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Thank you, Soulidified (our youth group) and all of your helpers.  It was a great supper last night, maybe even the best one yet!

           

Hespeler, 7 February, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Amos 5:21-24, Matthew 5:1-10, Psalm 82

      Such justice is not always completely satisfying, of course. If a terrible crime, such as a murder, is committed, we may be glad to see the perpetrator punished but we also recognize that even the sternest of sentences – even the death penalty where it still exists – cannot entirely satisfy. After all, no punishment, no matter how severe, can ever bring back a murder victim. For most of us, justice may be a good thing, but it is really only a way to make the evil of the world a bit better. It doesn’t make the evil go away.

      So there you have two words, righteousness and justice, about which we may have some mixed feelings. We would see them, however as two very different words with quite different meanings. Now, what if I were to tell you that the Bible only has one word? There is a word in the Bible that is sometimes translated into English as righteousness and sometimes as justice, but is just one word in the original languages. This is true both in the Hebrew of the Old Testament where the word is tsedeq and in the Greek of the New Testament where it is dikaiosunē.

      Think about that for a few moments. Every time you are reading in the Bible, and you come across the word righteousness, the people who translated that verse made a choice and could have used the word justice. And every time you see justice, it could have been righteousness. How might that change how we read some of our most well-loved passages?

      But an even more important question is what did that word – the original Hebrew or Greek word – really mean to the people for whom the Bible was written? And I think that that question can best be answered by taking a look at our Psalm reading this morning. Psalm 82 is, in many ways, one of the strangest chapters in the entire Bible. It presents what appears to be a meeting of what is called the divine council. God – the God of Israel – is there and is clearly presiding over the meeting. But there are other figures at this meeting and the strange thing is that they are all identified as gods. This is something that marks this Psalm as very strange in the biblical tradition which is generally quite insistent that there is only one God and that any other gods that people identify are merely false gods or idols.

      There are, however, a few biblical texts like this one that speak of the relationship between the God of Israel and the gods of other nations in the way that we see in this psalm. It is perhaps a throwback to older ways of thinking before that strong strain of Jewish monotheism fully developed. Or perhaps it was never really intended to be taken literally. After all, remember that a psalm is poetry.

      The message of the psalm is very serious, whether you take it literally or not, because in it we see God judging the gods of these other nations of the earth and condemning them – even threatening them with death. Why? There is really only one reason: justice, that very special word that is, in Hebrew, tsedeq. God condemns the gods of the other nations for their failure to act in justice. So, when God tells them what they have done wrong, we have a perfect description of what, in God’s eyes, justice is really all about. “How long will you judge unjustly, God asks, “and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

      So here we see what tsedeq – justice and righteousness – really means to God. It is not primarily about individuals being upright and pure and moral, though it does include that. And it is not primarily about criminals being fairly punished for crimes either, though it does include that as well. The justice that God is particularly talking about is mostly about how certain groups in society are treated – specifically the weak, the orphans, the lowly, the destitute and the needy. That is what God is criticising the gods of these other nations about, their failure to protect and provide for those sorts of people.

      So tsedeq (justice and righteousness), as defined by the Bible, is first and foremost about how people are treated in society. It is about treating people fairly and as equally as possible. And since there are some people in society (such as the rich and the powerful) who have certain advantages and often prosper at the expense of the less powerful, justice often looks like someone going out of their way to protect or support the weakest, poorest and most marginalized members of society.

      This kind of justice also has its basis in the very nature of God. The reason why, in the psalm, the God of Israel is able to criticize the gods of these other nations is not because his nation is stronger than theirs. On the contrary, Israel was a rather insignificant nation in world affairs at that point in history. Nevertheless, God may judge and condemn the gods of these other nations because God knows what real justice is. In fact, the very definition of justice is found in the nature of God.

      The Prophet Amos understood that that was what God really wanted. He looked around at the people of his own day and this is what he saw. He saw people who were trying to look righteous. They were doing the kinds of things that made them feel like they were better, more religious and more pious than other people. They were doing the things that, they thought, would make God approve of them – things like observing holy festivals and solemn assemblies to talk about righteous things. They were offering burnt offerings to demonstrate how good and righteous they were. But they were not doing justice. In fact, Amos observed that they were doing the very opposite of justice as God saw it because they were profiting and enriching themselves at the expense of some of the poorest and most marginalized people in their society.

