Are you the stumbling block?

Scripture: Luke 17:1-10

Prior to working at camp, I volunteered for a number of years with the youth group at my church in the Minneapolis area. For the most part, I loved the work I did there. We had a great group of kids who were excited about Jesus and made the Wednesday night gathering a priority in their schedules. Despite the reality that they went to over a dozen different schools, they truly were friends and made a point of getting together as often as schedules (and parents!) would allow. To this day, I still see many of them having stayed in touch when I log into Facebook despite a decade or more having passed since they were in high school.

Eventually, the youth pastor decided that he needed to step down for a variety of reasons, some personal, some public. I was one of the first and few to know outside his family and church staff when it was decided that he could stay on until after our mission trip, after which we would tell the youth and the rest of the congregation. That meant around 2 months of keeping the news to myself if I remember correctly. On the plus side, I had lots of time to sit with him and make a plan for transition time. On the down side, his upcoming departure was not my news to tell even when I would hear the kids making plans for the upcoming summer and school year.

His departure was tough. The Sunday it was announced had very few dry eyes in the congregation. For many, he was there one week and gone the next. As for the youth group, we suddenly found ourselves without a leader who, in some way, had become a father figure for a lot of kids with big, hard things going on in their families from divorce, to mental health hospitalizations, and even to the death of a parent. I found myself leading our group of volunteers as we tried our best to be there for kids while honestly feeling a bit hurt and betrayed by church leadership ourselves.

I won't pretend I as an individual nor we as a group of leaders navigated that next season perfectly. Far from it. We did the best we could but we were all volunteers and we found ourselves stuck in the middle of a LOT of inner church turmoil over the next two years. We made mistakes.

Several years ago, I came face to face with some of the mistakes I made when one of the youth, who was now a young adult, reached out to me. She wanted to tell me just how much she was hurt by choosing not to tell her certain information and enforcing certain policies for the youth group during that time. There wasn't a lot I could say then, nor still today, that would make that hurt any less beyond apologizing, expressing my sorrow that she felt caught in the middle, and asking for grace as a volunteer who was put in a situation with no good choices.

In Luke 17, we see Jesus turning from addressing the Pharisees as he finished the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) to addressing his disciples. In the Greek, the word for temptations is skandalon and it is also commonly translated as offenses. In the Greek, skandalon comes from the word for a bent-stick which is used to spring a trap or set the bait as well as to refer to a stumbling block or something that people would trip over. It is used both positively, as when people "trip" over Jesus and negatively as when someone gives false counsel or purposely causes division for the sake of causing division.

Jesus is telling his disciples that there are traps set in this world. Because we live in a fallen world, people are going to fall into the trap of sin. It is inevitable. However, they should take care that they are NOT the ones setting the traps. It would be better to die a rather horrible death by drowning than to be the one who causes someone to fall into the traps laid by sin in our world.

And when someone inevitably sins, even if that sin is against you, what are we do? Too often our instinct to stand aside and let them struggle, to let the trap close in even tighter on them. Instead, Jesus says we are offer them forgiveness. We are to offer them freedom from their sin and enable them to once again stumble about in the world and attempt to avoid the trap of sin. It isn't our job to judge their sincerity, only to continue to free them.

This Gospel always makes be think of that one girl who reached out to me from my former youth group. For her, for that season in life, try as I might not to be, I was a stumbling block for her. From small things like wrapping up small group prayer time by 8:30 as requested by parents, to bigger things like expressing concern to her parents, I never seemed to be able to do anything right to help her process, heal, and move forward. Looking back, I don't know what I would have done differently and trust it is something we will both understand better in heaven.

But what I can tell you is hearing her say that she had forgiven my mistakes was an unexpected weight lifted. I know going forward in ministry I will make mistakes, I will unintentionally hurt people simply because I'm not perfect. However, it leaves me with the challenge to do everything in my power to not repeat my mistakes because death by millstone enforced drowning sure doesn't sound like fun.