Today is Yom Kippur

September 23, 2015 – 8:43 am

Yom Kippur began last night at sundown, a time when Jews restore their relationship to God through repentance for their offenses. It’s the culmination of a ten-day period of reflection, repentance and return known as “teshuvah.” Repentance can be a refreshing, joyful act, says Louis Newman, a professor who has both studied and practiced it. Prof. Newman makes repentance sound so healing that it makes me want to do it regularly–and so we should. Today is a reminder to us all of the wonderful gift of repentance.

 

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LCMS Dispute Resolution

September 18, 2015 – 5:53 pm

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has invested a lot in peacemaking. I was part of their effort in the late 1990’s to train hundreds of district superintendents around the U.S. in Christian mediation, in hopes that they would be able to resolve pastor-parish conflicts internally, and well.

So it was with real sadness that I came across this case, Hillenbrand v Christ Lutheran Church, wending its way through the Michigan court system. Richard Hillenbrand was pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in Birch Run, Michigan, from 2005 until 2012, when the church let him go. He apparently requested a hearing before the LCMS Dispute Resolution panel, which was held in August 2012. The church decided not to participate in that hearing, and withdrew its membership from the LCMS. The DR panel recommended that the church review its decision to terminate the pastor, and that it award him backpay.

Presumably the church did not follow the decision of the DR panel, because Pastor Hillenbrand filed a wrongful termination action in circuit court, basically asking the court to reinstate him as pastor. The legal issue was whether the court had the jurisdiction to review a church decision, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s decision that it did not.

I can imagine Pastor Hillenbrand’s unhappiness at being terminated by his church. I suspect that the church was divided as to whether to keep him as their pastor, but the people who wanted him gone had more power. Pastor Hillenbrand no doubt felt vindicated by the DR Panel’s decision, yet frustrated that his church ignored it. He probably believed his former church leaders were in the wrong, and that this was highly unjust. His decision to file a civil suit was probably encouraged by supporters miffed by the church’s decision to withdraw from the LCMS rather than heed the Dispute Resolution panel’s advice.

So I understand the desire to seek justice in the civil court – but I can’t agree with it. As St. Paul says, “The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already.” (I Corinthians 6:7) In other words, even if the pastor had won the lawsuit, he would have lost the spiritual battle, by continuing to fight with his Christian brothers instead of forgiving and loving them, and by airing internal church matters in public, tarnishing the name of Christ. But he didn’t win; many resources were devoted to years of litigation, for naught.

The court came to the right conclusion, but it had to dig deep into LCMS constitution and bylaws to do so. It’s ironic that we live in a country that allows churches to make their own decisions, yet Christians regularly ask courts to review church decisions. If courts did rule on church decisions, Christians would complain about government interference; instead, it’s the courts that are continually reminding Christians to take care of their matters in their own churches and quit bringing them to court.

The LCMS Dispute Resolution system was designed to effectuate I Corinthians 6:1-7, by providing a church-based process for resolving disputes among the brethren. This case reveals a flaw in the LCMS Dispute Resolution system: a party can thwart it by withdrawing from the LCMS. Even though the process continues to a decision, and even though the process specifically prohibits a party from terminating their membership in a manner that renders the decision inapplicable (LCMS Bylaws, Section 1.10.2), in fact there’s no way to enforce it against the party that is no longer within the LCMS.

My hope now is that the hurting people at Christ Lutheran Church — and Pastor Hillenbrand — will turn to my good friends at Ambassadors of Reconciliation, a ministry devoted to reconciliation within the LCMS, to find healing and reconciliation from this sad event.

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Rep. Gamrat Apologizes

September 8, 2015 – 4:25 pm

Michigan Representative Cindy Gamrat apologized today before a House legislative committee for her role in a scandal involving fellow legislator Todd Courser.

The West Michigan legislator apologized “for the failures I’ve committed, which do not reflect the heart of who I am, the values I believe in, nor the people I serve. I humbly ask the forgiveness of God and my family and my colleagues for the hurt and difficulties my failures have brought.”

She accepted the summary findings of a House Business Office investigation, which determined that she and Mr. Courser misused taxpayer resources to hide their affair and inappropriately mixed official and political business. She acknowledged for the first time that she had a role in the May email designed to discredit allegations of their affair.

I would never want to be in Ms. Gamrat’s shoes, but we all can improve on the quality of our apologies, so studying public apologies can be instructive.

This apology is not bad. Measured against Peacemaker Ministries’ “Seven A’s of Confession,” it meets most of the criteria. She may not have “Admitted specifically” everything she did wrong, but the fact that she accepted the findings of the House report, including owning up to involvement in the email, which she had previously denied, is good.

One of the 7 A’s is, “Accept the consequences.” The House is considering a recommendation that she be censured, not expelled, and she asked for censure today. She said she did not want to resign. A sign of genuine remorse is a willingness to accept whatever consequences may result from the offense. This apology would have been more powerful had she yielded herself to whatever consequences her colleagues and her constituents deem appropriate.

The timing is also problematic, in terms of the sincerity of her apology. She lied to the House committee that was investigating the matter last month, perhaps hoping that her role in the infamous email wouldn’t come to light. Now that the committee is considering censure, she admits to wrongdoing. It looks self-serving rather than totally sincere. This apology would have been more meaningful had it come when the affair was publicly revealed August 7.

Ms. Gamrat is meeting tonight with constituents in Fennville. They get to decide whether her apology was sincere, and whether to forgive her.

