Here We Stand, V: The Ministry of Reconciliation

2 Corinthians 5:16-21; The Confession of 1967

July 21, 2013

The Confession of 1967 opens with a helpful reminder to anyone studying Christian creeds and confessions:

“In every age, the church has expressed its witness in words and deeds as the need of the time required. The earliest examples of confession are found within the Scriptures. Confessional statements have taken such varied forms as hymns, liturgical formulas, doctrinal definitions, catechisms, theological systems in summary, and declarations of purpose against threatening evil.

“Confessions and declarations are subordinate standards in the church, subject to the authority of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, as the Scriptures bear witness to him. No one type of confession is exclusively valid, no one statement is irreformable. Obedience to Jesus Christ alone identifies the one universal church and supplies the continuity of its tradition. This obedience is the ground of the church’s duty and freedom to reform itself in life and doctrine as new occasions, in God's providence, may demand.”

Our time is, at once, no different while also unique. That may sound contradictory, but I believe it is true of each moment in history. We are, as the apostle Paul put it 2,000 years ago, “working out our own salvation day by day in fear and trembling.” The human condition is constant across the infinite variety and distinctiveness of each age.

To understand why people in a given moment in history chose to speak of their faith in a particular manner, it is always helpful to understand a bit of that history. Take the United States in 1967 … please, as Henny Youngman would have said.

I could recite a bunch of facts for you, but, instead, I’ll just play this piece, released by Simon and Garfunkle at about the time the crafters of the Confession of ’67 were ending their work:

Silent Night/7:00 News

The sad thing is, all we really need to do is change a few names and datelines and the news remains. Not sure why we call it news, when it’s all that old.

Here would be something new: naming, proclaiming and enacting reconciliation across the lines of division that have marked our nation for at least the past half century.

The truly remarkable thing about the Confession of 1967 lies in how plainly, honestly and accurately its drafters named their present time. In April, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his now-famous “A Time to Break Silence” sermon at the Riverside Church in New York. In it, he named the “triple evils” of racism, militarism and poverty that plagued the nation.

The Confession of 1967, formally adopted in May of that year, was the result of eight years of work by faithful Presbyterians, and it noted the same three issues as “particularly urgent at the present time,” added a fourth – which it calls “anarchy in sexual relationships.” In that context, the confession proclaims four matters of faith quite clearly:

1.      In reconciling love, God overcomes the barriers between sisters and brothers and breaks down every form of discrimination based on racial or ethnic difference, real or imaginary.

2.      God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ is the ground of the peace, justice, and freedom among nations which all powers of government are called to serve and defend. The church, in its own life, is called to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace.

3.      The reconciliation of humankind through Jesus Christ makes it plain that enslaving poverty in a world of abundance is an intolerable violation of God’s good creation.

4.      The church, as the household of God, is called to lead people out of this alienation into the responsible freedom of the new life in Christ.

Reading the confession again last week I was struck once more by the prophetic tone of a text that dared to name the present time. Whenever I read this confession, I wonder how well or poorly we might do if charged with naming our present time. Another way of asking that question: what are our great moral blind spots?

It’s easy to look back and criticize our forebears for the things they missed or, more often, the issues they simply avoided. German Christians who prayed in church on Sunday and went about the business of the Third Reich on Monday and somehow didn’t see the disconnect. American Christians who went to church on Sunday … with their slaves worshipping in the balcony and somehow didn’t see the disconnect.

The Confession of ’67 demands that we confront the present time through the lens of our faith, and to do so with the honesty that compels us to confess our own deep brokenness and our complicity in and profit from deeply flawed systems and sinful institutions.

The challenge of the Confession of ’67 always leads me to think of the deep contradictions that reside in every time, and, indeed, within every human heart. Thomas Jefferson declared for the nation that “all men are created equal …” – words that probably rang just a wee bit hollow along the slave row at Monticello.  It’s not that Jefferson did not recognize the contradiction. Jefferson’s words carved in marble at the Jefferson Memorial are his own prayer of confession:

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”

Jefferson understood the evil, and he profited from it too much to put his considerable gifts to the hard task of abolishing it.

Again, it’s easy to look back two centuries and see that great moral blindspot. It’s easy to look at Germany in the 30s and see the blindness. It’s easy to look at the Jim Crow South of my childhood and see what then seemed so hazy to so many. It’s somehow way more difficult to look in the mirror and see the log in my own eye.

To be sure, it’s not really all that difficult to imagine some of the issues future generations will take us to task over. All of the issues that the Confession of 67 named remain unresolved almost 50 years later. The news of recent days reminds us that race remains the great wound in the heart of America. Militarism remains a largely unexamined fact of American life that has grown both in its scope and in being unexamined. The gap between rich and poor that sparked the concern of the Confession of 67 has only widened. And we still remain so very far away from articulating, much less living into, a rich, deep, and faithful expression of human sexuality.

If I were in the room to discuss a “confession of 2013” I’d press to add climate change, heterosexism, and the idolatrous worship of the market to the list of central concerns of our time.

It could sound utterly hopeless, this reciting of a lengthening list of broken places in our lives and the life of the world.

So where is hope? Where is the good news in all this?

What gives you hope? I put that question out to the book of faces last week. Folks responded with some of the things you might expect: family, friends, children, nature. I’d add music and art to that list. All of these are places of inspiration for most of us, but our friend Cheryl Hartmann really nailed it when she lifted up these words from scripture:

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is the great promise of reconciliation upon which the Confession of 67, and, indeed, the entirety of our faith, rests. That, in Jesus, God was in the world reconciling the world to God. We are called, as C’67 insists, to the ministry of reconciliation – to participating in the great work of reconciliation.

So where is hope? I find hope, and inspiration, and joy, whenever and wherever I witness people joining together in the great work of reconciliation. As the Confession of ’67 concludes:

With an urgency born of this hope, the church applies itself to present tasks and strives for a better world. It does not identify limited progress with the kingdom of God on earth, nor does it despair in the face of disappointment and defeat. In steadfast hope, the church looks beyond all partial achievement to the final triumph of God.

We live faithfully into that triumph, praying, “come, Lord Jesus.” Amen.