Hope for the youth

Young Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic Christians, by these days lived in real fraternity you manifest your desire to be protagonists of history and not let others decide your future. The Pope encourages you to stand firm in hope by letting the Lord live in your hearts and your daily lives. With Jesus, the faithful friend who never disappoints, you will be able to walk along the path toward the future with joy and devote your talents and abilities for the good of all.

Source: Pope Francis  -  As quoted in "Pope sends message to Taizé youth gathering" by Vatican Radio, 27 Dec 2016, http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2016/12/27/pope_sends_message_to_taize_youth_gathering/1281913

Churches Together During COVID

Parishes in the Austin Diocese, which includes Central Texas, may resume public celebration of Mass Tuesday, but a another group of area churches doesn’t plan to reopen until June.

Included in the group are Highland Baptist Church, Maranatha Church, Harris Creek Baptist Church, Antioch Community Church, Greater Zion Baptist, Crossroads Fellowship, Renew Church, Columbus Ave. Baptist Church, Brazos Meadows Baptist, Christ the King, Greater New Light Baptist, Grace Church, Waco, Grace Church, Hewitt, Ministerios Bethania, Central Christian Church, Park Lake Drive Baptist, Western Heights Baptist, New Life Christian Fellowship, Meadowbrook Baptist, New Faith Christian, Faith Bible Church and St. Stephen’s AME.

The pastors of the churches say they were encouraged to show unity, after watching their followers come together.

"Crisis always brought people together and I think the crisis has brought churches together," said John Durham, the lead pastor of Highland Baptist church.

"I have been so proud of the Waco community, where people have stayed active with their faith in the middle of this crisis," said Jimmy Seibert the Senior Pastor of Antioch.

Source: KWTX Waco  -  As quoted by Phil Brown on FB, 16 May 2020

What Was The Point?

What was the point of this tour? It was not just an informative trip for history buffs; the idea was for today’s Christians to identify with those who have gone before us; for us as Austrians to identify with the guilt and sin of our forefathers in the manner they treated these believers whose only crime was that they believed in God in a manner not authorized by the state and the church. Like Daniel and others in the Bible we wanted to bring these sins before God and say, „We and our people have sinned.“ While we realize that no-one can repent of sins for another, the effects of sinful acts excert an influence for many generations, especially if the original sin and the attitudes that led to it have not been dealt with, and our burden was to bring these effects to God and, so to speak, lift the curse that still lies over parts of our country because of this history.
In the process we truly became brothers and sisters in Christ: Lutherans seeing Catholics expressing sorrow over their Church’s past misdeeds; Catholics and Lutherans being accepted by Free Church Christians who normally feel that they are the only real game in town; both Lutherans and Catholics expressing regret for the treatment of the Anabaptists whom Free Church Christians consider their spiritual ancestors: it was a beautiful work of reconciliation wrought by the Holy Spirit.

Source: Austrian Round Table  -  Report on the Reformation Commemoration Tour of Austria, August 16-26, 2016, http://versoehnung.net/Story/Gedenkfahrtblog/

Grief in 2 Corinthians

Paul's description of the restored Corinthian congregation as "chaste", "holy", and "pure" (agnous) evokes her preparation for a renewed relationship with Israel's God modeled on Isaiah's description of Judah's renewed relationship with YHWH after the Exile (2 Cor 7:11; see also 11:2).  Ultimately, the Corinthian congregation's marital purity signifies their reconciliation with God and presages the abundance of grace to which that relationship will give birth.

Source: Rabbi Jonathan Kaplan  -  "Comfort, O Comfort, Corinth: Grief and Comfort in 2 Corinthians 7:5-13a", Harvard Theological Review, 104:4 (2011), p. 443-444

