Offering Christ to Frederick County and the World

PASTORAL REFLECTIONS:  FORGIVENESS AND EASTER
 
Why did Jesus say: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you?” Didn’t he realize this defies worldly logic? Yet God’s ways are not our ways, I’m reminded by Scripture. I remember when the late Paul John Paul II visited in prison the man who had shot him during a Vatican parade. There was this haunting news photograph of the pontiff sitting in the man’s prison cell, the two facing each other. “So this is where you stay,” the pontiff remarked. They talked and in the end they prayed together. It was so powerful. Perhaps the pontiff knew that forgiveness begins as change in one’s own inner landscape. There’s no worldly logic in that. It comes from within the deep and mysterious essence of divine Love.
 
The continuing miracle of resurrection is a new community- thrown together by baptism and Spirit with almost unspeakable awareness that Christ is calling it to changed lives and new human vistas. Jesus’ uncompromising new rule for life together is “love one another” with “agape” love – God-shaped love. That’s what happens when we wear the “Christ” imprint upon our hearts. The world sees it much differently.
 
The story goes that a woman’s husband had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, yet she stayed by his bedside every single day. One day, when he came to, he motioned for her to come nearer.
 
As she sat by him, he whispered, eyes full of tears, “You know what? You’ve been with me all through the bad times. When I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When we lost the house, you stayed right here. When my health started failing, you were still by my side. You know what?”

“What dear?” she gently asked, smiling as her heart began to fill with warmth.
 
“I think you’re bad luck.”
 
Some people can’t change. As Easter people Christ calling us to see one another with new eyes. Forgiveness may not be logical, but it is essential where God is present. Forgiveness holds a community together. It transforms and heals.  One of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner, wrote: “Forgiveness is when you set a prisoner free, and then you realize the prisoner is yourself.”
 
Faithfully,
Pastor Ron