splendid woman. He said to her, “It’s all right even though everyone says you’re all wrong. When, she embraced that grace and began to feel it’s power, she became what Don Quixote saw.
21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
“Great Is Your Faith”
The Canaanite woman wanted something of the goodness of God’s grace in her life too. She persisted until she got it. She took the rebuke, came back for more, and hung in there until Jesus could only do what he came to do - bless her.
It is often our vulnerability, our deep needs, which lead us into the arms of a loving, gracious God. It is also our persistence - our faith which will not give up - which sees the worst in life redeemed and turned into blessing.
Expect to have something of the goodness of God’s grace in your life - and don’t give up until it happens!
“A God Of Grace”
There are no favorites with God. God loves all equally much. He is a God of grace. It sounds like Jesus is saying there are favorites, but he isn’t. He is identifying his ministry- he is not excluding anyone.
The miracle here is not just the healing; her faith is a miracle.
God’s grace comes to us in Word and Sacrament. AND in acts of kindness, compassion, and friendship experienced and shared in the human experience.
i.e. Don Quixote: When he looked at that cheap and gaudy woman through the spectacles of his grace, he saw a splendid woman. He said to her, “It’s all right even though everyone says you’re all wrong. When, she embraced that grace and began to feel it’s power, she became what Don Quixote saw.
Sunday, August 3, 2014
August 10, 2014 9th of Pentecost
Matthew 14:22-33
22 Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. 23 After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone, 24 and the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.
25 Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. 26 When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear.
27 But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
28 “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”
29 “Come,” he said.
Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”
31 Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”
32 And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. 33 Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
“A Sound Of Sheer Silence”
Jesus finally is alone. Finally he has a moment to catch his breath, gather his wits about him, and just be with God in silence, to pray.
This is no game he is playing. He needs this time away in prayer.
It takes silence to ‘see who we are’, for it is in silence we touch the deepest part of our humanity as well as God’s divinity.
Thomas Szasz, an American psychiatrist has said;
“(Humans) cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.”
Faith cannot exist without solitude either.
“Only in silence, in the space between noise, speech, and activity, is there room for a person to become focused, to achieve gravity and centeredness. Only in waiting before the mystery of existence itself, in brooding upon the world and eternity, does one become endowed with true worldliness and true everlastingness.” John Killinger
“Compassion is the fruit of solitude (silence) and the basis of all ministry.” Henri Nouwen
To be about God’s business we need to seek a sound of sheer silence, so we can be compassionate as our God is compassionate.
“Let ‘s Walk On Water”
Miracles just don’t happen. They are caused by mortals such as Peter, you, and I, who dare risk in the face of overwhelming odds. Who dare act in faith.
God most often acts in concert with a mortal rather then going it alone. In fact we could say, God limiteds Himself to working with mortals - and waiting for one of us to be there before He does what He always wanted to do.
God wants us to walk on water; be a miracle of happiness and peace in our world.
Faith is to risk being caught up in a miracle; it is being open to the new creation God seeks to create through us for all.
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