Let's go on and begin. I told Mark Love, don't
put me in culling in the afternoon because
by Wednesday afternoon, everybody's going to be
gone. They're going to be out of here.
We'll have four. We have a few more than four
today. It's not a little spread out, but I'm
not going to make you move. You're okay. You
guys in the front row, you'll strain your
neck and that'll be okay. At least you're
sitting on the front. I'll reward you every
now and then by coming over and... You're
welcome. All right. Thank you. I appreciate
your hanging with me and I know that there are
a number of others who will be hearing
on tape and I appreciate it and I appreciate
your words. I probably should make clear,
and I should have said this at the beginning,
as we've had these flyers related to the
book that should be out by the first week of
May called The Body Broken Embracing the
Peace of Christ in a Fragmented Church. My
attempt to make that accessible to you was
not to hawk books. I couldn't care less about
book royalties. This provides for me an opportunity
to lay the larger picture down. You understand
that what we're doing here is some very small
slices of what we're doing in a much more
extensive way in the larger book. For those
of you who are interested in the Ministry of
Peacemaking, for me it's being a part
of that larger conversation. I'm not hawking
books. I am encouraging your participation
in what I think is one of the most crucial
dialogues of our time. If you want more of
that information, you can get that from us
afterwards. Let's begin in prayer. I'm grateful
today, Father, for people in this room and
people throughout the fellowship of churches
throughout the world who care about being
peacemakers and who believe that this is not
a marginal doctrine or some possibility that
takes place only after people already agree,
but that peacemaking among people with
differences is close to your heart, and that
this is what
you created the church to do, that we would
gather together with people who have a common
beginning, a common baptism, and share in a
common community so that our profound differences
can be talked about together and commonly laid
at the foot of the cross. I pray that
we will have the ability to tone down our
rhetoric and to ratchet up our love for each
other, that we will be a people of humility,
people who listen, people of encouragement,
that we do so in the name of Jesus and by His
power, and in whom today we pray. Amen.
Well, as I was working on this book project
this fall, I was provided a small ranch house
near Abilene, about fifteen miles south of
Abilene, the little town of View by one of
our board members and good friends. I had been
out there, I had not been out there except
just to check the place out, and so I took all
of my books and got everything ready to
go out, a little three room place out in the
country. It's a beautiful place with live
oak and cedar and mesquite trees everywhere,
and spent the first day working. Now I've
got to tell you, I'm a bit of a city boy. Even
though the house I grew up in, the house
that my parents still live in, is a few miles
out of the city here in Abilene, I'm not a
country boy, and there are just no other houses
around, and we're just nestled in the hills
out there, and it's really dark. I'm used to
the night sounds of cars passing by in
the middle of the night with the radio jacked
up high, with the bass boosters kicked in,
driving up and down our street. I listen every
night to the sound of train cars hitching
in and unhitching at the railroad tracks. This
is not what I was used to. So I worked
until about midnight that first night. I was
pretty tired, but I had my new iTunes hooked
up in my computer, and I had my little speakers
plugged in, and I put my Dave Matthews album
on and had one of my favorite Dave Matthews
pieces, warehouse, plugged in. I'm telling
you, I'm falling asleep to the sounds of music
around me and fell asleep pretty quickly,
and of course the album went out after a little
while, and right in the middle of the night
there were footsteps in the next room. I'm sure
of it. It was pitch dark, and there was
not a sound around, and I'm thinking, who even
knows where this place is? What am I
going to do? I began to think of my wife and my
kids. There's nothing to hit this person
with if they walk into the room, and I'm
telling you, my heart was beating so fast I could
just barely stand it. I've got sweat running
off my face, and I'm thinking, you know, it's
going to be days before they find my body, and
I finally mustered my courage. I had a
pair of sneakers. My tennis shoes were down by
my bed, and I picked up one of the shoes
and turned the light on, and the room was
empty, and so you can imagine what I did.
I went through the next few minutes, and I
looked at every room. I opened every closet,
I opened the water heater, I looked in the
shower. It's a little tiny place, but I just
went. I just looked at every conceivable place.
