Can We Talk?

Sometimes I wonder whether we have lost the ability to talk. I don’t mean the ability to form and speak words. I mean the ability to talk – really talk – with others.

Think about all the “conversations” about race, politics, or religion that you have heard or participated in recently, on TV, at public meetings, in church, on Facebook. It appears to me that, on the whole, we are pretty good at making demands, spewing projectile perspectives, yelling, interrupting, accusing, labeling, and making sweeping assertions about whole groups of people or about how the world ought to work. But we are not very good at conversing, especially when the stakes are high. At least, I don’t hear much genuine conversation going on around the very difficult issues we face together as the body of Christ and in the world, issues like racial tension, violence, politics, religious perspectives, sexual identity, even the future of the church.

In her wise and important book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre reminds us that “To ‘converse’ originally meant to live among or together, or to act together, to foster community, to commune with…When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another…Indeed, conversation is...a way of building and sustaining community.”[1]

If we are going to find a way forward through these challenging times somebody needs to create spaces in our life together for genuine, careful, caring, honest, mutually-honoring conversation, the sort of conversation that changes the participants and builds and sustains community toward a common good, rather than tearing it apart in a wrestling match over who will get their way, over whose perspective or interest or power will dominate the day.

Of all people, we who have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed with his Spirit ought to be able to engage and create space for this sort of conversation. After all, trust in the grace of God made known in Jesus who is our forgiveness, love, and hope frees us to go deep into the sorts of paradox, ambiguity and pain that so often give rise to fear and angry imposition of hardline demands. We who rest in amazing grace and walk in the way of the cross are able to face hard, harsh truths about the brokenness and sinfulness of life – together – and to lead the way in our human search for life-giving paths forward.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. [2 Corinthians 5:18-20; NRSV]

This sort of conversation is neither natural nor easy. In many ways, it’s quite countercultural. It involves deep listening to the other, listening at the risk of being changed, not listening in order to find a hole in an argument or a target for rebuttal. Community building conversation that moves to action calls each participant to honest sharing of their experience or perspective in an non-judgmental environment that honors each and is committed to working together for the common good. It’s walking, or rather, talking in the way of the cross, trusting that there really is “one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” [Ephesians 4:6; NRSV]

How might we create space for this sort of conversation in our families, our neighborhoods, and our congregations this fall?

How might your book group or Bible study or youth meetings or congregation council or committee meetings be different if genuine conversation about difficult issues were to become a high priority?

What if we all looked around our congregations, communities, and workplaces for people who are different from us or who hold perspectives different from ours and invited them into genuine and sustained conversation about the very things about which we differ? 

Such conversation certainly won’t remedy all the challenges, divisions, and injustices that we face. But I do suspect that, with McEntyre, we’d discover “conversation that discloses us to one another and brings us into relationship that reaffirms our common dependencies and our importance to each other. Like prayer, good conversation fashions words into vessels that carry living water.”[2]

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[1] Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 89.

[2] McEntyre, 110.

Spirit Filled. Spirit Sent.

Among other things, the month of May is graduation season. Our little family experienced its power and joy when our son, Nathan, graduated from Valparaiso University on Pentecost Sunday. Spending the day with him and watching him walk across that stage to receive his diploma folder and shake hands with VU’s president, Mark Heckler, was emotional, heart-swelling, and joyous. We are so grateful for and proud of Nathan. And grateful for the ways in which the Valpo community embraced him, equipped him, and formed him and, in that moment, sent him out for the next stage of his baptismal journey.

A few days after graduation day, I saw a fairly close-up photo of Nathan’s handshake with President Heckler, snapped by a friend of Nathan’s. I could see the joyful gleam in President Heckler’s eyes and the happy determination in Nathan’s. Powerful emotions rose again for me as I gazed at the look between the two.

Photo courtesy Ian Olive

And then, later, my brain made a weird connection, perhaps because Nathan’s commencement occurred on the day of Pentecost. Apart from the fact that both Nathan and President Heckler were wearing robes, that photo triggered memories of all those times that, bedecked in my own liturgical robes, I have stood at the door at the end of worship to shake the hands of every worshipper as they head out the door.