 

By abfifer | Posted in Apologies | Comments Off on Rep. Gamrat Apologizes

Forgiving Nazis: “I Highly Recommend It”

July 16, 2015 – 3:18 pm

Eva (Mozes) Kor was ten years old when she arrived from Hungary with her family at Auschwitz in May 1944. Despite experiments performed on her by the infamous Josef Mengele, she survived, and now runs a memorial to Holocaust victims in Terre Haute, Indiana, called CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors). Her twin sister also survived Auschwitz, but her parents and other siblings all perished there.

She has forgiven the Nazis. She announced this in a German courtroom in April, during the trial of Auschwitz “bookkeeper” Oskar Gröning. Now 94, Gröning was sentenced this week to four years in prison for his role in the “death machine” that was Auschwitz. Groning acknowledged his “moral guilt” in the deaths of 300,000 during the summer of 1944, but said that the “enormity” of his guilt made it impossible for him to ask for forgiveness. “I don’t consider myself entitled to such a request. I can only ask forgiveness of the Lord.” Some Auschwitz survivors do not believe this was an apology, and I find enigmatic his comment that his guilt made it “impossible” to apologize. The offender’s responsibility is to acknowledge the offense and ask for forgiveness; it’s up to the victim to determine whether to forgive.

But it was enough for Eva Kor. In a radio interview this week, she explained why she forgave Gröning: “He has repented, he has said he was sorry, what else can he do? …everybody deserves a second chance.” She noted that “revenge accomplishes nothing,” it would not return her family to her, and she wanted a chance to reclaim her life.

In the statement she made to the court in April, Mrs. Kor explained that she had the opportunity in 1993 to meet one of the Nazi doctors who worked at Auschwitz, Hans Münch. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Dr. Münch met her at Auschwitz in 1995 to sign a statement testifying to the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers, to refute Holocaust-deniers. Kor was grateful, but wondered, how could she thank a Nazi? She said she thought about it for ten months, “and one day the idea of a letter of forgiveness from me to Dr. Munch came to my mind. I knew he would like it, and for me it was a life-changing experience. I realized I had power over my life. I had the power to heal the pain imposed on me by Auschwitz by forgiving the people who caused that pain.”

“Many people hold onto pain and anger. Unfortunately, this does not help the survivors, and that is my only focus. My forgiveness has nothing to do with the perpetrators. It is an act of self-healing, self-liberation and self-empowerment. It’s free, everybody can afford it, it has no side effects and it works. I highly recommend it.”

She also noted that her forgiveness did not absolve the perpetrators from taking responsibility for their actions. But she was disappointed with the prison sentence for Gröning; she would have preferred that he be required to tell young people about the truth and evils of Nazism.

Eva Kor does not indicate, in either her court statement or the radio interview, whether there is a divine component to her forgiveness. She describes her reasons for forgiveness in what might be called “therapeutic” terms—for her benefit. Christians have an additional reason to forgive: we know that God forgives us, and Jesus commanded us to forgive one another. Despite these compulsions to forgive, Christians find it very challenging—myself included. So it’s humbling to hear of a person who came to this discovery on her own, and seems to be completely at peace with it. If Eva Kor can forgive the people who murdered her family, how can I as a Christian withhold forgiveness for lesser offenses? I’m grateful to Eva Kor for her example.

 

 

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Exonerated

July 7, 2015 – 5:12 pm

I’ve been moved by the recent revelation of a wrongful conviction here in Grand Rapids. When he was just 16, Quentin Carter was found guilty by a Kent County jury in 1992 of raping a 10-year-old neighbor girl and sent to prison. He served his full sentence—17 years—, despite his good behavior in prison, because he refused to admit to the parole board that he was guilty.

Now he has been exonerated. The real rapist, Aurelias Marshall, was the live-in boyfriend of the girl’s mother. The girl, now in her 30’s and still living in Grand Rapids, told police recently that, after Marshall assaulted her, he beat her until she could convincingly tell the story he told her to tell, that three young men had dragged her off her house porch and one had raped her. Marshall arbitrarily selected Carter, though he barely knew him, because he lived a few doors down and Marshall happened to see Carter’s name on papers in the trash.

This all came to light only because the “cold case” team at GRPD began investigating Marshall for a different felony, an unsolved murder from 1990. In the course of their investigation, they interviewed the rape victim, who told them that Marshall and not Carter was her attacker. That set the wheels in motion for Carter to be exonerated.

There are many aspects of this story that are disconcerting, to say the least. The girl’s mother didn’t report the rape until ten days after it happened. After the rape occurred, Marshall pled guilty to first-degree child abuse for abusing this girl, so wasn’t he at least suspected of the rape as well? Carter passed a lie detector test but the prosecutor’s office went ahead with the trial. Perhaps most troubling to me is that the victim says she went to the prosecutor’s office on two different occasions over the years to recant her story, and they would not listen to her.

I wrote in March about a prosecutor in Louisiana who has belatedly apologized for convicting an innocent man. Kent County Prosecutor William Forsyth, who was also chief prosecutor at the time of Mr. Carter’s conviction, has apologized to Mr. Carter on behalf of his office. The trial prosecutor, Helen Brinkman, is now in private practice in Grand Rapids.

But another reason that this story is so moving is that the now-exonerated Mr. Carter told a Grand Rapids press reporter last week that he’s not angry or bitter. He was quoted as saying, “You put everything in God’s hands and leave it at that.”

 

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