Artisans of Reconciliation: Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven

 

Last week Fr Joe shared with us a saying of Pope Francis that Christians are to be ‘artisans of reconciliation’.

 

An artisan is someone who crafts things that are both useful and beautiful.

 

Our Christian ‘craft’ is reconciliation with God and with one another, within and beyond the church: and reconciliation is both useful and beautiful.

 

Through time and application we can begin to master our craft and make something of enduring value. That is what we call the 'journey of discipleship'.

 

Another word for disciple could be ‘apprentice'. The Christian faith is an apprenticeship in reconciliation and love on all levels.

 

The artisan needs tools. If we are to be ‘artisans of reconciliation’ we need some tools for our craft.

 

The tool presented to us in this morning’s gospel reading is forgiveness.

 

It is not single-use-forgiveness, but forgiveness that endures, is patient, is costly and that aches for reconciliation.

 

The letter to the Colossians says, ‘God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’ (Colossians 1.20).

 

Forgiveness flows from the heart of Jesus - his heart wounded on the cross - and Jesus calls us to forgive our brothers and sisters, our fellow human beings, from the heart.

 

Reconciliation between human beings heals the wounded heart of Jesus, because the mission and purpose of Jesus Christ is to ‘reconcile all things to himself’ and he does this through forgiveness: ‘Father, forgive them’.

 

Perhaps the greatest hurdle is first to know that we are forgiven.

 

Knowing yourself to be forgiven enables forgiveness to flow. The slave in the parable did not realise that forgiveness is a gift: ‘give’ is part of forgive. And he was unable to forgive even a smaller debt of his fellow slave.

 

‘Forgive our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’ as we pray with Jesus in the ‘Our Father’.

 

Forgiveness also takes us deep into the complexities of the human heart.

 

When I make my confession - and seek forgiveness from God - I am seeking to go deep into my heart to uncover, to name and to confess the actions, the grievances and grudges, the long held hurts and irritations which have separated me from my Maker and from my fellow creatures.

 

It’s little wonder that people shy away from Confession. But what a release! To know that I am released from those things, that they have no hold over me and I am free to love and therefore reconciled to God. I am, as the hymn puts it, ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’.

 

Forgiveness is deep and complex, it is subtle but brings about amazing things.

 

Forgiveness raises hard questions: are there things, are there people, that can never be forgiven? Are some things, some people, just too bad to be forgiven? Why should I repeatedly forgive someone who keeps making the same mistake, or misdemeanour or sin?

 

When I forgive I am giving away my grievances and resentments. I am not suspending pain, I am not forgetting what has been done to me, I am not capitulating to the person who has wronged me.

 

When Gee Walker forgave the racist killers of her son Anthony, after his murder in 2005, she did a remarkable thing, driven by her Christian discipleship, her apprenticeship in the ways of reconciliation and love.

 

Her forgiveness did not undermine justice; the murderers went to prison for 23 years and 17 years.

 

Her forgiveness did not end her pain; she lost her son.

 

But as a Christian Gee Walker knew that forgiveness is never a dead end. Forgiveness renews people and situations, it restores relationships, it opens up future possibilities. Gee Walker was not capitulating to those who wronged her but was saying that they would have no more power over her. Forgiveness is strength, forgiveness is dignity.

 

Not to forgive would have locked her into never being able to live again: living again, being alive, is the fruit of forgiveness and reconciliation. This is resurrection life, life beyond resentment, reconciled life.

 

There are many things that might be weighing heavy on our hearts today: perhaps grievance, anger or bitterness, memory of trauma or pain or just the niggles of everyday life and rubbing up alongside tricky people. Take those people with you to the reconciling heart of Jesus; pray for them and yourself to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

 

As artisans of reconciliation we have the tool of forgiveness: being forgiven and being forgiving. And all this flows from God.

 

How about this week try it out afresh? As an artisan of reconciliation, and knowing yourself to be forgiven in Christ, look out for opportunities to forgive. And go out in newness of life: ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.

 

 

Bitesize Catechesis - Penance

Bitesize Catechesis

‘Bitesize Catechesis’

‘Penance’. I wonder what that word means to you?

Perhaps it sounds a bit dark, difficult, burdensome, judgemental or harsh.

Or perhaps it makes you think of a new TV mini-series about to start on Tuesdays on Channel 5.

Either way, like fasting and almsgiving it’s not a word in general circulation.

Penance can refer to two things. First the act of making reparation for something that has been done wrong, or secondly the act of intentionally making confession of our sins.

I want to think about both meanings, but mostly about penance as the act of confession, particularly sacramental confession, which has become known also, and helpfully, as the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Now there are those who say that the Church of England doesn’t do confession. Strange, because it does and it does because it’s deeply embedded in the scriptures.

Psalm 51 is a classic statement of confession, starting like this:

Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness: according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences.

Wash me throughly from my wickedness: and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my faults: and my sin is ever before me. (Psalm 51.3)

John the Baptist, our patron saint here, calls people to confession ‘proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Luke 3.3). And he does so in no uncertain terms: ‘you brood of vipers…’ (Luke 3.7).

