forgiveness and revenge

Like many others, I have followed the story of the former air force colonel in Belleville, Ontario, who has been convicted on about 90 criminal charges, including two counts each of rape and murder. While reading on the CBC website, I noticed that alongside the article, the featured ads were for surveillance equipment, pepper spray, and home alarm systems.

There is a multi-billion dollar industry in North America that trades in equipment and services meant to help us feel safe.

When violence is perpetrated against us, or those we love, or happens close enough to feel personal, we are confronted with our essential helplessness. I don’t know anyone who enjoys being reminded of the fragility of life.

On a visceral level, part of me desires to exercise power over the forces, and the individuals that threaten me. Maybe it is about the need to reclaim control. Or maybe it is just a primitive desire for revenge.

Years ago I had a summer job as a prison chaplain. When certain offenders were entering the system, their story arrived before they did. Word passed from the staff to the inmates about anyone convicted of sex crimes against women and children. I made visits to a man held in the infirmary because he would not be safe in the general population.

The part of me that wants to punish those who would threaten me, or the safety of those I cherish, understands why other prisoners would attack a sex offender. It would let them see themselves as better than him. It would be an outlet for their feelings of frustration, that they could not protect their loved ones from “people like him”.

I preached on Sunday about the potential for every person to be the “true self” that God creates us to be. I asked if there is anything that we can do or say, that places us outside of the embrace of God’s love and forgiveness. After the service, it was pointed out to me that I did not actually answer the question.

The “standard” answer is that we “love the sinner, and hate the sin”. We hold the hope that God always loves us, in spite of our mistakes and confusion, and there is always the possibility of reconciliation between us and God.

I think it is important to identify our feelings, which may include a desire for revenge, and separate them out from our thinking about whether or not God can forgive.

I think it is also important to realize that even if we were in a position to act on our desire for revenge, that anything we did would not un-do what the perpetrator had done. Most likely, any satisfaction would be short-lived. We look to our legal system, as imperfect as it may be, to provide judgment and consequences for heinous acts.

The spiritual challenge is for us to set aside the habit of seeing ourselves as the judge of others, and seek to be compassionate towards all.

Seeing Jesus

This month’s print edition of The United Church Observer http://www.ucobserver.org/ contains an article in the “My View” section by a retired minister named Wayne Hilliker. In the article, entitled “Intelligent Faith”, he says “our pews and our pulpits contain increasing numbers of people who find less and less meaning in the traditional doctrinal language of the church. The end result is that many find themselves believing in less and less. On the other hand, they also testify that what they do believe, they believe with greater and greater conviction. The theological challenge in such a climate is discovering the language that best expresses the core convictions that lie at the heart of the Christian story.”

I think Hilliker is arguing for preaching that expresses theological ideas in precise language, with the goal of stimulating the intellect- giving the mind something to chew on. I get this idea from the way he uses the words “belief” and believing. I think you could take out the word “belief”, and replace it with “idea”, and take out “believing”, and replace it with the word “agreeing”.

I appreciate the way that belief is defined in the glossary to Karen Armstrong’s book “The Case for God”. She says, “ Originally the Middle English verb bileven meant “to love; to prize; to hold dear”; and the noun bileve meant”loyalty; trust; commitment; engagement.” It was related to the German liebe (”beloved”) and the Latin libido (“desire.”) In the English versions of the Bible, the translators used these words to render the Greek pistis;pisteuo; and the Latin fides; credo. Thus “belief” became the equivalent of “faith”. But “belief” began to change its meaning during the late seventeenth century. It started to be used of an intellectual assent to a particular proposition, teaching, opinion, or doctrine. It was used in this modern sense first by philosophers and scientists, and the new usage did not become common in religious contexts until the nineteenth century."

I pay attention to the words I use in a sermon, especially the words that come with a lot of doctrinal or pietistic baggage. My own goal is not necessarily to be precise. I want to appeal to more than the intellect. I strive for expressions that may be vague, but which leave room for the play of spiritual imagination.

This past Sunday I re-told the story of the miraculous catch of fish, which Luke records early in the chronicle of Jesus’ adventures with the disciples. I held it beside the version from John, which is placed near the end of the gospel, and appears as a resurrection story. In Luke it is a story about disciples being called to follow Jesus. In John it is a story that offers the reassurance that somehow, the resurrected Jesus was still with them, even after his physical death. I also made reference to another story from Luke, in which Jesus and a group of disciples are crossing the lake, and a storm comes up that threatens to swamp the boat.

Jesus, who was sleeping, wakes up, and rebukes the storm, and it is calmed, and the waves subside. All the gospels were written long after the earthly life and death of Jesus. We can hardly help but read them with awareness of the Easter story. In a sense, every gospel story is a resurrection story. Does Jesus waking from sleep remind us of his resurrection?

One of the causes of hope we can draw from these stories is that like the disciples, we are not alone when we face the storms of life. My “short-hand” way of saying this in the sermon was to say that “Jesus was with” the disciples, and that “Jesus is with” us as well.

But what does it mean to talk about Jesus being with the disciples, or us, after his physical death? If I was going to “unpack” the baggage that comes with that phrase, I would end up saying something like this:

Through his very presence, as well as his words and actions, those who met Jesus saw/experienced/felt/knew the presence of the holy, the divine- perhaps something like what happened to Moses at the burning bush. Once they had been introduced to this divine energy/presence/light/love, their own minds/hearts/spirits were changed, and part of the transformation was that they became more attuned to seeing the divine, even in the absence of Jesus’ physical body.

Those in the mystical branch of the Christian faith have long been telling more mainstream believers that it is possible to have present-day experiences of “the Risen Christ”.