Sermon: The Reconciling God

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The Reconciling God

By Charles Rush

November 25, 2001

en I was a young pastor, all of about 23, still in Divinty school, I served a rural Church in the South, composed almost entirely of tabacco farmers, most of whom had never left the county their entire lives. It was a cultural adjustment for both of us.

Shortly after I began at the church, I was asked to do a funeral for the brother of one of the church members, one of the first funerals I'd done. Since I didn't know the man, and had just met the family, I decided not to give some trite eulogy, but to open the floor for people to spontaneously talk.

I knew this was a risky thing because country people are shy, painfully shy. At the time, I was taking a Master's level course in psychology and counseling, and our professor had been going through a series of group exercises to get us comfortable with silence. “Ministers don't need to have the answers for everything”, he cajoled us. “Sometimes they just need to be with their people, going through what they are going through in silence.” I prepared myself before the funeral, reminding myself, “silence is good, silence is good.”

It came time for the eulogy, I threw it open for anyone there to say a few words about the deceased. And there was nothing, nothing at all. It was a small church. I'm at the front of the church and while I am waiting in the silence I notice that everyone in the congregation, even the family members, are all sitting on the back 6 or 7 pews. I don't know what it meant but I was sure it was not good.

Nothing. I explained that we are just family and friends. No one needed to feel like they had to give Pericles funeral oration, just share what they had. Nothing. I kept saying, “silence is good… silence is good”. It was now an uncomfortably long time, what seemed to be an eternity.

Finally, the brother of the deceased stood up, and spoke from the back row. He said, “Reverend, some times the best thing you can say about a man is to say nothing at all.” With that, he sat down. They never covered what to do in these moments, so I said, ‘well, moving right along.' It was a fast funeral.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are common sense spiritual values for most of us gathered here today. We know that is the profound thing to do, and at least the polite goal in our families, even if it is not really attainable.

But it is not generic to religious quest. We are just deeply influenced by the teaching of Jesus. If I had to summarize the major religions today in their one sentence view of the spiritual life, it would go like this. Hinduism seeks immaterial eternity in the midst of material change and decay. Buddhism seeks enlightenment from the cycle of suffering desire. Judaism seeks righteousness through keeping the covenant of God. Islam seeks purity of the soul through submission of our will to God's. All of these religions have a place for forgiveness and reconciliation but in none of them is it a central theme. It is a peripheral theme that has become somewhat more central in the tradition because of the enormous influence of Christianity.

At least in the teaching of Jesus, you wouldn't be far off if you said that the spiritual quest was our response to the reconciling God. Only Jesus teaches that God is fundamentally about reconciliation. It is a profound insight we take for granted.

When I taught ethics at Rutgers, I did a short review of some important moral jumps in history. One of the really big leaps in moral imagination came from the great King Hammurabi of Babylonia, who lived in the 18th century b.c.. He gave us Hammurabi's code, made famous for it's dictum, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It created a legal precedent for proportionality in justice. If someone steals one of your sheep, you have the right to take one of their sheep as recompense. The great leap forward, morally speaking, is that it limited retribution.

Before that, vengeance was tied to honor within the clan, and it lacked limit. So if one of the young women from your village was raped, the response frequently was to burn down the village of those who did it and rape 10 of their young women. And what you got was spiraling cycle of violence and retribution that progressively escalated until there was complete vigilante anarchy in the whole region. Hammurabi had the insight that vigilante anarchy would lead to the destruction of us all and put an end to it.

It strikes me that here we are 4000 years later, and the wisdom of this still eludes those living within 400 miles of the King's Hammurabi's homeland. I read, with dread, Nasra Hassan's article “An Arsenal of Believers” in the New Yorker this week.[1] Ms. Hassan interviewed nearly 250 suicide bombers, or as they prefer to be called “sacred explosions”, since suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam.

When she asked one bomber how he felt after he had been selected by Hamas to detonate himself, he replied, “We were in a constant state of worship… Those were the happiest days of my life.”

When asked about the attraction of martyrdom, he explained, “The power of the spirit is upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward. Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull… In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah… We made an oath on the Koran, in the presense of Allah- a pledge not to waver… I know there are other ways to do jihad but this one is the sweetest.”

She interviewed an operative for Hamas who told her, “We need to exert more pressure, make the cost of the occupation (of Palestine) that much more expensive in human lives, that much more unbearable… Battles for Islam are won not through the gun but by striking fear into the enemies heart.”[2]

Vindictive revenge, whether done in the name of honor for the family, or in devotion to one's religion, have remarkably the same effect. If terrorism is successful, they do not get the Israeli's to voluntarily cede Israel to the Palestinians. They merely succeed in promoting like-minded extremist Jews to positions of power in the government to exact more violence, with less creativity and less humanity. This continues on and on until someone realizes that the very reason for living has become eroded to the point they have to say ‘enough'. There is nothing left to win, just fatigue in the face of tragedy and loss. The long history of civil wars and tribal fighting has played out this sad drama over and over and over again.

And there is nothing to break the cycle if there is no forgiveness. Forgiveness is a spiritual breakthrough that opens a new chapter in the midst of the long memory of grievance. It is an opening in an impasse.

That is what happened to Bud Welch, a man you've probably heard of remotely at least. Bud was divorced, owned a garage in Oklahoma City. He had one daughter, aged 23, named Julie that was the joy of his life. By all accounts she was a lovely young woman, one of those kind people of faith that not only talks the talk but walks the walk. She met her father every Wednesday for lunch until April 19th, 1995 when the Murrah Federal building exploded, killing her and 167 others as well.

