That They May All Be One
In case any of you have ever wondered if the beginning of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is conducive to getting a sermon written: it isn’t. The tournament had been underway for about 15 minutes when I sat down on Thursday to try to start this sermon. I had an idea of what I wanted to say, and I had several pages of notes. It was definitely time to start pulling it all together—time for the work to begin. But I just wasn’t ready to get to it. How could I tear myself away from the continuous tournament coverage, when Texas Tech, who I’d picked to upset Boston College, in a fit of Texan pride, was going up in flames? When my beloved Duke Blue Devils, the team every other team loves to hate, were seeing their championship hopes cruelly snuffed out in the first round? When my tournament bracket was on its way to making me the laughing-stock of the Divinity School pool?
Don’t worry—this isn’t my roundabout way of saying that I don’t have a sermon for you. I do. So you may be wondering, then, what in the world any of this has to do with the theme of reconciliation that rings out so strongly in our Scripture readings this morning. Well, here’s the thing: on Thursday, I wasn’t ready to do the work that was waiting to be done. The work was there, waiting to be tackled, but I just wasn’t ready. And I think that’s how most of us feel about the challenging notion of reconciliation, deep down. What do I mean by reconciliation? I mean the process of mending what is broken, restoring what has been lost, bridging the divisions between people, between communities, between humanity and nature, between humanity and God. Reconciliation means making things right—and today our world cries out for it. We know the work that is waiting to be done, but we know that it won’t be easy, and so we’re just not ready.
Now those of you who’ve been attending First Church’s Interfaith Forum on Repentance and Reconciliation may be starting to wonder about what I’ve just said. Because on Tuesday evening, Prof. Greg Mobley was telling anybody who’d listen that the hard work of reconciliation has already been done for us. So, you may be wondering why I’m standing here complaining about it. Prof. Mobley told us that in Christ God has reconciled the world to God’s self—that we don’t have to work for our reconciliation because it’s already happened! And far be it for me to disagree with him. Because when it comes to our reconciliation with God, the work has been done. “Everything old has passed away,” Paul writes to the church at Corinth. “See, everything has become new.”
In many Christian liturgies, including our own, worship includes a communal confession, which is followed by a declaration of God’s forgiveness, an assurance of God’s pardon. And in a certain way, that order makes sense, and seems logical to our ways of thinking. But in another way, that sequence creates the possibility of a serious misunderstanding—the danger that we’ll start to get the idea that the first step causes the second, that we’re forgiven because we’ve confessed. When in fact, as Prof. Mobley reminded us on Tuesday night, it’s more like the reverse: we can confess freely and trusting in God’s grace, because we’re already forgiven!
We see this reality played out in the story of the Prodigal Son. The younger son has been carefully rehearsing his confession, saying, “I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.” But well before he can get those words out, while he is still a long way off, his father sees him—just a speck in the distance, just a silhouette on the horizon—and is filled with compassion and goes running out to meet him. And he goes ahead and confesses, because he needs to. But the forgiveness has already been given. It was there all along. As many commentators have noted, this is really the story of the prodigal father. It’s God’s love that is prodigious, God’s love that is vast and undeserved and beyond all reason. The Good News in this story is very good news indeed.
BUT: what about reconciliation not between us and God, but between us and our fellow human beings? Between us and our broken world? Forgiveness from God is waiting at the ready, it’s true, but our relationships with our sisters and brothers here on Planet Earth are not always so filled with grace, and forgiveness is not always so obliging. If we have thought of reconciliation only in terms of God’s extravagant welcome to us, we may be set up for failure when we discover that in our own lives, reconciliation is often difficult, costly, painful—and hindered by our own fear as much as anything else. When it comes to reconciliation in the human realm, are we willing to let “everything old pass away”? Do we really want to see everything become new? Or do we find more comfort in clinging to what we know, even if its to hatreds, to prejudices, to enemies, afraid to let go of that which we have defined ourselves against?
In the 60th sura of the Qur’an, the sacred text of Islam, Muhammad says, “It may be that God will ordain love between you and those whom you hold as enemies. For God has power over all things; and God is Oft-forgiving.”[1] Are we ready for that? Are we ready to let what God has ordained shake us out of our neatly constructed identities? If we are to restore right relationships in our lives, what comfortable notions will we have to abandon? What cherished illusions will we have to drop? Those questions terrify me, because they point to the hard work of reconciliation.
