September 27, 2009 Des Moines
4th in the Getting Started in the Right
Direction Series
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Prayers
of the People
Encourage
us, O God, because you have called us to huge and important work. In a world at odds over religion, money,
marriage, and race; torn between caring for the earth and caring for the people
its resources make comfortable; between principles and pragmatism, you have
called us to be ambassadors of reconciliation.
And if we are to carry out that commission it will take more resources
than our own. What does reconciliation
look like for family members around a hospital bedside arguing over course of
treatment? What does it look like for
adult siblings in a lawyer’s office squabbling over inheritance? What does it look like for spouses who eat in
silence and sleep one in the bed and one on the couch? What does it look like for business owners
bitterly divided over how the road will be striped? What will it look like for church members
whose interpretations of holy pages are wholly different? If we are going to perform this kind of
ministry we will need your Spirit’s guidance, O God, and patience, and
strength.
Thankfully,
not all of life is conflict and estrangement.
We are grateful for brighter, cooler experiences of joy that enliven and
renew us. Knowing them, touching them,
celebrating with them reminds us how precious are the people with whom you have
surrounded us. We are touched by this
truth as well when those we love are weighted in seasons of ache. With your healing, comforting grace we pray
that you will bless those we call to mind, and those whose names we don’t event
know.
Both our
joys and our concerns reconnect us with the treasure that is this world and its
people, and we thank you for those connections when we see the inhabitants of
that world tearing each other apart – sometimes with our own emotions and
energies fueling the conflict. Forgive
us, we pray, for the part we, ourselves, sometimes play in estrangement, and
realign us with the ways that make for peace.
These things we pray after the witness of him we call the “prince of
peace,” who also taught us to pray, saying:
Our father in heaven...
In
the Direction of Reconciliation
If you
are looking for a good used machine tool, writes Matthew Crawford in his new
book titled Shop Class as Soulcraft, “you should talk to Noel Dempsey, a
dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel's
bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws,
and it turns out that much of it once resided in schools. Ebay,” according to the book, “is awash in
such equipment, also from schools.” It
turns out that “...Most of this stuff has been kicking around the secondhand
market for about fifteen years; it was in the 1990's that shop class started to
become a thing of the past, as educators prepared students to become 'knowledge
workers'.”[1]
Which
is to say that over the past decade or so we have put our collective emphasis
on other subjects, and there are only so many hours in a school day. Besides, Crawford points out, shop equipment
is expensive, and shop class can be dangerous.
Class sizes are limited by the tools at hand, and money – for facilities
but also for teachers – is always in short supply. So, more and more school districts across the
country have concluded, jettison the shop class. And surely those other subjects have
benefited from the extra time and money thusly liberated. The only problem, according to Jim Aschwanden,
executive director of the California Agricultural Teacher's Association, is
that we are producing a “generation of students that can answer questions on
standardized tests, know factoids, but they can't do anything.”[2]
Now,
the reality is that this critique isn't likely to stir many waves very soon,
because, as the author points out, our culture has undergone a radical shift in
our relationship to our own stuff – “more passive and more dependent. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and
what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to
repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some
minute component has failed.”[3]
Now,
all this could begin to sound like an interesting but irrelevant little
side-trip into the arcane challenges of public education, if the story weren’t
so representative of a larger crisis unfolding among us. The problem isn't merely
esoteric or academic. Recall, just for a
moment, that breathtaking interval in April of 1970 during the flight of Apollo
13 when a critical piece of equipment in the space capsule malfunctioned. The measure of the crisis was that if some fix
for the problem wasn't found in a relatively short amount of time, the
astronauts would die in space.
“Houston,” James Lovell announced in that now-legendary piece of understatement,
“we have a problem.”
Almost
miraculously, however, the astronauts survived.
How? Because the flight engineers
in Houston came up with a long-distance solution? No.
Because the problem mysteriously corrected itself? No.
The three space travelers were saved by their collective ingenuity and
creativity utilizing the equivalent of chewing gum, bailing wire and spit. In short, they knew how things worked and had
some sense about how to fix things.
I'm
not sure how their astronaut descendants would fare today, having grown up in
our “throw it away and buy a new one” kind of world. And closer to home, how do we do when the tire
goes flat on a country road where the cell phone signal isn't strong enough to
connect us with AAA? Fewer and fewer of
us, I'm guessing, can even locate our car's jack, let alone know how to use it
to put on the spare.
Similarly,
fewer and fewer of us are changing our own oil, cooking our own meals,
sharpening our own knives, making or repairing our own clothes, or unclogging
our own drains. In fact, we are rapidly
growing incapable of, and even disinterested in, fixing anything –
toasters and vacuum cleaners and lamps and dinner, to be sure, but also
relationships between individuals and groups and nations and belief systems,
and problems of almost every description.
