Ministers of Reconciliation

2 Corinthians 5:16–20 NRSV

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.

Greetings friends, it is so good to be here with you. This year, for our Pulpit Swap, we landed on the topic of Peacemaking. So, over these next couple of weeks, you’re going to hear a sermon or two one different aspects of peacemaking.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called Children of God.

If we call our selves Children of God, then we must be peacemakers.

I want to look today at peacemaking through the lens of reconciliation. We might say that reconciliation is some of the cumulative work of peacemaking. It goes far beyond peace in terms of just “not fighting.” Rather, this is about Shalom, wholeness, a restored relationship or community or system through reconciling.

We, your pastors, believe this topic is vital in this season of our lives because we live in a world so fraught with conflict and division. Peacemaking is counter-cultural, sadly. And we need peace and reconciliation, desperately. Lord, have mercy.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the ongoing conflict with Iran. War.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

As a basic ethic of following Jesus, we agree that war is bad. War is a farce, a scam, a ploy of the powerful.

If you go into a conflict and start fighting, you’ve left behind the call to peacemaking. At the most basic level, this is entirely anti-Christian. War is a tool of empire. Peacemaking is the work of God’s people.

But I want to go beyond that basic human reality that war is bad. We need ask harder questions and do deeper work of reconciling our conflicts. Why are we fighting? What are the root causes of our conflict? What are the factors that could contribute to resolution here?

As God’s people, we are to enter with a posture of peacemaking.

One of my uncles was drafted to the Korean War and registered as a conscientious objector. He objected to being asked to kill in war. And so, he became a medic. On a battlefield torn with death and chaos, the Christian witness is one of calming the hurting, relieving pain, bringing peace, shalom. Amidst the cruelties of war, peacemaking can still happen.

So today we’re going to consider that deeper way, the way of reconciliation. What does it mean, reconciliation? To reconcile.

The quick definition is as follows: To reconcile means to restore friendly relations, make two different ideas or facts agree, or check financial records for accuracy.

I’ll use the meaning around financial dealings later, but I want to lean on the first two notes in this definition.

Reconciliation restores friendly relations. Hear that, not just amicable, not just not fighting. Friendly. Like, friends. We water that word down to mean agreeable, but let’s give it’s full weighty meaning — reconciliation’s aim and end is friendship, mutuality, collaboration, and finding a way forward.

And then this, reconciliation “makes two different ideas of facts agree.”

Reconciliation is to make things that actually don’t agree be able to coexist. When we ask where Shroedinger’s cat is, we say it is, truly, both in the box and not in the box.

Reconciliation means meeting, compromise, agreement. We Presbyterians like this concept a lot and we call it “mutual forbearance.” Unity in things that actually matter, respectful difference in so many other things.

Unpopular example: I don’t much like dogs. But I can reconcile that some of the people I love the most love their dogs. I can hold both opinions and be reconciled — accepting my place and respecting the other’s. Reconciling doesn’t mean diminishing one side — it means being able to see the world alongside another and honor the goodness of God that shines through them. Period.

Ok, let’s unpack the text a bit to make sure we understand what the good news is here:

I’ve pulled this reading from the end of 2 Corinthians. It’s important to give a least a wide angle view on this letter, because it leads us to this text.

Through the Letters to the Corinthian church, Paul is instructing them on how to live in unity with one another as those who have found their life in Christ. Just because we start going to church doesn’t mean we’ve fully grasped how to model our lives after Jesus. So, Paul is reminding them, acknowledging their human nature, their base instincts.

Now, in the Early Christian world, the mastery of the self and the refinement of our bodies into wholeness with God is a major point of interest. The stoics say to refine the self through discipline. Others seek the highest forms of human potential through sport and war. Mastery and discipline.

But Paul and the Early Church persistently tells a new, good wrinkle to this desire: The refinement of who we are, you know what, we can’t do it. No it comes through Christ. It is because of Jesus Christ that we can refined, reconciled, to God.

And a quick note: when we hear “through Christ,” we can understand that as shorthand for “through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Messiah.” Through Christ, all these things are made possible. Through Christ, death is defeated and undone. Through Christ, all creation is being reconciled, restored, as God’s eternal church breaks through.

So, Paul reminds us, stop regarding just our humanity — in Christ, we are restored as body and soul, becoming like Christ.

Everything old has passed away. Everything has become new!

In the peace of Jesus, all things are reconfigured.

Have you had one of those times in your life when things got reconfigured? Like, when you had to step back and reconsider the path forward. I think about the first years of college, when I needed to reconfigure how I understood my personal responsibility to function as an adult, without parental prodding and nagging. There was a point in that process where that old, childish self, had to be set down and make way for a new me.

Death, loss, divorce, health issues — these things call us to reconfigure, don’t they?

Everything old has passed away. Now, we are new.

Because of the reconciling work of Jesus Christ, the peacemaking he does in all Creation, we are made new.

Vs. 18 is the key for me: 2 Corinthians 5:18 “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;”

Because Christ, so now we, have the ministry of reconciliation. You, me, we, are called to be ministers of reconciliation.

Because of Christ. Through Christ. As above, so below. As below, now above. Christ’s witness now becomes our witness, our imperative.

Because God is reconciling the world through Christ, we no longer count wrongs or rights, sins and divisions, prejudices and resentments — because of Christ’s reconciling love, we make peace. We set these things aside.

Quick recap: regarding each other no longer as base humans, sinful and incomplete. Instead, we now regard others through the eyes of Christ — with compassion, empathy, connection, and a mutual desire for being refined and remade and recreated as new, restored bearers of God’s image.

