The last verse we just heard tells us that "in Christ God was reconciling the world to him/herself...and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us"—us meaning the Church.
As background for talking about reconciliation, it's helpful to know that for several centuries The Presbyterian Church of which we are part of had a single standard for its faith and life. That standard was what we can call The Westminster Assembly documents. The Westminster documents were adopted by the Westminster Assembly, so named because it met in Westminster Abbey in London. Convened by the English Parliament in 1643 the Westminster Assembly met over a period of six years. It consisted of members of Parliament and ordained ministers of the Church of England. Five Presbyterian ministers from Scotland were in attendance with the right of discussion but without vote.
The Scottish General Assembly adopted the Westminster documents in 1647, after which the documents came to the New World by way of the New England Puritans and the Presbyterians in the Middle Atlantic states. They were officially adopted by the newly formed Presbyterian Synod in 1729, and they remained the official confessional standards for Presbyterians until 1967, a period of two-hundred thirty-eight years. The documents adopted by American Presbyterians were The Westminster Confession of Faith, The Larger Catechism, and The Shorter Catechism. The two catechisms are best known for their first question and answer—in the sexist language of the time: "What is the chief end [or purpose] of man [or humankind]? Man's [or humanity's] chief end [or purpose] is to glorify God and fully enjoy him forever." Presbyterian Christians often got the glorifying God part right, but they didn't always do so well with the fully enjoying part.
In the 1960's while the Roman Catholic Church was going through the upheaval of Vatican II, we Presbyterians began the process of reforming our confessional stance from one based on a single set of seventeenth century documents to one based on a series of documents spanning many centuries, from the fourth century to the twentieth century, and recognizing that the Church has the freedom to understand historic truth in new ways. In 1967 the Presbyterian Church adopted what is now The Book of Confessions, containing ten faith statements, the last of which was The Confession of 1967. An eleventh document called A Brief Statement of Faith was added after the 1983 re-union of the Northern and Southern branches of the Presbyterian family.
Those of us who were adults in the 1960's know well that it was a turbulent decade, with the nation and most churches divided over such issues as the War in Vietnam, the push for full racial and gender equality, the nature of authority—personal and institutional, and the role of the Church in addressing issues of social and political justice. The nation was polarized as were churches, universities, and families. Against that background the Presbyterian Church adopted a confessional document that includes these words:
God's reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which [God] has called [the] church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ. Accordingly, this Confession of 1967 is built upon that theme.
Therefore, the church calls men [and women] to be reconciled to God and to one another.
When I came to Rutgers almost three years ago, I discovered, and the congregation confirmed at an after-church forum, that most members and friends of the congregation were familiar with and informed about the issues confronting the society around us. They could talk about societal alienation and the need for reconciliation, i.e. peacemaking. But many people in the Rutgers family were not comfortable with or adept in talking about estrangement from and reconciliation with God. You have been very gracious in hearing what I have been saying about God and in accepting my premise that you are free to take what you like in my preaching and leave the rest.
What does it mean in 2009 to talk about estrangement from and reconciliation with God? Our assumptions, especially in a congregation like this one, may seem somewhat different from the assumptions of the people to whom Paul wrote his Corinthian letters. But in some ways they are similar. Corinth was a Greek city, a city built on commerce. The Greeks of Paul's time had little understanding of Hebrew monotheism; they had a pantheon of several deities whom they sought to placate and manipulate in order to have the best possible chance for a life as free of trouble as possible. They were like the man who managed a large supermarket in the town where I worked as a pastor. One Sunday he showed up at church, which was totally new for him. He came back the next week and the following week. I told him how good it was to have him as part of the congregation. He told me that his younger sister, to whom he was very close, had received a diagnosis of cancer and was preparing for serious surgery within a month. He asked me and the congregation to pray for his sister, which we did.
