Posted on 12/28/2016 6:29:13 PM PST by marshmallow
At today’s General Audience Francis said “faith is not just silence that accepts all without answering back, hope is not a certainty that safeguards you from doubt and uncertainty”
Complaining to the Lord is a form of praying. This was Abraham’s lesson, which the Pope reminded faithful of at the last General Audience of 2016, underlining that “so often, hope is hidden in the dark but helps us go on”. “Faith is also fighting with God, showing him our bitterness without any pious pretence,” because, Francis said continuing a series of catecheses on Christian hope, “faith is not just silence that accepts all without answering back, hope is not a certainty that safeguards you from doubt and uncertainty”.
Abraham, “believed, maintaining a steadfast hope against all hope, thus becoming the father of many peoples,” St. Paul wrote in reference “to the faith with which Abraham believed in the word of God,” the Pope added, “who promised him a son. This really was hoping “against all hope” as what the Lord had announced was highly unlikely given that the elderly man was almost 100 and his wife infertile. There was no way out but God said there was so he believed Him”.
Trusting in this promise, Abraham “sets on his way, agrees to leave his homeland and become a foreigner, hoping in this “impossible son which God was supposedly going to give him even though Sarah’s womb was as good as dead. Abraham believes, his faith opens up to a seemingly unreasonable hope; it, Francis said, is the capacity to go beyond human reasoning, beyond worldly wisdom and prudence, beyond what is normally considered good sense and to believe in the impossible. Hope opens new horizons, it gives us the ability to dream the unimaginable. Hope allows us to......
(Excerpt) Read more at lastampa.it ...
Good Lord. This pope is a piece of work. And, may I remind you, it doesn’t say much for the cardinals who voted him in. The Vatican has a long, sordid history of “taking care” of wayward popes. He needs to shape up, or the world just might be treated to another round of smoke watching.
Yet God also said Job was right in complaining to him. Job 42.7
God has big shoulders - if one is hurting and howls to the moon asking God why He let it happen, God will still comfort His child. He loves our acknowledgement of Him as “God” even when we are hurting too much to be polite or trying to argue with Him - He ain’t no pansy/snowflake.
“After 2 years I am finally able to thank Him again.”
No question I should remember to be more grateful....A fault not uncommon I suspect in this nation of plenty....
This is an awfully “blanket” statement to make, plus it makes one wonder if mirrors should be used by those making them.
If that were literally completely so, that one could not thank the good Lord for anything at all for two years, that would be a pretty grim perspective indeed.
Could this have meant just with respect to that lost child?
But even if it was about everything, maybe this was a lesson that was needed to demonstrate the ways in which the Lord can operate. Even daring God — God can take the dare if it is sincere, and even furnish a gracious anger rather than a wrathful one. Like another said, we are not talking about a wimp or a snowflake.
Also with respect to the lost child — in the Jewish tradition even today there is a tradition that God must by all means be praised on behalf of the lost person. Because God had made that lost person what he or she was. Or as in Christendom we might say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” God does not want the lost child to have so preoccupied his or her parents that even God had been forgotten, as if the child were ultimately the chattel of the parents rather than loaned. Consider perhaps God had a mission in heaven for that child and, unless he or she passed at that time, this mission could not be fulfilled. Things that seem stupid and pointless to us, aren’t stupid or pointless at all in the Lord’s larger plan.
OK this was a wordy discourse. As for the pope, this was a good beginning on the subject, one that concerns people in all sectors of earthly Christendom. I wouldn’t want to stop there. I’d want to outline ways in which such conflicts will resolve. And to encourage reading through stories about this in the bible. The bible has many wondrous stories in it with which we can identify.
I meant a gracious ANSWER rather than a gracious anger but maybe that was a fortuitous slip.
God can get angry at the road blocks in your life and still be gracious in how He pushes them to the side. I think of how He, though angry towards Moses for his diffidence, still brought Moses’ brother into the picture to help.
And though it may seem a little Christian chauvinistic to do so... I’m not ashamed, when I go to a typical US grocery store or merchant, to say that yes, if it weren’t for gospel belief, mankind would not have gotten off the ground like this and we’d still be living like what we are calling third world today. And at once I marvel at what the Lord has done, what that little babe who started out in the manger brought to pass, and this is just the very beginning, folks. The entire industrial revolution was hope-driven. Mere pride of man, with no other foresight, will crow and be preoccupied about the trivial. The spiritual capacity of man to worship, met by God, will be lifted up to higher and higher visions. The execution won’t be perfect on this mortal coil. But it will definitely stand as a witness to God — God knows the score, no matter what man may pretend.
Ping to all just because this is an important thing to look at. Forget me. I’m just another peanut in the gallery. But please don’t forget God and forget a fitting perspective on God.
I don’t know....fighting with God means you believe in Him, trust Him to hear you. Fighting is in a large way, crying out for help, for wisdom, for understanding. It demonstrates one is aware of circumstances larger than what is in front of them.
What is unacceptable is walking away from that heated prayer as an unbeliever.
Jacob Wrestles With God
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
27 The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
28 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[a] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”
But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel,[b] saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel,[c] and he was limping because of his hip.
http://www.crosswalk.com/faith/spiritual-life/how-wrestling-with-god-will-change-you-forever.html
And God is really master at the “gracious rebuke.” An art that has been lost in much of Christendom. It has started to show up, again, in the seemingly unlikely place of Donald Trump’s own art of the deal.
It means being kind enough to your audience that they understand that you care, while being frank enough to your audience that they understand that you are serious about the problem that must yield.