One night I looked under the porch. I went
and looked under my bed in case he had slipped
through when I was out of the bedroom and
looked under there, and I'm thinking, that's so
stupid, but I was pretty afraid, so I put
my shoe down and left a couple of lights on in
the room and didn't sleep much that night
as I had listened to mesquite branches hitting
against the roof of the house for the rest
of the night. Fear is paralyzing. Fear is
debilitating. Fear turns rational thought into
Plato. Under
the power of fear, human beings do odd things.
They suspend good judgment. They jump to false
conclusions. They anticipate unimaginable
consequences. The overriding impulse under
fear is self-protection, sometimes at any cost,
even if the behavior seems foolish or
peculiar to others. This last summer, Janine
and I were in Ghana, West Africa. We were
with one of our dear friends, Samuel Tuomasi
Ankrai. Samuel is a great man. He was one
of our students in the graduate school of
theology. He's a great preacher, powerful
preacher. He has an imposing presence and a
strong, powerful voice. He is what my kids
would call Buff, his chest and arms. I mean,
this is a powerful man. He took us to Kakum
National Park, which is a rainforest in Ghana,
and they have there at the rainforest a canopy
walkway where you can climb up into a canopy up
in the top of the trees about 200 feet
off of the ground and walk on these rope
bridges from tree to tree to tree and look down into
the jungle. This is pretty neat stuff. I mean,
this is a part of budding ecotourism in that
part of the world. The same thing's happening
in Brazil and other places. We were pretty
excited. He got us there and we said, well,
come on. And he said, well, I'm not coming.
I said, what do you mean you're not coming? And
he said, I'm afraid of heights. Well,
I mean, they're like five-year-old children
that are running across the way. We watched
an older woman, a white-haired woman with a
camera in her hand. She's leaning over the
edge of the bridge and taking pictures and
whatever and people scurrying back and forth.
And we said, come on. And Samuel said, I tried
this once and I got about 10 feet out on the
rope bridge and I could, I parallel, I just
froze. And I got down on my belly and crawled
back to the, he said, I'm not doing that again.
I'll meet you on the other side. So we went
on our way and we walked across from tree to
tree and came back at the end and there
Samuel was with this big broad grin waiting on
us. Ever been afraid of anything like that?
Anything like that ever frighten you? Like all
of us can tell our stories. Fear is a
potent emotion. Fear empowers decisive action
used rightly. Fear is a gift from God. When
it fills its proper role, fear fuels the body
during a crisis that provides strength we
didn't know we had. It sharpens our minds and
eliminates our distractions. It, it focuses
pretty clearly on the task that is at hand and
things that were pretty important a few
minutes before are less important in the
context of fear because fear prioritizes for us. Fear
rightly used and channeled as a good thing. But
at its worst, fear debilitates and it
makes constructive responses difficult, if not
impossible. At one extreme, fear paralyzes
us so that we can't move. We're out on the
bridge and we don't know what to do and we
just respect there. So we have to crawl our way
back to something safe. On the other extreme,
fear causes us to lash out at others, to push
people away in self-protection. Fear can cause
great destruction if it's not used and
channeled well. And when it affects the church, the
consequences can be devastating. I suspect that
much of the fragmentation that we are
experiencing in the church these days, which by
the way is not new to us or any other group,
this is not like this is the first time this
has happened. The fragmentation the church
is experiencing to some degree is a result of
fear. I don't know for sure. I've not
analyzed the situation. I haven't done surveys,
but I suspect that at least for some, this
is a consequence of fear. Certainly some people
are afraid. They're afraid of change or they're
afraid that change won't happen fast enough.
Some are losing power and influence. Others
fear that the church that they've always known
it is going away. But whatever its cause,
unchecked and unexamined fear can destroy
churches, and in many places it already has.
Unconstrained fear makes us judgmental and
impatient. Its instincts are to talk about
people rather than talking with people. It
undermines friendships and victimizes the
innocent. It pushes some people away. It pushes
other people down. While perfect love casts
out fear, fear unrestrained by love casts out
people, which is the situation we find
ourselves in.