Jesus' wisdom and warning

(23) Jesus told the people this parable (story): “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who told his servants to pay back the money they owed him. (24) As he began to settle his accounts, a servant who owed the king about 20 years’ wages was brought to him. (25) Because the servant was not able to pay, the king ordered that he and his family and all that he owned be sold to repay his debt. (26) Hearing this the servant fell on his knees, begging, ‘Please be patient with me, and I will pay you back everything I owe you.’ (27) The king showed mercy toward the servant and forgave him his entire debt and let him go. (28) But when that servant left, he found a fellow servant who owed him about one day’s wages. He grabbed him and began to choke him, demanding, ‘Pay me back all that you owe me!’ (29) His fellow servant fell to his knees, begging him, ‘Please be patient with me, and I will pay you back everything I owe you.’ (30) But he refused to forgive him his debt. Instead, he had the man thrown into prison until he could pay his entire debt. (31) When the other servants saw what had happened, they were very angry and went and told the king everything. (32) Then the king had the servant he had forgiven brought to him and he said, ‘You are a wicked servant! I forgave you of all your debt because you begged me. (33) You should have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you.’ (34) In his anger the king gave him to the jailers to be punished, until he paid back all he owed. (35) This is how my Father in heaven will treat you unless you forgive your fellow believers from your heart.”

Source: Bible (IEB)  -  Matthew 18:23-35

Fr. Peter Hocken

One area which Rome for a long time did not recognize was the charismatic work for Christian unity, according to Fr. Peter Hocken, an English priest long involved in the CCR.
The Renewal was born ecumenical - the fruit of Catholics being prayed over by Pentecostals - and from the start went beyond the conventional theological dialogue model that came out of the Second Vatican Council.
Hocken calls this extra element “charismatic ecumenism,” because it involves discerning the action of the Holy Spirit in - and recognizing the gifts poured out by the Spirit on - other denominations. One of its “striking hallmarks,” he says, is “the radical equality of all those baptized in the Holy Spirit,” one that “requires a new formulation of our convictions.”

Source: Austen Ivereigh  -  "Jubilee in Rome highlights charismatic fruits in Francis’s Pentecost papacy", Crux, 3 June 2017, https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/06/03/jubilee-rome-highlights-charismatic-fruits-franciss-pentecost-papacy/

Southern Acknowledgments

LaGrange's event is a rare official acknowledgment of a dark period in the history of the South.
The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, has documented 4,075 racial terror lynchings in Southern states between 1877 and 1950, few of which have been publicly acknowledged.
CNN found four instances of apologies for lynchings, including one in 2005 in Abbeville, South Carolina -- site of the 1916 lynching of a black farmer named Anthony Crawford at the hands of neighbors. White ministers apologized for racism, church burnings and lynchings, including Crawford's murder.

Source: Emanuella Grinberg, CNN  -  "'Justice failed Austin Callaway': Town attempts to atone for 1940 lynching", Emanuella Grinberg, CNN, 28 Jan 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/26/us/lagrange-georgia-callaway-1940-lynching/index.html

Ann Cogdell's Report

I want to end this overview of the June Gathering by telling you some of the things that were brought home to me.  I realized that I can’t enter well into what I'll call "identificational repentance" when really I’m indifferent; and I'm indifferent when things are distant from me -- distant in history or distant in the present, geographically or emotionally.   Particularly, in being among those who were definitely not indifferent, (and Europeans seem to have so much a better sense of history than many of us Americans, they're more connected) I felt the pain of not being able to respond as fully as I’d have liked.  The process of praying prayers of identificational repentance is both humbling and necessarily cleansing—looking at the sin of another or a grievous event of history, I felt that my eyes needed to be purified  so that I could look with care rather than point the finger.

I would commend the story of a German Lutheran pastor's experience of entering into identificational repentance during his time in a previous gathering held in Rome.


Source: Ann Cogdell  -  Report to Christ Church Anglican in Waco, 4 Sept. 2016

J.I. Packer - Why He Signed "Evangelicals & Catholics Together"

In an essay published in 1994, titled “Why I Signed It,” he defended the statement and his continuing involvement in the project. “I am a Protestant who thanks God for the wisdom, backbone, maturity of mind and conscience, and above all, love for my Lord Jesus Christ that I often see among Catholics, and who sometimes has the joy of hearing Catholics say they see comparable fruits in Protestants.”

Source: J.I. Packer  -  As quoted by Timothy George in "Packer at Ninety", First Things, October 2016, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/10/packer-at-ninety

Mark Rutte

The speaker was none other than Mark Rutte, now the premier of the Netherlands for over ten years. What did the church mean for us in these difficult days? he asked, answering with the word: ‘Togetherness’. What really counted in life? he continued. Not ‘more, more, more’, or ‘me, me, me’ but togetherness, ‘doing unto others what you would have them do to you’.

