Tag: Peacemaker

The YMCA & Forgiveness For All

The YMCA & Forgiveness For All :: June 6 is YMCA Founders Day, when we remember Sir George Williams and his 11 Christian friends who prayerfully and courageously started the Y in 1844. We celebrate all who have inspired the Y to be for all, empowered by the life and love of Christ Jesus. In these difficult times, we need the Y more than ever to support and train our members on how to do forgiveness for all. This will deepen our inclusive equity work in our communities. Read for more on this proposal.

The emphasis on inclusion in the YMCA is admirable and crucial.

For Christians in the Y we see inclusion as central to our original purpose, which is why we highlighted the prayer of Jesus “that we all may be one” in our early logo (John 17:21).

The adapting logos of the YMCA since 1881

The religious and social motivations for initiating the Young Men’s Association are an example of what radical inclusion looked like in 1844 industrial London.

On Founders Day, June 6, YMCA’s pause to remember Sir George Williams and his 11 Christian friends who prayerfully launched the Y in order to save young men in spirit, mind and body.

Sir George Williams, London

Here we are, almost 180 years later, benefiting from their religiously and socially inclusive work, still striving to keep living out our mission; remarkable really.

Inclusion in the YMCA and our world has gotten more difficult and complicated, for many reasons which include globalization, technological and proliferation of social media, and cross-cultural human migration.

More diverse people are more uprooted from their traditions and tribes, are more scattered across the globe, and thus more kinds of different people must interact with each other.

It doesn’t always go well.

Which is why the Y is so wise to emphasize inclusion the way it does.

However, one element I have rarely ever seen taught in the YMCA regarding inclusion is the practice of forgiveness.

What happens when people are bigoted and exclusionary? Is this just a misunderstanding? Is it just lack of understanding? Is it at least a character flaw? An area for improvement? Is prejudice wrong or just unpreferred?

Can we call bigotry “sin” in the Young Men’s Christian Association?

If we can, then we open up opportunities to really nurture a transformation in the spirit, mind and body of our fellow members that hold on to ugly stereotypes and bigoted habits.

To be honest, every single Y member has some kind of prejudice that they have to work on. If bigotry and prejudice foment hate and violence, we need a strong word and concept to describe it: sin.

Within the Christian tradition of the Y there are beautiful examples and practices for people to be transformed from sin-full exclusive bigots to grace-full inclusive neighbors.

One example is the life and teachings of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His Christian faith was undeniably central and crucial to his accomplishments for civil rights and a just peace.

When MLK taught about inclusion, it required teaching about and modeling forgiveness.

The Y is at a place in our inclusion work where we need to recover the teaching and practice of forgiveness. Without it we will have slogans with no spirit, policies to embody but no way to recover from hurt hearts and broken promises.

Social responsibility and being for all includes the practice of forgiveness – this is what enables there to be any kind of diverse social cohesion and survive the chronic misunderstandings and human foibles.

If the Y is as serious as we say we are about our inclusive mission, we must utilize our Christian heritage, in particular its tradition on forgiveness.

The brokenness and violence in our communities is more than just poverty of jobs and resources, it’s the sinful spirit of us all without recourse for letting go of grudges and making amends.

If nothing else, for the majority of Y members that identify with a Christian tradition, the Y ought to resurrect specifically Christian teachings on forgiveness so that Christian Y members who are racist or bigoted or holding on to grudges have proximity in the Y to the Jesus of John 17:21.

When it comes to forgiveness for all, where to start for resources and models?

For the many Christians in the Y, we start with Jesus Christ and what he taught and modeled on forgiveness. The Y ought to explicitly endorse and encourage Christian Y members to be more like Christ Jesus. It’s needed, no?

It’d be worth remembering and reflecting on the Christian sermons of Rev. Martin Luther King, especially the collected in the edition Strength To Love in particular his writings on forgiveness for all.

For a fresh and startling Christian perspective on forgiveness for all, I strongly recommend these provocative reflections by Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish Christian who wrote extensively around the time that George Williams was forming the YMCA. Kierkegaard was also a deeply formative influence on MLK. And me, for what it matters.

Take these Christian comments on forgiveness for all by Kierkegaard and reflect on them with a humble, inclusive spirit and mind.

I think they could be a powerful catalyst for Christians in the YMCA to reawaken as a powerful force for radical inclusion and reconciliation, healing and just mercy, inspired by the truth and grace of Christ Jesus.

That Jesus Christ died for my sins certainly shows how great his grace is, but it also shows how great my sins are.

Christ abandoned ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ and turned the relationship around. He introduced a different like-for-like: as you relate yourself to others, so God relates himself to you. Forgiveness is to forgive.

To forgive sins is divine not only in the sense that no one is able to do it except God, but also because no one can do it without God.

