When I was a kid, I heard for the first time someone utter the phrase, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” It’s not a direct quote but it was enough to get me interested in history. I find it fascinating. Because I value it, we will even be going over some Church history on a few Wednesday nights. Much to the chagrin of some of my parishioners.

And as I have looked at history, it seems to me that humanity has a few things that it is good at. Even a couple of things at which it excels. But it has occurred to me that what humans are best at is killing each other. Inflicting violence upon one another is what our nature has perfected. From sticks to swords to guns to bombs… we know how to mess you up.

I have spent a lot of time going through and trying to figure out what the Fulfilled Kingdom of God is like because I think it is what Christ tried to bring to us in his actions, words and life.

Isaiah, in 2, gives us the words, “In the last days…” This is the fulfillment of the kingdom. This is a snapshot of what the established kingdom will look like. No wonder Jesus thought it was important, it was right here in his scriptures.

In the Kingdom of God, there is no more war, no swords, no spears, no guns, no ICBMs.
In the Kingdom of God, the people will let God judge between the nations and between people.
This certainly isn’t how the world is now.

In fact, one could argue that those aspects of the kingdom are totally impossible to replicate in this world. The empires of the earth would never allow it. Our enemies too great, too strong, too evil. Where would the Church be if it followed that example to a tee? Would it even still exist?

And yet, we are told of a light. A light of the Lord. A light that is illuminating our path even now.

These are the ways he will teach us, these are the paths that we will walk. As our journey as individuals and as the Church moves us down our road, it is this light that shows us how to be people of the kingdom, how to be people who are able to see further than five feet in front of us.

Do we have the ability, responsibility, desire to emulate that established kingdom? If we don’t think that we can say yes, then it seems to be all for naught. Something we should think hard on and be serious about.

What are the caveats to God’s peace? Just war? Harm to others? Where in the Gospel are the exceptions to being a people of peace? Where in the words of Christ do we find the loopholes that let us get around the Sermon on the Mount?

Well, sure, that’s all well and good but we aren’t Jesus. We can’t follow his example. I mean, really, we might name ourselves “Christ-like” but come on….
Are we allowed to believe/participate in a transitional kingdom of God? Did Christ believe that just trying to be that kind of person, that kind of Church was good enough? When he asked for God’s will to be done on earth as it was in heaven, was he just being metaphorically ambiguous?

Is it ok to rely on what we can see? On our best understanding of how the world works?

The disciples came to Christ once and said, “Rabbi, send the people away. They’re hungry. We don’t have enough. We can’t do anything for them. We know the reality of the situation and so we need to send these people to the inns, the institutions, the governments that can provide for their peace and security.”
Christ would have none of it. That’s not how the Fulfilled Kingdom of God works.

Or does “be perfect as your father is perfect” mean be perfect? Does it mean that we are expected to follow our example and see what he sees and act like he acted?

But God killed lots of people in the Old Testament! Yep. Seems to have. And yet as we come to the Gospel, we find Jesus telling us over and over again, “You have heard it said… But I tell you…”

I understand the difficulty of the task assigned to us.

Beating swords into plowshares is hard work. It’s time consuming and laborious. You already worked hard to make the sword. And now you have to work hard to transform it into something else entirely.
But both are instruments. Swords for the killing and plowshares for the harvest. And believe me, the harvest is full and ready and maybe it’s not a matter of there not being enough harvesters but those harvesters not having the right tools for the job.

In Deuteronomy, God addresses the Shema, “Hear, O Israel”. Again, not Hear, O Egypt or Hear, O Babylon or Hear, O America.
Hear, O people of God. Hear, O nation of priests.

Isaiah addresses the same people. “Come, O house of Jacob”- Written to the people of God. Are we to place this on others?

Is this a call to be different than the countries around us? A call to be different than the countries we are in? Is this applicable to only governmental systems that we don’t happen to agree with?

Do we believe that we can be a people of peace? The body of the prince of peace in this world, in our country, our workplaces, our homes?

There was a time not long ago when God was assumed to be a vital part of the world in which we lived.
Throughout the history of Europe and then brought over to America, God had his place and it was inconceivable to think otherwise.
Before we think, “Ahhh, the good old days”, those people had their problems and issues with theology.

But the notion that everyone believes in God cannot be assumed in our culture anymore.

It seems that when this kind of change occurs, in this case change to a people’s perception of God’s character and God’s influence upon the world, there can be a tendency to tighten up our defenses and fallback on what it is that we have “always been told” rather than look anew at our own beliefs.

Deuteronomy 6 tells us that the YHWH is our God and that YHWH is one.