Through all the years of ministry that I've
been engaged in since the early 1970s, I've
not known how to engage or how to address fear
when I've encountered it. I haven't
always known what to do. I was too afraid
myself. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing.
I was afraid of making the wrong decision. I
was afraid mostly of criticism. I was afraid
of confrontation. I was afraid of conflict. I
don't like it at all. There's nothing in
my constitution that likes doing things that
cause others to be upset. So it's not surprising
that I would be paralyzed in the face of my own
fears. And I would be lying to you if
I said to you that I'm no longer afraid. But
over time, my perspective has changed. Like
a nurse who is no longer squeamish at the sight
of blood because she has drawn blood
for so long. The years have taken an edge off
of my fear. It's not that I've grown
calloused. I hope and I pray that that's not
the case. But I am learning to see people
differently now. After all these years of
ministry, after holding the hand of a young
man who took his last breath after a few months
of colon cancer, after preaching the funerals
of three year olds and young mothers, after
walking through the divorces of friends and
family and after having seen the human wreckage
of sexual abuse and the devastation of racism,
after receiving too many anonymous letters
challenging my sanity or my faith, after verbal
attacks in the back foyer and curt words over
the phone, after witnessing lives being destroyed
through the abusive behavior of church members
in the name of discipline and accountability.
My eyes are open to the frailty of the human
condition and the sheer brokenness of Christ's
church. To see with those eyes has been
liberating for me because it allows me to see others
in the way that I want to be seen as a hurting,
broken, sinful man in need of affirmation
from others. At my best self, I no longer see
dangerous enemies who oppose me, but hurting
people who deserve my kindness and my prayers.
I see people who are powerless or afraid,
people who are protecting their loved ones, who
are protecting their future, who are protecting
the church as they know it, safeguarding their
understanding of the gospel. In other words,
the more I look at people, including those who
are making attacks at whatever level,
I see people very much like me. I'm a member of
a community of brokenness. Lived among
other broken people, with that awareness comes
the task and the freedom of granting to others
what I have received, grace and peace. All our
churches are fractured communities. Every
one of them is broken, filled with broken
people. They are not gated neighborhoods walling
out the Pagan world. They're not fortresses,
nor are they businesses or civic organizations.
They are more like hospitals for the weak and
the lost.
What complicates the matter, of course, is that
when all of us gathered together in these
hospitals, we're all patients. Now, there are a
few folks walking around with clipboards
and white coats, but don't be deceived. There's
only one physician here. The rest of us are
all patients. And so to be treated by others as
if they have some kind of authority over
us because they put on the little white coat
and have a stethoscope around them is to do
disservice to the function of the hospital that
we are in. A few may even try to dismiss
some of the other patients, but it's not their
right and responsibility. They're also patients
here. There's only one expert in what makes
people ill. There's only one with any real
authority, Jesus Christ. The rest of us are in
need of care. Some of us may be in the
cancer ward. Some of us may be in the coronary
care unit. But whatever our appearance, whatever
we say, however we present ourselves, however
nice we dress ourselves up, we are all sick.
There are certainly things we should fear, but
the other patients should not be among
them. So if we recognize ourselves as being a
part of a community of brokenness, then
there is a change of perspective that gives to
us. It doesn't completely eradicate the
fear, but our fear is a symptom of our
brokenness. And our brokenness is an
opportunity for grace.
And our grace is the spring from which
peacemaking always flows. What I would do in providing
some sort of perspective on what we do at this
point, the thing that I've worked very
hard to do is not to give a simple list. This
is not about eight steps to conflict resolution.
A conflict resolution is important, but that's
not primarily what this is about. This happens
before conflict resolution. It's about our
hearts. It's about our nature. And there are
no easy steps. Anyone who says there are easy
steps either doesn't know what they're talking
about or they shouldn't be trusted. I don't
know easy steps here. But there are some perspectives.
I've not tried to provide in our classes all of
the breadth of scripture that can be brought
to bear in the material that will be published.
We'll spend time on Philippians and Ephesians
and Romans and 1 Corinthians to provide some
backdrop here. But let me suggest maybe four
things that we should be aware of that would at
least be helpful in this.