Reading Paul’s words from Romans 12, Rutte defined the good life as life in the service of the will of God – ‘his good, pleasing and perfect will’ – and not being conformed to the pattern of this world. In other words, he said, not going along with the crowd, as exemplified by Luther who stood for his convictions.

The corona crisis had confronted us with our smallness, the premier admitted, citing a fisherman’s prayer which John F. Kennedy had hung in the Oval Office: ‘O God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.’ Which was why we needed each other, and the church, he stressed. For in church we were not alone, we were together. And that was something we could not hear often enough.

Source: Jeff Fountain  -  "Togetherness", Weekly Word eNewsletter for 2 Nov 2020
https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?e=0b86898e11&u=65605d9dbab0a19355284d8df&id=cdb1197607

"They're good Germans"

The March of Life members ... sent a message to my father, asking to meet with him. They met in Caesarea for the first time a year and a half ago, on a Friday afternoon. That’s when the group members told him that they wanted to direct a play documenting his life story.

My father told them of his memories of the Holocaust and all about his adventures at sea onboard the Exodus. By his side were my mother, Jacqueline, and my eldest son Yuval. I’ll never forget the text message I got from Yuval, saying: “Mom, you don’t get what’s going on here. This isn’t just another lecture that he’s giving—they’re all descendants of Nazis. They’re descendants of war criminals who murdered Jews in cold blood.”

I have to admit, I fidgeted in my chair when I got this message.

“So what is grandpa doing there?” I replied.

“It’s not what you think mom,” he reassured me. “These young Germans are trying to atone for their grandparents’ sins. They’re good Germans.”

I started sobbing as he described the scene: “They came here with a guitar and they’re playing Hava Nagila, grandpa even said kiddush and grandma lit candles with them. There’s another kind of German, who believe in Israel and support Judaism, and they want to prove that they’re our friends.”

Source: Ynet News  -  "How the offspring of Nazis celebrated my father the Holocaust survivor",
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5434172,00.html

A Tutsi forgives a Hutu

Referring to Jean-Paul Samputu, a Tutsi who forgave the Hutu killer of his parents:

As Jean-Paul's story … bears out, forgiving is a deeply personal matter.  Ultimately each of us must find healing within, on our own terms, and in our own time.  On another level, however, forgiving is much more.  Even if its power connects people one by one, the resulting "ripple effect" can be felt on a much broader scale.  In fact, forgiveness can be a powerful social force, transforming and empowering whole groups of people.


Source: Johann Christoph Arnold  -  Why Forgive?, pp.202

Nate Bacon

Two years ago today, Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez, a beautiful young 20 year old indigenous Maya-Mam woman from near Xela, was shot in the head and killed by a Border Patrol agent in Rio Bravo, Texas. She had made the long, dangerous trek towards the US in search of hope for her future. Tragically, she never made it to her destination.

I felt led to attend her wake at the family home about an hour from us in an all Mam village. It was a life-transforming experience. Seeing her lifeless body in an all-white casket, surrounded by her family and loved ones was heart-breaking. I was the only ‘gringo’ present, and was able to express my own indignation (and that of so many others) at the cruel, criminal, and inexcusable action of another white man like me. God allowed me (it’s quite a story) to ask forgiveness on behalf of my country for its dehumanizing anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, which no doubt allowed that officer to feel justified in pulling the trigger on a petite and defenseless Guatemalan woman.
…
I am grateful for the beautiful unmerited seed of friendship with Claudia’s parents (Gil and Lidia). A situation that could have gone in an entirely different direction ended up with a sacred invitation last year to attend Claudia’s anniversary Mass in their home.


Source: Nate Bacon  -  Posted on FB 24 May 2020

Spirit of Fear ... NOT

(5) I remember your sincere faith—a faith that first lived in your mother Eunice and your grandmother Lois (see Acts 16:1-3) and I am convinced now lives in you. (6) Because of your faith, I encourage you to fan into flame the gift of God, which was imparted to you through the laying on of my hands. (7) For God did not give us a spirit of fear but the Holy Spirit of power, love, and self-discipline.