It is God’s joy to forgive sins. Just as God is almighty in creating out of nothing, so he is almighty in uncreating something; for to forget is to uncreate something.

When I hate someone or deny that God is their Father, it is not they who lose, it is I. It is I who then have no Father. With unforgiveness there is always the reversed echo.

The anguished conscience alone understands Christ.

Is this the test: to love Christ more dearly than mother and father, than gold and goods, than honor and reputation? No, the test is this: to love the Savior more than your sin.

God created out of nothing – marvelous you say. Yes of course but he does something more marvelous- he creates saints out of sinners.

You will get a deep insight into the state of Christianity in each age by seeing how it treats Judas.

Father in heaven! Hold not our sins up against us but hold us up against our sins, so that the thought of you when it wakens in our soul, and each times it wakens, should not remind us of what we have committed but of what you forgave, not of how we went astray, but of how you saved us!

The need for forgiveness is a sign that one loves God. But both parts correspond to one another – when a person does not comprehend what a great sinner he is, he cannot love God; and when he does not love God, he cannot comprehend how great a sinner he is. The consciousness of sin is the very passion of love. Truly the law makes one a sinner, but love makes one a far greater sinner! It is true that the person who fears God and trembles feels himself to be a sinner, but the person who in truth loves feels himself to be an even greater sinner.

You may think that the sin remains just as great whether it is forgiven or not, since forgiveness neither adds nor subtracts. But this is not so. Rather, when you refuse to forgive you increase the sin. Does not your hardness of heart become yet one more sin? Ought not this be brought into the reckoning as well?

All Kierkegaard quotes in this article taken from Provocations, pgs 283-287
For more YMCA resources on forgiveness for all, try out this devotion series called Living Stones developed by Y leaders.

Revolutionary Christianity In The YMCA?

We expect the presence of Christ Jesus to bring about transformation in people and places. But how do we participate in it? Passive? Ambitious? Impatient? Idealistic? Cynical? Violently? Coercively? Profitably? French Christian activist and theologian Jacques Ellul writes brilliantly on a revolutionary Christianity, based on his experiences during and after the resistance to Axis powers in WW2. His reflections have great insight for Christians today, especially those in the YMCA.

What kind of “C” are we looking for in the YMCA? A status quo kind of “C” or a revolutionary one?

In focusing more and more on what Christ Jesus taught about the disruptive Kingdom of God, there is some new imagination required for what that would look like in the YMCA and where I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Especially when being a pastor in a community organization that seeks to avoid controversy in its striving to be for all.

How to be revolutionary without violence or mimetic rivalry, but also not just struggle in order to get more of the same.

How to think about being a pastor and involved in politics and economic development, with social justice and neighborhood revitalization, without ending up as a pawn or a jerk?

In these days of searching and listening, I turn again to Jacques Ellul.

In my vocation as a pastor with the YMCA, there is some inner questioning on what is the wisest way forward in this complex and volatile context.

I found the following paragraphs to be immensely helpful to me as I seek confirmation of God’s leading in my life’s work:

“The Christian can never regard himself as being on the winning side, nor can he look on with pleasure while everyone else goes to perdition; should he do so, he would be lacking in the Spirit of Christ, and by that very fact he would cease to be a Christian.

Bound up with the lives of other men (be economic and sociological laws, and also by the will of God), he cannot accept the view that they will always remain in their anguish and their disorder, victims of tyranny and overwork, buoyed up only by a hope which seems unfounded.

Thus he must plunge into social and political problems in order to have an influence on the world, not in the hope of making a paradise, but simply in order to make it tolerable – not in order to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply in order to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wills for it – not in order to ‘bring in’ the Kingdom of God, but in order that the gospel may be proclaimed, that all men may really hear the good news of salvation, through the death and resurrection of Christ.

Thus there are three directions in which the Christian ought to action the world:

First – starting from the point at which God has revealed to him the truth about the human person, he must try to discover the social and political conditions in which this person can live and develop in accordance with God’s order.

Second – this person will develop within a certain framework which God has ordained for him.

This is the order of preservation, without which man lacks his true setting.

Man is not absolutely free in this sphere, any more than he is free in the physical or biological domain.

There are certain limits which he cannot overstep without danger to the society to which he belongs.

Thus the Christian must work, in order that the will of God may be incarnated in actual institutions and organisms.

Third – this order of preservation will have meaning only if it is directed towards the proclamation of salvation.

Therefore, social and political institutions need to be ‘open’: that is, they must not claim to be all, or absolutes.

Thus they must be constituted in such a way that they do not prevent man from hearing the Word of God.

The Christian must be ceaselessly on the watch – intelligent and alert – to see that this ‘order’ is preserved.