First of all, I think that we are called by God
to have hearts of confession. I think
that confession is the beginning of peacemaking.
Confession is an opportunity that the church
has to say, I am not God. God has his
responsibilities and I have mine and my
responsibilities are
not God. God gives, God empowers, God provides,
God serves, God offers his grace as a free
gift to us. God has his responsibility. It is
God's view. It is God's prerogative to
see the world and to do whatever it is that God
will do. And all that God does is not
always accessible to me. God is beyond our
understanding. It's not that he hasn't given
us a pretty clear sense of who we are and what
we should do, but I don't have God's
prerogative. God does what God does and I have
my responsibility. My responsibilities
to say, to understand, to grasp and to commit
myself to the fact that I am not God. Confession
is an opportunity for the church to say, God
will do what God does and I'm going to be
obedient and responsive to him. He is Lord, not
me. Several years ago, I was speaking
at a conference in Indianapolis and someone
came to me afterwards and said, I have a group
I want to tell you about. And I said, okay,
what kind of group is it? He said, it's a
one-step group. I said, a one-step group? And
he said, yeah, it's a one-step group.
And I said, well, I've heard of 12-step groups.
And he said, well, that group has 11 more
steps than I've got. So, okay. So what's the
step? He said, the step is step down. Step
down. I've lived my whole life sitting in my
own throne in my own heart and I've lived
my life as if my way, my will, my future, my
understanding was dictating everything
and it was killing me. And it finally dawned on
me that I'm not responsible to sit in the
throne of my heart. There's only one Lord and
it's not me. And so I've stepped down.
I think that's not a bad group to be a part of,
folks. To step down. I'm not in charge
of the church. Christ is the head of the
church, not me. No one else is the head of the church
other than Christ. I am not responsible for the
whole church. I am accountable to my brothers
and sisters. My brothers and sisters are
accountable to me, but I'm not the head of
anyone else
in the church. I'm called to step down. And so
part of my role at confession is declaring
that Jesus is Lord and I am not. God is holy
and I am unholy. But the other part of it
is to say I am a sinner to confess our sins. I
think that the church has marginalized the
role and place of confession to the great
detriment of the church. Confession is not
a practice that is the prerogative of Roman
Catholics as if the rest of us don't have
any responsibility. Oh yeah, confession, that
penance stuff is what Catholics do. Confession
is what humans do when they understand how
little they have to offer and who God is.
Confession says, I can't do it. I am a sinner.
And when we gather together as God's people
in a church, our task is not to just simply sit
and sing songs and feel good about how
the worship is going. That Sunday we had a
great song service and had a wonderful prayer
and that was a fine lesson. Thank you very much.
You go home feeling good about ourselves.
Church is a place where we come together and
say we have nothing to give. We have nothing
to offer. We're just sinners here. And when we
confess our sins, when we confess our unworthiness,
when we confess our unholiness, there's
something dramatic that happens. Church is a
place where
a holy God encounters an unholy people and the
unholy people surrender to him. That's
the window of surrender is when confession is
made. You are Lord and I am a sinner. If
we were a confessing people, there would be
among us a heart of humility that would change
how we see one another. A group of people that
confesses looks at one another through
different lenses. We see each other with
different eyes. If I know how broken I am, I'm
not the
one that's got my act together. I haven't
figured it all out. I'm not doing it all right.
I don't have all the understandings. And if I
don't, why would I expect that you would
have it all figured out in the person who says
he's got it all figured out. He knows
exactly what it is that you're supposed to do.
Has it all worked out? And unity comes
only when everyone agrees on every issue on all
things, which means generally to agree
with me. If you agree with me, we're going to
have unity. Unity. Unity doesn't take place
when people agree. Unity in scripture always
takes place when people don't agree. It takes
place when God takes people in their
differences and calls them together anyway
through the
cross of Christ. And the first part of that
process, it seems to me, is the place of confession,
which keeps us from being cynical and arrogant.
We come to church to lay down our arms. We
come to church with white flags in our pockets.