I am sure you know or have experienced this time-honored tradition. Often this moment in the doorway or narthex includes some version of “Good sermon” or “How are you doing?” It might also include a prayer request or an update on someone’s situation or the introduction of a visitor.

This is all good, of course. Yet, I wonder, how might that moment at the door be different if it were a little more like the moment between Nathan and his university president on the commencement stage? What if that liturgical handshake were actually understood to be part of the sending rite?

After all, in worship God’s Spirit embraces, equips, forms, and sends us for the next steps in our baptismal journey with Jesus. We carry our diplomas in the mark of the cross on our brow and we don’t just leave worship, we are sent. That moment is its own form of commencement, another beginning in living the new life of Jesus in the world.

Looking carefully, as I shake the hands of worshippers across this territory I can see in their – in your – eyes both a sense of readiness and confidence that you have received what you need and a little nervousness at the challenge of the task ahead. But, thanks be to God, you are energized and ready to go. So stride across the stage and go! Use the gifts you’ve been given through water and Word, bread and wine, and the fellowship of the body of Christ to share the new, abundant, and lasting life of Jesus with the world that is desperately looking for what you have been given.

Go in peace! Serve the Lord!

New Life Unnoticed

They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.

Mary Magdalene, first report from the empty tomb [John 20:2]

She turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus…supposing him to be the gardener…

Mary, weeping outside the tomb [John 20:14-15]

Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

On the road to Emmaus, the first Easter evening [Luke 24:16]

Icon by Vladimir Tamari

New life rises from a stone-closed tomb and it goes unnoticed, unrecognized, unappreciated. The first visitors to the empty tomb assume that the body has been moved or stolen. One of them thinks the just-risen Jesus is the gardener. Others ask the traveling companion who comes up alongside them if he’s the only one who doesn’t know what awful things happened to Jesus in Jerusalem…and it turns out the companion is, in fact, Jesus.

This life is so new, so fresh, so unexpected that no one sees it for what it is: world changing, life transforming resurrection. People just like you and me squint at the new life through old lenses, lenses clouded by long-held assumptions and colored by fear, yet rendered obsolete the moment Jesus shed the shroud and left the tomb.

We are Easter people. We live on the far side of the resurrection of Christ. We proclaim for seven weeks: Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Yet we so often walk through our days as if Jesus were still lingering in the tomb. Resurrection life is afoot in the world and, squinting through old lenses, we so often miss it.

Thankfully, this Risen One is persistent. He keeps coming up alongside us to give us new lenses to see the new life he offers. A sip of wine and a bit of bread…water and Word washing over us…forgiveness offered or received…a friend living in recovery day by day…a simple sunrise or the complexity of a relationship restored…these and so much more are signs of resurrection and new life afoot in the world, so easy to overlook or mistake for something else. In, with, and under the mundane matters of our drudging days the Risen One comes near again and again to speak our name, open our eyes, stir our hearts, take our hands, and lead us out of dark tombs into resurrection light.

This Eastertide, may God’s Spirit open our eyes wide with wonder to see new life coming near, open our hearts to receive it with hope and joy, and open our hands to share it with all we meet along the way.

Christ, our companion, hope for the journey,

Bread of compassion, open our eyes.

Grant us your vision, set all hearts burning

That all creation with you may arise.

       [Susan Palo Cherwien, “Day of Arising,” ELW 374]

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

Religious Freedom? Really?

This week, Indiana’s legislature passed a bill, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (SB 101), which is now in the hands of our Governor, Mike Pence. He has said that he will sign this bill into law. This act would allow private parties — including businesses open to the public — to invoke a religious defense in legal cases involving refusal of service. Many folks think that this legislation is focused particularly on protecting refusal of service to gay and lesbian people. The implications of this legislation certainly include, but also reach far beyond, this particular community.

This paragraph is found in the social statement, “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust,” adopted by the 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America:

While Lutherans hold various convictions regarding lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships, this church is united on many critical issues. It opposes all forms of verbal or physical harassment and assault based on sexual orientation. It supports legislation and policies to protect civil rights and to prohibit discrimination in housing, employment, and public services. It has called upon congregations and members to welcome, care for, and support same-gender couples and their families and to advocate for their legal protection.

