Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Seeking Reconciliation
Scripture: Matthew 5:1-12
Later in the service we will be having a formal dedication for our Stone Turtle: the permanent, three-dimensional land acknowledgement built by our Right Relations committee with guidance and help from a local Algonquin artist, Mike Strickland.
Acknowledging the land is a practise we are learning from indigenous people here in North America. It amounts to someone saying “I come in peace”, with the added dimension of recognizing that someone else already lives here and we are not planning to displace them.
The obvious irony of our acknowledgement is that we have, indeed, displaced the people of this land and have not yet made a treaty that allows us to stay here in our city, with our massive infrastructure and even our friendly additions, like gardens. A land acknowledgement, under these circumstances, should challenge us, should make us think deeply about what we are really saying.
When the Hebrew people invaded the Promised Land of Canaan after being toughened up by forty years in the wilderness, scripture records them as being encouraged by God to be ruthless in killing the residents, in some cases including women and children, tearing down places of worship and making every effort to wipe out the local culture because it was Pagan: the Canaanites didn’t worship the God of Israel.
I’m not going to get into a theological critique of this history except to say that this understanding contributes to what is going on in Israel and Palestine today. There are many people who still take it literally, who believe that this ancient promise is still to be fulfilled in literal, geographic terms, in the present.
Instead, I’m going to point out that when Europeans figured out that the American continents existed, they took this same theology and applied it to themselves.
That was impressive theological sleight-of-hand. To do this they had to:
1: explain how European Christians had inherited the promise made to the Hebrews; and
2: explain how the Americas had somehow become the “promised land”.
Once they had done this, both Protestants and Catholics alike, it became very easy to justify doing the same violent invasion and cultural suppression described in the early books of the Bible.
This is what we carry with us when we come to the table for reconciliation, with all of the historical ripples like residential schools, the 60’s scoop, missing and murdered indigenous women and two spirit people and the failure of our governments to honour treaties, either to the letter or in the original spirit.
That’s a lot to reconcile.
Jesus gave us wisdom that should have prevented all those past wrongs and should guide us today: “The meek shall inherit the earth”.
Jesus came out of that culture that believed in the promised land and all of that history of conquest and then later conquest by empire after empire. They didn’t care about inheriting the planet, “the earth”; so another very legitimate translation of this passage is: “The meek shall inherit the land”.
Jesus is giving a radically different theological spin on things. It’s not the armies and empires that God will bless, it’s the meek: the people who come in a gentle spirit, who do not come in arrogance, who do not feel entitled, who do not insist that they deserve something.
Jesus calls us to approach each other gently and lovingly, acknowledging and grappling with the bad things that have been done. That’s what reconciliation is all about: if nothing bad has happened, there’s nothing to reconcile.
This is true in every level of life. We are called to reconciliation in our personal lives, in our churches, our schools, our jobs. The Bible talks about Jesus reconciling us to God and calling us to be reconciled to each other.
“Reconciliation” is ancient Christian language at the core of our faith and it makes us very uncomfortable. Why? Because it calls us to confront the ways we have made life harder for other people; it calls us to struggle with the log in our own eyes instead of the speck in someone else’s eye and to do it face to face with someone we may be very angry with or who may be very angry with us or, more likely, both at the same time.
Real reconciliation takes an effort. It pushes us out of our comfort zones; it challenges us to see life through the eyes of someone we may not like very much or someone who seems incomprehensible to us. It calls us to abandon stock phrases like: “That’s in the past, get over it”, or “They deserved it because of (pick your excuse)”, or “They should have known better”.
Not because we are abandoning the idea of accountability but because we are being called to stop putting our own perspective between ourselves and our understanding of the other, we are called to the level of love that allows us to love our enemies.
That’s hard to do; it’s even hard to understand.
I recently heard someone talking about our new Holy Manners. Their interpretation seemed to be that this approach prevented us from calling someone else to account for what they were doing.
That’s far from the intent: the point is that we do, indeed, hold each other accountable for what we do and say but when we do it, we are to be respectful and kind. We do not attack, but we do speak clearly, never forgetting the call to love, no matter how upset we might be in the moment.
That is a high calling that is hard to make real in life. It is at the core of reconciliation. It’s much easier to imagine when we are speaking of the church trying to reconcile with indigenous people but we understand it best when we consider the very personal situations we find ourselves in where we have to deal with people who have really upset us.
The way to go forward is to take it all seriously: our own experience and feelings; the experience and feelings of the other people with whom we disagree; and then we try to reconcile those different perspectives and find a way to come together, despite our differences.
It is easy to give up, to quit, or get frustrated and walk away or to dismiss the experiences of someone else as somehow less worthy than our own.
But we are not called to quit.
Jesus was willing to take reconciliation all the way to the cross to bring people together and to connect us with God. That says to me that reconciliation is worth whatever effort we can bring and when we find it challenging us deeply, then we should understand that God is giving us room to grow.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 