Church is a place we surrender. We have nothing
with which to negotiate. We have nothing to
offer God that merits His attention, much
less His generosity. We admit we are weak and
sinful and divided and frustrated and
petty people. And God makes us holy and sinless
and united and gracious and people of peace.
If confession were a part of our identity, I
think we would look at each other differently
when we would see each other. Our eyes would
not be hard. It's the softness around the
edges, kindness in the wrinkles. It hasn't
always been this way, of course, for us. As
Paul told the Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, we
used to see one another through human eyes,
but we do so no longer. Christ has given us new
eyes. Now we see fellow sufferers. We
see those who are frail and sick like we. We
see patients with gangrene limbs and serious
conditions of the heart. We look behind the
anger and the gossip, and we see people made
sick by legalism or paralyzed by fear. We look
behind the smugness and the cynicism
and see people with too many wounds and too few
friends who have noticed or cared. We
see the powerless and the helpless, the injured
and the lost. They have burdens to carry.
And out of confession, we're able to offer our
own shoulders. Secondly, we need to repent.
We need to repent. That's a word I used to hear
a lot when I was a child. I don't hear
it much anymore these days. Repentance is not
merely a preparatory step before baptism.
That's quickly taken and then promptly
forgotten once we towel off. Repentance is the kind
of behavior that Christians participate in. Our
hearts are filled with repentance. Repentance
calls for God's people to walk alongside the
prodigal gazing anxiously toward home. We
see what we had not seen before. We see a
father racing toward us. We see that we've
not just broken our father's rules, but we've
broken our father's heart. I like how Frederick
Beekner, however, has put it in his wonderful
book, Wishful Thinking. He says to repent
is to come to your senses. It is not so much
something you do with something that happens.
True repentance spends less time looking back
at the past and saying, I'm sorry, than to
the future and saying, wow. I mean, every time
I read those words, they just stop me
in my tracks. We're used to kind of a cut rate
repentance, a kind of cheap repentance.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Forgive me of all of my
many sins, which is hardly repentance.
Repentance is not just looking at the past
saying, I'm sorry. It calls for a deep remorse
for the toxins that I have gathered and which I
have spread, the pain that I have caused
others. But it's also a looking forward at the
future and imagining what the new us,
the new me looks like, imagining God's future,
seeing what God is doing through people like
me and looking at the work of God and saying,
not only I'm sorry, but wow. Repentance is
crucial to this process.
The third characteristic of peacemakers is what
I'm calling living as if. To live as
if. We acknowledge that we are still sinners.
We acknowledge that the others are sinners
and are also broken. We are not naive and
understand that the church is still divided.
We recognize that there's still racial and
cultural boundaries, that there's still unhealthy
talk that we're all suffering. But by the grace
of God, we are empowered to live as
if we live as if the church were a community of
care and compassion. We live as if the
walls were torn down. We live as if there were
no cultural barriers. We may not know
how our neighbor is going to respond to our
attempts at hospitality or our acts of service,
but you know, that's not our concern. I'm not
responsible for his actions or her actions.
I'm only responsible for mine. I live as if
they will respond with graciousness and thanksgiving.
And if they don't, we will serve them anyway in
the same way that God treats us as if we
were deserving of his mercy. We treat others
with kindness and understanding no matter
how they act. That's what it means to forgive.
God forgives us in spite of, we forgive others
in spite of. We don't wait until they come to
us and get their act together first before
we forgive them. We forgive them because that's
what Christ does to undeserving people. We
live as if, and over time by God's grace,
living as if becomes living as reality. Our
behaviors become our habit. They become the
norm. They become our spiritual instincts
we create for ourselves and for our neighbors,
the possibility of a new world, a new relationship,
a new identity that becomes true and right for
us. I'm not talking about a sanctified
version of act your way into a better way of
feeling or fake it until you make it. I'm
not talking about playing games, but I'm urging
us toward an authentic behavior that reflects
the self-emptying character of Christ. When we
serve others who do not serve us, we embody
Christ. When we treat with kindness those who
are not kind toward us, we incarnate Christ.
