6 Practices: Week 3 - Reconciling

Isaiah 62:1-5

I Corinthians 12:1-11

We’re talking here at the beginning of the year about practices that can get us moving.  Practices that can help us receive more of God’s goodness.  Practices that can help us become the people God created us to be.  We’ve talked about the important practices of “paying attention” and “leading.”  This week we’re talking about the practice of reconciling.  It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, so yes we’re talking about race and reconciliation.  But learning to practice reconciling will touch every corner of your life.  Racial reconciliation is just one part of it.

 

Reconciling is so important – you might even say it’s the heart of the good news.  It’s at the very center of being religious.  The very word “Religion” is from re-ligio and carries with it the sense of re-ligamenting or re-connecting something.  So religion is about re-binding things that have become unbundled.  Re-uniting things that have been divided or separated.  Some version of this impulse lay underneath all the world’s religions.  But it certainly captures the heart of faith in Jesus Christ.  We need new ligaments binding us together with the earth, with other people, with ourselves, and with God.  Now do you get the sense of how “big” and far-reaching the practice of reconciling is? 

Writer Henri Nouwen puts it like this:

“There is not a moment in our lives without the need for reconciliation. When we dare to look at the myriad hostile feelings and thoughts in our hearts and minds, we will immediately recognize the many little and big wars in which we take part. Our enemy can be a parent, a child, a "friendly" neighbor, people with different lifestyles, people who do not think as we think, speak as we speak, or act as we act. They all can become "them." Right there is where reconciliation is needed.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. put it like this:

“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists . . .  -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

The Confession of Belhar, adopted as one of our PCUSA Confessions, puts it like this:

We believe

• that Christ's work of reconciliation is made manifest in the church as the community of believers who have been reconciled with God and with one another;
• that unity is, therefore, both a gift and an obligation for the church of Jesus Christ; that through the working of God's Spirit it is a binding force, yet simultaneously a reality which must be earnestly pursued and sought: one which the people of God must continually be built up to attain;
• that this unity must become visible so that the world may believe that separation, enmity and hatred between people and groups is sin which Christ has already conquered, and accordingly that anything which threatens this unity may have no place in the church and must be resisted;

The reading from I Corinthians 12 is about connections and the common good.  It’s one more place in scripture that makes very clear that God is at work making peace wherever there’s hostility.  That hostility takes many different forms for us.

It’s our hostility and distance from the earth.  You see this in the ways we litter and pollute; in our indifference towards how our lives harm the planet that others share; in our larger culture’s hostility towards farmers and farming and rural communities; in our love of convenience and processed food; in our lack of wonder and respect for all the other animals who share our planet.

It’s our hostility towards other people.  We walk around angry, with our guards up.  We’ve been hurt or disrespected.  And so we begin to see others as potential enemies.  Because we’re busy and anxious, we rarely relax and take the time to get to know others well.  And so all kinds of stereotypes and generalizations color how we relate to others.  We’re not very good at making ourselves vulnerable and honest.  Our hearts often lack hospitality and genuine openness.

As we begin to discover some of the ways we’re divided from the earth and from others, we come to realize that we’re divided even from ourselves.  We cannot get access to the beautiful, tender, kind, compassionate, and forgiving parts of who we are.  We feel blocked from our feelings.  We partition off some of our experiences and memories.  We live from the inside a painful division.  Sometimes others actually say it to us, “You don’t seem like yourself today.”

And in all these ways, we live divided and disconnected from the God who is the love that binds all things together.  We feel distant from the God who is closer to us than our own breath.  We feel isolated and alone before the God who holds all of reality together as one vast inter-connected whole.  We look for God far off or up there or in a sacred book, when God is always patiently waiting nearby, ready to welcome us when we’re ready to be welcomed.

Now consider the power and significance of our reading from I Corinthians 12 this morning.

The Apostle Paul is writing about spiritual things, spiritual matters, to a congregation that’s divided.  There are disagreements about how to organize their lives together.  They are at odds about who is most important within the church.  Some of the folks there have had the powerful experience of speaking in tongues.  They’ve become convinced this “gift” is the most important one.  They now take up the posture of a privileged elite within the rest of the community.

No, no, no, no, no, says Paul.  Whatever God’s Spirit gives is given for the “common good.”  God’s Spirit isn’t aimed at making some people more important than others.  God’s project in the world isn’t to create a privileged elite.  God’s Spirit, God’s project, is the “common good.”  God’s plans are for all of us to bring who we are, what we have, how we’re gifted, what we’re capable of, and what we’ve experienced, before the community in a way that it benefits others.  These differences are manifestations of the same Spirit.  They are given by the same God so that all can play a role in the common blessing of life.

Now let’s translate this message about the importance of everyone, about the importance of the common good, into the wider reality of our lives.  How do we live with the realities of privilege and power and the common good in 2016? 