But, in doing so, he will find that he is confronted by two possible errors.

The one error consists in believing that by constant progress in this order we shall attain the Kingdom of God.

It is enough to remind ourselves of the Book of Revelation, or of Matthew 24, to condemn this attitude.

The other error arises out of the conviction that by achieving certain reforms we shall have reached this order which God wills.

In reality all solutions – all economic, political, and other achievements – are temporary.

At no moment can the Christian believe either in their perfection or in their permanence.

They are always vitiated by the sin which infects them, by the setting in which they take place.

Thus the Christian is constantly obliged to reiterate the claims of God, to reestablish this God-willed order, in presence of an order that constantly tends towards disorder.

In consequence of the claims which God is always making on the world the Christian finds himself, by that very fact, involved in a state of permanent revolution.

Even when the institutions, the laws, the reforms which he has advocated have been achieved, even if society is reorganized according to his suggestions, he still has to be in opposition, he still must require more, for the claim of God is as infinite as His forgiveness.

Thus the Christian is called to question unceasingly all that man calls progress, discovery, facts, established results, reality, etc.

He can never be satisfied with all this human labor, transcended, or replaced by something else.

In his judgment he is guided by the Holy Spirit – he is making an essentially revolutionary act.

If the Christian is not being revolutionary, then in some way or another he has been unfaithful to his calling in the world.”

Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, pgs 35-37

John 17:21 & Our Flourishing

John 17:21 & Our Flourishing ::: what are ways the mission and Christian origins of the YMCA enliven our work these days to strengthen the foundations of our community for all? Especially for diverse Christians in the Y striving to live out their faith in an inclusive, equitable and global way…

Unity.

It’s like a shattered dream.

German concentration camp, Flossenberg

Yet, it still compels a certain kind of yearning:

“If only we were more authentically united, we would have more peace.”

That’s my summary of what I hear people say.

We are not wrong to want unity, nor in the wrong to make attempts to forge unity in a hope for peace.

It’s just that calls for peace in general, abstract speeches for unity ring hollow after awhile.

How many of us want the results of peace without the work of unity?

In my church world the prayer for unity by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is getting a lot of traction (again).

It’s a beautiful prayer, very personal, raw, emotional and grand in its vision for humanity and God.

For Christians in any given community, there is usually some kind of chronic conflict disturbing the peace.

The garden prayer reminds us that the unity God wants for us most is oneness with Christ Jesus and the other “little Christ’s” in our world.

Maybe because of our public role in the community we can have a hand in preventing further disunity or defend it from worse conflict.

But as a Christian, in both our public and private world, the unity that matters most and that has the greatest power for unity in the world is to be found in the garden prayer of Jesus.

Here is a key part of that prayer:

“Father, my prayer is not that you take (my disciples) out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.

They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.

Sanctify them by the truth; your Word is truth.

As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.

For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be sanctified in truth.

My prayer is not for them alone.

I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.

May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one – so that they may be brought to complete unity.

Then the world will know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

[Jesus, in John’s Gospel, 17:15-23]

In the news media these days there is deep yearning for unity and peace to prevail between the people of Israel and Palestine.

Here in the USA there is a passionate desire for unity and peace to heal the racial divide.

How many families, how many friends have become painfully are separated in spirit, mind and body due to divisions over vaccines, election integrity, political ideology, and just plain drifting apart due to irreconcilable differences?

From whence comes any kind or real unity and peace in our world of suffering, chaos and disillusionment?

We as a global humanity have more scientific and technical answers for what disrupts unity and peace for a national society, tribe and culture than ever.

Same for tested theories of reconciliation and healing.

But, however abstract and principled these observations and theories may be, it is often not a matter of knowledge or information that keeps us from doing peacemaking and unification.

It is likely much more a matter of the will, of our desires, of what we want to choose.

We humans live through the heart, and too often merely use our head to justify what our heart feels, believes, sees, hears and experiences.

Jesus prays from the heart for unity within humanity: in particular those who will see him, hear him, believe him, and follow in his truth.

These humans in the first century were derisively called “little Christ’s” for their imitation of Jesus.

Despite the mocking and persecution they became a community, an embodiment of this prayer by Jesus for unity, truth, peace and love.

The current disunity in the world is mostly driven by incentivized envy and greed, insatiable lust and gluttony, lazy apathy towards others who suffer but bitter anger over ones own; mostly though it is wounded pride that drives ourselves, our tribes and modern societies to vengeful and “defensive” violence and madness.

This is generally true throughout recorded human history around the world.

For the past two millennia Christians have entered into almost these tribes and societies in the world, establishing the presence of Christ there through little communities.

What happens though is that these “little Christ’s” over identify with the culture and then too little with the presence of Christ Jesus.