When we forgive others who have not sought or
deserved our forgiveness, we reflect the
very nature of Christ, and over time by such
actions, hearts are changed, including our
own. How often should we forgive the one who's
injured us, Peter asked? How many times? As
many as seven times? Not just seven, Jesus
answered, but seventy times seven. Forgiveness
has no upper limit. There is no statute of
limitation. We live forgiven, extending forgiveness
to others, even those who do not ask for it or
deserve it. And over time, perhaps those
who have wounded us become for us what they
have been all along in Christ's eyes. Godly
men and women, our brothers and sisters,
sinners forgiven by God.
May I mention one other quality, and one that I
have found difficult to frame, but I think
is also important. It is what I'm calling an
ironic absence. Ironic is not a word that
I heard or remember hearing until I was in
graduate school. We had a visiting professor
who came by and used the word ironic, and I
thought, he meant ironic, I think. I didn't
know why he used that word. I thought maybe he
was British or something. I don't know,
but I thought, ironic. And then I heard it a
few weeks later, and I thought, well, maybe
there is a word called ironic. And I looked it
up in the dictionary, and sure enough,
it is. It comes from the Greek word irene,
which means peace. An ironic person is a person
who seeks peace, who is humble, who listens and
encouraged. Sometimes, to be a peacemaker,
a situation is so intractable and people's
behavior is so destructive that rather than
a confrontation, disengagement from the
dialogue is necessary so that peace might prevail.
This is what Paul is dealing with in 1st and 2
Timothy. In his extensive discussion in
1st and 2 Timothy about sound doctrine, a
phrase that we have, I'm afraid, abused
through the years. Sound doctrine means healthy
teaching, sound in the sense
of our body being sound, safe and sound,
healthy, functioning, sound. There is some teaching
that is healthy and there are some teaching
that is not healthy. And over time, unhealthy
teaching undermines and destroys the church.
And so Paul is concerned as he's writing
Timothy and a very volatile situation in
Ephesus that things be done in a way that healthy
teaching is preserved. Healthy teaching edifies
and encourages. But among the elements of
the unhealthy teaching that Timothy was facing
was a morbid craving for controversy, disputes
about words, dissension, slander, base
suspicions, and wrangling among Christians,
some of whom
are looking for a financial advantage. 1
Timothy 6:4, and 5. Paul tells Timothy to
avoid disputing about words because they don't
do any good but only ruin the hearers. 2nd
Timothy 2:14. He urges them to handle the word
of truth rightly. That is to communicate
constructively, to be ironic. 2 Timothy 2:15.
To do that, you've got to avoid godless
chatter because it leads people into more
ungodliness. Because it works in a church
like gangrene in a sick body. 2 Timothy 2:16 17.
So he says have nothing to do with
disengage from stupid senseless controversy
because they breed quarrels and God's children
are not quarrelsome. Rather the servant of God
is kind to everyone. The Word of the Lord
is kind to everyone, teaches well, is
forbearing, and corrects opponents with
gentleness. 2nd
Timothy 2:23 and 24. There are times to
disengage. There are times to say I can't
continue in
communication with you because it's tearing the
body apart. Now I've had some hard decisions
to make because that's not my tendency is to
disengage. My tendency has not been as
some has been. Anytime criticism comes just
blow it off. Every time criticism comes I
want to say, but if you only understood, if you
knew that I was really a nice guy, if
you knew that I really love the Lord and you
just, my every instinct is to engage this
but sometimes it's just unhealthy. And I don't
always know when that is to have a ministry
of ironic absence. That is to say I pulled away
from the conversation in order to create
an opportunity for peace. When the attacks
become personal as opposed to about issues
I tend to begin to back away at that point.
This becomes unhealthy. When the attacks are
against my family, that's too destructive. I'm
not sure that's the time to continue
in that disengagement. When it becomes clear
that there is no momentum toward resolution,
that the impetus is in the direction of
destruction, that sometimes it's just wisest
when people
become quarrelsome and squabble over words
rather than advancing the cause of Christ.