      That is why Amos knew that he could speak to them and rebuke them in the name of God. He told them what God thought of their so-called righteousness: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.” God clearly doesn’t care for what this world often thinks of as righteousness – at least, not for the outward showiness of it all. What God does desire, Amos says, is clear, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

      Just realizing that there is only one word in the Bible that is translated sometimes as justice and sometimes as righteousness is something that can actually revolutionize the way that you read your Bible. For example, take this well-known and well-loved verse that we read this morning from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. We read it in a translation that is probably quite familiar to most of us. Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

      You know, I always thought that I knew what that verse meant. It meant that if you sought to be righteous – if you did your best to always do the right thing, to be pure and spotless and maybe better than other people, you would be rewarded. You would get the righteousness you were looking for and you would receive a reward from God for your dedication to what was right. And yes, it does mean that. But is that what Jesus (and the gospel writer) primarily meant for us to understand?

      Remember that that word that is translated as righteousness is the word dikaiosunē– the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word tsedeq. That means that the verse could have equally well been translated as, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled.” That is to say that those whose greatest desire is the kind of justice that God was demanding from the gods of the other nations in Psalm 82 – the kind of justice that particularly consisted of protecting the weak and helping the poor and saving those who had no one to help them – that these are the ones who are blessed.  Somehow I think that Jesus may have had more of that side of the idea of justice in mind when he said this.

      I mean look at what Jesus went on to say from there. Jesus ends this whole part of his sermon by saying, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” And, once again, the word that is translated as righteousness there is the Greek word, dikaiosunē.  Now what, exactly, did Jesus think that people might be persecuted for?  Was he predicting that you would be persecuted for doing the right thing, for being pure and better than everybody else? Well, sure, perhaps. That might happen sometimes.

      But isn’t it a little bit more likely that you will run into persecution because you are working for justice? Think, for example, of Martin Luther King Jr. thrown in the Birmingham City jail. Why was he put in there? For his excessive righteousness – for being too pure. No, not him. He actually had some problems along that line. But he sure was thrown in jail for standing up for and demanding change for a certain group that were systematically disempowered in American society. He was persecuted for justice – biblically understood justice – and not really for righteous.

      And I think that this is exactly the kind of situation that Jesus had in mind when he spoke about persecution. That’s why I think that he had the same thing in mind when he spoke of those who hunger and thirst for justice and promised them satisfaction.

      I think that the practical applications of this one are pretty clear and straightforward. We have spent too much of our corporate Christian lives in the pursuit of righteousness. And I don’t mean righteousness in the sense of being the best people that we can be and doing the right things as much as is humanely possible. There is nothing wrong and everything right about pursuing that kind of righteousness. No, the kind of righteousness that gets us in trouble is the kind that makes us go through motions of religiosity and then makes us feel like we must be better than other people because of it. I have it on good authority from Amos that God hatesthat kind of righteousness.

      We need to let go of that and pour our hearts into the pursuit of justice for the sake of the displaced, the homeless, the weak and the forgotten. That is what will bring us closest to the heart of God. This week, your assignment is simply to do that. Find someone who, for whatever reason, is marginalized or disempowered in our society. Look around, I don’t think that such people are too hard to find. Do one thing, however small, to demonstrate God’s love to them and do it without judging them in any way. That is what God is looking for. It is what God calls justice.

     

Hespeler, 31 January, 2016 © Scott McAndless

2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20, John 14:1-17, Psalm 8

ne Tuesday morning several years ago, I was busy, working in my office, crafting a sermon, when I was interrupted by a phone call. The woman on the other end of the line only introduced herself as Sister Eunice. She wouldn’t say who she was calling for or what her goals were, but she wanted to ask me some questions. I, perhaps somewhat foolishly, agreed to try and answer them.

      She started asking her questions and it quickly became clear to me that, in her mind at least, I was on trial and that if I did not give what she saw as the right answers, she would judge me a heretic or worse. Then she asked this question: “Is Jesus Christ God?” She wanted a yes or no answer.
Actually, I guess she wanted a yes answer. But let me tell you something: the Christian church spent a few hundred years trying to figure out how to give anything but a yes or no answer to that very question. The answer it did come up with is something called the Trinity.

