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Good
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 Sermon
03/14/2010
Reconcile ~ by Reverend Thomas Cary
Kinder
March 14, 2010 Third Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 32; II Corinthians 5:16-20; Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
Today’s passage from the Apostle
Paul is like a secret garden’s door that stands hidden beneath
thick ivy in a high wall. If
we can find the door within Paul’s dense theological statements
we can find the way into the garden of inner peace and world peace. I would like to start the sermon by
trying to part the tangled ivy in the passage. This will take us through some
abstract theology, but we need to struggle through it in order to
reach the practical place behind it: the peace Paul’s insight
can bring to our heart and to our home and community and world.
The
passage in II Corinthians begins “From now on,
therefore,” so the first thing we need to do is look back to
see what Paul has just been talking about. It turns out to be what we talked
about here last week. We read
in Genesis how God formed humans out of the dust of the ground and
then breathed the Spirit of life into them. We are both dust and Spirit, or as
Paul puts it, both flesh and Spirit.
Paul’s word for flesh is the Greek word sarx, which he uses to stand
for our materialistic, selfish self, as opposed to the flesh that is
permeated with Spirit and transmits its light.
To
Paul, Christ’s presence on earth has made the holiness of our
flesh clear, because Christ shone the Spirit of God so visibly
through his own flesh. Paul
says in the verses before today’s passage that Christ’s
death helps us die to our selfish side and no longer live for
ourselves, but live as Christ did for the Spirit.
This
is what is on Paul’s mind when he says, “From now on,
therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.” That phrase “human point of
view” is a translation of the one word sarx, that word for selfish flesh. To “regard no one from the
selfish flesh point of view” means two things. First, we no longer think of people
as being on earth to satisfy our selfish desire for pleasure or power
or pride. People are not
objects for us to judge or manipulate for our own ends.
And
second, we no longer look at anyone else as being just what is on the
surface. Thanks to Christ, we
can see now that all creation has the same Spirit in it, and is holy,
and has the potential to be one with God. There is no created thing that is
inherently bad, there is no class or race or religion that is
excluded from God’s love, there is nothing we can do to ruin
our potential to be spiritual flesh, no matter how selfish or hurtful
we have been.
Christ has opened a door for Paul,
and he looks through it and sees the world completely
differently. Paul says,
“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything
old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” It is not that the world has
changed; it is that Christ has changed Paul’s vision of
it. This is very
important—the new creation has come through a shift of
perspective, a shift of relationship to the world, not through any change
on the part of others.
Paul
uses the word reconcile to describe what has happened, and once he
has said that word he repeats it four times in two verses. It is as if Paul thought to
himself, yes, this is it. This
is the word that captures what I am trying to say. Being reconciled to God is the door
that leads to peace, to a new creation within and around us, to
God’s realm on earth.
How
can we open the door of reconciliation, the door of peace? Paul’s original Greek word
for reconcile implies that it is a two-way action. The door has to be opened from both
sides. The good news is that
God has already done half of that opening. Christ opened the door and showed
the way through it. But we
still have to do our part of reconciling to God, and so we need to
ask, what does it mean to reconcile or be reconciled?
It
has three aspects to it.
First,
there is reconciliation as between people who have been
estranged. To reconcile a
friendship requires forgiving one another and making a conscious
decision to re-unite. To be
reconciled to God in this sense means that God forgives us, we
forgive God, and we try to be united with God in our daily life.
Second,
there is reconciliation as between a checkbook and a bank
statement. This form of
reconciling requires aligning ourselves with God’s way and
God’s vision of the world.
Since God’s way is all-forgiving love toward all
creation, we have a calling to that ministry of reconciliation and
unconditional love ourselves.
That is our role in the world.
And
third, there is reconciliation in the sense of reconciling ourselves
to a situation. It means
acceptance. Psalm 32 says,
“Do not be like a horse or a mule without understanding, whose
temper must be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not stay near
you.” Being reconciled
to God means that we hand our will and our life over to God’s
care, and we follow God’s way wherever it leads, even if that
requires loving and seeking reconciliation with our worst enemy. We reconcile ourselves to our role
as reconcilers.
These
three dimensions work together to open the door of peace: forgiveness
of all and doing the things that make for reuniting; aligning
ourselves with God’s vision of the creation and God’s way
of unconditional love; and accepting and following where God’s
vision and way lead us.
After
all the thick and tangled ivy is cleared away, the door is as simple
as this: if we are reconciled to God, we will see the world
differently, and so we will change the way we act toward the world,
and so the world will change around us as a result of how we
act. “Have peace in
yourself and thousands will find salvation around you,” as St.