There are those times. I hope those times are
rare. I would like at some level to make
a distinction between just kind of shots that
come lobbed over from several miles away from
people that we don't know or people that I'm
not in community with. I want to do everything
I can to serve and honor but when they happen
within my own congregation, that is to say
my own family of accountability under our
elders, I don't want my first instinct to
just turn my back and walk away. I would want
an ironic absence to be the strategy of last
resort. Elders have responsibilities here to
make sure that seeds of discord are not
being sown in their church. It's one of the
reasons that Paul says to Timothy that an
elder is one who manages his household well
because someone who is not able to bring peace
at home is not someone who is going to be aware
of what's going on with discord in
one's own church. I think that perhaps one
other response is necessary. One that may
be the most difficult for us to take. I don't
think we can afford any longer to tolerate
much less support those who sow seeds of
discord in our midst. I mean to say that out of love
and out of concern for the peace of the church,
however much they may rationalize their behavior
and however they may characterize their
opponents, those who sow seeds of discord are purveyors
of unsound doctrine, unhealthy teaching,
precisely as defined by Paul in 1 and 2 Timothy. And
as Paul clearly instructed Timothy, we must
have nothing to do with these sorts of behaviors,
2 Timothy 2:23. The health of the church is at
stake. We must distance ourselves from
those who justify uncivil behavior toward
others. I have made a painful decision. You
can do whatever you choose. I am going to
cancel subscriptions to any publications that
attack people or endorse the division of
Christ's body. Churches may have to act decisively
toward preachers in their congregation who
treat others in ways that do not reflect the
attitude of Christ. It is time for the church
to love and admonish those whose divisive spirits
undercut the witness of Christ in the world. We
can't tolerate it any longer. It is time
for Christians to embrace those whom Jesus
blessed in the Sermon on the Mount as the
children of God, that is, peacemakers. So we
end with where we began. Christians ought
to be able to talk to one another. We ought to
be able to talk to one another about any
topic. I have been in situations over the past
couple of years in which the very thesis
that Christians ought to be able to talk to one
another about differences has created
such upset that communication almost shut down
because there are some topics, apparently,
that some people think we can't talk about. And
I don't know what Christians can't talk
about. We ought to be able to talk to one
another. We should be able to disagree without
hostility. We should be marked by the cross and
known as a people of peace. But we are
not. Throughout history, and certainly within
the experience of churches of Christ, few
Christian qualities have been so rare and so
ineptly sought and so badly needed as peacemaking.
It has not been our priority. It has not been
our passion. We haven't cared that much and
have been willing to live with the kind of
fragmentation that we see evident everywhere
around us. And as a result, our churches are
often spiritually stunted. The body of Christ
is broken. We live in narrow worlds surrounded
by people mostly like ourselves. We talk little
to anyone whose opinions differ from our own.
We seldom see beyond ethnic and social boundaries.
We too often engage in accusation and blame,
and all of us bear responsibility at some
level. No one is innocent here by things we
have done and not done in this regard. We
build walls of self-protection. We seek our own
interests. We don't love as we ought.
We're silent when words must be spoken and we
shout when everything in the universe calls
for us to be silent. Christ's body is broken
because we and our sins are broken. And yet
it is in this brokenness that we find our hope.
Because Christ's body is broken, we
can encounter the broken body of Christ on the
cross so that we might be healed. He was
wounded for our transgressions as Isaiah said.
Our brokenness is met by Christ's. We meet
him in our brokenness and therefore we can find
healing. We share in his suffering and
therefore we're able to share in each other's
pain. And by that means Christ's peace heals
us and it is healing us even now. In spite of
all appearances to the contrary, peace
is breaking out among us. In spite of our
brokenness, in spite of our sin, in spite
of how messed up we are, in spite of our
fragmentation, in spite of our desire to always
be right
and only talk to people like us, nevertheless
by God's power, peace is breaking out anyway.