      I’m going to confess something to you here. I have never really wanted to preach a sermon about the Trinity. This is not because it isn’t an important topic in itself, but because I have just found that it isn’t all that important to people.

      Oh there was a time when it was considered to be vitally important. Did you know, for example, that there was a time when there were regularly riots in the streets of the City of Alexandria over the question of what was the precise relationship between the Father and the Son? Did you know, that, in the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa complained that he couldn’t go anywhere in the City of Constantinople without someone wanting to argue with you over the Trinity. He said, if you asked someone for change, they’d try to start and argument over whether the Son was begotten or not, is you asked the price of a loaf of bread, somebody would tell you that Father was greater than the Son; if you asked whether your bath was ready, the attendant would go on and on about how the Son was created.

      Now those are people who are really engaged in the question of the Trinity. People today, by contrast, have almost no interest in the issue whatsoever. They want, like Sister Eunice, to declare that Jesus is God and get onto other much more important things. The Trinity has just become this completely theoretical concept that you’re supposed to agree with but that has absolutely no practical application. Yes, you can find places where people earnestly discuss Trinitarian theology, where people disagree, but you are not going to find anyone taking it as seriously as people once did on the streets of Alexandria or Constantinople.

      Now, on one level, I do find that to be a really good thing. I am glad that people don’t feel the need to attack and hurt one another over or cause riots over slight disagreements about the relationship between the Father and the Son. But, at the same time, isn’t this stuff supposed to matter? And yet we behave like it doesn’t.

      The Trinity is not really a Biblical concept. Yes, there are a couple of references to the formula, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the New Testament. We read both of those texts this morning. But those are not statements of fully formed Trinitarian theology. What we do find in the New Testament are reflections on the experience of the people in the early church. These earliest followers of Jesus had experienced something very powerful. Somehow, in this person of Jesus of Nazareth, they had experienced the presence of God in a way that they had never experienced it before. They also knew that Jesus had said a number of things that, at least when they remembered those statements afterwards, seemed to indicate that he also understood himself to be the revelation of God – statements like the one in the Gospel of John where Jesus says, “If you know me, you will know my Father also.”They also knew that they continued to experience the presence of God in the life of the church through the action of the Holy Spirit among them.

      I am convinced that that is about as far as those earliest Christians went with their thinking about the nature of Jesus. They didn’t seek to precisely define the relationship between the Father and the Son or the Son and the Spirit. They just knew what they had experienced. And besides, they were kind of busy doing other things: preaching the gospel, acting with compassion, dealing with some persecution of their faith here and there. Who had time for a philosophical discussion of the internal relationship of the God that they had experienced in three ways?

      And then something happened. A guy named Constantine happened. Constantine was fighting to take over the Roman Empire and, on the night before his greatest battle, the story goes, Constantine received a vision that told him that, if he fought under the sign of a Christian cross, he would prevail. He did, he won, he became Roman Emperor and before you knew it, Christianity had gone from being an outlaw religion to the most important religion of all.

      We have no way of knowing how genuine Constantine’s conversion was but some have noted that it may have been a politically smart move for him to make. For one thing, his army was full of Christians and fighting under a Christian banner was a great way to win them over to his cause.

      Constantine also had another problem. The imperial administration was in a mess. And, as he looked around, the Christian Church was about the only institution that was organized enough to unite and hold together an empire that was falling apart. He was looking to use the unity of the church to build up the unity of his empire.

      But there was a problem: the church wasn’t united. As soon as the persecutions ended and the church found some breathing space, guess what happened. People started to find the time to have philosophical discussions about the internal relationship of the God that they experienced in three ways. And, lo and behold, when it came down to defining it and putting it into words, they didn’t quite agree.

      In particular they disagreed over what was the precise relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Did the Father create the Son? Had the son always existed? Were they equals or was one greater than the other? Those kinds of questions.

