Richard Harvey on Jews & Lutherans

So I am waiting for Lutherans, both as church bodies and as individuals, to show the fruits and action of repentance. Many expressions of regret and remorse have been made over the years for the sufferings of the Jewish people, but few actual acts of repentance, requests for forgiveness and demonstrations of a new heart, attitudes and actions to restore relations between Jews and Lutherans.

Source: Richard Harvey  -  "A Messianic Jew Looks at Luther", https://lutherandthejews.com/2017/02/09/a-messianic-jew-looks-at-luther/

Fr. Peter Hocken

Not only will God not reject his promises to his servants, but he will not deny their call and their work.  Just as the Lord always acknowledges the witness of his Old Testament servants, Abraham, Moses and David, so he will always acknowledge the witness of his Christian servants, whether Peter and Paul, Athanasius and Augustine, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin, John Wesley and Count von Zinzendorf, Dwight Moody and Charles Spurgeon.

Source: Fr. Peter Hocken  -  One Lord One Spirit One Body, pp.67

Jean-Paul Samputu

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

Cardinal Bergoglio's Address

In his pre-conclave speech, the then Cardinal Bergoglio told his fellow cardinals, "The church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries." He then warned of the dangers of a "self-referential" church" "When the church does not come out of herself to evangelize, she becomes self-referential and then gets sick. . . . The self-referential church keeps Jesus Christ within herself and does not let him out. . . . When the church is self-referential, inadvertently, she believes she has her own light; she ceases to be the mysterium lunae. . . . It lives to give glory only to one another." The call to go out to the peripheries has to have implications for Christian unity. It is the "self-referential" church that has no interest or zeal to go out to the other without which Christian unity cannot happen.

Source: Fr. Peter Hocken  -  Pentecost and Parousia, Peter Hocken - p. 101. / Address of Pope Francis to media representatives, in the Paul VI Audience Hall, Vatican City, March 15, 2013. Text made known by Cardinal Ortega of Havana, Cuba, with the agreement of Pope Francis.

Resistance - Listen, Receive, Encourage

Francis was aware that a number of cardinals and curial officials present as he spoke are engaged in such resistance, including Cardinals Burke and Sarah, but he declared “the absence of reaction is a sign of death!” whereas resistance “is a sign that the body is alive.” 

Consequently, he said, “the good resistances—and even the less good ones—are necessary and merit to be listened to, received and encouraged to express themselves.”


Source: Pope Francis  -  "Pope Francis Speaks about the Reform of the Roman Curia and the Resistance to it", by Gerard O'Donnell, America - The National Catholic Review, 22 Dec 2016, http://www.americamagazine.org/content/dispatches/pope-francis-speaks-about-reform-roman-curia-and-resistance-it?utm_content=buffer50118&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"I Only Love Momma"

Early in our childhood development we are often unable to self identify with more than one pole.

I experienced this with my own son when he was three. I would look him in the eye and say, “I love you so much buddy,” and he would respond, “I ONLY love momma. I don’t love you. I just love momma.” After putting my heart back together, I would gently respond, “You can love us both,” and he would respond, “I can only love momma.” This went on for nine months, but eventually a couple neurons somewhere in his cute little head fused together to permit him to say I love you to both of us.

Carl Jung explains that this phenomenon can continue through adulthood, causing us to relate primarily in either/or categories.

I’m convinced our adult civilization is regressing emotionally.

We slide back to childhood when we particularly dislike something about a people group (progressives or conservatives) and deem it necessary to find ways to accumulate a burning mound of facts about why we should hate “them.” Polarization is not a result of intellectual enlightenment or informed thinking; it is a result of emotional regression.

To sign up for Jesus and join his movement is to take on the mature work of integrating differing poles rather than regressing into either/or categories.

Source: Dan White  -  "When Clinton and Bush go to church … together", V3 Church Planting Movement, Jan 2017, http://thev3movement.org/2017/01/when-clinton-and-bush-go-to-church/

Dylan from The Porches of Holly

Dylan thought about how odd it was that even after Jesus was resurrected from the dead, He bore the scars that humanity pounded into His body. He pondered how God could carry the scars of angry men, yet release them from His judgment. 'Father, forgive them.' While men ripped the body of God to shreds, He submitted Himself to their sin, yet did not hold their wrongs against them. 'What kind of insanity was that?' Dylan wondered. 'If only I could do the same," he muttered.

Source: Traci Vanderbush  -  From her novel The Porches of Holly, as quoted on Facebook by the author on 18 June 2020

Orthodox & Catholic

He was supportive of me when I was received into the Orthodox Church at a parish of the Moscow Patriarchate in Amsterdam. Not every Catholic priest I was close to at the time viewed this as a positive event. Dan teased me: “This kind of thing can happen when you love your enemies.” He was referring to my frequent trips to Soviet Russia in the 1980s and the two books that came out of those journeys.