Christ inclusively connects and unites his diverse followers around the globe, even when they come from warring tribes and societies pitted against each other.

For example, too many USA Christians over identify with the government of Israel and are mostly ignorant of the Palestinian Christians suffering in the Holy Land.

  • People inspect the rubble of a destroyed residential building which was hit by Israeli airstrikes, in Gaza City, Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Or, here in the USA, too many White Christians are in denial of the racism that has wounded Black Christians in spirit, mind and body.

There is also the ecological crisis, of how wealthy Christians in the world despoil and degrade the land and cultures of poor Christians.

Of course there is rationalization and justification of intent and motives, of actions and consequences that blunts the conviction to repent, confess, lament, be sorrowful for the sinful brokenness and pride which is adversarial to Jesus’ prayer of unity.

Let’s not deny the truth of the experience of suffering, both of Jesus and those who through the past 21 centuries have also suffered at the hands of those with political, economic and religious power.

Jesus is the incarnation of God’s Spirit in the human spirit, mind and body.

Whatever Jesus prays and does, it’s an embodiment of God’s desire for the world he created and the people he loves.

When Jesus prays for unity, love and truth, it’s not an overspiritualization at the expense of material cynical reality.

It’s the wisdom of God for how he is at work in the world that he fashioned and still holds in his hands, so to speak.

The flourishing of Christians is an overflow from being united with Christ and each other.

It does not mean there is no more suffering.

But it does mean no more suffering alone, no more suffering without faith, hope and love.

In this world we will suffer. But will there also be any flourishing in its midst?

What sets apart “little Christ’s” in communities across the globe is there solidarity with those who suffer across the globe.

It is the way of the world to hate their enemy, to take an eye for an eye, and give help to only their own.

But Jesus embodies a different kind of way, truth and life in the world; those that follow it are set apart, are sanctified, and strive to love their enemies, heal the unthankful, turn the other cheek, and seek just mercy for all.

What’s the vision that empowers Christians to strive for this kind of unity and flourishing?

Jesus prays that we who are his followers would have union with each other like he has with the Father, and that we would have union with both Father and Son, through the life-giving, spirit, mind, body -saving power of the Holy Spirit.

Theosis is the theological word for this dynamic transformation, of our oneness with each other as we are made one with God in Jesus through the Spirit.

Somehow this begins in this life on Earth,

There is no movie-soundtrack that accompanies theosis, no awards ceremony to recognize the achievements, no social media promotions to highlight theosis.

Theosis is gritty, it can be grueling, it is forged amidst suffering, as we strive for just mercy for the neighbors we love and hate, for the fellow Christians whom we enjoy and those we don’t understand.

Theosis is fueled by imitation of Jesus, by submitting to the Same Spirit which energized his work, by a vision of God sustained through trust.

Theosis and flourishing go together, along with the suffering that comes from being fully human in this real world.

There is no utopia!

Theosis is not about perfection in this life, it’s not about convenience, efficiency or effectiveness.

Theosis is about the fruit of the Spirit bearing out in our lives as we follow in the way, truth and life of the Jew Jesus.

Theosis looks like God sending Jesus into the world, which we can read about in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

Theosis looks like the apostle and disciples of Jesus being sent into the real world to proclaim the gritty gospel, preaching repentance and forgiveness of divisive sin – to the ends of the Earth.

Theosis requires love; this kind of love from Jesus to us that flows through us to fellow humanity is patient, this love is kind, it does not envy or boast in pride, it does not greedily seek its own at another’s expense, and like God is not easily angered.

Theosis is experienced through love that rejoices in the truth, a love that keeps no record of wrong, a love that does not delight in evil.

Our flourishing in theosis is experienced in God’s love for us and our love for neighbors, strangers and enemies; a love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, a uniting love that always perseveres amidst the suffering and evil in the world.

Flourishing, theosis, love – it is all in the details.

Every day.

Being present, in the chaos and injustice, the mundane and boring, the busyness and hecticness.

It’s the courage to be, the courage to believe you are loved by God, the courage to desire unity, theosis, and flourishing despite observable inequities and brokenness all around us.

Shattered dreams are a crucial and painful moment that test our resolve to keep the faith, to keep hoping and loving (ala Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

Jesus’ prayer for our unity and flourishing, our theosis, occurred while on his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night of his betrayal where he begged God to take this cup of suffering from him.

With drops of blood on his brow he prayed to accept the will of God.

His shattered spirit, mind and body on the cross would seem to have rendered his prayers ineffective.

Yet…the union he had with God before and after that shattering were transformative, they were the opening up of a new kind of theosis and flourishing for all.

May your desire for unity and peace, may your yearning for theosis with God in Jesus through the Spirit, amidst the chaos and suffering of our world, bear the fruit of flourishing for all Creation.