     Well, Constantine wasn’t going to have that kind of disunity in a church that was supposed to reunite his empire. So this is what he did: he brought all the church leaders from all of the different parts of the empire together to a place called Nicaea, put them in a big room and said, “I don’t care what you decide, just agree on something. You’re staying here until you do.” And that is when the church basically came up with the doctrine of the Trinity and in particular the statement of it that we find in Nicene Creed that we read this morning.

      So that kind of answers the question of why church came up with the particular doctrine of the Trinity at that time. And it maybe helps you understand why it was important to Constantine that they agree even if he didn’t care what they agreed. What it doesn’t explain is why everyone apart from Constantine was so worked up over the question. Why were they rioting in Alexandria? Why was it the only topic of conversation in Constantinople?

      Well the reason why has much more to do with politics than with theology. This is the thing that people miss: Constantine, and the Roman Empire with him, may have embraced Christianity at least as a political tool, but there were some things that did not change. Most importantly, Roman Emperors had, ever since the days of Caesar Augustus, been seen as divine. They were gods. And Constantine, despite his need of the church, did not, give up his divine status. He was still a god and that was one of the foundations of his political power.

      And, in that political context, the discussion of the place of Jesus within the Trinity takes on a different meaning. If Constantine is divine and Jesus is divine and both are subordinate to God, than it becomes easy to see the emperor and Jesus as equals. It makes it easier for the emperor to act with divine authority over the church and all Christians – to demand their unquestioning obedience. There were many Christian leaders who went to Nicaea and argued for that position, but they lost of course. The final decision that was made at the Council of Nicaea was to make it absolutely clear that the Son was in no way subordinate to the Father – not in his creation and not in his nature.

      Constantine may have professed not to care what the church decided, but he did come to regret it. He and many of his imperial successors ultimately rejected the decisions of the Council and embraced the heretic position that the Son was subordinate to the Father. It was just easier to run the Empire as they wished that way.

      So, in that sense, what the church was arguing about at the Council of Nicaea was not just some theoretical question. It was a vital, every day question that was well worthy of being discussed in every bakery, every bath house and every home. The question was, who do we really answer to: Jesus or the emperor.

      I am a Trinitarian Christian. I believe in a God who is one and yet I recognize that I have, and the Christian body has, experienced that one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I’ve never really worried about the matter much beyond that. I’ve certainly never got caught up in those ancient arguments over what are the precise relationships between the persons of the Trinity. Those seemed to be theoretical formulations that had little to do with the practical needs of a Christian life.

      But recognizing that the people who fought for the decision at Nicaea were fighting for some very practical implications of how God was going to be seen in the empire makes me think that maybe some of those fine distinctions that they made can be useful to us.

      For example, the question that Sister Eunice asked me all those years ago, “Is Jesus God,” could be one of those fine distinctions that matter to us. I know that simply affirming that Jesus is God is something that a lot of people do today, but the Christian faith decided a long time ago that it cannot just be as simple as that. To say that Jesus is just God does not adequately capture what Jesus has done for us.

      Yes, it is true that Christians believe that we have experienced God in this person of Jesus. But we cannot say that Jesus is God without also confessing that he is fully human. We cannot talk about Jesus divinity without talking about his humanity. It would not have been enough for Jesus to simply be God and pretending or appearing to be human. The whole point of having a saviour like Jesus us that he understands what it is to be human with all of the problems, all of the weaknesses and all of the temptations that go with that. If Jesus had not been completely and utterly human, it would not have mattered that he was divine because he would not have connected with us in any way that mattered.

      And when we confess that Jesus is totally human, and yet completely divine (as the church confessed at Nicaea), it also does something else. It elevates Jesus above any authority – including church authorities, civic and political authorities –  that this world can muster. What Jesus asks of us is more important than what any of those other authorities can ask. That doesn’t mean that we cannot choose to honour and respect such authorities when we deal with them in this world, of course, but there is a remarkable freedom that is given to us as followers of Christ, of the one who is, “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made.” We answer to a higher authority to any found in this world.

      My challenge to you this week, therefore, is simply to live as a Trinitarian Christian. What that means, in my mind, is not that you have to wrap your mind around some complex definition of the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What it practically means is that, when you come up against very human problems in this world – weakness, temptations, fears – you remember that you have an advocate on your side in Jesus who understands what you are going through. That can make a whole lot of difference.

