The Cross and Reconciliation

The Cross and Reconciliation

(2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11-32)

10:30 am, 4^th Sunday in Lent, March 10, 2013; Windsor UBC; J G White

It was at least a month ago that I planned my preaching for these Sundays before Holy Week. I thought it appropriate for us to listen to the Cross of Christ, and discover what Jesus' death says to us about repenting, being reconciled, and taking up our own cross. So, today is about reconciliation.

God has provided. All this past week I kept meeting up with people who need to be reconciled in some way or other: even myself. Again and again the need to be reconciled presented itself. Life is our teacher when we walk with the Master, Jesus.

Before I tell you my anecdotes from the week, keep looking with me at the finale of 2 Corinthians 5. Verse 18: God... reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Jesus' sacrifice by execution – with it's consequent forgiveness of our sin, making us right with God – brings about reconciliation with God, and makes us agents of reconciliation.

And, as God does this work with our souls and minds and bodies, we become Jesus' ambassadors of reconciliation. God actually trusts us, more and more, with His ministry of reconciling people. Think about how the Lord trusts you. Incredible.

Now then, I do believe Jesus parable of the talents applies here, talents being a quantity of money given to three slaves. Mathew 25. The ones who took and invested and grew what was entrusted to them were praised, and were then trusted with more. But the slave who was given little, and did nothing with it, was cursed. 'You wicked, lazy slave!' The Master declared, For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but form those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

God can trust us with more power to reconcile as we do well with the reconciliation that's offered to us. We are trusted to be ambassadors for Christ in as much as we trust Him and entrust everything we have and are to Him. We limit ourselves when we don't entrust everything to Jesus. The more of our own little kingdom we put in His Hands, the more we can be trusted with in His glorious kingdom.

Well, as Pastor, people occasionally expect me to be an agent of reconciliation. Last week, a person I did not know at all called me to make an appointment: an appointment for her and her husband to come in a talk. They find themselves suddenly estranged from a young teen granddaughter, and feel totally blocked about how to reconcile with her. They came in and poured out their stories, and their hearts, longing to understand what went wrong, and how to make it right.

For the most part I felt as helpless as they, and can but pray that one day the granddaughter will come back – like that famed prodigal son? – and that those grandparents will welcome her – like the forgiving father in the story, who threw open his arms and threw the big welcome-back party. The Kingdom of God is a party, don't ya know? :)

I turn from this personal challenge, to Jesus upon the Cross. See Him there, betrayed by one of his closest friends, Judas. See Him there, abandoned by almost all the rest of the disciples. As He died, He was experiencing betrayal and rejection by those dearest to His heart. That betrayal He bore upon the Cross. And out of His death will come reconciliation.

At the same historic moment, know that the religious elite were mostly enemies of Jesus by now. When Christ was twelve years old he amazed the teachers in the Jerusalem Temple; but when in His early thirties, those ministers of worship and religion and rules and ethics oppose Him. Jesus came to reform His religion; His would-be religious co-workers reject Him.

This past week I had a session with a person I know, from outside our Church, who talked at length about difficulties at his workplace. He is feeling pressured by those he works for, and it's all about a decision in his personal life. He finds them not supportive, butting into his business, and supplying lots of stress. His workplace is totally stressful, because of a personal plan he has for himself that should be pure joy.

I think Jesus understands completely what it is to be pressured by those who should be your colleagues at work. Jesus' religious career led him to a Cross of execution, the other religious experts of His Faith were glad of this. What would Christ teach us about being reconciled at work? This can can be explored with Him.

Our Saviour also can show us the way to reconciliation with things of our past. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 5:17, exclaims, So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

Sometimes I dive into the filing cabinets in my Study here, and read old minutes. Did it again just this past week, reading minutes of our Music Committee from the 1990s. I wondered again about the kerfuffle over hiring a Music Director back then, who would play the Organ, when the Organist had not and did not resign or retire. Awkward! Hurtful. Does our reconciling God use this to teach us reconciliation?

I've also read Deacon Minutes from the 1980s, including a time of squabble over the Assistant Pastor becoming Senior Pastor, or not. He did not. And then, I guess, our next Senior Pastor was put through the wringer. The minutes of one deacons' meeting in the book are blank – a blank half page.