Source: Jim Forest  -  "Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ:  Why Should an Orthodox Christian be Interested in Him?", Orthdoxy In Dialogue, 12 Dec 2017
https://orthodoxyindialogue.com/2017/12/12/father-daniel-berrigan-sj-why-should-an-orthodox-christian-be-interested-in-him-by-jim-forest/

Matt Maher @ Onething

We need everybody.  There was a season when we needed Billy Grahams, and we needed individual evangelists and people with platforms.  That's not what we need now.  What we need is everybody, everybody together.  … We need everyone to come together, be together, and I think that's where the beauty shines the most.

Source: Matt Maher  -  Worship Leader Q&A Panel, Catholic/Ecumentical Track, Onething 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_pesyj1nVo

Breaking the Barrier of Silence

The March of Life organization was founded nine years ago in a bid to commemorate the Holocaust and fight anti-Semitism. It encourages young Germans to investigate their families’ past, break the barrier of silence and uncover the acts committed by their grandparents in the Holocaust.
 
“For years, no one in Germany discussed what had happened only several meters from the German city centers, “explains Heinz Reuss, the organization’s international director. “Not only was there no public debate, there were no family conversations about the past either. People didn’t talk about what they did in the war. We started investigating our family’s past, started asking questions. Many of us discovered that they grandparents were Nazi criminals. We were shocked.”


Source: Itay Ilnai  -  "Nazis’ descendants sing ‘Hatikva’ to Holocaust survivors", Ynet News, 6 Jan 2017, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4902914,00.html

Catholics & Anglicans in Rome

As Catholics and Anglicans, we are humbly grateful that, after centuries of mutual mistrust, we are now able to recognize that the fruitful grace of Christ is at work also in others.  We thank the Lord that among Christians the desire has grown for greater closeness, which is manifested in our praying together and in our common witness to the Gospel, above all in our various forms of service.  At times, progress on our journey towards full communion may seem slow and uncertain, but today we can be encouraged by our gathering.  For the first time, a Bishop of Rome is visiting your community.  It is a grace and also a responsibility: the responsibility of strengthening our ties, to the praise of Christ, in service of the Gospel and of this city.

Source: Pope Francis  -  Address to the Anglican Parish of All Saints in Rome, as reported by Vatican Radio, 26 Feb 2017, http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/02/26/pope_catholics_and_anglicans,_brothers_and_sisters_in_chris/1295193

Vatican II - "a Sea Change of Huge Proportion"

True Significance [of Vatican II] Is:
That it was fundamentally altering three convictions central to historic Evangelical objections, which understood (whether accurately or not) Roman Catholicism to hold:
1. an exaggerated exaltation of the Catholic Church as an institution whereby it communicated that the institutional Catholic Church was in itself a salvific agency serving, in an exaggerated way, as a continuation of the ministry of Jesus;
2. an exaggerated view of its sacramental ministry, seen to be the key to ministering salvation (either in baptism or in penance (described as “necessary”, D. 839, 894-896, albeit with the usual emergency alternative of the “desire of the sacrament,” D 898) or in the Eucharist);
3. “Rome never changes” and hence, until the Council of Trent’s decrees are explicitly renounced, all appearances of change are superficial at best.

All three points are implicated in one single decision taken at Vatican II: its acceptance that Protestants who had no membership in and no sacramental ministry from the Catholic Church were yet regenerated Christians.  When one considers the change in the first point alone – termed by some as the Catholic “tendency most suspect to Protestants”  – this is a sea change of huge proportion.  With this change the focus has been removed from the institution itself as a salvific institution and switched back to the underlying Gospel message.  


Source: Paul Miller  -  "Evangelicals Cooperatively Evangelising & Discipling with Catholics in Faithfulness to Evangelical Distinctives", by Paul Miller

March of Life, Germany

“The March of Life insists that we don’t keep silent again,” says Reuss, “that we speak publicly about what our forefathers did. The goal is to bring together the Nazi criminals’ descendants with the Holocaust survivors and the victims of the Holocaust. The meeting between them is part of our message – to remember what happened not just through figures and data, but through personal stories too.”

Source: Heinz Reuss  -  Quoted by Itay Ilnai in "Nazis’ descendants sing ‘Hatikva’ to Holocaust survivors", Ynet News, 6 Jan 2017, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4902914,00.html

JPII - "Sins Against Unity"

In his apostolic exhortation of 1994, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, John Paul II called for a confession of Catholic sins in the past, including sins against unity. "Among the sins which require a greater commitment to repentance and conversion should certainly be counted those which have been detrimental to the unity willed by God for his people."

