The Two Way Street

This Sunday we will read together the "Parable of the Unforgiving Slave."  You can find that passage at http://biblia.com/books/nrsv/Mt18.21-35.  The punch line of the parable is jarring.  "So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you," Jesus tells his disciples, "if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."  Is this a simple exchange of goods and services?  Is our reconciled relationship with the Creator of all things conditional on our willingness to let go of the sins of others?

If so, it seems that grace has gone out the window.

In fact, forgiving and being forgiven travel the same road.  This is the real basis of the punch line. When I hang on to my desires for revenge, when I cling to my self-justifying stories, when I put being right ahead of being in relationship, I will find it difficult to receive and experience forgiveness--whether that is from God or from another human (or even from myself).

It isn't that God will refuse to forgive.  It is instead the case that I will be unwilling and ultimately unable to accept forgiveness.  I will cease to have resentments.  Instead, I will simply become my resentment.  When that happens, the good things in this life will be swimming against the tide of righteous self-absorption.  And that tide will sweep the good things of this life back out of my heart.

This is what the Evil One desires--that I would be so resentful, so suspicious, so defensive and so fearful, that I will cut myself off from all others.  This is what the Evil One desires--that I will live and die afraid and alone, isolated and alienated, but self-justified to the end.

The path to life is, instead, rooted in humility and paved with compassion.  It is possible that the other person might be right.  It is possible that there is more to the story than I imagine.  It is possible that if I see things from another perspective, my mind and heart might change.  It is possible that even if the other person is really, really wrong, I might at least develop some empathy that will cure me of the worst of my hatred.

Forgiving is first of all about removing the roadblocks of resentment and rage.

Making Failure Fruitful

Samuel Smiles was the original "self-help" author.  His most famous book, oddly enough, was entitled Self-Help.  The book catapulted him to literary stardom in early nineteenth century Great Britain.  He became a self-help guru and consultant before such things were imagined.  

Smiles is quoted (without attribution) thousands of times daily.  In his biography of the railroad pioneer George Stephenson, Smiles wrote, "We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”  

Of course, the quote is often reforged into something like, "We learn more from our failures than from our successes."  This is part of the premise of the new book by Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon and Schuster, 2014).  Lewis is a highly engaging writer.  And she has the gift (which I greatly admire) of putting together odd and apparently unrelated stories into compelling essays.

I told my spouse I was reading a book on failure, and she appeared concerned for my mental health.  This book is something other than that.  Lewis reflects on the power of the "near win" to motivate mastery.  She reminds us of the dangers of success--particularly the danger that we will return to what has worked in the past even when a better solution is now available.  And she reminds us of the necessity for gritty courage in the face of criticism.

She reminds me that hope is essentially a creative process.  "Agency comes," she writes, from the convergent and divergent thinking that the creative process requires."  Agency is one of the elements of real hope.  The discovery and/or construction of alternative pathways to the future is another of the elements of real hope.  So hope depends on having the conscious capacity to envision alternative ways to future goals.

Lewis notes that creativity training is the most de-funded aspect of education in our society.  Time spent on the arts and humanities does not result in increases on state-mandated proficiency tests.  So the money is put elsewhere.  "With the recent decline in our investment in the arts and education," she notes, "we are smarter, yet less equipped to find novel approaches to problems.

So we are producing smarter people who are increasingly desperate.  Desperation narrows both perceptual and cognitive abilities.  So the intelligence is then applied with greater and greater energy only to the familiar responses to problems.  So, for example, our response to crime is increasing the levels of legal violence rather than exploring alternative responses.

I was puzzled by how Lewis' perspective might interact with the framework of Appreciative Inquiry.  Does an unstintingly positive approach to organizational life actually narrow our options rather than widen them?