Seraphim of Sarov said. Be
reconciled, and you will reconcile the world.
I
apologize for all the abstraction that Paul has led us through. Jesus was a more concrete teacher
with his parables and stories, so now let’s turn to a more
practical way of thinking about all this. The characters in the parable of
the Prodigal Son can help us understand how we can pass through the
door of reconciliation to inner and world peace, or what can hold us
back.
The
Prodigal Son begins as someone who is completely focused on the
selfish, materialistic side of his flesh and divided from his loving,
serving, spiritual side. As a
result, when his pursuit of pleasure runs out of cash, he sees no way
out of suffering, and he is full of fear. He finally is reduced to absolute
humility, out wallowing with the pigs. Then he is able to let go of
everything and return home to his father and confess the truth.
This
letting go of our selfish flesh is the first change reconciliation
requires, but it is just the beginning. The Prodigal Son comes home still
fearing and expecting the harsh justice he deserves.
The
father, though, sees his son returning from a distance and runs out
and before his son can say a word he throws his arms around him and
kisses him. The son says,
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no
longer worthy to be called your son,” and he is about to ask to
be hired on as a field hand, but his father cuts him off.
It
does not matter to the father what his son has done, all that matters
to him is to reconcile. The
father has the kind of perspective Paul was talking about—he is
not looking from a human point of view, he is looking from
God’s point of view, a vision reconciled to God, and it enables
him to forgive without question and to love without condition and to
pour out all he has to give—the fatted calf, the best robe, the
ring.
But
then there is the third character, the older son who is as much a
slave of sarx as his
younger brother. The prodigal
son was greedy for the pleasures of the flesh that wealth and
indulgence could buy, but the older son is greedy for the pride of
place that wealth and dutiful work could buy. He has not yet discovered his
ambition’s emptiness, as his brother did, and so he cannot let
go. His father tries to show
him the way through the door of reconciliation, the shift of
perspective needed to see life completely differently, but the son cannot
see beyond his selfish flesh that is lost in its hate and rage,
crying justice, not mercy.
Christ’s
message, like Paul’s, is that to have peace, we need to be
reconciled to God, and reconcile.
The
drama of the Prodigal Son plays out in the various levels of our
experience over and over. We
see it first and foremost in the inner life. You may know people who are unable
to accept their own flaws, who beat up on themselves, who have an
inner voice that sounds like the older son in the story. It is good to have humility like
the prodigal son, to know the truth of our weaknesses and wrongs and
to feel called back toward God and community from our selfish ways,
but then we need to be like the father who forgives even before we
ask, like God who has compassion on us and loves us
unconditionally. If we cannot
change the proud, angry, hateful voice of the older son within us, we
need to leave it, lovingly and sadly, outside the feast and shut the
door, and be at peace.
On
another level, you may have known couples that could not live in
peace because one of them or both of them judged the other and held
onto grudges. A friend of mine
in his 80s was in a marriage like that and used to say of his wife
that she was even-tempered—always mad. You just want to sit them down and
tell them that contentment is only a shift of perspective away, that
if they would each be like the prodigal son and see their truth and
humbly turn to one another, and each be like the father and focus on
forgiving and unconditionally loving one another, they could enter
that secret garden where couples celebrate and adore one another and
dwell in peace, despite being just as humanly flawed as any other
couple.
And
imagine those same attitudes played out on the national level. What if Israel
and Palestine
each decided to be reconciled with God and to reconcile with one
another, if each played the part first of the prodigal son and then
the father toward one another, instead of the proud, hateful and
angry son? What if the Unites
States took this as our foreign policy across the board, to look at
the world not from a human perspective, not from the perspective of
selfish flesh, but to look from a vision reconciled to
God’s? What if we saw
and confessed our truth and tried to reform our own selfish ways as a
nation, and responded to all our enemies or estranged friends with an
outpouring of gifts of compassion and love?
This
may sound like a wildly idealistic dream, but it is the way that
Christ calls us to take, and our work will not be done until we have
transformed our nation and community and home and own heart to be
reconciled to God in this way.
This is the door to peace, and there is no other that has ever
been discovered. It is not
easy, but it is straightforward: all it takes is this simple shift of
perspective from looking at things from a human point of view to
looking at things from God’s point of view, and letting that
guide us to reconciliation.
Let
us practice this now in silent prayer. We can know God’s point of
view only by being silent, quieting all our preconceived notions, and
letting the still, small voice of the Spirit speak through the
earthquake, wind and fire of our self-concerned flesh. Reconciliation begins in listening. Let us pray in silence…
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