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"Reconciliation as a Lifestyle"
THEME: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Someone has said that that approach will create a world full of one-eyed, toothless people. There’s another better way — the way of reconciliation. Most of us are open to overcoming barriers that exist between people. We truly want to understand the world community and to build friendship. Can we become a peaceful global village while there is still time?

God is not on vacation although there are times that people wonder where God is, and yet God is right there behaving as God would behave if you understand his character.

Last week I stood beside the hospital bed of a man who had a very serious operation from cancer. Yet as I took his hand and prayed for him, I was aware that God was there. And it was evident in his spirit because he knew God was there.

A few weeks ago I flew to Ohio to have the funeral sermon of a friend of mine who had died of lung cancer. While this was very traumatic, as I looked into the faces of the family and shared with them the love again of Jesus Christ, it was evident God was there, for they were people of hope and of faith, believing that God is at work even in very difficult circumstances.

You, with me, have asked the question again and again. “Where is God in this circumstance or that?” When you look at that from a personal standpoint or look at the world at large, the question comes up again and again, “Where is God?” when we think about the problem of apartheid in South Africa. And “Where is God?” when we think about the way people are trying to cope with that problem. And yet a friend of mine, the Reverend Samuel Hines, just returned from his visit there, stood before a committee in Washington, D.C., and with tears running down his cheeks, he said, “I wouldn’t have believed it if I had not seen it, but people of God, black and white, are meeting together in prayer, seeking to find ways to be brothers and sisters to one another even under very difficult circumstances.”

The same can be said for Central America, for the Middle East, for other parts of the world and yet, as I address you on this subject, “Reconciliation as a Lifestyle”, my concern is that we don’t simply try to use God as some automatic miracle worker who would move in and straighten things out for us, but rather that we understand God and how God works, for God doesn’t manipulate people, he doesn’t violate human personality, he doesn’t reach in and do it all for us, but he works with us and through us.

The text read a few moments ago from II Corinthians chapter 5, and I urge you to take the Bible and read the passage. This text tells us that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” That is, that God came into the world, God involved himself in the world, God participated in our predicament.

If you ask me why Jesus had to die, the answer I give to many a person on the street is by asking another question, “When you love a person, how long will you hang in with that person? When will love let you stop and cop out?”

You know the answer: Love doesn’t cop out. If you really love a person, you hang in all of the way, even to death. And that’s exactly what God did in Jesus. He came and involved himself in our experience and he hung in with us all of the way to death. This is the way God works. God keeps involving himself in the human predicament. God is around in the world, but he is not going to be a little cosmic bellhop, our little servant, who will do all the things we want, to bail us out of our predicament. Rather he works with us to ask us to become an extension of his love so that his work of grace and reconciliation might be extended into the world through you and me.

Several years ago there was a mad man who took a hammer and smashed into the face of the beautiful Pieta, one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces, and damaged it. Sculptors were called from many places of the world to come to Rome with the assignment that they would be there to repair the Pieta. I am told that for the first days and weeks, they did no work on this sculpture. They sat and studied it, meditated on it, thought about it, ran their hands down over the carving and the lines. Finally, when they began to work, it was not their mind and their ability, but they were an extension of Michelangelo. They were doing again what he would have done with that piece of sculpture.

And that is what God is asking of us. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” Now he has committed unto us (to you and me) the ministry of reconciliation.

Let me ask you a question: “Why is it that some of the greatest minds of the world are given to pursuits in the area of economics, banking, world economy? Or they are given to programs in science and even the development of nuclear arsenals and things of this type, and we act as though this is a great expression of the human mind. Why is it that some of the greatest minds of the world are not given to ministries of reconciliation, strategies of love, building networks of faith around the world that will transform lives, to strengthen the ministry of the church so that finally the nations of the world may discover that it is possible for a people to be one community, to love one another and to share?”

We simply have not taken seriously what it means to put ourselves at the front line of current thought, as Christian people to be involved at the frontier, to discover how to be God’s people in a world. And yet, it’s important for us to do clear thinking. Sound thinking does a lot to simplify and answer many things in life.