Source: Pope John Paul II  -  Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 34

When Christians Look Radically Different

And frankly, I think the church in the United States, the more it embeds with politics… Europeans understand where that goes. When the church and the state are seen like this [joins hands], and then the state proves what it is - a flawed and sometimes corrupt system -  then the church is judged by this, and rejected. There are countries in Europe where the church is set back for decades and decades, because they have been stained by how they sold their soul for power, I would say. As the United States grows more and more secular, I tell the people there: ‘We are becoming more like the fertile soil in which the early church did best’. Like the Roman Empire, this was a pagan and hostile society in which Christians stood out by being different. When you are in a place like the United States or Europe in its recent past, where the majority will claim to be Christians, but then they look like everyone else, then the people do not understand what the gospel is. But when Christians look radically different from the world around them, then the people can see the difference.

Source: Philip Yancey  -  "Philip Yancey: US evangelicals should learn from Europe’s history of religion and power", Evangelical Focus Newsletter, 23 September 2016, http://evangelicalfocus.com/world/1951/Philip_Yancey_US_evangelicals_should_learn_from_Europes_history_of_religion_and_power_

Protestant & Catholic, Black & White

"There were many beautiful Holy Spirit moments at our kickoff," the Atlanta leader said, "but something that really delighted my heart was seeing Protestant and Catholic, black and white coming together in prayer to seek God's heart and pray for our community. Already this shows the healing power of God that He longs to pour out everywhere!"

Source: Shawn D. Carney  -  Quoting the Atlanta leader of 40 Days for Life in "Day 3: The Lord's Call for Unity" eNewsletter, https://yh125.infusionsoft.com/app/hostedEmail/92618968/0dae2e849b01799c

From Iraq - "Think About This"

“Here in Iraq we Christians cannot afford to throw out words carelessly as the media in the West can do,” he added. “I would ask those in the media who use every issue to stir up division to think about this.”

Source: Archbishop Bashar Warda  -  Catholic Archbishop of Erbil, Iraq, as quoted in Archbishop to Anti-Trump Protesters: "Where Were You When Muslim Terrorists Were Slaughtering And Persecuting Christians?", Freedom Outpost, http://freedomoutpost.com/archbishop-to-anti-trump-protesters-where-were-you-when-muslim-terrorists-were-slaughtering-and-persecuting-christians/

Robert Schuman

Too often we forget that Hitler’s demise did not automatically guarantee peace to a traumatised and broken Europe. Euphoric scenes of Allied soldiers giving out chocolates, cigarettes and kisses to flag-waving crowds quickly gave way to the daunting reality of rebuilding a devastated and divided Europe. It’s one thing to win a war. But how do you win the peace?

Chaos threatened on all sides. Hatred and bitterness towards the enemy and collaborators poisoned grass-roots attitudes among victor and defeated alike. Families had been separated, divided and destroyed. Deep wounds festered physically, psychologically and spiritually. Hunger, poverty and unemployment added to the miseries of injury and upheaval, totally eclipsing anything we are currently experiencing in Europe today. The Cold War was about to begin. Today’s generations have never known the climate of mistrust and suspicion, crisis and conflict that dominated Europe over the five years following the war.

Reconciliation
Today thoughts of such conflict among EU nations are unthinkable, thank God! Thanks in large part to the story of the stunningly rapid yet lasting Franco-German reconciliation after the Second World War. Central to that story is an unassuming, French lawyer-politician, acknowledged as the ‘Father of Europe’, Robert Schuman. Drawing inspiration from his Christian faith and Catholic social teaching, he searched for an alternative to the old order of competing nation states which had repeatedly led to war. Even while imprisoned by the Nazis early in the war and again after escaping in hiding, he wrote that ‘we French will have to learn to forgive and love the Germans to rebuild post-war Europe’. To many that sounded like treason. After the war, when appointed Foreign Minister, Schuman kept looking for a way to prevent the vicious cycle of war.

Exactly seventy years ago on this Saturday, on May 9, 1950, Schuman announced a plan in a speech lasting a mere three minutes. Surely that was the defining moment of post-war Europe! For that speech laid the foundations of the European House in which today half a billion people in twenty-seven nations live together in peace. From that moment on, there was a plan on the table with the goal, in Schuman’s thinking, of forming a ‘community of peoples deeply rooted in basic Christian values’. These values stemmed directly from the teachings of Jesus, Schuman argued. True democracy was ‘evangelical’, he wrote, rooted in the gospel, embedded in the

Source: Jeff Fountain  -  "Who Won the Peace?", Weekly Word eNewsletter, 4 May 2020
https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?e=0b86898e11&u=65605d9dbab0a19355284d8df&id=cd6d1b85b2

M. Basilea Schlink

The joyous shout "Who is a God like you, who pardons sin!" was missing in my life - and with it the joy of heaven, which is ours in Jesus.  And all because I had forgotten what it means to weep over my sins!  That is why my love for Jesus had burned low.  It's pardoned sinners who are on fire with love.  From bitter experience I know how impoverished a life without daily repentance is.  No nearness of heaven.  No radiant joy.  No worship ascending from a heart overflowing with thanksgiving.  No passion for Jesus.  No power or anointing or fruitfulness in ministry.

Source: M. Basilea Schlink  -  Repentance: The Joy-Filled Life, pp. 15-16