Thank you

I am more appreciative for all of the communications I have received this Lenten season about forgiveness than I can express.

Members of the Foundry congregation have been taking some amazing steps ... contacting relatives they have been alienated from for years, asking ex-spouses for forgiveness, praying for their own grace to accept God's forgiveness for things they have beaten themselves up about for years.

I do not think I have ever received so much feedback about any sermon series ever before.

I think we happened upon a very important topic. Even as we move on to another series after Easter, I encourage you to continue to think and pray about forgiveness.

You are invited to our Good Friday services at noon and 7 p.m. when we will anoint with oil for forgiveness.

And thanks to everyone who has shared their story with me this Lent!

From Alicia ....

This past week’s sermon brought another “aha” moment for me. Dean said (I’m paraphrasing based on my memory) that you know you have forgiven someone when you think of them or remember them – including all of their faults – and feel only love and peace in your heart.

I only knew one of my grandparents, my father’s mother. Her name was Rebeca Gutierrez and pretty much everyone in the family will tell you that she was not a very nice woman. I’ll just leave it at that. Although I grew up just a few miles from my grandmother, I don’t have many happy memories of her. This always made me sad, especially when I heard others talk about their warm relationships with their grandparents.

But, as I’ve gotten older and have encountered challenges and heartbreaks that I never expected, I have come to appreciate and love my grandmother in a new way. I’ve come to appreciate that there were probably reasons she acted the way she did. I can guess what they might have been – she was widowed with three young children, she fled the Mexican revolution at age two – but I don’t really know. However, this helped me view her in a way other than just the grandmother that fell short of my childhood dreams.

As the negative memories of my grandmother started to fade, I was able to see more clearly the incredible ways her strength and courage shaped my life. She was a woman before her time and had vision and foresight that are not always easily appreciated.

In the early 1950s, my grandparents were both school teachers living in East Los Angeles with three young children. Then my grandfather died of cancer, when my aunt was just an infant. My grandfather’s death did not deter my grandmother’s plan to get her children the best education possible. She bought a house in South Pasadena, an almost exclusively white town just a few miles away, against the petitions of residents in the neighborhood. They did not want Mexican Americans in the neighborhood, clearly evidenced by the sign “No Dogs, No Negroes, No Mexicans” at the city pool. The move was not without its hardships, but her plan was successful and all three of her children (and one of her grandchildren, me) graduated from Stanford and also earned graduate degrees.

My grandmother’s drive for access to the American dream for her children and Mexican Americans generally (she and my grandfather were leaders in the Mexican American Movement, a civil rights movement in the 1940s) had many successes and provided a platform for me to reach even higher. However, as many of us know, breaking down barriers and fighting for inclusion are not easy tasks and these activities may have impacted how she treated those closest to her. I have learned to forgive the lack of happy times with her. I may not have memories of baking cookies with her, but I carry on her legacy and for that I’m incredibly proud and thankful.

A blog from Alicia

Thanks to Alicia Gutierrez for this post --

As Dawn mentioned in her sermon on Sunday, this has been a tough sermon series. Talking about forgiveness is difficult. When the sermon series was announced I was unsure of how I felt about it. Yeah, it’s a great idea – we all know forgiveness is a good thing – but what would the series look like? Most importantly, would it really help me get over the terrible betrayals that I decided to focus on?

Well, my skepticism turned out to be somewhat justified, at least as I initially conceptualized a forgiveness series. Neither Dean nor Dawn has given us a step by step program about how to forgive. I so wish they did! Instead, they have focused on the importance of forgiveness, the reasons why forgiveness is in keeping with Christian principles, and how choosing to forgive is following the example of Jesus Christ.

During this past sermon, I had a sort of “aha” moment. I understood why it’s so important for me to forgive these particular wrongs done to me. I thought I understood it before, but that was just a theoretical idea, and after the past several sermons the importance of forgiveness clicked in a new way. I saw clearly how holding onto anger is holding me back and making peace with the past – and forgiving those who hurt me – is the only way to move forward into the life that I want to create.

I describe myself as being in a “forgiveness soup,” I know a lot is going on as I work through my pain consciously and subconsciously, but I can’t explain it in any logical way. However, this past Sunday I realized that the teaching, prayer, fellowship, and meditation of this Lenten season is helping me move towards forgiveness. This is better than a step by step plan. I am learning to forgive by developing a deeper understanding of God’s word and by strengthening my faith as I ask God for grace and guidance.

Payback

I have been spending way too much time googling topics related to forgiveness on the internet. This week I googled the word "payback" and found a site where you can have dead flowers or a dead fish mailed to someone you are angry at.

Here is a testimonial from the website:

Testimonial: "Just wanted to thank you guys for providing such great service. I wish I could have seen my ex's face when he got that box of dead roses! You guys really made my day. I'm glad I got even with that jerk. More people need to know about this service, so I'm telling my girlfriends because I'm pretty sure they know some jerks too. Most guys are anyway."--Jessica

Comments anyone?

Resentment

Johann Christoph Arnold's book Why Forgive? (available as a free ebook download here) includes this wonderful quote from Nelson Mandela -- "Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemy."

Excusing versus forgiving

I am going to be quoting this essay by C. S. Lewis tomorrow during the teaching time.