I heard a story that illustrates this about the couple that met at a summer conference ground near a mountain area in which this man and woman found that they had a lot in common. One thing they had in common was their pleasure in climbing to the tops of the hills of the mountains around, and so they made a date — the next morning they were going mountain climbing. That morning they came out carrying their mountain climbing boots, and in their sneakers they hiked to the foot of the mountain. They sat down on a log, took off the sneakers and put on their mountain climbing boots. And up the mountain they went, finally reaching the top of the ridge where they had wanted to achieve their goal. They were looking out over the panorama of that marvelous beauty, when suddenly he noticed that on a ridge just across from them was a large bear sensing their presence. He stood up on his hind legs and sniffed. And when he discerned where they were, he dropped down and came down the ridge and was cutting across to their ridge. Of course, this gentleman said to his companion, “We better get out of here.”

Down the ridge they went as rapidly as they could, but each time he could look, he saw that bear was cutting across the valley and starting up their ridge. When they got to the bottom, they were running as fast as they could. But suddenly she turned and went over to the log where her sneakers were. He said, “Come on, we’ve got to outrun this bear.”

She took off her boots and put on her sneakers and said, “I don’t have to outrun him. All I’ve got to do is outrun you.”

I think it is that kind of thinking that we need to do in all of life. Why can’t we outfox the world in terms of the problems we are facing by realizing there are things we could do that would make a difference. Make a difference because we model what it means to be a people of God in a world of tension and turmoil.

To talk about reconciliation as a lifestyle is a rather daring affirmation. To say that you and I will live and think in our total life about what it means to build bridges to people, to move beyond issues to persons, to love others more than we care about our own interests, to be more interested in people than in profits, to be more concerned about the well-being of people in society than just about status or prestige or power.

In this passage I want to line out several things for you to think about with me. The first one is that God’s act of reconciliation means that God takes the initiative in his grace. A God-kind of love always takes the initiative. You do not stand by passively. You move into the experience of the difficulty. You become involved in the problem.

Mother Teresa’s book is being offered you just now. I would like to remind you that Mother Teresa says, “You will not really care for the poor unless you get involved with the poor.” That is to say you need to get close to people to care for people.

There’s a lot of our life that is done by committees rather than by relating to people. And it is good to have committees, to have things well organized, but we need to be careful that they don’t just remove us from the pain and the healing of associating with people.

A few years ago Esther and I were in England and we were in The Cotswolds and we walked up to a beautiful old church in this area. The path up to the church was a path through the cemetery which appeared to be in the front lawn, as we would say, of the church. So on the way up the path to the church, we were reading the inscriptions on the tombstones. And here was the name of this person and the date of birth and death; and then the next one, and so on. But there was a little note there about each person. We came to one which we both stood and chuckled over because we had been involved in educational administration and a lot of committee work, and you would hardly guess what was on that tombstone. There was his name, date of his birth and his death, and then the inscription: “He died in committee.”

Sometimes we are so involved in committee work that we use that as a way to insulate ourselves and keep ourselves from really getting close to people and knowing where they hurt and how they feel.

My move to the inner city of Washington, D.C. was a rather strange move for one who has done a lot of work in an office and with people in committees, and one who has taken seriously these wonderful seminars on management and how to get things done through other people and how to magnify your interests by getting people involved in it. And now suddenly I find myself in a setting where, while I am still seeking to motivate people in the life of the church to become the arms of the church out in the city, in their professions and wherever they go, so that in the daily workweek, we are sharing Jesus Christ. I have also found that if I am going to do that, I must move with people, I must share with people, I must understand people.

I remember the story of the woman (when I was living in Richmond, Virginia, with a family and I was in graduate school), riding on the bus from downtown out to the suburbs, coming through a ghetto area, she was heard to remark to the person sitting beside her, “Why don’t they make those people build those shacks back off of the highway so we don’t have to look at them?”

That’s the way we tend to do. We insulate ourselves from the problem. But television has brought it into our living room. You and I can’t live today in a global village without knowing what’s going on on the other side of the world — the problems, the famine, the difficulties in Ethiopia, the bloodshed and the strife in South Africa, the tensions and guerrilla war in Central America, the problems and turmoil in the Philippines because of the tyranny of a person who doesn’t know the meaning of the democracy which he talks about.

