O God, in your abundant grace you sent your Son to be the light of the world: Grant that we may come and see the difference that Christ makes in each of us as we seek to become your beloved community; and as we gather in intentional worship, may we ever be reminded of your transformative love which is the foundation of our faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
If you were to turn to the Catechism in the back of the Prayer Book, you’d read that the mission of the Church is to “ restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” That’s a pretty tall task – restoring all people to unity with God and with each other. But this audacious mission statement comes not from a grandiose sense of what the Episcopal Church thinks it can accomplish, but rather is grounded in the words of St. Paul. In the second letter to the Corinthians, he writes “God has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”
As we continue to explore our new identity statement at St. Luke’s, which is found on the inside cover of your bulletin, this week we’ll focus in on the difference that Christ makes as expressed through Beloved Community. And it is simply not possible to speak about becoming the Beloved Community without speaking about reconciliation. But what do we mean by “reconciliation”?
“Reconciliation” comes from a Latin word that means “to bring back together.” So the first thing to understand about reconciliation is that it begins with brokenness. Things that are in harmony do not need to be reconciled. So the fact that both St. Paul and the Catechism describe our ministry as reconciliation tells that things are broken.
You all know that we’ve been engaging in the work of Becoming the Beloved Community as commended to us by both Presiding Bishop Curry and Bishops Rodman and Hodges-Copple. The call of Becoming the Beloved Community is about the long-term commitment of the Episcopal Church to seek racial reconciliation. The model given to us by Bishop Curry has different phases of this work, and we’re currently focusing on “telling the truth.” As you know, the truth can be a powerful, transforming, and dangerous thing. It is Jesus who tells us that the “truth will make us free.” The truth is not always comfortable. The truth is not always what we want it to be. The truth does not allow us to remain as we are. But the truth is the truth, and as people of faith, we have to face it.
The truth is that we need racial reconciliation because things do need to be brought back together. Our nation and society are plagued by racism, rooted in the history of our own Anglican forbearers coming to this land and claiming it as their own, despite the fact that there were Native Americans already here. We then enslaved the people of Africa to build what would become the strongest economy and empire that the world has ever known. We have a sad and long history of racial division with groups such as the Japanese, Irish, Italians, Jews, and today, people of Latino descent.
Lent, of course, is a season in which these imbalances are brought to mind. We begin our liturgy with the Confession of Sin, which very clearly names the truth that we have separated ourselves from God and from each other. The work that we are doing around the Beloved Community right now is focusing on naming and understanding this brokenness that needs to be reconciled. You’ll recall that in the fall, we gathered after worship one Sunday to watch a video and have a discussion about racial reconciliation. On the evening of Palm Sunday, April 14, we’ll do that again. The Youth Group is going to cook dinner for us all, and then we’ll watch a video or two and have some truthful conversations about the state of disunity we find ourselves in.
As I hope you’ve heard, thanks to a grant from the Diocese, we’re also doing this work of Becoming the Beloved Community by reexamining our own history as a parish. We have a wonderful history book that tells a part of our story as the people of God at St. Luke’s. But that book doesn’t tell the whole truth – and so we’ve contracted with a local historian to research what role slavery played in the establishment and construction of this church in which we are sitting right now.
We’re also going to release a series of professionally produced videos later this year which will be interviews with African-American members of this parish and the Salisbury community to record their truths of how race was experienced as they grew up in this church and city. And we’re also going to host an event in November that I truly hope advances the work of racial reconciliation for our community. Over the weekend of November 8-10, we are hosting a Beloved Community event headlined by the Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, an ordained, white man, and the Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta, Dr. Catherine Meeks, a lay, black woman. They will each deliver lectures, engage in conversation with each other, and promote dialogue for us all. We’ve just announced this event, and so I hope that you’ll put it on your calendars and begin to spread the word.
I’ll acknowledge, these are difficult conversations because when we do the work of reconciliation, we run into the fact that things are out of balance. Think of what it means to “reconcile” a checkbook – it means to make the necessary adjustments so that things come into balance. The fact that things are out of balance means that we have to take a hard look at the systems which benefit many of us. And I fully recognize that this work might be seen by some to be “rocking the boat.” It would far easier to not do this work around the Beloved Community. But St. Paul tells us, just as God reconciled us to himself through Christ, we have been given the ministry of reconciliation. The truth of the matter is, as we pray in our Post-Communion Prayer, this is the work that God has given us to walk in.