And St James in his letter says, ‘The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. (James 5.15-16)

The Church of England has always retained sacramental Confession to a priest. In the Book of Common Prayer service The Visitation to the Sick it recommends that someone whose life is in danger or drawing to a close should confess their sins:

Here shall the sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which confession, the Priest shall absolve him…

So Confession is not compulsory in the Church of England, at least not personal confession, but it is to be commended. At every Eucharist we begin with the penitential act of confession which is corporate if not individual.

***

The prominence or otherwise of penance in the Church of England is by the by, and old debates have moved on.

There’s a deeper issue though and it relates to our sense of shame and/or guilt and fear of being judged, either by other people or by God.

None of us wants to be judged. ‘Don’t judge me’ is one of the cries of our times.

It’s a way of saying, ‘please don’t trample on my fragile sense of who I am. I am a harsh enough judge of myself, without you judging me too’.

Penance seems to be about judgement.

But without judgement we lose our sense of accountability. If I can’t be judged, I can’t be held accountable or responsible for what I say or do.

One way we can engage with what it means to be accountable, and take responsibility for our lives is to subject ourselves to judgement, so as when we make our confession, when we do penance.

But, boy, is that hard.

***

It’s hard because then being judged gets mixed up with guilt.

Very often penance and confession are associated with guilt. And we have been trained in late modernity to believe guilt to be a dreadful thing.

Knowing that guilt is bad doesn’t make feelings of guilt go away. We even feel guilty about feeling guilty. And then guilt mutates into shame, which actually is rather worse.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is very interesting on this subject.

He distinguishes between ‘guilt-cultures’ and ‘shame-cultures’.

His argument is that in a guilt-based culture you have forgiveness, and the moment you have forgiveness you can say ‘mea culpa, I did wrong’. You take ownership of your shortcomings and know that, somewhere down the line, there is forgiveness.

Today, and social media magnifies it, you are: ‘trolled’; ‘called out’; ‘no platformed’; ‘deleted’. That is a shame-culture and there is no forgiveness in a shame-culture. There is no way back. So in a shame-culture you deny you did wrong, and keep denying it.

Shame cultures create scapegoats. I don’t want to be shamed and ostracised so I point the finger at someone else whatever the cost. Shame feeds more shame and is utterly corrosive. It’s the story of Adam and Eve: they hide; they throw blame around.

One last thought on guilt: it can also be a prompt or spur to act better!

***

Where does all this get us then?

The church has a means by which we can face up to, acknowledge, name and handover our sins and shortcomings. A place where we can be profoundly honest about ourselves. That is in confession, penance.

It is a place of reconciliation, restoration and forgiveness. It’s a way of rooting out the sins, that like weeds can become pernicious and invasive to our souls

Sin stunts who we are made to be; confession releases tension and self-loathing so that we are freed to be his children once again.

Someone once said that it is the most liberating thing to be called ‘a sinner’. It sounds really odd. It sounds like it diminishes who we are. It sounds like plain old-fashioned hellfire and damnation. But think about it: being declared ‘a sinner’ means there’s hope; being a sinner means we’re made good but fall short, and can be restored and renovated.

St Augustine saw penance as being therapeutic. Confessing our sins, he argued, is good for our souls, it is healing and helps us grow.

This is the spirit of what confession is about removing guilt by declaring forgiveness, sparing us shame and freeing us to be, as the hymn puts it, ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’.

I want to end by commending individual confession, penance, for precisely these reasons and as a way of growing in our faith and discipleship.

***

Wheat & Tares: Reflections on judgement and judgmentalism

First preached as a sermon by Canon Andrew Bishop at Guildford Cathedral Sunday 23 July, 2017, Sixth Sunday after Trinity. Gospel text, Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

‘Let anyone with ears listen’ Matthew 13.43

In nomine Patris…

The parables that Jesus told his disciples and the crowds who followed him are multifaceted. On first hearing they are deceptively simple, and certainly memorable. Many, but not all, have an obvious and apparent meaning. But a second hearing, or reading, makes us realise that there is a whole lot more to them. The parables become searing and searching. If we are reading them faithfully, with attention and open to the possibility that God will speak through them, we find that the parables read us more than we read them.

Weeds in a field of wheat

And we bring our own experience and insights to the parables. If you spent the day in the garden weeding yesterday, between the showers, or have it planned this afternoon, no doubt you will be thinking practicalities and the merits of glysophate (for those not horticulturally minded, it’s a weedkiller) or the hand trowel. But more than that we start to be searched out by a parable like this. We might begin to wonder what weeds need plucking out of our own lives; what are the weeds that need plucking out of society?

This is a tough parable. Its conclusion really flies in the face of what we might assume the gospel is all about. Surely God does not want the destruction of anyone, be they virtuous wheat or malevolent weeds; so what’s all the talk of furnaces of fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth? Surely we moved on from all that after the Middle Ages? It doesn’t feel the sort of modern message we might want to hear.