This God is God and the only God to boot.

So I think that begs the question, “Who is God to you?”

If this is going to be the foundational statement of who God is, then we should really have an understanding of who this God is to us.

What does this God you love look like?
What does he sound like?
What are that God’s qualities?
What are that God’s characteristics?

We can say God is loving and just but without looking at those deeper even they cannot mean much.

Do we have a God who loves everything? A God who is so loving and gracious that nothing we do really matters so go ahead and live any way you want. After all, it’ll all be forgiven and “once saved, always saved” no matter what, right?

Do we have a God that is so just that we should probably live in constant terror of him lest we stick one toe over the sin line leading to God raining fiery retribution on us?

What about those people around you? Those you come into contact with each day? Do they even believe in God and if so, what God? Have they been told all their lives that God is a sweet old man with a long white beard who just can’t wait to get them to heaven so that they can sit next to him playing a harp for a billion years?

Have they been told all their lives that God is actually a big bully who hates them because they can’t do everything perfectly and couldn’t be more disappointed in how they turned out?

Are we talking about a God who can be trusted?
Are we talking about a God that we need to be afraid of?
Is it a God that Jesus had to save us from?
Is it a mockable God?
A weak God?
A tyrant?
A genie to grant wishes?
An immovable God?

We may say the word God to ourselves and especially to others but we need to know what they believe about God in order to have an actual conversation with them.

You may hear people say, “Well, we can’t know all that about God so you just need to take a leap of faith.”
I have found that whenever someone said that to me, they absolutely meant that I needed to leap towards their view.

I can have an hour long conversation with a Mormon about God and Jesus and we can leave believing that we think the exact same way about the matter. And it’s because we are using the same words but it’s very possible that those words have very different meanings to each of us.

If we just haphazardly throw out a “God will take care of you” to someone and leave it at that… what if that person has been taught their whole life that God “takes care” of people by punishing them for their mistakes?

So it seems like this verse, to me, is God calling us to have a deeper understanding of who we believe God to be and since he is “One”, he is the only God, we should really get to know what others are talking about when they talk about God.

The verse also mentions something familiar. The word “all”.

Loving God with our all.

What does that look like for you?
Does that mean for you that you need to be loud…
extreme…
big…
impressive?

Or does it mean loving God with the whole of who you are?

Heart, soul, and mind

Again we see the Jesus Life leading to the Jesus Way and Jesus Truth. Our actions and beliefs should be given to God in totality.

Does this mean that we can even come to God with less than 100% of ourselves?

In Matthew 6, Christ talks about trying to serve two masters and how if we do, we will hate one and love the other. This is a warning, a signpost showing what will happen if not 100%. It’s just how our nature works. It’s what’s going to happen.

If we hold back parts of ourselves from God, if we try to be the master of pieces of ourselves, then have we been faithful to this verse?

And what does that tell us about whom we believe God to be? A God we can’t trust to handle all of our stuff? All the bits of us?

I think it’s interesting that the Shema starts with “Hear, O Israel”. A command to the people of Israel, to the people of God. Not Hear, O Egypt or Hear, O Babylon.

I wonder how often we hold others to the standard that God has set for his people. I wonder how often we judge those who don’t know God by the same measure we are to measure ourselves.

But they still need to know God and how will they know… How will they come to understand what God is like… His Church.

But here’s the rub… they will know God by both the good and bad actions and beliefs of his Church.

And so we come back to knowing who God is and what it means to love him with all of ourselves.

I don’t know what it’s like to have people drag me from my bed in the middle of the night only to be stripped of all my possessions and thrown into a boxcar headed for who knows where.

I don’t know what it’s like to have people take my children away at gunpoint from our village and to have my son forced into violent warfare and my daughter sold as a sex slave.

I don’t know what it is like to have my parents betray me to the government secret police because of my religion and held without trial for years and years.

I think that any time someone preaches on the topic of forgiveness, there is more than one person who wonders, sometimes angrily, how forgiveness is even an option for people who have had such atrocities foisted upon them.

How dare we even suggest that Nazis in Germany deserve to be forgiven for the killing of 6 million Jews?

What right do we have to think that rebels in Darfur deserve forgiveness for what they have done to families and children in their already war-torn country?

How does someone have the audacity to believe that someone’s closest relatives should be forgiven for a betrayal that would lead to imprisonment in a Chinese prison for years on end?
Hard to answer those questions. Especially since I have never gone through what those people went through.

And a huge part of me is very sympathetic to those arguments. When I hear it with my ears and see it through my eyes, I don’t see the fairness of it. In fact, the injustice of it becomes almost overwhelming.