      And when the powers of this world get you down – the gods of this present age (whether they be the market, the power of consumerism, the power of racism or hatred) – it means remembering that there is a higher authority to whom we answer and that you are set free to serve the one God – the God made known to us in Jesus Christ.

Hespeler, 24 January, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Mark 1:14-20, Ephesians 4:17-5:2, Psalm 32

ccording to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus really only had one sermon – one message that summed up all of the others. “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’” That is how Mark introduced the entire preaching ministry of Jesus – essentially a three point sermon: 1) The kingdom of God is here. 2) repent and 3) accept that this is good news.

      And all evidence seems to indicate that his message found an audience. People appreciated it and received it as the good news that he said that it was. Think about that for a moment: the centrepiece of the message is repent. When was the last time you heard somebody telling people to repent and it sounded like good news to you?

  
    If you were walking down the street one day and a little bit ahead of you at the street corner you saw a man preaching and every other word that he shouted was “repent,” how would you react? Would you say to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like he’s got a happy good news message,” and eagerly run forward to hear what he had to say? Or would you cross the street and pass him on the other side, staying as far away from him as possible? I know what I’d do! So I find it actually quite amazing that Jesus expected and received such a positive response. It makes me wonder, are we actually using the word repent in the way that Jesus used it?

      What does repentance mean to you? I would imagine that most of us would say that repentance has to do, most of all, with feelings. Repentance, to most of us, means feeling sorry for something that you have done or in some cases that you have failed to do. And feeling sorry is not a very pleasant feeling. It is one that most of us do our very best to avoid feeling. So, ifrepentance is primarily a feeling, Jesus would be telling everyone, “The kingdom of God is here everyone, you should all feel really bad.” That does not sound like very good news. But what if, when Jesus was talking about repentance, he wasn’t talking about a feeling?

      The other problem with the notion of repentance that is a bit of a stumbling block is its connection with guilt and forgiveness. The assumption is that repentance is something that comes out of our feelings of guilt and that is a requirement before forgiveness is possible. This leads into all kinds of calculations and insecurities.

      For example, say that I have a friend who hurts me in some significant way. Maybe they say something that I perceive as very insulting. But, as hurt as I may be, that person is a friend nevertheless so I want to forgive them be there is this requirement (or at least this expectation) that, in order for there to be forgiveness there must be repentance. So I’m waiting for their repentance.

      So my friend comes up to me and says, “Gee, I guess that you totally got all upset at what I said and you think I owe you an apology. Well, I guess, sorry.” And then, you see, I have a problem because what we normally do at that point is that we judge that act of repentance, don’t we? In particular, we ask if it was sincere – did the person really mean it or were they just saying sorry because they were forced to do it. And the assumption is that, if it is not sincere or heartfelt, that it is not real repentance and so I shouldn’t forgive.

      This idea can particularly mess us up our relationship with God where we make the same assumptions. In the practice of the church, we are regularly called upon to confess our sins and repent of them and so many of us have fallen into the practice of listing out all of the things that we have done wrong and telling God how sorry we are for them.

    But then some of us fall into this cycle where we start to question our confession and repentance. Was it sincere? Did I really feel as sorry as I said I did? And there are Christians who fall into this pattern of being afraid that they are not forgiven and can’t be forgiven because their feelings of remorse just are not strong enough.

      So again, if that was what Jesus was actually saying, how eagerly would people have heard that? Basically, he would be inviting people into endless and fruitless speculations about whether they felt bad enough about themselves (or their friends who had wronged them felt bad enough about themselves) for forgiveness to happen. That doesn’t really sound like good news to me. But what if, when Jesus was talking about repentance, he wasn’t talking about it as a necessary prerequisite for forgiveness?

      You see, we are all raised into certain ways of thinking about and seeing the world. We are also formed by the things that happen to us (both the good and the bad things) that condition us to think in certain ways about ourselves and about the world and about God. This way of thinking and being is the “mind” that the word metanoia is referring to.

