Reconciled to be Reconciled
We cannot expect to achieve reconciliation simply by ignoring the pain and hurt caused by our actions or the actions of others.
18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.[1]
Throughout both of his letters to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul is writing to a church ripe with divide. The Osteens, Driscolls, and Furticks of the Corinth created dividing lines within Christ’s body. The church in Corinth is divided as many were pledging loyalty to different celebrity pastors of the first century. Imagine that, celebrity preachers before Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Paul’s words are intended to remind the church, then and today, that while the consequence of our sin has led to division, God seeks nothing less than full reconciliation with humanity. The reconciliation God seeks is different from the reconciliation we seek after we wrong someone or we are wronged. God is after something more cosmos-shaking than reconciling with a co-worker after he microwaved fish in a communal kitchen just before you were about to begin a Wednesday night Bible study. Still, then you took the job and punchline too far.
Author Jemar Tisby, our guide for Lent, invites us to consider how fractured our relationships are with one another and God. He writes that racial reconciliation is not a desire to return to the days of Leave it to Beaver or an era where the greatness some experienced was at the expense of others. Instead, Tisby writes that reconciliation is reviving our relationships to match God’s functional pattern more closely for human interactions.
Retired United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon writes, “’Reconciliation’ too often focuses… upon interpersonal reconciliation without focus on systemic and structural justice. Many black people push back against the call for ‘reconciliation’ because it presumes there was a time when we were in a right relationship. It also implies that we work toward reconciliation from an equal footing.”[2]
This fundamental pattern has alluded to humankind for as long as sin has further our separation from God’s holiness and one another.
The Apostle Paul is inviting the church to return to their, our, baptismal covenant, remembering that we have been raised to new life in Jesus Christ. A life where the pain and separation of our sin are no more, and we can begin to bridge the divides in our human relationships.
Much of the reconciling work we see or invite others to participate in can feel like we are taking one step forward and 15 steps back. We think we have made some progress – we have identified the walls (literally and figuratively) that Pastor Sara mentioned last week. We devise a plan, literal and theoretical sledgehammers in hand, prepared to engage in what the late Congressman John Lewis called “good trouble.” The wall is before us. We take a swing, stepping into action to uproot and dismantle, pledging to overcome the systemic causes. Then, just as it feels like we are making progress, another headline – local or national – pushes our efforts back.
Reconciliation can feel as though it is so far out of reach or that our individual and communal efforts have no last effect in furthering community building with Imago Dei as the foundation.
18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.[3]
God is reconciling the world. In Christ, God has reconciled the world. This is the already and not yet reality of the Kingdom of God.
The Church – in Corinth, Arlington, and wherever the good news of God’s salvific work is proclaimed – has been trusted with this message. And what is the message?
“While we were yet sinners, God died for us, and that proves God’s love for us.”[4]
God is the active agent in our reconciliation with God and one another. This message of divine reconciliation is baked into our story. It is our story.
During World War II, as war devastated Europe, Brother Roger began praying and worshiping God in solitude while caring for Jewish refugees escaping the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
Nearly 80 years later, “the Taizé Community is made up of about hundred brothers, Catholics and from various Protestant backgrounds, coming from around thirty nations. By its very existence, the community is a “parable of community” that wants its life to be a sign of reconciliation between divided Christians and between separated peoples.”[5]
For the Taizé Community, reconciliation can only occur through prayer, repentance, and penitence.
There has been a significant movement throughout our nation as we reckon with the divides caused by racism. Statues, idols of racism and hatred, are being toppled. In this act of reconciliation, not only are the monuments being removed but new monuments are being built to honor the legacy of those whose work to dismantle racism in our communities was snuffed out too soon, yet whose legacy lives on. Yet, the sin of racism, a sin that has yet to be confessed by many, hinders the reconciling work of tearing down these idols.
The reconciling work of God is how the Kingdom, the Kin-dom of God[6], inches closer and closer to fruition. And the difference between God’s reconciling work and our attempts could not be more different.
God’s starting point is grace and forgiveness.
Grace – God loving you before you knew it and then transforming you, justifying you from the inside out as you, as we move closer to sanctification.
Forgiveness – you are forgiven. Period. This is amazing news, considering we each know the things we have done to fail at following God’s top ten, which Christ distilled into his top two, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,”[7] and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[8]
Our starting point often ignores Christ’s commands of beginning with love, beginning instead with talking points and what Paul calls “human standards”[9] for how we interact with one another. And unfortunately, our human standards are laced with sin and corruption, both of which prevent us from reconciling our brokenness on our own.
Without the help of God, without God at the center of everything we do, with prayer, fasting, and self-denial, the work we so desperately want to happen will always fall short. Our starting point often lacks prayer, fasting, and meditation on God’s holy scriptures. There is a reason the season of Lent begins with an invitation to a Lenten practice - Without these practices, without “self–examination and repentance; prayer, fasting, and self–denial; and reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word,” the reconciliation we seek puts us as the acting agent, not God, and the Church bears witness to the grand work of God rather than our attempts to fix that which we continue to mess up.
In other words, we cannot expect to achieve reconciliation simply by ignoring the pain and hurt caused by our actions or the actions of others. We must be willing to confront the reality of our brokenness and seek healing and forgiveness from one another.
And God steps into our brokenness.
God’s grace is amazing, cutting through the lies we tell ourselves and others. Lies like, “things are not as bad as they seem,” “I’m not a racist; I have a black friend,” or “I know they need somewhere to live; I just don’t think our neighborhood is right for them.”
Until we realize the task we have set before us cannot be accomplished without divine intervention, we will continue with our one-step forward and 15-step back routine. And this is where the Good News lay.
Our sin has not separated us from God. God is continually seeking us out despite our sins, despite the ways we have mucked up what God created and called good. And in seeking us out, in reconciling us to God, God is extending an invitation to each of us to be part of the reconciling work that began when in the water of Mary’s womb and when our sin thought it could stop the reconciling work of God, the light of Christ’s resurrection proved that God’s grace, God’s mercy, and the reconciling work of God cannot, and will not be snuffed out.
[1] 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, NRSV
[2] https://day1.org/articles/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003f3d/will_willimon_preaching_to_confront_racism
[3] 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, NRSV
[4] https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/book-of-worship/a-service-of-word-and-table-i-and-introductions-to-the-other-forms
[5] https://www.taize.fr/en_article6525.html
[6] Using this term in place of “Kingdom” is my attempt to be open to being transformed, understanding that the word “Kingdom” is laden with baggage and harm that I am beginning to understand. I guess you could say the veil is being removed.
[7] Matthew 22:37
[8] Matthew 22:39
[9] 2 Corinthians 5:16