So do we leave it there, declare that things have moved on a bit and conveniently ignore this parable? I suggest not.

If we remember that the parable reads us as much as we read it, it becomes frighteningly modern and prescient. This is because the parable condemns judgmentalism and commends judgement.

Judgements need to be weighed carefully

Judgement has got a bad name in recent years. This happens when we mistake judgement for judgmentalism. Making good judgements in our choices is fundamental to be responsible human beings in society. Judgements are integral to justice, and in the gospels justice and mercy go hand in hand. Mercy is not a soft option but is the partner of judgement.

Our age is curiously judgemental and not so good at making judgements. Social media firestorms rage in the heaping up of judgements against other people; be they politicians, celebrities, media figures or even, bizarrely, the judiciary. Demands for instant solutions force and hurry poor judgements which results in poor decisions. Judgmentalism evacuates mercy from justice.

In contemporary society very often the word, ‘religious’ or at least ‘Christian’ is assumed to be synonymous with ‘judgemental’. And it has been well earned. The church has often been complicit in believing herself to be the judge, dispensing condemnations and anathemas to those who step out of line.

The church has wanted to do the weeding long before the harvest. This has led, quite literally sometimes, to the burning of those people who dissent or fall outside the norms of the time or those we choose to point the finger at, scapegoat and blame.

The point of the parable is that the weeding, the judgement, is not our task. In the parable when the weeds are uprooted the wheat will be uprooted along with it: put another way, the very act of us judging and seeking to root out others corrupts us at the same time.

Marchela Dimitrova, “Jesus Christ, the Judge.” 2011

The parable resists our human inclination to judge others, and indeed even to judge ourselves. How dare we? How dare we, who proclaim in the Creed, ‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’, seek to be judges ourselves? The judgement is Christ’s not ours.

As individuals, the church and as a society we all stand together under judgement. Here’s the challenge. How can the church show not what it is to judge, but what it is to stand open to judgement? In other words, to be penitential?

Remember: this parable is a vision of the Kingdom of God, not a world controlled by the church. It is as demanding for the wheat – the children of the kingdom – as it is for the weeds – the children of the evil one. Yet we are impatient to start weeding, trimming, tidying: for the children of the kingdom other gifts are required: patience, faith and trust. The judgement is Christ’s.

This has a direct personal implication and impact. As the children’s song goes, ‘Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me’. We can change that to, ‘Let there be penitence on earth and let it begin with me’.

The seeds of pernicious weeds are usually pretty tiny, mobile and germinate easily. They take root quickly and deeply. So it is with our own shortcomings– that ‘persistent buried grudge, the half-acknowledged enmity which is still smouldering’ that envy or jealousy – those things, once they root and take hold, become sin; they impair our vision and sharing in the life of God.

At each Eucharist we open ourselves up and speak words of confession and are assured that God’s judgement is merciful and inclined to forgiveness. For some, and perhaps it should be for more of us, the practice of confession one to one with a priest becomes a way of digging deeper, not to diminish ourselves but to be filled with God’s mercy. The priest does not judge, but the penitent says before God, I am open to judgement.

As a paraphrase of the last verses of Psalm 139 put it:

Investigate my life, O God,

    find out everything about me;

Cross-examine and test me,

    get a clear picture of what I’m about;

See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong—

    then guide me on the road to eternal life.

And this moves beyond the personal and into life together. What then does it look like for the church to be open to judgement? It requires us to re-position how we speak of the faith. So, rather than condemn, we commend.

It has been said that, ‘through creative, repentant activity in public life, the church participates in God’s healing transformation of the world.’ That is hard. It is also something that will not be understood by the world.

We acknowledge that this has to be spoken to ourselves as the church first so that we can speak it to the world. An example might be how we speak of the ecological crisis and sustainability. We need to retreat from sanctimony and confess the ways that our use of scripture has led to domination and the exploitation of the world’s resources. In end of life matters, we need to commend life and support all that enriches life before we condemn those of a different position: we all stand under judgement.

We cannot claim to be anything other than fallible human beings, but fallible human beings entrusted with a great treasure for and on behalf of the world.

The existence of the church is the guarantee that Jesus Christ remains committed to the world for which he died.

You and I are implicated in that as disciples. The church tells the world that Jesus’ message is to the end of the age. It is not about being superior, or judgmental, but rather, being faithful to Christ in a world that does not know him, simply out of love for that world and ‘all who dwell in it’.

So, the message is: forget the weeding! It is not my job or your job, not the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, nor even the Pope’s job, to make the kingdom neatly manicured or weeded, wielding spiritual glysophate and religious hand trowels, with us judging what is a weed and what is a flower. This is Christ’s ministry.

Let’s reject judgmentalism and take judgement seriously. And may it start right here: in my heart and in yours.

Roger Toulson (1946-2017)

Dedicated in thanksgiving for the life of Roger Toulson, Lord Toulson, sometime  Queen's Counsel, Lord Justice of Appeal, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom: the least judgmental judge I know. May he rest in peace. Amen.

© Andrew Bishop, 2017