The Ministry of Reconciliation

By: Simeon Bruce

I speak to you in the name of the One, Holy, and Undivided Trinity. Amen.

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Good morning! I’d like to begin by thanking Mother Brenda for trusting me once again with the proclamation of God’s word here at St. Andrew’s. I’d also like to thank all of you for being here this lovely morning, it’s a delight to be with you.

This morning, I want to turn your attention to a tantalizing little puzzle that appears at the beginning of our reading from 2nd Corinthians. Feel free to turn there in your bulletin if you like, and read with me the following: “As we work together with Christ, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.”

Wait a minute. As we work together with Christ on what? Accept God’s grace in vain how? I think this is one of those moments where the collators of the lectionary have dropped us into the tail end of a conversation. We’re only getting the second half of what’s being said in this part of St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. So I’m gonna zoom us out, way out, and talk first, a bit about Paul, the City of Corinth and why on earth St. Paul is writing them letters anyway, and then bring us back to the text itself with some more context under our belts to help us understand what we’re reading here.

First, who on earth is St. Paul? If you want the long version of his story, I strongly encourage you to read the Biblical book of Acts, it’s a rollicking good tale. But the very short version is that at first, he was a devout leader in the Jewish community who made a real name for himself persecuting Christians. But God (don’t you love that phrase? God has such a way of turning everything upside down) God had a plan for this guy. Jesus miraculously appeared to him and the grace of Jesus Christ turned his whole life around. He didn’t just become a convert to Christianity, he became its most important missionary in the Biblical age. And actually, about one quarter of our New Testament consists of letters written by St. Paul and addressed to church communities that he founded across the Roman empire.

And the letters to the Corinthians, which we have been reading from recently, are letters from St. Paul to the church he had founded in Corinth. Corinth in St. Paul’s time was a Roman colony city. It was situated at the intersection of two extremely important trade routes, and had control over two important ports on either side of the Corinthian isthmus. We’re pretty accustomed to thinking globally now, but for the people of the mediterranean in that day, this isthmus was as crucial as the Suez canal is to global shipping now. It was the main shipping route between the entire Eastern mediterranean and Rome. So if you were an apostle with a message to spread, what better place? Tell the crowds full of merchants and sailors in Corinth and you could rest assured that your message would make its way across the Empire. St. Paul was a smart man, so he went there to preach. Work smarter, not harder, am I right?

So we know who’s writing: St. Paul, the missionary. And we know his audience: Christian converts in Corinth, many of whom he knew personally. What’s the message? The lectionary brings us in at the start of chapter 6 today, that’s the part we read earlier about working together with Christ and not accepting God’s grace in vain. And like I said, that’s the tail end of this section here – where Paul actually starts talking about this work we are supposed to cooperate with is a few sentences earlier, in chapter 5, where St. Paul writes these famous words, “If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation: everything old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”

So, St. Paul is arguing, Christians are a new creation – there’s a new way to be human in the world, and it looks like being reconciled to God and then becoming a minister of reconciliation. We are called to work together with Christ in that ministry, and Paul is arguing here that if we are not in the reconciliation business, we have received God’s grace in vain. Harsh words.

Harsh words meant to create a sense of urgency in the hearer. There’s been some kind of rift or tension between St. Paul and the Corinthian church. He goes on later in the passage to say his heart is open to them, and he begs them to open wide their hearts also.

We in this day and age know a fair amount about rifts, tensions, and closed hearts, don’t we? We, like those Corinthians, live in a society rife with inequities, and divided along many lines into a complex, and sadly frayed, social fabric. We, too, live in a time and place that desperately needs ministers of reconciliation.

I have encountered, as I’m sure y’all have, the idea that practices of dialogue and reconciliation are actually naïve and harmful. That we shouldn’t open our hearts and listen to people who disagree with us in good faith. But while it is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and I don’t deny that, the truth is that Jesus loves all of the people that I cannot stand.

And when I stand in judgement of someone else, and I write them off as incurably [fill in the blank], my own judgmental posture testifies against me that I have not left room for God in my attitude or in my thinking. I have forgotten that Christ makes new creations of us as people.

I haven’t been called to judgment and hard-heartedness. I am called to be a minister of reconciliation. I have no enemies, only beloved siblings in Christ. And I think St. Paul is pointing that out here to all of us.

Now, an important caveat is in order. St. Paul is calling the Corinthians to open their hearts to him, despite their differences, when he truly has their best interests at heart. He truly loves them. I don’t believe that we are called to intentionally fling wide the doors of our hearts to active abuse. I don’t believe that we are called to an intentional martyrdom, so that by our sufferings we can redeem others – that is Jesus’ job, not ours. We, as finite human beings, have limits, and we have to observe our own boundaries, and those of others.

But I’ve begun to wonder if what I believe to be my boundaries are really just the edges of my comfort zone. And if I’ve written off some people that I really could have a relationship with if I were willing to love them for who they are, even if we disagree.

I can’t know for sure. But to my shame, I haven’t tried. I want to change that. And if there’s somebody in your life that you’ve been thinking about for the past few minutes, somebody you know loves you but that you just haven’t been able to look past a disagreement with, I hope you’ll join me in thinking about what changing that might look like.

Because we have been called to work together with Christ. We are ministers of reconciliation, sent to a world that desperately needs us to open our hearts wide, past the limits of our comfort zones.

To which I hope you’ll join me in saying, “We will. With God’s help.”

AMEN.