St. Paul had something grand in mind when he wrote about this ministry of reconciliation which has been entrusted to us. The Greek word that he used is katallege, which you can hear is related to our word “catalyst.” He centers this transforming reconciliation in the grace of God, writing “All this is from God.” God is the one who provides the catalyst for reconciliation. He proclaims, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ.” This is our identity – we are ambassadors of Christ’s reconciliation and at St. Luke’s, we are calling this “Beloved Community.”
This is, perhaps, the most important thing there is to understand about God’s grace, the Resurrection of Jesus, even all of the Christian faith – that there is a New Creation. When we get to Easter in a few more weeks, it’s not only a celebration of Jesus’ being made alive after death, but it’s also the dawning of the New Creation. The old days when Sin, Death, and the Law were in charge are over in exchange for the New Creation of God’s grace. And this is why reconciliation is possible – because we have been reconciled by God, we have been brought into the New Creation by Christ. And it really is an audacious claim for us to think that reconciling all people to God and each other is our mission. But it’s absolutely possible because of even more audacious claim that the Crucified Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, and not only him, but all of Creation with him.
That phrase, “Beloved Community,” comes from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King who describes the Beloved Community not as some utopian goal that will be achieved only in heaven, but rather as a realistic and achievable goal where we share in the abundance of God and do not tolerate racism or violence. And he says this is possible not because humans are perfect, but because love is. King said “Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites.” This why that adjective “beloved” is so important. We’re not working towards community in general, but a specific kind of community. What we seek is the Beloved Community, a community grounded in the love of God and constructed by the reconciliation that God has given us in Christ.
As a way of thinking about what the Beloved Community looks like and helping us to see how it might work in our lives, I want to share a story. There was a man who had two sons. The younger asked for his share of the inheritance and squandered it in dissolute living. The older son stayed home and worked. The younger son was out of options, he returned home and was given a party by his father. But the older son deeply resented this show of grace.
We misread this parable when we try to figure out which of the sons we are – are we the wild and rebellious one or the faithful one who insists on fairness? It doesn’t matter. The story isn’t about the sons. It’s about the father. This is a father who is willing to cross boundaries for his sons. When the younger son appears on the road, he runs out to greet him. When the older son refuses to come to the party, he goes out to him. The father gives all of his love and livelihood to both of his sons. He’s a father who is seeking to reconcile his family and he celebrates with lavish joy when the younger son is reconciled.
The work of Becoming the Beloved Community is an expression of this parable. Through the Resurrection of Jesus, God has thrown us the best party we can imagine in the New Creation. As it was for the younger son, it’s a party we don’t deserve, but it’s the one we’ve been given. As with older son, we might find reasons to not enjoy the party. Maybe talking about race is uncomfortable, maybe you have personal stories and scars that make this difficult work. But there’s a party going on, and God has asked us to join in it.
The difference that Christ makes is that “behold, there is a New Creation.” This New Creation is marked by our state of reconciliation with God and we have been made ambassadors of this reconciliation. As we share and spread this good news, we are striving to build the Beloved Community, and, at its best, this is what people should “come and see” when they encounter Christians and the Church.
I want to close by reading a paragraph from a theologian who wrote imaginatively about this parable through the lens of grace. As I read it, think of it as a description of what it means to live in the difference that Christ makes in the New Creation and of our work in Becoming the Beloved Community. In envisioning the conversation between the father and the older son, he writes “The only thing that matters is that, fun or no fun in the far country, your brother finally died to all that and now he’s alive again – whereas you, unfortunately, were hardly alive even the first time around. Look. We’re all dead here and we’re having a terrific time. We’re all lost here and we feel right at home. You, on the other hand, are alive and miserable—and worse yet, you’re standing out here in the yard as if you were some kind of beggar. Why can’t you see? You own this place. And the only reason you’re not enjoying it is because you refuse to be dead to your dumb rules about how it should be enjoyed. So do yourself and everyone else a favor: drop dead, shut up, forget about your stupid life; go inside and pour yourself a drink.”
