Remembrance Sunday – How do we live as God calls us to do?
Revelation 22:1-5; Matthew 5:43-48
We all have our own stories to tell – the things that we remember, that have been good positive memories or painful difficult ones. Sometimes things turn out well, despite the difficulties, and sometimes they don’t. In times of war, people so often find themselves running- sometimes to safety, sometimes to even greater danger and they may find that people help them or they may not. But it’s not just the big international situations of conflict that may be part of our story. We may have been bullied: at school, at work, at home. We may have neighbours we can’t cope with. We may have conflicts at home, in our churches, our neighbourhoods. And in all this Matthew’s gospel has Jesus telling us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. How do we begin to do that? Is it even reasonable to expect us to? ( to read more click on the title)
In order to begin to live in this way we need to understand that this kind of expectation is not reasonable. It goes way beyond our normal cultural values- however we arrive at those. But that is what the kingdom of God does. It takes what we regard as reasonable and turns it upside down, shakes us up and then asks for more. It takes us beyond what is comfortable and fits nicely into our lifestyles and asks of us those kinds of things which may make our lives really hard. So forgiveness; so love; so mercy.
Having recognised that the next thing is to see that what is being described here in this kingdom language is what God is like. God, in Christ, prays for his persecutors, forgives those who nail him to the cross. We are being asked here, as always, to look to God ; to turn away from our own limited expectations to what God can do in us.
Revelation 22 gives us a picture of the river, flowing out through the city streets into all the surrounding countryside. The trees that grow there have leaves which are for healing of the nations. Healing, reconciliation, making peace – that’s what the river does. And where does it flow from? From the throne of God. So it is in God that we can love our enemies. It is in God that healing and reconciliation is possible. It is in God that we can go beyond what is reasonable and join with others in welcoming strangers, in meeting with people we might find threatening, in taking the risk of trusting those that we have learnt to fear.
That was the vision of the writer of Revelation- writing from a place of persecution and danger. Could it be yours?