 In the spirit of these shared commitments, the day after this legislation passed in the Indiana House, I wrote and submitted this letter to the Indianapolis Star newspaper:

What is religious freedom? Is it free range to do whatever we want, regardless of the possible negative consequences for others? Is religious freedom the “right” to use our business enterprises as shields from people and circumstances that we think might taint our own moral purity? Is religious freedom the unmitigated permission to impose our own moral codes on others and to keep them at a distance so our own moral purity won’t be compromised? Not according to the Christian scriptures, the very scriptures invoked by some supporters of the misguided and so-called religious freedom legislation.

At the heart of Christian faith is the good news that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven and saved by grace (not through our own moral purity or works). By this amazing grace we are set free from trying to keep ourselves pure and holy and are called, rather, to follow Jesus into the dark places no one else will go and to love and serve – to touch, eat with, and welcome as Jesus did – those whom others turn away or whom the powers that be push aside.

The apostle Paul put it this way in his ancient letter to the Galatians (chapter 5): “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery…For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

This is the religious freedom Christians are called to embrace in their daily, workaday lives and in the businesses they run.

The Rev. Dr. William O. Gafkjen

Christ Was Born For This!

Christ was born for this! Christ was born for this!

[Good Christian Friends, Rejoice; ELW 288, LBW 55]

Oddly, this refrain from a sprightly medieval Christmas hymn came to mind in mid-November as I watched, through tear-blurred eyes, the press conference of Ed and Paula Kassig, the parents of Peter Abdul-Rahman Kassig, after they learned of his brutal murder by ISIS. The press conference was held in the narthex of the family’s United Methodist church in Indianapolis.

“Our hearts are battered,” Paula said, “but they will mend. The world is broken, but it will be healed in the end. And good will prevail as the one God of many names will prevail.”

“Please,” Ed asked, “allow our family the time and privacy to mourn, to cry – and yes, to forgive – and begin to heal.”

Battered…will mend. Broken…will be healed. Allow us the time…to forgive. God will prevail.

Unexpectedly, oddly, my heart began to sing, quietly, slowly, barely audible in my own consciousness: Christ was born for this. Christ was born for this.

One commentator on this hymn has said that its “catchy melody bounces along in a triple rhythm that is easily sung and danced.” There was neither singing nor dancing when it came to my mind. It was more like the voices of the Kassigs, weary, broken, trusting, hopeful: Christ was born for this, even this, especially this. Christ will not let this deep brokenness, this savage evil, this unbearable pain have the last word. It will take time, but we will be healed, we will forgive; the world will mend, God will prevail. Christ was born for this.

One of the unusual traits this hymn has picked up as it has echoed its way to us from the 14^th century is a brief, strange mid-verse change in meter. In some versions (preserved, for example, in some United Methodist hymnals), the phrase “News! News!” is inserted at then end of the second line in each verse. So, verse two of the hymn reads like this:

Good Christian friends, rejoice with heart and soul and voice;

Now ye hear of endless bliss: News! News!

Jesus Christ was born for this!

He has opened heaven’s door…

This odd interruption reminds me of a newsboy standing on an old, cold December street corner holding up the special edition newspaper just released, beckoning to all who pass by, “News! News!” Perhaps a contemporary image of this might be those intrusive pop-ups that appear on our computer screens to let us know that an important email message or news report has arrived and demands our attention.

As we move through the challenges of our days, Christmas interrupts our rhythm, breaks our stride, and disrupts the doldrums of our days with the cry: News! News! Christ was born for this!

The tinsel, bright lights, and beautiful wrappings of this season cry out, too, with the good news that all our struggles, pain, anguish, doubts, fears, and most desperate aching for peace and joy, forgiveness and new life find their home in the manger, in the child of Bethlehem who enters deeply into this troubled world to break its stride by rising from the tomb.

I can hardly wait to sing this wonderful hymn this Christmastide. Thanks to the Kassigs, it might even move me to dance (or at least to sway a bit; I am Scandinavian, after all), resting the world and my own travails in the sure and certain promises that come wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Christ was born for this!

September Church Rhythms

“Where two or three are gathered in my name,

I am there among them.”