Jesus, who knew no sin was made to be sin: He has surely taught some of us about reconciliation from that piece of our history. And yet there may be more to learn in our souls.

I could go on. Go on about a nasty deacon fight in about 2003 over the title of my Assistant Pastor. Or the resignation of Pastor Welton in 1862, after five years as Pastor here. His resignation was not accepted by the Church. He eventually agreed to stay, and became our longest serving pastor: 16 years. The minutes of his time here suggest an interesting chapter for the ministry of reconciliation.

I have a confidence in God: I believe in the mystery that we can learn from our past, and be the greater for it. So it is for our personal crises. Many people have to reconcile with traumatic events from their past. You who know such experience can tell me if reconciliation is really the word for it.

Look again, with you mind's eye, to Christ upon the Cross. Here He is, tortured and dying. The kind of event that, if one survived, would give post traumatic stress. This was not, of course, the first attempt on Jesus' life. One of the first was near His own home Synagogue, when the upset citizens tried to throw Him down a cliff. Jesus can be our Master, our Model, our Teacher for dealing with the personal traumas we have suffered. Because of Him – reconciled to Him – we can take a personal journey to reconcile with the deep hurts inside us, from our past.

Again this past week, I found myself facing my own insides: my mind, heart, soul, ego – all that stuff that makes me me. I've never suffered any great trauma, but there are things to be reconciled in here. I'm taking an online course from the Center for Action and Contemplation right now, dealing with addictions, stinking thinking, the personas we present and the like. I'm also in a small group, learning from Dallas Willard and John Ortberg about living Jesus' sermon on the mount. There is good and evil struggling within me, and I was looking there this week. I feel comforted that the Apostle Paul was like me: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 7:15)

Look to Christ crucified again. His last temptation? As the movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, explored, He faced the temptation to escape and not go through with this sacrificial death. The Devil, and Accuser, who had tempted Him in the desert a few years before, was there again. A gospel song reiterates what Jesus said when being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:53):

He could have called ten thousand angels,

but He died alone, for you and me. (Ray Overholt, 1958)

The light and dark that both dwell within, both part of who I am and you are – these our Jesus understands. He experienced intense temptations. And even having no sin of His own, what did Jesus experience? For our sake God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:1) And as we read last Sunday, He himself bore our sins in His body on the cross. (1 Peter 2:24) Thus, Jesus knows what it is to have inside what we have inside us.

So He brings about our reconciliation with God, with others, and with our inner selves. Thanks be to God! But I have one more little chapter from my week. It is about the body. Ever find you must be reconciled to your own body?

Many people, who have problems in the body, are on my mind. Sharon and I went to see one of them – Marilyn White – in the palliative care wing of the VG hospital. She is failing. Not quite as positive and energetic. Not supposed to get out of bed and walk by herself anymore. Not alone at nigh anymore – family members are taking turns staying with her.

She had an enthusiastic hymn-sing with some of you a few weeks ago, and reflected on what music to have for her funeral. This past week, she talked quietly about it with us, thinking through some details, and sharing her philosophy of funerals.

And now I wonder... what is it like to make peace with one's body when it is dying. To let go of, well, it must feel like yourself. But this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. (1 Corinthians 15:53) Jesus' body, when He was dying, was a tortured thirty-three year old body. He knows what death is all about. And... of course... this is what what are all waiting for... Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep / died. (1 Corinthians 15:20) Jesus reconciles mortality with immortality; the body that dies, the spiritual body that lives.

So I've been listening all week for reconciliation. Ya know, so much of this happened in one day, Thursday. The couple estranged from their granddaughter, the guy needing reconciliation at work, reading music committee minutes, small group study about the inner life, visiting Marilyn in hospital – all came to me on Thursday.

These situations are understood by our Saviour. He goes to the cross – His execution – to reconcile us to God, and to one another, to our past, to our whole selves.

We learn that we get reconciled – it happened – but it also keeps going on. We are still being reconciled to God. We are still being reconciled to those people we hurt or who hurt us. We keep on being reconciled within ourselves, amid the inner conflicts that simmer, between the light and darkness that is me.

Keep Jesus going to the Cross and the tomb in your heart. Following Him, we will get to know what reconciliation looks like, and receive it, and give it. This is amazing Good News!

Amen.