Reconciliation: The Fruit of Forgiveness

2 Corinthians 5.17-21: . . . anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. . . All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. . . God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.  (The Message)

Reconciliation: The Fruit of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is

1. A gift – it is not deserved or earned.  It is given.

2. A sacrifice – forgiveness costs the giver.

3. A humbling – to receive forgiveness is to be humble.  So too giving forgiveness can be humbling.  Hubris will not do it.  Pride cannot receive it.

4. A work – something we do rather than something we think.

Knowing what forgiveness is – a sacrificial gift humbling to receive, costly to give, the work and the will together, the question remains, what is the fruit, the result, of forgiveness?

We forgive and receive forgiveness, is because God has so commanded.  This is obedience.  Have no doubt about it: if you are refusing to forgive, you are disobeying God.

Next, we forgive because it is in our own best interests to do so.  In his Yom Kippur sermon, a rabbi spoke about the importance of forgiveness – of seeking it and granting it: “Jewish law requires a person to ask for forgiveness three times—it must be genuine, heartfelt and inspired by true remorse. If the wronged individual does not forgive after three sincere attempts, then the person who did the wrong is forgiven and the one not forgiving becomes guilty and now needs to ask for forgiveness for not forgiving.”  Forgiveness is so important, so crucial, to the community of humanity, that to refuse to extend it when asked for is to take on the sin of the one seeking the forgiveness.

We forgive and are forgiven because it is in the interests of the one doing the harm to be forgiven.  It is an act of freeing from bondage and captivity – theirs as well as ours.

Ultimately – the very reason God commands forgiveness, is that we may be reconciled – to God, to ourselves, to the world.

Forgiveness is the agency of reconciliation –  cosmic rather than individual or even collective –  the work of heaven and all creation.

We are creatures made to live with others.  God has created all of this in such a way that what we do affects heaven as much as what heaven does affects us.

We are all in this universal boat together.  Reconciliation, the fruit of forgiveness, is the essential grease to the machinery of our lives together.  Without reconciliation, someone’s going to get kicked out of the boat.  Equilibrium is lost.  And the boat sinks.

Sometimes reconciliation looks like two estranged people coming back together into a relationship better than ever before.  Sometimes it means mom and dad stay divorced, but they quit fighting and start caring about the feelings, needs and desires of the other parent as much as their own.

Sometimes reconciliation means visiting the one who murdered your loved one in prison.  Or loaning your most bitter enemies money in order to rebuild their countries, as in the Marshall Plan following World War II.

Sometimes reconciliation means sharing your very best secret deer stand with the brother who never shared a single toy with you.  And being glad to do it.

It isn’t easy.  But it’s necessary.  Our world is crumbling in on itself for the want of some reconciling hands reached out in the hope, the dream, that things might be otherwise.

Beginning with ourselves, recall basic commonalities to all the possibilities of reconciliation:

1. Reconciliation means seeing the other person as a human being who is as loved and cherished by God as are you and treating them – broken, hurt and hurting them – accordingly.

2. It means being open to the possibilities of a new relationship beyond your wildest imaginings – which also means being open to the possibility of being hurt again.

3. Reconciliation means understanding, accepting and even embracing as good that we are all in this boat together and that we are all essential to the boat’s not sinking – none are expendable, not even those who have done me the most harm.

4. Reconciliation means living in to the reality that redemption is the way – the only way – for humanity to survive and thrive on this planet.  As Abraham Lincoln once famously said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.  To be unreconciled is to live in a permanently divided house, which is to say, no house at all.

As Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians, we are made new . . . we have been given a fresh start . . . that start comes with a challenge: don’t bring the old hurts, the old wounds, the old grievances with you into this new life. . .

God has entrusted God’s message of reconciliation to us!  It is an extraordinary gift.

Isn’t it time and past time to drop our  differences . . . roll up our sleeves and get busy doing the work – the work of making things right between us?

That, after all, is why we are here.