No, I don't think so.  It is not the case that we learn from failure as such.  Failure is just failure.  What we do after we fail is the real question.  Does a failed experiment allow us to shift our focus to a different solution?  That is the real core of Lewis' conversation.  So she points to Samuel F. B. Morse.  Morse spent a lifetime struggling as an artist.  And he invented the modern telegraph.  Did the one reality lead to the other?

Studying failure can lead to a narrow problem orientation.  Using failure to break open our perceptions and engage our appreciative and creative vision is an entirely different thing. Lewis puts it this way:

When someone thinks they understand something, the mind edits reality so efficiently that errors can be hard to perceive, but when someone observes a scenario they are unfamiliar with, a part of the brain operates inefficiently, giving us time to see the outliers and consider their significance. (page 162).

We do in fact learn wisdom from our failures, if we are brave enough to pay attention. 

The book is The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Creativity-Failure-Mastery/dp/1451629230/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1409405815&sr=1-1

Yesterday's Message at Emanuel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDKdSi8IJ0&feature=share

Message for June 29 now on youtube!

See and hear the message for June 29th, "Re-Valued" here:
http://youtu.be/1KWypoPQn_o

Emanuel Lutheran Church, Council Bluffs, Iowa
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New Book Ready for Sale

http://blur.by/T1GhAq

It's the new book, Waiting in the Shadows.  These are the first person sermons presented during Lent at Emanuel Lutheran Church.  It turned out nicely.  You can preview and order online.

5 Living on the Edge

Seeking the Mind of Christ

I was privileged to attend the recent assembly of the Western Iowa Synod, ELCA.  The last time I attended an assembly in this part of the country, it was still the old Iowa District, TALC.  I found my first WIS assembly to be a great experience.  I am grateful to Bishop Prois and his Mission Team, to the WIS synod council, and to all the churchwide and institutional staff and the volunteers who made it such a great assembly.

The one resolution that produced real debate concerned our support for Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land.  You can find the proposed resolution in the assembly reports: 

http://www.wisynod.org/uploads/2/3/0/3/23032342/2014_assembly_reports_book_for_web.pdf.

The resolution that was actually adopted was quite different from the proposed resolution.  That adopted resolution will be published in the minutes of the assembly and in follow-up reports of the assembly.

I appreciated the passion of the discussion and debate.  Regardless of the outcome, voting members left the assembly with much more information about Palestinian/Israeli political realities and perceptions than they had when they came.  Voting members left the assembly knowing that they had reflected on and discussed issues of pressing real-world significance.  There was much in the experience to applaud and for which I am grateful.

I was also struck by how "secular" the debate was.  Our conversation could easily have taken place at a public political assembly of some kind, and the content of the conversation would have been altered very little.  The exception to that observation was the presentation by the Rev. Dr. Robert Smith on Christian Zionism, but that was in a workshop attended by about three dozen voting members.  I was surprised by the lack of actual prayer during the plenary conversation.  I understand that there was the press of time and emotions were running high.  But there seemed to be little effort to discern what might seem good to the Holy Spirit and to us.

More than that, it seems that the decision was made on the basis of existing political options and preferences--roughly pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, for example.  I longed for someone to ask just how this issue looks to those of us who follow the crucified and risen Messiah.  There seemed to be a lack of theological thinking applied to the issue and discussion.  There seemed to be a lack of longing to discern and to have the mind of Christ on this issue.

As I read N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God, I am reminded of how important this is for Christian living in the real world.  Paul urges us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12).  Every issue looks different in a world where Christ is risen.  I longed for some sense of our vocation as ambassadors of reconciliation rather than advocates for one side.  It seems that the assembly shared that longing, based on how the resolution was eventually adopted.

I have been preparing to teach once again a Bible study on Paul's letter to Philemon.  I love that little letter for precisely this reason.  When we face the tough issues of real life, how does Jesus change everything?  Philemon and Onesimus faced this life and death question and open the door to our ongoing conversation in this regard.  I long for a church that expends every effort to have the mind of Christ--as well as the heart and the hands of the Messiah.