Yet we know of those problems and know what our ministry is as a Christian people. Somehow the love of God which takes the initiative and moves in, calls you and me to be agents of reconciliation, to take the initiative and move in, to do something about this situation in life.

Reconciliation as a lifestyle means a God-kind of love that takes the initiative and moves. It means a God-kind of caring in which you care more about persons than just about your opinions, even your convictions. For you and I have to get beyond simply defending ourselves to sharing the truth that will transform other lives. It’s a God-kind of suffering, a willingness to identify with a person no matter what the problem is. And to do that, knowing that you may not always have the answer but knowing that you are saying, “I’m here because I care.”

You know, it has dawned upon me that love is the only thing in life that always succeeds even though it doesn’t always win. I’ll repeat — love is always a success even though it does not always win. It’s a success because it does something to lift the spirit of the person with whom you share it. It’s a success because it demonstrates that there are values in life that are greater than just coming out on top. It’s a success because it has a transforming value in its influence both upon the person you are serving and the people around you in society.

As I look at this passage, there is a second thing I would like to point out. Lifestyle love — what does it mean to have reconciliation as a lifestyle? I said first that it is a God-kind of love that takes the initiative that moves into a person’s experience. Secondly, it is a God-kind of forgiveness, or mercy, that is able to remove the barrier between you and another person by forgiving whatever they have done to hurt you. You move beyond that barrier to put your arm around them and say, “I care more about you than about what you have done to me.”

Forgiveness isn’t easy. Forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness is the most difficult thing I know. Forgiveness means you actually resolve within yourself your own indignation upon the other person’s sin, and you release them. You take your thumb off, because the refusal to forgive means that you have the person under your thumb making them squirm and wiggle. You take your thumb off and let them be themselves and let them be free.

Isn’t it marvelous that God forgives you and me without asking us to prove everything to his satisfaction? Rather he forgives us, knowing that it is in that very act of liberating, of freeing us, of releasing us that our lives can be changed, so we can become different persons. Because in that act of forgiving, God includes us, and reaches out and puts his arms around us and says, “Come, I want you to be in my family as one of my children.”

The tragedy in the world today is that as people profess to know God, we become so private, and individual, and selfish about our religion. It is as though what we want is a little private kind of experience between me and God to guarantee me that when I die I’ll go to heaven. We are really not open to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. We are really not open to become his agents of reconciliation to be servants of God now in this life. And yet God has called us into a kingdom that is already moving into our experience. It has the dimensions that are already in the dimensions that are “not yet”. There are some things more to come. But the very fact that we know Jesus is coming back and there is something more to come, puts meaning into the present, the already, and we begin living now by principles of love, and justice, and mercy and peace.

There is not another institution in the world, not another institution in the world that can do this like the church. For the church has the message of peace, of love, of justice, of forgiveness. So I would call upon you to begin understanding what it means to be the people of God.

One of the tragedies of our time is that we have reduced the church to a lot of little churches, little organizations, little institutions. And then we burn up a lot of our energies spatting around or fussing around about which one is the best, and where I should be and who has got the greatest program or which denomination has the advantage. We have lost the dynamic of sharing with the world the fact that we are a part of his church, the body of Jesus Christ, and that Christ is head and Lord, and that the church is his body, and whatever form of our fellowship, we really are called to be witnesses to his work.

The text says, “God has committed unto us the word and the work of reconciliation.” We are now agents of reconciliation, called to be an extension of God’s work of grace in the world. That means proclaiming the good news of the gospel, sharing in an evangelism that invites people to become children of God, that welcomes men and women of every race and kindred and nation and tongue to become heirs together of the grace of God. A witness that recognizes that there is no Christian culture as such, that there are Christians in every culture when they name the name of Jesus, and in that confession of Jesus as Lord, we become one new people that can affect the world so that we become lights punching holes in the darkness, a salt to the earth bringing the preserving power of the gospel into human life, enriching that life so that people can enjoy more fully what God intends life to be.