Sermon Cliff Note: Bible 101

School’s started.  It’s time to get back to basics.  Using the book of Philemon as our departure point, let us consider seven guidelines for reading and understanding the Bible.

1. The Bible is not a book; it’s a library.   Its contents are a compilation of many books written by many people over a period of centuries.  It was written by people doing well and people suffering; by people afraid and people brave; by people sure and by people in doubt; by the learned and the unschooled.  When we forget that we are hearing many voices rather than one, we reduce the Bible away from a story of God’s people seeking understanding of their God to a text book with rules to be memorized.  It is so much more than that.

2. Context matters to meaning  Philemon was a man. . . a slaveowner . . . a convert to Christianity . . . someone Paul believes that he (Paul) has authority over . . .  That Onesimus was a slave is important to the story.  Just as important is who Philemon is.  Their context matters.  So does ours.  What we understand about enslavement matters – more, perhaps, than what the letter actually says.  Think not?  Consider that this letter was used by both slaveholders and abolitionists in the United States during the argument over slavery.  It’s the same letter.  But what each person believed before they ever read it determined how they would hear it.

3. Not every word is for every person in every time  If you have no enemies or have long-ago forgiven them, Jonah has little to offer you.  The Bible as a whole presupposes a belief and faith in God.  If you’re an atheist, the Bible has little to say to you.  Philemon is Paul’s letter to one of his students, a convert to the Christian faith, begging him to see another convert as a brother in the faith and not as slave.  There are lessons we can learn from Philemon.  Before coming to those lessons,  we must begin with the clear understanding that this letter was not intended for us.

4. To learn a new thing, we have to listen with new ears.  (Put another way: if we already know it all, all we know is all we will ever know) Paul invites Philemon to see Onesimus not as a slave but as a brother.  The letter begins with Paul’s own condition – that of a prisoner.  Who is Paul more like – Philemon?  Or Onesimus?  What new thing do you suppose Philemon heard/learned from Paul’s letter?  What did it require of Philemon to be able to learn in the first place?  As Christians, it’s one of our jobs to always enter the world with a teachable spirit.  We have to be open to learn a new thing.  Or we won’t.

5. We don’t worship the Bible; we worship The One the Bible speaks of   A story, any story, is just one piece of the whole cloth.  The stories reflect where the people were at the time.  No less, but no more.  Thus today we can say that enslavement is wrong and not think we somehow violate the teachings of the Bible, for it is not the Bible we worship.

6. Any interpretation we give to the Bible that condemns someone else (rather than ourselves) is suspect (the Bible is not intended to be a weapon)  If we come to the Bible looking for evidence that someone else is ‘wrong’, we come in the wrong spirit.  If we come to the Bible seeking ways to prove we’re right, it’s the flip side of the same coin, isn’t it?  If, however, you read a word that challenges you, changes you, convicts you, you’re most likely on to something.  The book of Philemon is about Philemon.  Not Onesimus.  Paul is writing about Philemon to Philemon.  It is Philemon who Paul seeks to change.

7. People not like us have much to teach When the white majority in the South in pre-Civil War days read Philemon, they read a ratification of the existence of enslavement.  When African American theologians read Philemon, they read Paul encouraging Philemon to set Onesimus free.  It’s almost impossible to imagine a perspective we do not have.  So I cannot read this library with the eyes of someone who is black in America . . . or with the stomach of someone who is desperately poor . . . or with the pain of someone whose life has been nothing but despair . . . and I cannot imagine it on my own . . . but if I listen to them – to the others who are so different than me, I can learn much.  I can see and hear these blessed texts in a whole new way.  Conversely, if all I ever listen to are people who think just like me, then I’ll end up with a Bible that looks and sounds . . . just like me.

The challenge is to be open to listen for a new word, a new understanding, for Christ has said, I am making all things new (Rev. 21.5).  And that includes our ideas of how things should be, especially when it comes to the story of God.

Amen.