The surgery was successful and the man's sister was declared cancer-free. The man stopped coming to church. The polytheism of the ancient world was something like that. People offered food and gifts to idols of various kinds in the hope of receiving favors—fertility, health, wealth, or a safe voyage on the sea. They were doing the best they could. They had never heard what the Hebrew people had come to understand, that there was a God wholly different from human beings, a transcendent God described as spirit, a God whose creative energy was the source of all that came to be through an evolutionary process, a God who loved what she/he had created and desired justice and peace in the word-wide human community.
The Apostle Paul took the Hebrew understanding of God to the Corinthians, and he said to them that the God he had known as a young man had recently self-disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth, an amazing teacher-healer who had emphasized the loving nature of God. Paul told the recipients of his letters what they already knew, and what you and I know today: that the world God intended to be in harmony is the scene of alienation and bitter antagonism, that something in our human nature predisposes us to hostility rather than hospitality, to conflict rather than community.
For Paul what needed to be fixed first was people's relationship with God. That can be said in different ways. Some people might say we need to be in harmony with the universe. Others might say we need to be comfortable in our own skin. For me, being in a healthy relationship with God means believing and knowing in the depths of our being that we are wholly worthwhile as we are, that we don't need to prove our validity to anyone, and that we don't need the trappings of wealth and power to feel good about ourselves.
I agree with Robert Wicks of Loyola College in Maryland, who writes [in his book Touching the Holy], "While all the major religions rightly expect people to help others in need, paradoxically the real challenge of the spiritual life is not primarily to give love, but to receive it. For when our hearts are alive with love, we can, and do, spontaneously share with a sense of mitzvah (giving and expecting nothing in return)! And so, with a healthy sense of self-love, the call from God to love others as we love ourselves is transformed from an exterior command into a powerful interior attitude of hope that can lead to true compassion, sound friendship, and effective social action."
Because I believe that, the central theme of my preaching is God's unconditional love for all people without regard to age, race, national origin, sexual orientation or economic status. I have known too many people, in churches or outside of churches, who were committed to fixing other people and the world with the best of intentions but who had little or no awareness of what needed to be fixed in or about themselves.
The work of reconciliation begins with being reconciled. The work of peacemaking begins with being at peace with oneself.
Robert Coles of the Harvard Medical School faculty tells of meeting Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the ground-breaking Catholic Worker Movement, for the first time. She was a tireless advocate for the poor, for social justice and peacemaking.
It was on an afternoon, almost thirty-five years ago, that I first met Dorothy Day. She was sitting at a table, talking with a woman who was, I quickly realized, quite drunk, yet determined to carry on a conversation.
I found myself increasingly confused by what seemed to be an interminable, essentially absurd exchange taking place between the two middle-aged women. When would it end—the alcoholic ranting and the silent nodding, occasionally interrupted by a brief question which only served, maddeningly, to wind up the already over-talkative one rather than wind her down. Finally silence fell upon the room. Dorothy Day asked the woman if she would mind an interruption. She got up and came over to me. She said, "Are you waiting to talk with one of us?"
One of us: with those three words she had cut through the layers of self-importance, a lifetime of bourgeois privilege, and scraped the hard bone of pride. With those three words, [one of us] so quietly and politely spoken, she had indirectly told me what the Catholic Worker Movement is all about and what she herself was like. [Robert Coles, A Radical Devotion, 1987, page xviii]
What was she like? What made it possible for her to treat a quarrelsome drunken woman with complete respect? The same thing that motivated her work on behalf of the poor and powerless, the same thing that underlies Barack Obama's amazing ability to speak evenly and firmly to people who have felt unheard and uncared about. Dorothy Day knew she was loved by God, reconciled to her Creator, and free to do the work of reconciliation without the hindrance of self-absorption. She knew that any just endeavor to bring about social, economic, or political change has to begin with an honest look at ourselves, that any effort to heal a broken relationship requires healthy self-awareness on the part of the one seeking reconciliation.
I agree with the Apostle Paul that peacemaking/reconciliation is central in our mission as a church. May we be strong in our assurance of God's love as we work for reconciliation in our personal lives and in the world.
Thanks be to God.