[Jesus, Matthew 18:15-22, NRSV]

This month, all over Indiana and Kentucky and across the country, congregations and other communities of faith, large and small, urban and rural and everywhere in between, return to the regular rhythms of congregational life. Sunday School and other education and formation classes crank up. Committees and councils begin to meet again at their appointed hour on whatever second Monday or third Thursday of the month is theirs. Worship attendance returns (we pray!) to its post-vacation season levels. Regular trips to the food pantry or other places of service ministry resume.

The month of September is a busy time, an exciting time, a hopeful and even a tense time in the life of the people of God.

It’s also a holy time.

I suspect – actually I know from my own experience – that in the midst of all the planning and preparation and publicity and implementation for this autumn advent we tend to forget that there is something more than just human activity going on. This is not just a class or coffee klatch or kid’s program or adult fellowship we are preparing or engaging. As incredible as it may sound given some of the things we do when we are together, it’s all part of the gracious reign of God come near and it’s steeped in promise.

Where two or three are gathered in my name, Jesus promises, I am there among them.

Where Jesus is, God’s reign comes near and things happen; people – and worlds – are changed.

Where Jesus is, forgiveness is offered, received, and shared. Tattered lives are held together in love and healed by grace. Deep, holy hospitality is offered to people who are lonely or wandering or hurting, including even those who show up every Sunday morning or Tuesday night. Broken-bodied, poured-out love is offered and available for all in Sunday School classes and discussion groups, in worship and the coffee hour, in prayer groups and committee meetings, in parking lot conversations and quiet moments in a corner of the narthex…Jesus is there; lives are changed.

This is holy time.

Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Interestingly, Jesus spoke this world-altering promise near the conclusion of a brief discussion about how to deal with broken relationships in the body of Christ. Surely somewhere along the way this fall, in the midst of the meetings and studies and conversations we now resume, something will go wrong, the fabric of our life together will tear. Even there, where some sin, some selfishness, some hurt or misunderstanding threatens to unravel our life together, even there the promise holds: I am among you. Even there the love we know from a wooden cross and an empty tomb draws near with life-changing, new-world rendering power and grace.

Thankfully, in the midst of all the busyness, the planning, the worry, the hope, the challenge, the joy, the brokenness of autumn days is Jesus, crucified and risen. These are holy days. This is holy work. Jesus is afoot.

Prayers for Israel and Palestine

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, of which I am a part, has a longstanding relationship with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL). Shortly after Israel's recent military ground movement in Gaza, ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton spoke by phone with ELCJHL Presiding Bishop Munib Younan. Bishop Younan said that of the 13 wars he has witnessed in his part of the world, this is the one that concerns him most and asked that the people of the ELCA pray for the people of the ELCJHL and all people and leaders who live in this part of the world.

In response, Bishop Eaton wrote a letter to Bishop Younan. You may find a PDF copy of the letter here: Bishop Eaton Letter to Bishop Younan. An ELCA news release about this situation can also be read at: http://www.elca.org/News-and-Events/7681.

Bishop Eaton has asked that this letter be distributed among the leaders and congregations of the ELCA. She also asks that letter be read in congregations this coming Sunday and that a time of silence be observed this Sunday as we pray for our brothers and sisters of the ELCJHL and that peace will come to Palestine and Israel.

Please join us in praying for peace in Palestine and Israel and in so many other troubled places in the world and in our own neighborhoods.

What Are You Bringing to the Tomb?

…they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared... (Luke 24:1)

…they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell… (Matthew 28:8)

Have you started to think about what you will wear to worship on Easter Sunday? How about what you will bring with you? Who will you bring to worship that day?

And what will you take with you when you leave?

Many of us spend a good bit of time deciding that to wear to worship on Easter Sunday. It makes sense that we want to dress up a bit on this great day, using bright colors and new clothes to celebrate the good news that Jesus has, indeed, been raised from the dead.

I wonder, however, what would happen if we spent as much time reflecting on what we bring with us to worship on this great day. Offerings, I hope. A worshipful spirit, yes. But I am thinking more about the “spices” of grief and struggle, disappointment and discouragement, sin and sorrow that we carry around in tightly tied bags buried deep in our hearts. Do we dare to gather them up and bring them with us to worship on Easter Sunday?