Source: The Apostle Paul  -  2 Timothy 1:5-7

K. Albert Little meets some Catholics

Until I, as an evangelical Protestant, met some halfway decent Catholics I had no idea what they believed. Likewise, if it wasn’t for my Anglican friend I’d have no ideas how gosh darn similar we actually are.
It’s not until we actively begin to reach out and meet each other where we are that we can begin to take down these walls, brick by brick.

Source: K. Albert Little  -  The Cordial Catholic on Patheos, 1 May 2015, "Dear Christians: Take Our Unity Seriously, Because Everyone is Watching", http://www.patheos.com/blogs/albertlittle/dear-christians-take-our-unity-seriously-because-everyone-is-watching/

Make Peace or Become the Next Victims

Meanwhile, two other men in the congregation had entered into a feud over a different matter, spewing bitterness and wrath over everything they came in contact with.  I felt that the Lord wanted them to help minister to the devil-afflicted brother, so I went to them.  "Our brother needs you and I'm going to minister to him," I said, "but I can't permit you to come to his house because your attitude towards one another opens the door for the enemy to attack you.  You must make peace between yourselves or you may become the next victims."

Knowing the urgency of the situation, they agreed to do something about their problem.  One came to me and said, "I want to change, but I won't go to him because he'll say that I surrendered.  But he could say the same thing about coming to me.  Would it be fair if we met somewhere at a neutral spot and you could come and help us?  I'm willing to sak him for forgiveness and also to forgive.

The other man accepted this proposal, and I arranged for them to get together at a big, lovely old house with a garden on one side and a beautiful orchard of fruit trees.  It was a warm, sunny day and we stood together under a large apricot tree.  Immediately the two began to stammer things like, "Brother, forgive me; I've been wrong."  I urged them not to argue about who was wrong.  "Just forgive," I said, "and don't go into too many details."

Source: David du Plessis  -  From "A Man Called Mr. Pentecost", as told to Bob Slosser, Ch. 10, pp 83-84

A Baptist meets the Pope

Theologian Steven R. Harmon was part of a group of Baptists who met with Pope Francis I at the Vatican last month.

“When we met Pope Francis, we were impressed with his genuine joyfulness,” Harmon said in a university news release. “He greeted us by imploring, ‘Pray for me!’ and we assured him that we do and would continue to do so.”

The pope included a warning during the audience.

“He also said to us, ‘We must find a way to get together, or they will eat us raw!’ We interpreted this to mean something like, ‘If we don’t find a way to live in unity, the enemies of the gospel will eat us alive!’”

Source: Jeff Brumley  -  "Religion Notes: Baptists hear warning from pope during Vatican meeting"
https://baptistnews.com/article/religion-notes-baptists-hear-warning-from-pope-during-vatican-meeting/#.XD4aXM9Tnxh

Joe Tosini

Tosini wants to be there to celebrate with Pope Francis a new process of what he calls “relational reconciliation,” a process that “is not about doctrinal alignment” or theological differences among Christians. It’s about affirming that in Christ, Christians are brothers and sisters called to love one another, even when they differ like siblings in any family do.

“The scandal of division is completely opposite of what Jesus prayed for,” Tosini said.

“Our challenge is going to be the diversity, the differences that we have,” he said, but the key is to let them be “reconciled in Christ” just like members of a healthy family accept their differences as a natural part of family life.

An important step, Tosini said, is to follow Pope Francis’ example having Catholics and Pentecostals acknowledge each other as Christians and stop treating and speaking of each other as less than Christian.

Source: Cindy Wooden  -  Catholic News Service, "U.S. Pentecostal promotes what pope calls ‘walking ecumenism’", 17 Oct 2016, https://cnstopstories.com/2016/10/17/u-s-pentecostal-promotes-what-pope-calls-walking-ecumenism/

Appropriating from each other is ... appropriate

Catholics are already copying Protestant techniques for generating enthusiasm in their children (there’s even a growing Catholic niche within Contemporary Christian Music), and evangelicals are tinkering with the model of Catholic education in their own Christian schools. More substantively, many Catholics appreciate the straightforward earnestness of evangelical devotion, while evangelicals are beginning to appropriate the spiritual exercises and theological precision developed in the Catholic tradition. This is possible only because Catholics and evangelicals both have a rich love for Christ, and want it to get richer.

Source: Daniel P. Moloney  -  As quoted in a First Things letter to the editor, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/03/peter-and-mary-together