The entire essay is well worth reading. Here is a short excerpt--

As regards my own sins it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other [person's'] sins against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other [person] was not so much to blame as we thought. But even if he [or she] is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him [or her]; and even if ninety-nine per cent of his [or her] apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one per cent of guilt that is left over. To excuse, what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

Wow!

A report from Julie about Ash Wednesday at Dupont Circle

From Julie Bringman, Director of Sunday Night at Foundry ministries --

Some people are calling it Ashes-to-Go; some people say it is a national movement; on a whim, I called it an Ashes-Flash-Mob. Whatever the catch-phrase, a group of people in DC received the imposition of Ashes on their foreheads and heard the words “You come from dust, and you will return to dust, beloved child of God,” without planning for or entering a church.

Peter Dull, Ty Trapps, Sam Hedlund and I got up early Wednesday morning and made our way to the Dupont Metro station for this religious social experiment. We had ashes and hand-made signs reading, “Got Ashes?” We sought to offer this ancient church ritual to anyone interested.

In the 8-9am hour that we were there, countless people filed into and out of the metro. Many with earbuds and newspapers paid no attention; some with ashes already on their forehead smiled in recognition; some asked, “What is this all about?” And some welcomed the invitation and received the ashes.

PBS Religion and Ethics Blog and CNN Belief Blog were curious about this as well. Watch their take on the experience below.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/ashes-to-ashes/10374/

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/22/for-the-rushed-on-ash-wednesday-ashes-on-the-go/

I don’t know what the impact of this social experiment will be; I don’t know if this will become a regular occurrence for Foundry. But I do know we are a church that seeks to have an impact beyond the walls of our building. This was a new expression of this deeply-held Foundry value.

I do know when we are open to the Spirit’s leading, when we are creative with tradition, we make room for God to show up in new ways in our own lives and in the lives of others.

--Julie

SN@F giving out ashes on the street yesterday

Watch this video about Sunday Night @ Foundry folk "doing"ashes at the Dupont
Metro yesterday.

Ash Wednesday

From Eugene Peterson's book The Pastor: A Memoir

Jan and I were visiting a Benedictine monastery, Christ in the Desert, in New Mexico. One of the brothers was leading us on a path from prayers in the chapel to the refectory where we would have lunch. The path led through the cemetery. We passed an open grave.

Jan said, “Oh, did one of the brothers just die?”

“No, that is for the next one.”

Three times a day, on their way from praying together to eating together, the monks are reminded that one of them will be “the next one.”

And I was reminded that there is a long tradition in the church’s life that the pastoral vocation consists in preparing people for “a good death.”

Ash Wednesday is like that open grave. When ashes are smeared onto our foreheads, the pastor says: "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." It is a reminder that life has an end.

We don't talk about this much anymore, but the first Methodists made a sort of cult of dying a "good death." Methodists would repeat stories of how someone had died at peace with their God, happy to go on to the next life.

The story of John Wesley's own death has been told and retold for more than 200 years. Here it is according to J.F. Hurst's book John Wesley the Methodist:

Wesley died on 2 March 1791, in his eighty-seventh year. As he lay dying, his friends gathered around him, Wesley grasped their hands and said repeatedly, "Farewell, farewell." At the end, he said "The best of all is, God is with us", lifted his arms and raised his feeble voice again, repeating the words, "The best of all is, God is with us."

Maybe. The point of the stories about Methodists dying a good death was that it was important to the first Methodists that they knew with assurance that their sins were forgiven so that they could die with grace and peace in their hearts. They could die without any unresolved issues between them and their God. It would be nice.

"Lord, let me know my end," the Psalmist prays. "Let me know how fleeting my life is." (Ps 39:4)

Life is too short to waste very much of it on unforgiven resentments against those who have sinned against us or unresolved guilt about sins for which we will not fully accept God's forgiveness.

The message is, I think: Give forgiveness and get forgiveness and move on. Life is short.

Lent 2012

Welcome to Lent 2012. Last year we did a money fast during the season of Lent. This year our topic is forgiveness and we are inviting everyone to think and pray about forgiving others, ourselves, and maybe even God.

There is a book to read: Why Forgive? by Johann Christoph Arnold of the Bruderhof Community, an Anabaptist group similar to the Amish. The book is full of stories and I was moved by it the first time I read it 9 or ten years ago. It is actually now available for free as an ebook here.

My goal this Lent is to forgive two resentments that have festered inside of me for years -- one for more than 50 years. I have also set a goal of accepting God's forgiveness for two things in my life that I have felt guilty about for years. I am not looking forward to it. I have been attached to this resentment and guilt for a long time. I am not sure how to let them go.

We have groups here at Foundry for you to join to think, share and pray about forgiveness. Read about them here. I encourage you to join one or start your own. It only takes two people to make a group.

As always, I welcome your reflections. If you'd like to be a guest blogger, email me your blog and I will post it. dsnyder at foundryumc dot org.

Join us for ashes tomorrow, Ash Wednesday. We will be imposing them at Foundry at 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. Our Sunday Night @ Foundry crew will be giving out ashes at the Dupont Circle Metro stop from 8 to 9 tomorrow morning if you'd like ashes to go.

May you have a holy Lent!