We are a predominately white congregation.  What does that mean?  It means that we didn’t create problems of racial superiority and racial hatred and racial division.  But we inherited it.  And like everyone else, we cannot claim to have perfectly clean hands and hearts.  It means that our job right now is to think of ourselves as “allies” of all those who struggle for justice.  We are “allies,” for example, with the two predominately African American congregations in our community.  We are “allies” with our African American neighbors, and with our Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese neighbors.  We’re on their team.  We’ll fight with them and for them for a community big enough to include all of us.

We are a predominately white congregation in a larger community that is becoming more racially diverse.  While the African American population in the US is holding steady, the past century of immigration in America has been primarily Hispanic and Asian.  Perhaps what we’re seeing now is more immigration from the Middle East.  And those larger immigration trends are making life more diverse even here in the Midwest.  By 2050, whites will be a minority in the US.  So even if our primary job right now is to be “allies” with those who look different from us, we will need to begin dreaming about what it will look and feel like to be a racially diverse, multi-ethnic congregation. 

Everything I’ve said so far is boring the pants off of all our young people.  They live in a globalized world where boundaries don’t matter that much.  They live in a mobile world where different kinds and different colors of people travel frequently and immigrate often.  They live in a world where the public schools have always been integrated.  They listen to Hip-hop –Kanye, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and G-Eazy, not Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.  And so they are ready, more than ready, to be part of a congregation that stands and fights for a more inclusive, more welcoming, more just community.  They live in a world shaped by the dream of Martin Luther King and all the giants of the Civil Rights work of the 1960’s and all the ordinary folks since then who’ve worked to make that dream a reality.

Our young people live in a world where black music, black artists, black movies and tv shows, black community leaders, business leaders and black presidents are normal features of American life.  They go to school with African Americans, with children of mixed race marriages, with Indian, Hispanic, and Asian kids.  And in their social media feeds they are connected to the rest of the world.  Our hearts and imaginations are already diverse and multi-ethnic, and our streets, our schools, and our community are following quickly. 

Are you ready?  I ask this question to a predominately white congregation.  A congregation with a strong and passionate history of involvement in civil rights.  A congregation who knows a little something about activism, courage, and justice.  A congregation that’s proudly part of a wider denominational network that welcomes, works, and cheers for increasing racial diversity.  Are we ready?  Are we ready to confront our fears, our stereotypes, and our privileges, in order to make room for others?  Are we ready to practice reconciliation, to do the hard, purposeful, intentional work of sharing space with all kinds of different looking children of God?

Of course there is an interpersonal and relational dimension.  Do everything in your power to gladly welcome others into the full life of the wider community and into our congregation.  This means simple things, like getting to know people who look different than you.  Asking questions and being quiet so you can learn something.  It means being curious about the life experience of others.  It means using your imagination about what it feels like for racial minorities to live and work here.  It means refusing to listen to racist jokes or racist gossip or racist stories.  It means you’ll be a peacemaker in a world that’s afraid and angry.  You’ll connect what’s divided.

But if you don’t take anything away from the sermon today, please remember this.  Attending to our personal relationships is not nearly enough.  If you have black friends, Hispanic, Asian, or Middle-Eastern friends, it’s not enough.  If your heart and attitude is on the right side of this fight for a more just and welcoming community for all, that’s not enough.

Why not?  Because the problem is not just a problem with interpersonal relationships.  It’s a systemic problem.  It’s an inter-generational, ongoing, deep in the fabric of our society kind of problem.  It’s in the air we breathe when we’re born kind of problem.  Racism is the American original sin.  It shapes our imagination and perception.  It permeates politics, business, education, and the geography of every community.  It flares up sometimes as an intense hatred of others.  But usually it is happy to go unrecognized and unacknowledged, quietly shaping who we hire and where we live and how we vote.  All this is simply to say, racism has power and teeth.  If you want to fight the good fight, wonderful.  But you better be part of a larger community that can sustain you.  You’ll need deep friendships that give you courage to keep going even when it looks dark.  Maybe that’s what church is.

For us as the new family of God gathered around Jesus Christ – for us to settle for a racialized and divided community or congregation would be hell itself.  If we cannot move forward into the multi-ethnic, many-colored love of God, the supposedly “good news” of being part of Jesus’ new family simply won’t make sense to the next generation.

 

But here’s the good news.  We’re not imprisoned by old habits and practices.  We’re learning new practices and new ways of being together.  We’re learning to organize our lives, our relationships, our passions and priorities in new ways.   We’re learning from Jesus a better way to live.  We’re learning that our divided and racist culture is a lie.  It’s a lie because what we know is that all people are beloved children of God.  What we know is that God’s love knows no color or racial boundaries.  What we know is that it takes work and courage to love as widely as God loves.  But we can do it.  We can do it because God has given us the Spirit that connects us all together into the common good.