All posts tagged love

Lesson 15: Forgiveness – A Way to Healthy Relationships

by Pastor Fritz Foltz on April 18, 2012 in Practical Theology with 7 Comments

forgivenessThere are two ways to understand forgiveness. The first focuses on it as a law that calls on us to repress our natural human instincts in order to do what God wants. It usually ends up either dividing people between those who obey and those who do not. Or, it promotes confession of sin over and over again without any intention of changing our lifestyle. When we turn religious teachings into laws, Jesus’ call to forgive as we are forgiven becomes a difficult commandment; a demand made upon us.

A second way is to see forgiveness as a guideline to a healthy lifestyle. Religious teachings show the way to the good life. God’s Word actually is good news that promises blessing if we have the sense to practice what is taught. If we forgive, we shall find ourselves in a satisfying relationship with God and other people.

Martin Luther King writes of the need for this second way of forgiveness: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate… Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

King believes forgiveness is healthy, because “hate sears the soul and distorts the personality. Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true…Forgiveness is the lifting of a burden or the canceling of a debt. The evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. The evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship.”

The Bible presents this second way of forgiveness as the critical factor in salvation. When God tries to overcome the violence that characterizes humans in the first chapters of Genesis, he finds that his own use of violence does not work. He lays down his weapon, his bow, and begins the history of salvation that involves never again using his great power but rather practicing forgiveness and love.

Of course, we can find parts of the Bible that would seem to picture God using vengeance, punishment, or just fairness (an eye for an eye); but we should acknowledge the scriptures culminate with Jesus calling us to imitate God by going beyond an eye for an eye to forgiveness, even forgiveness of our enemies.

Most of us agree modern society is far from using forgiveness as a way to restore healthy relationships with either individuals or nations. We remain primitives who think our survival depends on doing unto others what they have done to us; and even worse doing it unto them before they do it to us. Perhaps it is time to really listen when Christ calls us to be merciful as the Father is merciful, to turn things around, to make enemies into friends, and finally to live according to the love by which God made this world.

Lesson 30: How Does God Operate Through Words? Part 4

by Scott Noon on October 29, 2011 in Doctrine with No comments

Bob suggests we’ll always have false prophets, because we’ll always have people looking for religious interpretations that support their preconceived ideas and prejudices. I think we are bound to have more, because of the way modern media uses words.

We are leaving the age of the printing press when people saw books as “hard copy’ to be copy-written and treasured in their original versions. In those days the Bible was sacred “text” with authorized versions. We expected our clergy to be learned as they studied and sought the one and only true meaning for us. We respected the authority of the Bible and the authority of the clergy.

That is all gone with the new electronic media. I think it is one of the issues involved in my friend’s comment about how two good people can read the same Bible passage on homosexuality and get two very different interpretations. It is probably not accident that almost all of the leadership of those opposed to the ELCA sexuality study and calling for leaving the community are elderly authority figures, most of them already retired.

Today the electronic text is fluid, constantly being updated. Scholars deconstruct the original to seek many meanings. The question has become what do you get out of the text, not what is the author’s intent or some authority’s interpretation. Social networking has become simply telling a group of friends what you are doing, thinking, and feeling now and then reporting the same in maybe six hours. Everything is focused on how the text works for you, how you shape words.

So too people in our day read side by side many translations of the Bible. It is compared to and weighed against other sacred texts as readers pick and choose what works for them. The Bible is now an open book that is read in light of our situations rather than the ancient one.

That makes it very important to consider how God’s Word shapes people in these times. In some ways we have more similarities to the early Christians than to those since the printing press. All is more fluid and diverse. I think that means the Church should be emphasizing community not institution, stories not doctrines, and love not law.

If history is now regarded not as objective fact but the living memory of a people through sacred story, as everyone seems to know except elderly history teachers, then we should be gathering community to tell stories that teach love. We should be telling the story about God coming to save this world from her self- destructive ways. The Bible is primary story, stories about how God has come from the time of Abraham through the present to shape and change hearts and minds. We should be telling the Gospel as a story about Jesus living and dying for humanity rather than examining it as a doctrine. I think our role has become telling the story accurately and allowing people to respond. We are less and less called to tell people how they should interpret the story and especially how they should act in response. Quite frankly, those who have been doing this lately have shown themselves to be not qualified.

Christian life is best described as faith, hope, and love: a faith that trusts God’s story of salvation, a hope that accepts His promise to bring that salvation into our hearts now and to the whole world in the future, and a love that returns good for evil as a means to participate in that story.

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