The gospel writers Mark and Luke tell us that on that first Easter morning the women brought spices along with them to the tomb. In my mind’s eye, I can see those first witnesses of resurrection so shocked, so surprised, so overwhelmed by the realization that Jesus is risen that they drop the bulging bags on the floor of the tomb. I can see the bags burst as they hit the hard floor. I can smell the place of death filling with the sweet aroma of frankincense and myrrh, like the spices first laid at the cradle of the infant Christ. “He is not here, but has risen.” No need for the spices now.

Is it possible this Easter Sunday for us to be so shocked, so surprised, so overwhelmed by the news that Christ is risen, that we drop our own “spices,” watch the carefully woven bags burst, and smell the sweet aroma of new life rising from the open tomb of our spice-bound days?

I wonder, too, who will you bring to Easter Sunday worship?

I mean this literally, of course. Who needs to hear the good news, but might not go to worship if you don’t invite and bring them? But I also wonder about all those people and communities who are wrapped up in spice bags in the chambers of our hearts. These are the ones who have hurt us or disappointed us, or whom we have hurt or disappointed. These are the people and broken relationships that we can’t bring ourselves to talk about or reconcile or heal.

Do we dare to gather them up – at least one or two of spice-wrapped people or relationships – and bring them with us to Easter Sunday worship? Is it possible that this Easter Sunday we will be so shocked, so surprised, so overwhelmed by the good news of Christ risen that we will allow the bags we’ve so carefully wrapped around our broken relationships to be torn open and replaced with reconciliation or healing?

None of the gospel writers mentions the women’s spices once they hear that Jesus is risen. It’s as if the spices and their burst bags are left on the floor of the tomb as the women run back into the world carrying the lighter load of awe and joy and a life-changing story to live into and tell.

What will you take with you from Easter Sunday worship? I pray that you will be taken by and will take with you hope, healing, and new beginnings. I pray that you will meet and be carried back into your daily life by the awe and joy of resurrection life. It might not happen finally and fully this particular Easter morning. But I trust that you will find your grip on those bags loosened, if just a bit. You will receive a foretaste, a sign, a glimmer of hope and healing and the joy and freedom of new life in the risen Christ.

So, dear sister, dear brother, gather up those spice bags and all those people you’ve wrapped in them. Tuck them into your pastel purse, clip them to your Easter bunny tie. Bring them along to worship Easter Sunday…and every Sunday. Look for the crucified and risen Jesus to surprise you just enough that you find your grip loosened. Then leave the bags on the floor of the tomb and go. Go in awe and joy. And with that lighter load, run and tell others the good news: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Checking Our Sight Lines

sight line - noun

1. 
a hypothetical line from someone's eye to what is seen

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Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus. [Hebrews 12:1]

Lent is often a time for individuals to focus on their spiritual life by (re)establishing spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, corporate worship, or generous giving for the poor. Congregational ministries during Lent often support these disciplines through additional worship opportunities, Bible classes, prayer groups, World Hunger coin boxes, and the like. In some ways, such disciplines provide opportunities to check our “sight lines” by asking questions like these:

•  To what have I been giving most of, or the best of, my attention?
• Are the people, things, and situations that I have been looking to helpful or hurtful?
• Does what I look at empower or equip me for serving others or is it just self-serving? Does it move me to give my life away or cause me to hoard it?
• In other words, do my sight lines point me toward Jesus crucified and risen and beckon me further down the way of the cross? Or do they point me away from Jesus toward someone or something else that distracts or harms, disempowers or disappoints myself or others?

Of course, I am referring here to literal sight lines. It is important that we be discerning about what we look at with our physical eyes. What we look at changes us in powerful ways and influences how we interact with the world.

For the moment, however, I am primarily thinking about our spiritual sight lines. These sight lines also form us and influence how we interact with the world.
      What are we looking to in hope that it will provide meaning or excitement or peace or power or whatever else our heart seeks? As it turns out, many of the things we look to cannot deliver on the promises they make. So many of them, even the best looking ones, lure us down endless, dark, distracting rabbit holes of self-absorption and self-justification.

The scripture and liturgies of Lent call us to reassess our spiritual sight lines. They call us to repent, to allow God’s Spirit to turn our sight lines back toward Jesus, the one who actually delivers on God’s promises and who enlists and empowers us to be means by which those promises cross into the sight lines of others.

