Bishop Smith
Proper 19 Year A
St. Thomas the Apostle
September 13, 2020
The putting back together of broken things on this fragile earth is God’s purpose for the church. Just as God put Jesus back together, only more so, after they killed him.
- The resurrection is our template for mission.
- That’s why there is a St. Thomas. That’s why there is a Church. We are here to participate in God’s project of restoration and renewal.
Because, we humans have a way of falling apart and falling to pieces.
- (I’ll spare you my fabulous rendition of the great Patsy Cline.)
- If something can be broken, then someone will break it.
It is poignant that the gospel today is Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness, seventy-seven times over, if that’s what it takes, and a parable about two people who desperately need forgiveness themselves.
- In God’s cosmic project of putting together broken things, and lives, and relationships, forgiveness is the practice. And reconciliation is the outcome.
- Jesus lived forgiveness, and he taught it.
- During the evening of his first day risen from the dead, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto his disciples, and told them about the power of forgiveness thereby entrusted to them. So John writes.
- This may be important: The breath of the Spirit and the power of forgiveness are resurrection’s first gifts to the band of Jesus’ followers.
Now forgiveness is a dodgy word, because often we take the power out of it. Forgiveness is not live and let live; it is not letting bygones be bygones.
- Forgiveness is not forgive-and-forget. It is not adequately conveyed by our saying, “Oh, that’s ok.”
- Forgiveness, real forgiveness, is robust and usually requires courage. Forgiveness is not for the faint of heart.
- Do not think of a pre-fab greeting card, mostly built for the sake of making nice.
- Think of the savior on the cross. That’s what forgiveness costs, and what it looks like. He did forgive, as he hung there dying.
Reconciliation, the partner and purpose of forgiving, also needs some fortifying in our vocabulary.
- Too often we will sentimentalize this work—and minimize its true cost.
- I have come to think, for example, that the language of “racial reconciliation” has become too weak, and inadequate for the work.
- And it has a way of letting white people off the hook. It lulls us into thinking that reconciliation is about meeting halfway, or something, or a group hug, or something.
- It lets us off the hook. It does not take into account the historic horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.
- The evil structures which this history built into our present time are often invisible to white people.
- Let me say that again: They are mostly invisible to white people. I guarantee you that they are not invisible to people of color.
- The language of racial justice helps us know reconciliation’s true cost. The icon of the savior who dies on the cross helps us see its true measure. Justice and reconciliation often go together.
There is not a one of us who is not broken—broken lives, broken relationships, broken promises, broken worlds.
- More than a few of us are survivors of the Church having done the breaking.
- So we show up, looking for a place to belong and a place for restoration. If that is the case, then I am glad that you are here. I hope that St. Thomas can be a place like that for you.
- Let me suggest this: A pathway toward our own healing and return lies in our joining God’s project of renewing a broken world. In the work to put together broken things in the world, we may ourselves be made whole.
- We are baptized to become servants of that ages-long project. Insofar as we engage in what Jesus is doing, then we may find a measure of restoration in our own lives.
- The struggle to make good the very injustices which are our own legacy… may paradoxically set us free.
- This is the mystery of mission and ministry. Our salvation often lies in the doing of it. For the sake of Jesus. And for the life of the world.