The truth is that there are broken essentials all around us, and
somebody better be learning how to repair them.
Fortunately
for the world, we have stepped forward.
We have discerned that God is calling us to be a “Reconciling
Community -- mending estrangements caused by conflict, injustice,
or ignorance.”
As
you know, we have spent this month of September trying to get this new season
started off in the right direction by lifting up the four major areas guiding
and clarifying our sense of the mission to which we believe God is calling
us. We have talked about our calling to
be:
l
a Caring
Community
who builds and nurtures active relationships that respond to human concerns,
joys, and needs;
l
a Welcoming Community which is intentional about
extending hospitality to all people;
l
a Stewarding
Community that
models and advocates for a faithful, responsible use of all God's gifts and
resources.
Today we complete the series by getting started in the
direction of Reconciliation. If
you have started to think that shop classes and spacecraft crises, flat tires
and dormant kitchens are a bit far removed from the work of the church, let me
suggest that reconciliation is all about fixing things that have either broken
apart or fallen into disrepair. As we
have prayed about and reflected upon this work over the past year or so, we
have rightly observed that chasms don't just arise from a single cause. Feuds – the likes of the legendary Hatfields
and McCoys – almost certainly flame up over some insult or conflict. But prejudice and estrangement between races
– as existed in our country in virulent forms up through the 1960's – aren't
the result of an argument. They arise
from ignorance, mistaken beliefs, unrepresentative experiences. And injustice drives other people apart. The work of reconciliation, in other words,
isn't a “one size fits all” proposition.
Sometimes it will rely on information and education. Other times it will depend on skills for
conflict resolution. Still other
situations will require the spiritual skills of forgiveness and a willingness
to start a relationship over again.
We aren't, of course, left to
our own devices. We have some experience
with this sort of thing, after all -- and some role models. For starters, according to the Apostle Paul,
“we regard no one from a human point of view.” Since the time of our own personal
reconciliation with God given voice in our confession of faith in Jesus Christ
as Lord, we have come to see people as God sees them. Because “if anyone is in Christ, there is
a new creation.”
Now, we will be the first to
admit that this isn't always easy – and we don't always live out of this new
identity. People, after all, can be
so...well...human – which, recalling the Genesis story of our creation, means
dirty. People, as we well know, can very
effectively conceal their heavenly side while quite nakedly exposing their
earthy side. And we know how ugly that
can be; which is why it is so valuable to see through all that – like God
does. It's certainly true that people
can appear to sell themselves out for the sake of power or pleasure, but God
knows that people tend to act like they do – and respond how they do -- out of some
pretty basic needs.
People want to believe that they
matter, and that life matters; and they want to feel safe. When any one of those needs gets violated or
threatened – and sometimes they can all feel threatened at once -- well, let's
just say that we aren't always philosophical in our response. Sometimes we come out swinging. Sometimes we simply run away and hide –
behind a rock, or inside of ourselves.
Sometimes we get radio talk shows and put other people down. Sometimes we build walls in an effort to put
as much space as we can between us, and sometimes we file lawsuits; other times
we walk streets in protest or lobby our elected representatives.
But from God's point of view,
each of those reactions springs from an understandable and desperate need to
know that they are worth something, that life is worth something, and that they
don't have to worry about being snuffed out like a candle. When we look at people that way – through the
eyes of God – we can't help but react to their reactions from a very different
place. What we have learned from Jesus
is that God doesn't respond to us dismissively or punitively. God reaches out to us in reconciling –
indeed, sacrificial – love. What was the
second part of that memory verse we learned in childhood? “For God so loved the world that he gave
his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have
eternal life. For God did not send the
Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved
through him.”
And having been brought close,
we have now been entrusted with the blessed ministry of drawing close to
others. Paul put it this way:
“God...reconciled
us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of
reconciliation...”
We are,
he says later on...
“...ambassadors for Christ; God making an
appeal through us...”
Wow! Ambassadors of reconciliation. It's hard to imagine a more wondrous – or a
more daunting – job description. But if
it helps, keep in mind that it isn't our job to bring about world peace – although
if you can swing it, be my guest. No,
our job is much narrower, much humbler, and much closer to home.
Think
of our work as relational public works employees – patching holes, repairing
severed lines, bridging gaps – you know, fixing the broken places among
us. Just as though we had been students
in some holy shop class.
Which,
of course, we have. Reconciled, we have been entrusted with this ministry of
reconciliation. No longer looking at
things the same way we did before, we live as ambassadors for Christ, God
making God's appeal through us.
From
the looks of things, there will be plenty to keep us busy.