But this is not just true for individuals; it’s true for the church as a body as well. I wonder what Lent – and the consequent celebration of Easter – would be like if each congregation and its leaders also spent forty days in a sort of communal recalibration of the congregation’s sight lines. Truth be told, nearly every aspect of congregational life – congregational meetings, committee planning, council agendas, youth events, choir rehearsals, staff meetings, fellowship gatherings – can suffer from sight line drift. We start looking primarily at what we don’t have: not enough money or people or young people. Our sights focus on change for the sake of change, or the next great innovation that promises to get people in the door. Our sight lines are directed toward disagreements and power struggles or inward on ourselves.

If we are not careful, over time we drift away from our core mission to simply be the body of Christ in the world, to shine the light of Jesus, to make Christ known. Without even noticing it we “major in minors” and focus our attention and energy on non-central (even if alluringly important) concerns that simply cannot bring life to us or the world if Jesus crucified and risen is not right smack dab in the center of them.

Just as each baptized person is called to turn away from – to repent of – unhealthy, sinful, or otherwise life-snatching sight lines, so is every congregation. Every gathering of the baptized is called to realign its sight lines in order to participate more fully and faithfully in God’s cross-shaped mission of healing and hope in the world.

This Lent, dear sisters and brothers, may God’s Spirit grant that we, the body of Christ, will turn away from distracting and destructive sight lines “and the sin that clings so closely, and run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” [Hebrews 12:1-2]

Letting Go

In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Corinthians 5:19; NRSV)

The Huria Kristen Batak Protestan (HKBP) church is the Indiana-Kentucky Synod’s global companion in Indonesia. Four of us from this mission territory visited the church and our companion district, Sumatera Timur, in early December. While there I learned that in some HKBP families New Year’s traditions are more important than Christmas, part because they focus on forgiveness. When I asked her about this, HKBP Deaconess Lamria Sinaga said this is true for her family and graciously described for me what her family does to ring in the New Year:

My family gathers together at midnight. We have short worship that includes singing, Bible readings, and an offering. The offering goes to the church to thank God who delivers us again to a new year and a new day. After the worship, my father asks us to share honestly our experiences of the old year and our hopes for the New Year. We begin with the youngest and move toward the oldest in the family. We sometimes cry, because our sharing is about how we have hurt each other by what we’ve said and done in the past year. We ask forgiveness of one another and offer forgiveness to each other. After we have finished sharing our confession and our forgiveness, the oldest in my family offers prayer. Then we share hugs and handshakes and eat together. After a while we go to my grandfather’s house and do the same thing, usually finishing early in the morning. My father says that a heart full of being forgiven and forgiving others will bring us through the new year full of joy and happiness and makes it possible, even when we find trouble and difficulty in the future, to encourage one another.

Creating a list of New Year’s resolutions intended to improve our lives is good. Popping corks and exchanging kisses to welcome the New Year is fun. Standing on the threshold between the past and the future and honestly confessing how we have hurt each other and seeking and offering forgiveness is essential. It’s the ring on which the keys to God’s kingdom hang.

After all, how can we move forward into newness when we are still bound to the hurts, sins, and brokenness of the past? How can we walk into to God’s future together when festering resentments and aching hearts keep us apart?

The primary words for “forgiveness” and “forgive” in New Testament Greek are forms of áphesis and aphíēmi [e.g. Matt 6:14-15; 18:35]. The common root of these words means to let go, to free or be set free. To forgive and be forgiven, then, is to set others free, to be set free ourselves. God does the forgiving, of course. In forgiving and being forgiven we experience the freeing, life-giving power of that gracious gift in our lives. In the act of forgiveness we become means of God’s grace for others and we ourselves are set free to welcome the new future that God offers.

So, let’s ink those lists of resolutions and pop the corks at the appointed time. But what do you say we also use the early days of 2014 to follow – as individuals and families and as congregations – the example of our sisters and brothers of the HKBP? Can we trust God’s grace and be honest with ourselves and with one another about the ways we are still in bondage to the sins, resentments, and hurts of the past and offer to one another the freedom of forgiveness, today and throughout this emerging New Year?