Bud said that from that day on, he lived in hate. And it was pretty easy because Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were easy people to hate. Bud was able to focus all his frustration and rage on these two, hoping for quick jury trial and a slow death for the both of them.

Many months after her death, Bud was watching television one day, a news item about the bombing and the impending trial. Some reporter had gone to Buffalo to Tim McVeigh's home to see what kind of upbringing he had. Bud got up to flick off the television when he saw an image on the screen. It was Tim's father, middle aged, kneeling in his flower bed and the man was looking up in the camera. There was something about his expression in that moment, Bud said to himself, “that man has lost a child too.” That was a turning point for him.

He didn't do anything with that moment. It just stored itself somewhere in his psyche because he wasn't spiritually or emotionally ready to do anything with it. Months more pass.

In January, 1996 Bud went back to the block of the Murrah building to remember his daughter. He was walking around and came to the place where she used to park her car every day. He stopped. Right near there was an elm tree that had been ripped up during the bombing of the building. But it hadn't died. It had a number of scars but it was also beginning to put out some new branches. Bud writes, “the thought that came to me then seemed to have nothing to do with new life. It was the sudden, certain knowledge that McVeigh's execution would not end my pain.”[3]

Bud had a conversion, a change of heart. He realized that ending the cycle of hate would not come from without. It could only come from within and it could only begin with himself. As the scriptures say of the prodigal son, ‘he came to his senses'. St. Augustine once said, “there is always time for the amendment of life.”

Bud then came on the national news because he began speaking against the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh. But in the course of that speaking tour, he was invited to Buffalo to speak to some nuns.

He reached out to Tim McVeigh's father, who responded with an invitation to his home. There was a lot of anxiety on the part of both men but when they met they had quite a lot in common. Mr. McVeigh was an assembly line worker for GM. Talking was actually not too difficult. He met Mr. McVeigh's 24 year old daughter, Jennifer who was there also and even looked, like parent will do, at pictures of the McVeigh kids when they were young. It was a very emotional time, of course. Eventually, they hugged as they parted. Bud Welch said to them, “We are in this together for the rest of our lives.”

Bud Welch came to national attention because he opposed the death penalty as the father of one of the victims. But it was interesting to watch Michael Radutsky's piece for '60 Minutes' where he had Ed Bradley interview half a dozen family members from the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing on the eve of Timothy McVeigh's execution. Some of them were for the death penalty, some of them opposed, but they all got to the point of forgiveness that Bud Welch got to in order to get on with the rest of their lives. Each of them spoke religiously and profoundly about getting boxed into a corner with their frustration and rage, needing to have a new spiritual dimension open up or else they would have stewed, stagnated and stalemated in their grudge.

Forgiveness is a profound spiritual insight, so necessary because we live in a world where we are not perfect, where we make big mistakes, inflict frustration and anger on those around us.

In our parable this morning, Jesus suggests that the relationship between us and God, the relationship between each of us, is fundamental. The relationship is, in some sense, ultimate. Because of that we need forgiveness and reconciliation in order to go on. There is no suggestion that morals don't matter. There is no suggestion that hurts aren't real, that disappointments and missed expectations don't have any consequences. They are very real and the hurts they cause are very real.

But what a different perspective that opens up when we believe that the relationship is ultimate. Most of the outrageous behavior we countenance towards other people, happens because we don't think we will see these people again, or they no longer matter to us. We act outrageously and then we just walk away.

But if we can't walk away, that is different. That is really one of the profound things about the vows we take in marriage: ‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in comfort, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.' We make a pledge that the relationship is ultimate, that we aren't going to walk away. We pledge to work this thing through, come what may. We are promising to each other to fathom the profoundest depth of love that we humans are given to know. As it turns out, we cannot plumb the depths of what love has to offer at it's profoundest level without having a sense that this relationship is ultimate. Because it will test us to the point that we want to walk away, it can hurt us like no other hurt being that vulnerable to someone else. But what a difference it makes if when we take that pledge to ultimacy seriously, when we are not going to walk away- we try this, we try that. Reconciliation in all of it's spiritual depth becomes manifest in our midst.

God wants for us to be reconciled- with our spouses that have hurt us, our friends that have taken advantage of us, with our business partners that are just jerks, with our dysfunctional in-laws, with our neighbors who are just annoying… Indeed, with our enemies. God is like a father who sees one of his kids in the distance, the one that has pissed through his inheritance in no time, the one who is not worthy to be called a son anymore. When God sees him, God runs down the road to meet him. God wants us to be reconciled. God wants to be reconciled with each and every one of us.

It is a profound insight. And if it is true, we need to amend what we teach our suicide bombers in the future. Right now, they are told that when they inflict harm on the anonymous infidels they seek to harm for righteousness sake that they are immediately exempt from God's day of judgment. Instead, they get to go straight to the place where 72 virgins attend to them and their needs. We need to tell them that those 72 virgins are the children and the grandchildren of the people they will kill. We need to tell them that the first needs these 72 virgins will attend to is do deal with some reconciliation after the terrible tragedy that they have inflicted. We need to tell them that they will have an eternity to work on it. Because if Jesus is right, if the relationship really is ultimate, then work on reconciliation may be the most important spiritual work God would have us to do, not only here but beyond.

May you be blessed to be a people of reconciliation and in working through the difficult task of forgiving others, may you too be released to get on with beauty of living abundantly.

Amen.

[1] It can be found in the November 19, 2001, pp. 36-41.

[2] Ibid. p. 38-39.

[3] This was originally reported in Guideposts, May, 1999. I found it on the website, ‘forgiving.org' and couldn't locate the original.