And yet, when I look at the Scriptures, which I have said that I believe to be the record of God’s revelation… I seem to find a different story. In Matthew 6- The Sermon on the Mount; in the story of the Good Samaritan; at the table of purpose in Psalm 23… I seem to find a view that says “deserve” doesn’t have anything to do with offering forgiveness.

And when I think about it, it the “undeservingness” of forgiveness that actually makes it worth something.

So how do we reconcile these two seemingly incompatible ideas?

Maybe it is too much for some of us to start off forgiving the acts of genocide.

Maybe we need to start working on something closer to home.
Can we come to a place where we forgive the Al Qaeda terrorists who murdered 3000 Americans 10 years ago? If not, try closer. Can we forgive those terrible Republicans who are trying to steal the welfare of old ladies and little kids or those evil Democrats who want to ban God from the world and abort all those little kids? If not, try closer.
Can we forgive our coworker or boss who makes our lives a living hell day after day in the work place? If not, try closer.
Can we even forgive a family member who has hurt us so deeply that it seems the wound will never scar over?

As I think about it, I imagine for some it might be easier to forgive the faceless terrorist than it is to forgive the loved one who broke our heart.

So no matter what the hurt imposed upon us, I suppose that forgiveness is usually a tough thing to muster up inside of us.

But I am reminded of the greatest crime in history. The greatest betrayal ever committed in the world. And as the Lord God of Heaven was placed upon a crucifixion tree and the whole of humanity stood below him guilty as sin and as undeserving as anyone has ever been, his words were…

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

And if there can be forgiveness even in the midst of that, there can be forgiveness anywhere.

Forgiveness for others. But also forgiveness for ourselves. I think it is so important that we are honest with ourselves when it comes to this. Is there something or many things that we have hidden deep within our hearts for which we have never forgiven ourselves?
Is there something that sits on you and weighs you down, something that constantly tells you a story about yourself that is false and destructive?
Find that. Root it out. Know that until you are able to forgive yourself, you can never really forgive others.

Something we don’t often think about is the idea that maybe some of us need to come to a place where we forgive God for something.
Blasphemy! I know.

But I think that a lot of times, we blame God for all the hurt and pain and struggles of lives. Not everybody but enough. We cannot reconcile in our hearts how a good and loving God can allow things to happen to us. And we are taught that we dare not question God or get mad at God, so we shove those feelings down and lock them up and they fester and rot until that blame turns into hate.
I believe with my whole heart that God is big enough to handle it.
I believe with my whole heart that God would rather us be angry and honest than subservient and false.
Scripture shows us over and over again that God can deal with angry. God can deal with honest.

Who in your life needs to be forgiven? God, others, yourself?

And bear in mind that forgiveness is not a happy good time wiping clean of the slate.
Our actions still have consequences.
When David, a person after God’s own heart, made choices that led not only to adultery but to cold blooded murder, the Lord sent Nathan to show him his sin.
And David repented.
And David was forgiven.
But the consequences remained and his mistakes affected him, his wife, and his son.

So it’s not a matter of having to choose between justice and forgiveness. They are not mutually exclusive in any way.

And it seems to me that of all the attributes of the Kingdom of God, forgiveness appears to be as essential as it gets.
If we are serious about emulating our example and serious about that Kingdom being here on earth as it is in heaven, then we must be a people of forgiveness.

But not just giving forgiveness to others, but also seeking forgiveness for ourselves.

Christ tells us in Matthew 5 that if we are about to give an offering to God and we remember that someone has a beef with us, we need to leave that line immediately and try to make things right with that person.
This is how important Christ thought receiving forgiveness was. Leave your offering. Seek out the person you have wronged. Try to set things straight. Put your pride and ego aside and repair your relationship.
We talk a lot about giving forgiveness but it seems to be important to also seek it out. To give people the opportunity to forgive.

It is a humbling thing to ask for forgiveness. And we do not like to be humble. We want to think that we are somehow more deserving of forgiveness than those who have hurt us, than those who have betrayed us.

But we have all owed a debt. A debt that we could not pay. Do we actually think that our debt is less important or less valuable than someone else’s debt?

Don’t be fooled. Don’t believe the false story that would have us be an unforgiving people. That would have us be a people who don’t believe that we need forgiveness from others.

Think about the cost of forgiveness this week. Think about what it means to offer it and receive it.