People view God as only being one dimensional. He’s angry at everything or He’s smiling at everything. The ability to combine the two in an overall constructive manner really seems to escape a lot of people’s minds! The troubled, often wrong, but still idealistic (in many ways) pope has managed to “bumble” into an important perspective here. I’d be giving praise to the Lord for the way He works, and be less concerned about the pope as original source. But again (maybe to stir the pot a bit) that was some of what ole Martin Luther was trying to raise consciousness about. He didn’t want to start a rival church. It started when enough people disagreed with enough of what was going on that they felt they couldn’t even worship in common. This doesn’t have to go on forever. But Christians the world over will have to let God work attitude adjustments in their lives if the church is to reunite as one.
Good post I couldn’t agree more.
God doesn’t want a fake relationship. He wants our entire heart which includes our anger, pain, and frustrations with Him.
Someone said it best though when we go to Him like this we should always end as His Son did: not my will but yours be done.
Again though this doesn’t mean we are to be fake in our acceptance. I maintain it’s ok to leave it at that (accepting His will but not being happy about it). At least for the time being.
I think Mother Angelica said it best when she famously said: sometimes Jesus and I aren’t on speaking terms. I think that encapsulates what the Holy Father was getting at perfectly.
Indeed, just before expiring on the cross, Jesus said “Why hast Thou forsaken Me?” In a way that would have been rhetorical, since Jesus certainly had head knowledge about it. But His heart was now loaded down with the sin of the world, and His heart had been pulled away from the Father’s love because of it, and was now in the realm of the Father’s wrath. His heart felt the conflict to the fullest.
But it ended up with “Into Thy hands I commit My spirit.”
Then, He was free to die. And “It is finished.” That’s it. God the Son has now borne this sin. The person laying the burden borne of sin upon Jesus, will find it borne back and the thing that had been sin saturated, now permeated with heaven. Jesus has washed with His blood.
Because in fact that is part of our sin that needs cleansing.
Jesus did not, in pique, say “I’ll forgive your sins, but only if you weren’t someone who actually nailed me to this cross.”
Letting Himself be nailed and showing His love when it happened, guided by His infallible foresight, was an amazing act. But it brought us Christendom which has survived through the worst abuses as long as those abuses did not extend to refusing to accept the personal ministry of the spirit of Christ to carry out His cleansing and redeeming work.
The more I look at this, the more I (yeah I know I am a crazy evangelical, but still) want to tell people just stop when they’re panning the pope for this. Just stop. Sometimes we’re in the position of nailing Jesus to the cross. Because we do not understand — because we lack the heart knowledge and faith, or put biblically, we acted in ignorance and unbelief, we do this. Jesus says, nail Me if you must. I will even love you after that, in fact I planned to do that. And once we start to understand and accept that love, then our hearts will become mollified, and we won’t be nailing Jesus so badly any more. We will still tack Him from time to time, but sin will be eased out of our lives through His truly selfless love.
Insofar as prayer is communication with God...
Not an interpretation I favor, though.
And talking about reunification, or for that matter just this troubled pope.
What Francis is today, doesn’t have to be what Francis is tomorrow. He too, along with the rest of the world’s sinners, nails Jesus to the cross. Which Jesus has already arranged a gracious response to. Will Francis permit Jesus to mollify his own heart? Maybe Francis will, and we’ll start to see Francis caring, but now from love principles directly, about things that have been so important to traditional Christendom but seem to be getting short shrift from Francis right now.
There is a Roman Catholic prophecy, I believe, that the pope corresponding to Francis would be the last pope. Let me dream as a crazy evangelical, please humor me if I am wrong but give me patience to see if maybe I am right. What if a new era of Jesus’ grace comes upon the world. We may be seeing independent signs of it coming in Donald Trump’s (and Mike Pence’s) success and unusual influence even before the previous US president has officially left. What if the hearts of many members of Christendom are transformed with a love unprecedented in history except, perhaps, for the very early church. What if somehow the churches finding themselves wanting and finding ways to unite. What if Francis says “this new united body needs no pope; I am honored to have been the last one of the former Roman Catholic part, but now we have shed denominational boastings.”
This is just a dream, but the bible says “your old men will dream dreams.” Maybe the younger ones will begin to see visions. Things more powerful than the dreams of ole rednecks like me well into middle age.
I would beg: please don’t automatically hoot at everything that is going on with Francis. Francis looks like a Jesus rebuild job to me, still in progress, still with some bothersome areas of wreckage and ruin, but with some very interesting features too.
Maybe we should say it is not the most preferred practice. However, God will accept even it, in preference to being ignored. The rage that cares enough to nail Jesus to the cross, can be transformed into righteous anger at Satan once its holder understands that he was acting in ignorance and unbelief.
I’m saying this as a crazy evangelical, so right away you know what my bias is. But humor me please, and maybe I might actually be right.
I think yes he is a piece of work — a Jesus rebuild job, not a wallpaper and paint job. Along with all the messes it will have when partway through.
And I think yes, cardinals can’t take any pride in this. Neither should any man. This is a Jesus job.
And I think as far as smoke watching is concerned, maybe we will watch the smoke of the incense of a reunification of the church (into something that looks, since I am biased I say this, somewhat like crazy evangelical, but which undoes the splintering). No more will a man say I am Roman Catholic, or I am Orthodox, or I am a Protestant (let alone of whatever sub-denomination). He will say I am a Christian and I am proud and delighted right out of my sinful soul of what Jesus has done and is doing.
Old news, actually.
“Israel” means to “struggle” with God.
“islam” means to “submit” to allah.
You are correct. We see the weaknesses of the current Pope but he is never the less a Bishop with a flock.
It’s pleasant to see other Christians (and not just Catholics) talk about Reunification in positive terms. Thanks.
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