Last summer, I had an internship working as a hospital chaplain. I worked mainly in an ICU, and the experience was a crash-course in human frailty and human forgiveness. One patient was a man in his 70s, whose particular illness meant that he was sedated or unconscious much of the time. As a result, I had never actually spoken with him, but I had prayed over his body many times. He didn’t have any visitors and I had assumed he had no family. His condition worsened, and in the days just before his death, a middle-aged woman began to visit, and to sit in his room holding his hand. The patient was her father, and as we prepared for his death, she shared with me that he had sexually abused her throughout her entire childhood. They had been estranged for almost all of her adult life, but recently, after a lifetime of work at it, she had moved to a place of forgiveness, she told me, and now, she only wanted wholeness, she only wanted him to be at peace. I was in awe—I am in awe—of the way her pain had been transfigured. In awe that she could offer him her forgiveness. “How?” I remember asking her. How could she do it? Healing between those souls happened the only way it could, through a commitment to the hard work of reconciliation, to the slow healing of deep wounds.
In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, we see him making a case for this kind of healing not just between individuals, but across communities. The church in Corinth was tearing itself apart over theological disputes and personal prejudices. In particular, Paul’s vision of life in community had taken a beating, and the Corinthians were no longer sure they had any real responsibility to each other. In today’s text, Paul tells them—and us—over and over so that we’ll be sure to get the point, that God “has given us the ministry of reconciliation,” as he says in verse 18. In verse 19, God is “entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” Verse 20: “God is making his appeal through us”. Paul’s emphasis on us is not a claim of exclusivity, but rather is a plea to the church in Corinth—and to us—to recognize that God’s work is accomplished in and through human relationships.
Paul’s message for us today is that, unbelievable as it may seem, God chooses to work through humanity. God chooses to work through our free and willing participation in what the Hebrew Scriptures call tikkun olam, the repair of the world. This is the “ministry of reconciliation” of which Paul speaks: that we humans are God’s instruments of healing, that we are “treasure in earthen vessels,” as Paul says to the Corinthians elsewhere. We are the medium through which God’s imperceptible but never-ending transformation of the world will be accomplished. Paul is telling us that reconciliation is not only to be longed for and looked for in some far-off and hazy future. We cannot pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” without considering our own role in that transformation.
Today, nearly 2000 years after Paul sent his letter off to Corinth, our faith is still in need of healing on a broad level. The fractures in the
Paul’s writings have ensured that reconciliation is a near-universal theme in Christianity, but at the risk of sounding like a denominational chauvinist, I’ll say that the idea of reconciliation, of movement toward unity, should have special resonance in the United Church of Christ. We are rooted, after all, in our identity as a “united and uniting church.” When our four ancestor denominations merged to form the UCC they wrote, in the Preamble to our Constitution, that “believing that denominations exist not for themselves, but as part of that Church Universal, and hearing with a deepened sense of responsibility the prayer of our Lord ‘that they may all be one,’ we do now declare ourselves to be one body.”[3] With a history like ours, reconciliation should be our bread and butter! To make manifest the unity of the Divine shouldn’t be just a nice idea to talk about here in Lent, it should be our mission and our theme, as we follow the example of Christ, the great iconoclast, the smasher of boundaries, the destroyer of status quos and comfort zones.
And speaking of comfort zones: can we push ourselves to imagine an even broader vision, of healing with other faiths and within the international community? We can be sure that God sees that healing, but can we? Our world has been damaged through and through by countless acts of violence committed in the name of religion. The city of Jerusalem is filled with holy sites sacred to the traditions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, yet Jerusalem is also full of religiously-motivated conflict, routine violence, and deep-seated distrust. That holy city has become a poignant symbol of the tensions that keep us from walking in the way of peace, despite the message of peace that our traditions share. How can we work together to overcome centuries, even millennia, of hatred and fear? How can we move beyond a superficial tolerance that masks our residual mistrust and ignorance? Conversations like those at our Lenten Interfaith Forum might represent one beginning.
We know that reconciliation will not be achieved through quick fixes or easy answers. Yet as challenging as this work will be, there is Good News here, too. Hear these words from Paul once more: “everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! And all this is from God.” The old has passed away. God has already done the impossible, and now our work is to live into that reality, to reveal the unity of the human family, to make manifest Christ’s prayer “that they may all be one.” If, as Paul says, this ministry is entrusted to us, then be assured that we are equipped for this ministry. Be empowered by God’s reconciling love! And together, let’s commit ourselves to the work of reconciliation, relying in that effort, as in every effort, on the transforming grace of God.
[1] Qur’an 60.7.
[2] "'I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist: Right-wing TV evangelist and former Presidential candidate Pat Robertson is the man Bank of Scotland has chosen to spearhead its US subsidiary. Why?", by Greg Palast, Guardian Unlimited, May 23 1999.
[3] Louis H. Gunnemann, The Shaping of the