The following thoughts are from Guest Blogger: Steven Stillwell.
A very thought provoking service and discussion again took place this past Sunday under Pastor Ken’s leadership of “churching” in a different style.
The topic of the day: forgiveness.
All the considerations and even all the ways we go about forgiving, right through varying degrees to wrong ways of using forgiveness. It was a very active discussion and left me considering it further through Sunday, into the night, and into Monday as well. This is a sign that Pastor Ken was tuned into what the Spirit was trying to get his flock to learn more fully about.
Monday morning, while in the beauty of the creation walking the dogs (oops, don’t let the girls know I called them dogs) I opened my mind to another aspect of what our act of forgiving others offers to start. Besides freeing us of the toxicity of being hurt/wounded/ sinned against I am compelled to believe it is our gift of a seed (remember last week’s discussion of planting seeds of true truth) to generate contemplation in the person forgiven to generate the beginning of repentance, rather than how the order is usually viewed, that we forgive only if requested by an act of repentance.
According to the creation narrative, we are created in the image of our creator, and that our creator breathed life into us – making us unique in creation, as everything else was simply spoken into existence. To go further with this line if thought; shortly after the ascension of Christ there is the promised sending of the Spirit to dwell in us, to fill us. In other words, we, having been created in a unique way and being reinforced with our being filled with the Spirit after the ascension event with a new form of Pentecost (OT Pentecost experiences were to one person to then spread to others, the NT Pentecost is multi-messaged to all at once) we actually hold God within us, our bodies are, as scripture reminds us, the temple of the Spirit, the temple of our God.
Therefore when we are wronged, sinned against, as a temple of our God, we are required to forgive the person sinning against us, for that has already been taken care of when Christ uttered the words, “It is finished.”. In the grand scheme of things, that forgiveness should cause the person being forgiven to stop and contemplate why they are being forgiven and thus begin act of repentance, an act of change to true truth.
If I am forgiven by someone, and do not take into consideration why I am being forgiven, if I do not try to understand the offence and how I caused it, so I can improve myself, then I have made this act of forgiveness cheap, worthless and not as powerful as the act could be full circle. I take the grace of being forgiven and make it cheap as Dietrich Bonhoeffer discusses in great depth in “The Cost of Discipleship”.
Forgiveness should spark a time of contemplation with repentance to bring us all closer to the image we have been created to be; which spreads the dialog out vertically to our world, instead of keeping it as something between God and ourselves. Our faith is personal, it is never private! This is the stuff of our Christian counter culture in the empire run amuck.
Steven Stillwell is a blogger, farmer, advocate, friend and sojourner. One of his great passions is Street Fare Farm.