New Year's Reconciliations
On the Monday before Christmas – another day when temperatures climbed into the mid-70s – I took a long bike ride. I was pondering this month and the series of sermons and after-worship gatherings circling around the theme of reconciliation.
I had Paul’s words to the Corinthians running around my brain. You know the words; I use a few of them often in the assurance of God’s grace and mercy:
“From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 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. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
I was tempted on that unusually warm afternoon – just like yesterday – to focus on humanity’s urgent need to reconcile with creation itself lest “White Christmas” became a reference completely lost to future generations living with the inconvenient truth of global climate change. But that global reconciliation is not unrelated to Paul’s message nor to the idea of New Year’s reconciliations, let’s begin small and local.
How many of you made a resolution for the new year? I know I did. In fact, on that same bike ride last month I developed quite a list of things I’d like to do better, or, at least differently than last year – including not spending Mondays – my day off – thinking about sermons! I’ve already blown that one – did it on New Year’s Day, in fact: a Monday and a holiday, to boot.
Ah well, perhaps the others will go better. Among those things I’ve promised myself: to waste less time; to get more exercise; to read more; write more; and be more careful about what I consume – both in terms of calories and media consumption – watching bites and bytes, you might say. A more or less typical list, I reckon.
You may be wondering, at this point, if I’ve forgotten the sermon title or lost track of theme of reconciliation in this recitation of resolutions. I don’t think so because, you see, most of the resolutions that we make – whether at the beginning of a new year or in the middle of the thing – most of them are signs that point to places and circumstances and relationships in our lives that need reconciliation.
This is nothing new under the sun, although it is also always particular and unique to our own lives and circumstances. This was true in Jesus’ time as the people streamed out of the city to the river on the edge of the wilderness seeking renewal in the baptisms performed by that ultimate outsider, John the Baptist.
“Repent!” John cried. “For the kingdom is near.” Repent – turn your life from its old ways and be reconciled to God’s ways. Repent – turn from fearful striving and be reconciled to God’s way of love. Repent – turn from broken relationships and be reconciled by God’s way of mercy and compassion. Repent, and be reconciled.
That is the core message that John proclaimed in offering the cleansing and renewal of baptism. Jesus takes that core message and deepens it: from a baptism of water to one of fire and spirit that remains still a call to repent and be reconciled.
We celebrate this core message each week in worship when we offer a prayer of confession and follow it with an assurance of forgiveness. “This is the good news of the gospel,” we proclaim, “that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven. Thanks be to God.”
Now it would be easy to walk away from that feeling a simple absolution. We’ve been forgiven, there’s nothing more to be done. It would be an easy grace or, to borrow
Bonhoeffer’s phrase, a cheap grace.
The ministry of reconciliation is about so much more than that. It is, indeed, about what it means to live in Christian community. As Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, puts it, “to live a ‘forgiven’ life is not simply to live in a happy consciousness of having been absolved. Forgiveness is precisely the deep and abiding sense of what relation – with God or with other human beings – can and should be; and so it is itself a stimulus, an irritant, necessarily provoking protest at impoverished versions of social and personal relations.”[1]
The ministry of reconciliation is not merely something that we do, as Christians, it is who we are. It is not an adjunct activity of those particularly gifted at mercy, it is how we are called to live our lives. It is not merely something that we ritually reenact each Sunday in worship, it is what we are sent in the world to act out again and again and again in each and every relationship of our lives.
In a society of broken marriages and families, in a culture of fractured communities, in a world of deep and violent brokenness, the ministry of reconciliation is crucial. In such a world, there is no more important witness that we can make than figuring out how to be a community of true and deep forgiveness and reconciliation.
So I invite you, in this season of resolutions and renewals, to join in a journey of reconciliation.
We will explore the practices of forgiveness and reconciliation this month in several ways – in sermons and in the small group experiential learning that Rusty Lynn is going to lead us through this morning and in two weeks, and we will seek ways together of living more fully and deeply into this call that was sealed in us at baptism and that we remember and celebrate when we gather at table.
So, let us come to the table: a community of reconciliation called the church, the body of Christ in the world given a ministry of reconciliation for the world. Come to the table knowing that, in Christ, you are a new creation. Come, from whatever background and situation or orientation, knowing that in Christ, none of that matters. Come from north or south or east or west. Come without fear. For, as Isaiah said, “Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; 6I will say to the north, "Give them up," and to the south, "Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth—7everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."
posted by David Ensign at
6:46 AM
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