Praise God. Mostly we deal with local
conflicts, clashes of personality, but in some cases
we find startling opportunities for the
in-breaking of the peace of God. In recent
days, I know
of 2 congregations who ended up in the same
city who half a century ago divided painfully
over issues that mattered a great deal then,
but it came together recently and met in common
assembly and asked forgiveness of each other
for their past sins and they took together
the Lord's Supper as brothers and sisters in
Christ. There are old differences that
remain but a new spirit prevails. They share
what they can in common. They care together
for the poor and the Good News and the lost.
Here is the peace of Christ. Leaders at some
predominantly white churches and other
Christian institutions have offered apologies
for the
institutional racism that marred our past. And
while they were not personally responsible
for the discrimination and segregation of
another era, they have confessed the sins
of their institutions and have repented
publicly for the devastating effects of racism. Meaningful
conversations are taking place across ethnic
lines. Genuine friendships are being formed
and fellowship at the deepest level is extended.
Here is the peace of Christ. A quarter of
a century ago, friendships were ripped apart
and families divided in the split that came
to be known as the International Churches of
Christ and the Mainline Churches of Christ
as separate fellowships. And as we've been
talking each afternoon at 315, in recent months,
many of these relationships have come to be
restored. I talked to an ICOC minister yesterday
who told me that he is the only member of his
family that was a member of the International
Churches of Christ and his brother was a member
of the Mainline Churches of Christ and all
the rest of his family members of the Mainline
Churches of Christ. They haven't shared together
Christmases over the past 25 years. They've
hardly communicated over these past 25 years
because of the anger and the frustration and
the division that have taken place. And since
last year, these two brothers, each of them
preachers, came together and prayed and the
preacher from the Mainline Church invited the
one from the ICOC not just to come to
church but to come preach for his church and
all of his family gathered together and for
the first time in 25 years, they broke bread
and drank of the cup of the Lord together.
Peace is breaking out among us. Something that
may be more difficult and more painful
for some. On several recent occasions, men and
women from independent Christian churches
and the a cappella churches of Christ have met
for conversation and prayer. We share
same heritage, same fellowship, same
commitments, baptized for the same reasons,
gather in churches
that are organized in the same ways. We share
all of the same instincts. We've come together
to seek relationship, to ask forgiveness and to
pray. No one is advocating, relinquishing
those characteristics that have made our
respective fellowships as they are. No one's calling
for merger. But hearts are heavy because of the
wounds of our division. We are not guilty
today of what happened a hundred years ago, but
we're discovering people of goodwill,
people of peace who care about the things we
care about and it's harder to demonize
them when we sit at table with them and meet
them and pray with them. And here is the peace
of God. We have choices to make. What we do in
the coming days will largely determine
who we will be in the coming decades. The
future of our churches is being decided now.
Will we continue to be segregated into
churches, into groups of people who look alike
and think
alike? Will we hide behind the walls of our own
making so that we can't even talk to
people who are different than we? Will we grasp
the possibilities of our own baptism?
Can we offer a place of welcome at the common
table of Christ? Can we respond constructively
to the fragmentations large and small that
imperil our churches? We cannot avoid playing
a role in this current environment. We cannot
sit out this dance. Even doing nothing plays
a decisive role in shaping us because it
guarantees that our future will look exactly
like our
past. How we respond, what kind of people we
choose to be will set a trajectory that
will affect the course of our churches and the
lives of our children and our grandchildren
for generations to come. We know because we are
the heirs of those who in similar situations
by their speech and by their silence in ways
both constructive and debilitating shaped
our own churches today. We know because God has
granted us the grace in our day to be
instruments of his peace. Shall we pray?
Give us courage and give us wisdom. Call us to
confession. Break our hearts into repentance.
Allow us to live as if the other were acting
responsibly and we are deserving of our forgiveness
because we have received your forgiveness as if
we were your perfect children. But we
confess today that we are not and we are
grateful that you have embraced us anyway. We pray
that we will be responsible to the fellowship
that we share with you so that we will call
others who share our common baptism, our common
hope and anticipate a common future of being
gathered together at your table. The great
messianic banquet at the end of time that
here and now we would be empowered to deal with
one another even in our differences as
brothers and sisters in Christ by the power of
Jesus whose blood has cleansed us and in
whose name we pray. Amen. Thank you all.