      In our reading this morning from the Letter to the Ephesians, we have a really good description of how those early followers of Jesus lived through that experience of going beyond the mind that you have been given: “You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts,” the apostle writes “and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”That was the kind of experience that Jesus was inviting people into. He was asking them to put aside the falsehoods they had been taught to believe, the delusions that they clung to and the ways of their life that were no longer nourishing them and to embrace renewal in the spirit of their minds. And I can definitely imagine people hearing that as good news – a chance at a pretty exciting new beginning.

      Now, does going beyond the mind that you had involve feeling sorry for and having regret for the mind that you had before and what you did with it? Absolutely, it certainly can and often does. But feeling sorry is not central and not always necessary to the experience of metanoia. So you do not have to waste any more energy judging whether your own or somebody else’s feelings of remorse are sufficiently sincere for there to be forgiveness.

      And what is the connection between metanoia and forgiveness anyways? Well, there is a connection. An experience of going beyond the mind that they previously had can certainly help to put someone in a position where they can really experience forgiveness. But I would not say that metanoia is a necessary prerequisite for forgiveness. Please listen to this carefully: God doesn’t forgive you because you repent. God forgives you because of Jesus and what he has done for you. God forgives you because he loves you. God rejoices when you go beyond the mind that you had, but he doesn’t wait on that to offer you forgiveness when that is what you need.

      Now, one thing that metanoia certainly does include is a change in action. When you change your ways of perceiving and thinking about the world, changes in behaviour will naturally flow from that. But sometimes people do miss that first step and attempt to practice repentance by merely reforming their behaviour. And so we make resolutions. We tell ourselves that we need to try harder to be better and it doesn’t work. You have to change your mind before you can change the behaviour that springs from that mind.

      People also have trouble when they go through a metanoia experience and they decide that they need to make some changes in behaviour but then those changes don’t come as easily as you might think. The ways of thinking may have changed but they find that old habits and patterns ofbehaviour are pretty deeply ingrained even though you don’t see those things in the same way anymore. This can be discouraging, but it is no reason to despair. It is a common experience, connected to the very nature of our humanity, but you will find that if you hold fast to your renewed mind and trust in God, the change that you truly desire will come.

      I know that we sometimes avoid dwelling on the notion of repentance in the church these days. Of course, it is not all that surprising that we wouldn’t want to talk about repentance if we’ve been assuming that repentance is all about feeling sorry and guilty all the time. But I think it is time that we realize that repentance, at least repentance correctly understood, is exactly what we need most.

      But the really big question is, if it’s not going to be us wallowing around in feelings of regret, what does genuine metanoia mean for us today. Do we all have some repentance to do? Absolutely. But what mind do we have to change or go beyond? I would suggest that a true exercise of metanoia really begins with an examination of your thought patterns (and not your actions). Nevertheless, your actions might still be a good indicator of where your mind is leading you astray.

      So I am going to suggest an exercise in metanoia that I want you to try this week. I’ll bet that at some point this week, you will do something that you are not entirely happy with. (I mean, it happens to most of us often enough.) You might do something that disappoints you. Say you act in a way that puts down or belittles someone else. Maybe you act in a way that is prejudiced or mean. Or it could be that you fail to do something – fail to speak up for yourself or someone else who really needs it, fail to help someone when you could have.

      Just keep your eyes open, I’m sure something (small or large) will come up at some point this week. And, like you have probably done before, you will be inclined to condemn yourself for your failure and perhaps make a resolution to do better next time. Well, this is what I want you to do differently this week: don’t do that. Don’t focus on your actions (apart from making any amends for them if you need to).

      Instead, I challenge you to engage in metanoia. Ask yourself, prayerfully and with God’s help, not what you did wrong but what were the thought patterns that led you to act in the way you didn’t like. Did you put someone else down because you struggle with your own self esteem? Is there some event in your past that makes you fearful of a certain group of people? Were you looking for validation? Acting out of fear? Were you afraid to care, to risk, to share?

      Prayerfully seek to understand the mind that made you act as you did and then prayerfully seek a new mind that goes beyond the one that you have. Immerse yourself in the truths that will overcome the lies that we all tell ourselves. That is what true metanoia means. If you begin there and your patterns of thinking change, you may find that your actions change too slowly and that you keep disappointing yourself, but don’t give up. When you practice metanoia, real and enduring change is possible. And that is good news for anybody.