Crusaders –
On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
Along the lines of my last post regarding civility I have been thinking about crusaders, and not just the ones from days of yore. Yes the sins of the crusades of the 11th -13th centuries and beyond have be well documented. We moderns scoff and judge the political intrigue and religious manipulation that resulted in some of the most un-Christian acts ever committed on planet earth. But as they say hind sight is 20/20. As one who fancies himself a bit of a historian I have found that it is easy to sit centuries removed and cast judgement on those who lived long ago. Our modern lenses the way we see things. Our lenses sharpen and even hyper focus on certain events, because they are important for us now and other events are less in focus because, well we just don’t think they are as important. So our idea of justice is skewed, our idea of what was important may not be what was important way back when.
Ok… I do have a point some place here…. oh, I think this might be it… Crusaders are not dead. They are alive and well today, and I am not talking about your local Roman Catholic high school team.
Crusaders dwell among us today, and while they no longer ride stallions, nor wear suits of armor, they are all around us and how they go about their quests has changed very little, at least in reputation, over the years.
In our modern debates about just about anything the crusading ones emerge very quickly on their high horses, covered in armor of righteous indignation. These crusaders can take on many forms, some maybe folks from some conservative church someplace in the middle of no place protesting on street corners or at military funerals, hurling invectives and nasty slurs to point to the holiness of their cause and how God is on their side. Ok, that one was easy and pretty obvious, but try having a conversation about what the bible says about our relationships, and you will find people mounting their modern high horses on both sides of the issue pretty darn quickly. No Pope could rouse a legion of crusaders more quickly than any of todays “hot button topics.”
I call these modern folks crusaders because they display many of the same traits. Roland Bainton a reformation scholar pointed out four characteristics of a crusader.
1) the cause is holy
2) the crusaders are godly, the enemy is ungodly
3) God fights for the crusaders and against their opponents
4) the war is prosecuted unsparingly. Take no prisoners.
I believe they are true now as they were for the first crusaders.
Like those crusaders of the past today’s crusaders are no less impassioned, their energy is fueled by a pious fury that holds no quarterfor people with who feel differently for whatever reason. There are folk on both sides of most modern issues that fit this profile, but the ones the baffle me the most are those who are intolerant of intolerance. In this light it seems that when you are a crusader, you have no time for mercy, you leave no room for forgiveness to be requested nor granted, and grace belongs only to you and those who march under your banner.
Much like those early crusaders it isn’t as if there is not some element of “justness” to their cause, there almost always is, but often the cause becomes the end all be all. In such a cause there is no room to grow, no room to see the other side of an issue, no room to see what God may be up to in all of this, because when you are “right”, it becomes your god.
That being said, there are places, and I think I have been fortunate enough to be in one of them where people for the most part are able to climb down off of their high horses and walk together knowing that there will be differences and that God is not done teaching, guiding and blessing us yet. In this space, we may differ on many topics, some of them may even have eternal ramifications but in the grace and mercy of God we can talk, we can learn, we can grow our relationships as children of God and in that relationship we can trust in His salvation and not our own self-righteousness.
Odd combos
I can’t tell you how today’s post will go, been slogging away getting all my ducks in a row for Holy Week. I know it is well over a week away, but for some reason people want to know what is happening in advance! So tha
t is what has been keeping be busy and will be until Maundy Thursday next week when it all actually gets better. The preperation is done and It is just a matter of, well worshiping and letting the story of Easter do its thing, I just try not to get in the way.
I would be interested if you have been working on the book of faith 40 Day Lenten
Journey to hear how things have gone for you. Please leave a comment, write an e-mail or gasp… talk to me in person!
Sometimes there are things that normally don’t go together and when you think about them it strikes you as just odd. But, when you finally experiance them together, well, a light bulb goes on and things change.
Now, I am not talking not going together like broccoli and bubble gum… but things that might not automatically strike you as going to gether. I like mustard, and until a few years ago, I wasn’t a big fan of mayo. Imgagine my suprise when I first dipped a prezle into some yellow dip only to find out that it was mustard and mayo and it was really good! In fact I am eating it right now… pardon the mustard stains….
Sort of like Reese’s peanut butter cups… ok fine chocolate and almost anything goes together pretty well! But you get my point.
How about this combo… you are an innocent man about to be murdered… and just before you die, and with what little energy you have left, you forgive all those who either by their actions or by their in-action, are responsible for your situation.
Umm… ultimate injustice, and forgiveness ummm… not a combo you 
would ever in your wildest dreams come up with, but that is God for ya.
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer and we say these words “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” The one who teaches us to pray this knows a forgiveness that is deeper than I can imagine. It is from this deep pool of love, ultimate relationship, that a forgiveness like this can be offered to all.
C-3PO
If you are not a Sci-Fi fan, maybe C-3PO just looks like an odd jumble of letters and an number. But for Star Wars fan’s C-3PO is well known as a protocol droid (robot) central to all of the Star Wars movies. You may not know this but there is a new animated Star Wars series call the “Clone Wars.” I don’t get to watch it often, but my son does! Recently I saw a blurb for an episode that fits out theme pretty well it was simply called, Trespass.
As I mentioned yesterday as we look at the petition “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” sins, debts, or trespasses, they all work to do the heaving lifting.
God is better at dealing with trespasses than we are!
I guess I have been partial to trespasses as that is the word I grew up using. But I like it for other reasons. To trespass put most simply is to go someplace we do not belong. If you think about it is a perfect word for what we do, cross boundaries, we play gods all the time. The boundaries we cross are not just in relation to God either, we cross boundaries in each other’s lives all the time.
Getting back to C-3PO… It seems people are trespassing all over the place, because of greed, or pride or who knows what. So in an effort to broker a tentative peace, Anakin turns to C-3PO for help — and finds his fluency in more than six million forms of communication to be most useful.
C-3PO and Luke Skywalker... more than a Sci-Fi movie?
There is only one language we need to understand when it comes to sin, debts and trespasses and that is the language of forgiveness. The debts we pile up, the sin we commit, and the boundaries we cross as we trespass are impossible for us to pay off. The Good News is that God has indeed wiped out our sins and has communicated this in the most concrete of ways in the gift of his Son Jesus the Christ.
A little now on forgiveness… Some have taken Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” as a conditional clause. If it is we are all in some serious doo doo. No, as I have prayed and studied this prayer I have heard in these words both an example and a goal. We are to forgive as God in Christ has already forgiven us. That is the promise of baptism, that is the promise of Jesus. We have the purest form of forgiveness laid out for us here, this is the example. Secondly this is also our goal, we are called to become what we already are in Christ Jesus, as we learn to forgive as we have first been forgiven.
Finally I must speak to our forgiveness of others. As our devotions stated, it is indeed a two way street. Often people who have been hurt quite badly struggle with the issue of forgiveness. This is an honest an faithful struggle not a sign of weakness. We need to learn, heal and grow from experiences where we will be called upon to forgive. It may not come quickly, it may not become perfectly, but this is why Jesus taught us to pray: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,”