Finally, I would like you to note with me a third thing and that is that God’s love then transforms lives in society by calling us to this new experience of fellowship with Jesus Christ. Listen again to verse 17, “If anyone be in Christ, he (or she) is a new creation. The old things are passed away. All things are become new.”

Now that’s true personally in one’s personal life. Just let me explain that for a moment by saying when you come to Jesus Christ, you are a new creature. The Holy Spirit does the work in your life that makes you a new being. The Bible calls it a new birth, being born from above, being changed because of the presence of God. This means you have a new master, a new Lord, a new purpose, a new motive, new principles, new direction. Life is new. It’s new because you have a new relationship.

Now while that is true for us personally, it is also true in society. Any society that takes Jesus Christ seriously, finds the change begins to happen in the community because now we become people who worship together, we sing God’s praise together, we pray together, we talk together about what difference it makes when you know Jesus Christ and walk with him. Every community that has had an impact of the gospel, like a meeting of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Crusade, knows what I mean when I say, “Now we are thinking together, and we are talking about Jesus together, and we are doing things that transcend the limitations of our particular little groups that tend to cut us up.”

Just now I am involved in several committees in Washington, D.C. that are preparing for a citywide crusade next April 27 in which we expect to see all of the churches sharing together. The dynamic of this meeting will not be simply that we will come to an assembly and hear the preaching of the gospel. It will be dynamic what happens before, during, and after the meeting, because suddenly the people of the city and community are thinking and praying and singing and worshipping and witnessing together about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our world needs to see this happen. We need to demonstrate a cooperative spirit that says, “If your heart is as my heart, give me your hand. If you worship the same Lord I worship, let’s get about the King's business.”

We are a part of a world of 4.7 billion people, and 2.7 billion of them don’t know Jesus Christ. The tragedy is that many of them have an impression about Jesus Christ and Christianity that is other than the word that we have in this New Testament.

I remember the words of that great atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy really has shaped the minds of many people in this century. Nietzsche said on one occasion, “If you Christians want me to take your savior seriously, you’re going to have to act more saved.”

That means that you and I are going to have to put in practice what we profess. We need to begin behaving our beliefs, not as though the behavior of our works is going to somehow earn God’s acceptance.

The poet says:
        I cannot work my soul to save
        For that my Lord has done.
        But then I’d work like any slave
        For love to God’s own Son.

But rather if you know Jesus Christ, then you walk with him. You cannot genuinely, authentically express that belief without it showing up in the way you live, the way you conduct yourself, the way you manifest your love to other people.

May I remind you that sometimes we measure life as though we must be able to calculate success by numbers or size or status, but actually God measures it another way and that is by influence. And that influence may be upon one or two lives that are shaped for the work of God in the world.

There is a story I picked up sometime ago. This young man was a student in New York City at Columbia University. But his life was one of dissipation and waste. One Sunday morning early after having spent Saturday night in revelry and debauchery, he was on the way back to his dormitory room, when he came by a church. The door was open, and people were going in. This young man, with memories of his youth in his mind, suddenly felt an inner yearning to go in and check it out again. So he went into the church. He sat down in the back pew, and he looked around as people were singing. Then as the pastor called the congregation to prayer, other people went to prayer, but he sat there just looking around over the audience. Suddenly, looking across the aisle, he saw his favorite chemistry professor with his head bowed reverently in prayer. The young man sat there in amazement. He watched that chemistry professor’s lips moving as he prayed. He got up and left the church, went down the street back to the dormitory. When he got to his room, he dropped down on his knees under conviction for if that famous science professor could worship God and pray, then he better begin praying and worshipping God.

Years later, this young man was a missionary on furlough from India. And on his furlough, one of the first things he did was go back to Columbia University and look up his chemistry professor. The man had retired by now. So he got his address. He went to his house and sat down with him and said, “I have come to tell you a story that you have no way of knowing.” He told him the story I have just told you. And then he thanked him for an example that God used to transform his life.

May I remind you that we are to model the faith that we profess, believing that the spirit of God will use that example to transform other lives by calling them to faith.

May God grant you the wisdom and the grace to be an agent of reconciliation.

     

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