Reconciling the worlds

A sermon for June 21, 2009.

I was a bank teller in a busy downtown branch of City National Bank in Columbus Ohio in my early twenties. It was a really fun job, most of the time. We got to know the regulars, the local businesses, the State Agencies from across the street, the young lawyers in the firms upstairs in the office tower – it was really good for my social life. Most people were very professionaland pleasant. We also cashed a lot of what were known as “blood checks.” The twelve dollars that people got from the nearby lab for selling their blood, fifteen if they had a rare type. We were the nearest bank to that lab and so we were the first stop for these folks in such desperate need of cash. They were a living counter weight to the affluence of the usual clientele.

The part of the day that was the bane of my existence was the final tally - reconciling the drawer. We had to account for the cash in and out and total every check on a big hundred key adding machine all to zero out the drawer. My problem was that I was always out of balance by a factor of nine – evidence that I had transposed number somewhere. Some times it was 45 cents, $81, $720 and even more shocking amounts. I had to spend all kinds of time discovering which transaction was wrongly entered and put it right. It was what I was known for. I was reconciliation challenged.

Then, in my first year in seminary many years, Ron Allen, my professor of New Testament, assigned, as he does every year, for the biggest research paper for his New Testament survey course, today’s passage from II Corinthians – the reconciliation passage. He says that it is the most important passage of the New Testament. Imagine how I felt, reconciliation challenged person that I am! I dutifully camped out at the seminary library, researched, drafted, wrote and rewrote about reconciliation and in the process began to understand why Professor Allen assigned it. “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them…” I grasped it intellectually and academically, earning a perfect grade for my paper. But it still didn’t have that compelling spark of an ‘aha’ moment until Richard Wilbur’s poem set to music as the Christmas hymn A stable lamp is lighted caught my attention. The last verse goes like this…”But now, as at the ending, the low is lifted high; The stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry, in praises of the child by whose descent among us the worlds are reconciled.” The poetry and the tune that first brought it to me lit the spark of understanding. But it truly wasn’t until two weeks ago when I preached about Jesus’ understanding of living in the two worlds at once, this world and the divine world, that a full understanding of II Corinthians finally broke in on me. Fixing this world so it is in balance with the priorities in God’s kingdom is the ministry of reconciliation. Understanding that the world knows us by one set of criteria, the world treats people by one set of priorities, the world chases goals that are its own and none of this matches up to the criteria, the priorities or the purpose of the kingdom of God. Jesus came and showed what a human being that lived the values of the kingdom looks like.

Jesus began his ministry of reconciliation by announcing that this kingdom is here, and then he described it in his stories and his actions. First and foremost, the kingdom is known by its compassion. The Hebrew word for what Jesus was describing is translated often as mercy but it has the heart connection of compassion which means “to suffer with.” Here we understand that God is not indifferent to human suffering. Over and over again the Gospels tell us that Jesus had compassion on those who came to him blind, lame, outcast and afraid and as he healed them he made the kingdom present. He brought the characteristics of the kingdom into this world, through them – in other words, he reconciled the worlds.

The character of the kingdom is peace. The Old Testament prophets provided the descriptions, the peaceable kingdom in which the lion and the lamb sit together, the strong do not prey on the weak, swords are turned into farming implements. So Jesus set about to teach us how to create the peaceable kingdom here. He did it by teaching non-violent resistance which is the powerful way of exposing evil and confronting it without resorting to the violence that only begets more violence. He showed his people how to bring God’s peace through justice into a world that only knew peace through armed oppression. And then he made himself a living example, he didn’t allow his followers to take up arms in his defense and in the story of his arrest in Luke when somebody cuts off a soldier’s ear, he heals it. Jesus made real the God’s compassion, giving hope to the oppressed but also trying to free the oppressors from their bondage to evil. It is God’s will that evil be overcome and those who are its instruments redeemed.

The long Gospel reading from Mark today illustrates these points. These two stories, the calming of the sea and the demons exorcised and sent into the pigs come right after last week’s parables. Many scholars assume that we are to read these as parables also, they have much more meaning if read symbolically rather than stopping at the miraculous event level. The calming of the sea is like God in creation, controlling the waters and separating them to make the earth. The water, particularly stormy water, was known as a place of chaos and in God’s kingdom, there is no chaos so Jesus made the stormy sea into still waters. The demons named Legion that occupied the unfortunate Gentile were the same ones that occupied Israel. They are the demonic power of domination, the kind that Rome and all unjust systems exert on those without power. By casting the demons into the sea, the world is rid of them and the worlds are reconciled, at least in that place for the moment.
There is a real little gem in the reconciliation passage that can flit by unnoticed and that is that when we are reconciled to God, all is forgiven. What does that mean? I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, “Yes, I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and it’s all done for me.” It means being like him and accepting that the kingdom is real and in our midst. Once you have been opened to the kingdom of compassion and peace, you are changed, you can no longer be an instrument of indifference or oppression. God’s compassion lives through you as it did through Jesus. You become the prayer of St. Francis. The prayer evolves from “Lord, make an instrument of your peace” to “I am an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, I sow love, where there is injury, I forgive, where there is despair I bring hope.” When you live that, nothing you have done before matters for you are reconciled to God. As in Christ, in you the worlds are reconciled.