Followers of Christ washed with forgiveness and fed with forgiveness, even as we are sinners, cannot and will not refuse it to another. No one was denied Christ’s table. Jesus consistently moved his table beyond the boundaries and lines of purity, righteousness and acceptability. We who eat at that same table, who kneel to receive strength for our own personal forgiveness, are called to rise and look honestly at the sin of our corporate life, of the system of “how things are.” We are connected to the larger world at the table of Christ.
The forgiveness we receive compels us beyond our own hurts and fears into significant realities of the world’s pain, injustice and sin.
Forgiven followers of Jesus go where Jesus went. Regularly practicing our sacraments of baptism and eating at the table of life gives us the power to forgive. When we find that source, we move beyond the walls the world erects and break them down through our acts of genuine, hard, gritty forgiveness. We become freed people who free the world!
This message is excerpted from “Healing after brokenness” by AmyJo Mattheis in the July 2017 Café online magazine. Today we commemorate Catherine Winkworth, 1878, and John Mason Neale, 1866, hymn translators.
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