When I was 6 or 7 years old, I was in the pool with my family. It was a normal day, like any other day. Sunny and hot. Texas has a few of those days. At some point, a bee or wasp or something that flies and stings landed next to us in the pool. My dad, in an attempt to save us all from the wretched beast, splashed it out of the water. Unfortunately, as soon as it was free from the water, it took a sharp left turn and stung me right on the eye socket. That… hurt. A lot.

Later that summer, I was spending time with my grandparents and I was at their pool. As I was enjoying a ride down their slide, a horsefly bit me in the eye socket. In the exact same spot.
Not only did this one hurt, my whole eye and most of the left side of my face swelled up.

30 years later, I can still picture both of those things.
And for years and years after that summer, I had a fear of bees. But not only bees. I didn’t like anything that buzzed and flew. Didn’t matter if I knew that it couldn’t hurt me. When one came near, a feeling welled up in my stomach that told me that I needed to be afraid. It was an emotional and physical reaction.

Fear is a very real thing that each of us encounter in our lives. In a lot of ways, it can define our lives. How do we deal with fear? Do we let fear rule our values and therefore control actions or is there another way?

David in Psalm 23 was telling us something about fear.
David knew, through personal experience, that we all eventually walk through our very own valley of fear. Probably many times more than once. It’s not really even a matter of if but of when.

So you have been there. You will certainly be there. You might be in your valley of fear right now.

So what are you going to do?

So many of us decide that it is too much for us, that it is too hard to do anything other than set up camp right there in that valley.

The valley becomes, not a place of transition and trial, but our home. After enough time, it is amazing what can begin to feel like home to us.

How many of us cower in the presence of our enemies as we wallow in our valley?

How many of our enemies—sorrow, hurt, loss, greed, pride, anger—have we let rule our little fear empire?

How many of us still think that our enemies are people, people usually camped out in their own little valleys of fear?

And it’s during these times that we usually think that we are most alone. Sure, maybe we do some praying for God to magically escape us from this terrible place but what if that is not what is best for us.

Can God really be so cruel as let us languish in this place?

Even worse, can God be so short-sided to maybe even have led us here?

And yet, it is the rod and the staff that guide us. It is the rod and the staff that guide us to the green pastures. They lead us to the still waters.

Could they not have led us to the valley of the shadow of death?

And if they have, if God has, then why? For what reason?

In the story of the Good Samaritan, we are challenged to ask ourselves who our enemies are. But even more than that, what is our responsibility towards people who we must now consider our neighbors no matter what we thought of them before.

As we treat them as God treats them, we notice their suffering. We bind their wounds. We make arraignments for their continued well-being because that is who our Father is and what he requires of us.

We feed them. And here in the Psalm we see a table.

In Christ’s story of the Great Banquet, we are told of another table that is prepared. A table overflowing with good and wonderful things. A table that is eventually surrounded by those, who at first and maybe even second and third glance, we would never expect to be invited to such a place.
A table at which we find the empty seats of those whom we would have been certain to see.

The table in Psalm prepared for us in the presence of our enemies. Why? What sense does that make? A table that we are supposed to sit at and relax at smack dab in the middle of this horrible rotten valley.

Do we feast at the table in their presence so that we can scoff at them or make fun of them? To taunt our enemies with our abundance?

Doesn’t sound much like the God I know.

I think that as much as we would like to think of ourselves sometimes as having a special “in” with the Big Guy so that he’ll hook us up with the good stuff, this is not a table for privilege. It is a table for purpose.

It is a valley where we can begin thinking of our enemies as our neighbors. A place to not simply take pity on people trapped in their fears but to stand next to them. A place where we are able to invite them to this table and share with them the overflowing goodness and mercy that will follow them the rest of their lives.

So go back to why we are lying in this valley in the first place.
I think it’s because God isn’t afraid of the valley. And if the shepherd isn’t afraid of it, why should his sheep be?

All fear is just the corruption of something good. God tells us not to worry about what we are to eat or drink but we don’t believe it, so we fear that we will not have enough. God tells us that the last enemy has been conquered but we don’t believe it, so we fear our death and the loss of those we care about. God tells us that he is love but we don’t believe it, so we fear.

1 John tells us that perfect love drives out fear. In perfect love, there can be no corruption, there can be no fear. Because fear involves punishment.

I wonder if we fear things like loss of security, ill-health, abandonment, worthlessness, because we think those things are punishments from God.

But again, perfect love drives out fear. Love, true love, not fluffy storybook love, is what sustains us in the valley. It is what lets us sit at the table and offer people a place next to us. It is what lets us travel through the valley of the shadow of death with the same confidence we would have if we were lying beside still waters.
Because our shepherd leads us there. And he is not afraid.