And because God’s image is in us, untarnished, restored, now we have been giving the message and work to pass on. We are to share the good news of reconciliation, as we have received it, so we offer it to one another.

Jesus tells a story about two men who owed debts. The one who owed a huge debt, through a measure of grace from his creditor, finds himself released from the obligation. Grace, mercy, forgiveness. In financial terms, wouldn’t we say their accounts have been reconciled?

We would expect that man to have such gratitude and want to extend that to the one who owed him a much smaller sum. However, that’s not how the story goes. Rather, the first man goes to the one who owes him money and demands the debt be paid, immediately. You see, he’s reconciling his accounts and he just wants to get that off the books. That’s just clean business, right?

But the first man totally misses the point of the grace extended to him. No, he expects to get what’s his. And he’s a real jerk to the second fellow.

Finally, the first creditor gets word that the man who’s debt he’s forgiven is being a bit of a bother about some much smaller debt, well, he’s not happy. He has the first man brought in and demands he pay his full debt. And then he throws him in jail.

This is the central challenge of Paul’s words to the church in Corinth, in the most practical ways, is to model the grace and peace that they have been given, now extending it to others.

When have you been extended grace?

When did reconciliation and healing happen for you?

What happened next?

Now, let’s not jump to the easy, simplistic answers here. Just pass on the grace. Pay it forward. Blessed to be a blessing.

You see, I don’t think those answers and platitudes actually get at what we need to learn from this teaching. This isn’t about the karma of Christ being passed on through all of his good-two-shoes followers. This isn’t about do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Dare I say, we miss the point if we think that reconcilation is even possible without pain, blood, sacrifice, and self-emptying.

And, I believe we are unfaithful and neglect our calling as children of Christ when we don’t learn to practice reconciliation.

Woah, slow down there, Sethy. Unfaithful? Neglecting our calling?

Yeah. Let that sink in.

We neglect our calling and live unfaithfully when we do not live as ministers of reconciliation.

Peacemaking is in our souls. We are meant for it.

And we become curved in upon ourselves, hobbled and angry, when we do not learn to be reconcilers.

We’ve all seen the lack of reconciliation and what it does. The family member who no longer speaks to the rest. The angry man who leaves the church when his opinion didn’t win the day. Bitter feuds that boil and eat away at our hearts and bodies and souls.

We know what it is to walk around with regret for those missed opportunities to reconcile. I can think of people I long to be reconciled with, but probably won’t ever have the opportunity this side of God’s glory. And it eats at us.

I’ve been thinking about historic forms of reconciliation that have worked, at least in part. I think about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, painstakingly seeking healing following apartheid. I think of the work we’ve done in our Presbytery to acknowledge the silences of indigenous voices. Reconciliation takes many forms, but it is always hard work, requires mutuality, and takes time.

It’s made me think about the kind of reconciliation we’ve practiced in this country. Our country is so divided, angry, and resentful against itself. And a huge part of that is that we haven’t truly found reconciliation for the wrongs done to indigenous and African people in our country’s past. We have not found reconciliation for the scars of slavery, for boarding schools, for genocide of whole civilizations and peoples.

Why is America sick?

Because we have neglected the work of reconciliation.

Good news for you. Not the kind of good news that gets you or me off the hook, but good news in spite of our faults. God, through Christ, is reconciling all things to Godself.

Good news. It’s not about us. Through Christ, this has and is and will be happening. Even while we’re floundering in thinking about each other in those base, human terms, God is reconciling all things.

The way of Jesus, the Great Peacemaker, is one of bringing back to wholeness.

Another word we use to speak of this is shalom.

God is unrolling shalom upon Creation through Christ Jesus.

Good news. Amen.

But we haven’t gotten off the hook. There is still the work of shalom, reconciling, peacemaking.

Friends, we neglect our calling as Children of Christ if we do not practice reconciliation. We are no better than the two-faced lender.

I’m at a place in my life where I’ve realized I carry around a lot of burden, guilt, story, hope, in me. We might call these attachments, things I’ve agreed to carry around with me. Memories of a hurtful moment. A betrayal. Pain from when we wronged someone.

And at this moment in my life, I so deeply long to start setting these things down.

I can’t go find everyone who comes to mind when it comes to needing reconciliation. That’s not practical, and again, it’s not really the point.

The good news here is the Christ is doing this work of reconciling, so I am able to release it. I can’t hold it any longer. I give it to the one who will make things new.

As I was preparing for this sermon, I thought of an old friend that I haven’t talked with in a long time.

I thought about what it would mean to be reconciled for some of the hurt we have between us.

And I don’t know how that kind of reconciliation can happen at a distance. But what I do know is that I can practice setting down my pain from the relationship. I have to accept my part in it. And I have to reconfigure.

Remember, talking earlier, about needing to reconfigure?

Maybe the simplest, clearest thing I can encourage us to do is this: let it go.

Lay your burdens down. Forgive. Truly, forgive and let it go. It’s not worth carrying any more.

Reconciliation doesn’t mean things go back to the way things were, no. Rather, through Christ, reconciliation looks like accepting what brokenness has been a part of our lives and laying it down.

AND reconciliation does look like doing the hard work, here and now, in our lives together, to build that new creation. Since we are ambassadors, our task is to spread reconciliation where we go. To be people of peace in the chaos. To be the medic bringing shalom amidst the fires of hell.

People of God, this work has been entrusted to us. It is our sacred task, our calling, that for which God made us and now call us Children of the Most High God.

Do not turn away from this calling. Do not neglect your sacred duty.

God is reconciling all things, through Christ. All will be made whole, all will be made new. Amen.