The news this past week has been horrible. One morning, I picked up the newspaper and read a headline saying, "Traffic-Stop Sheer Horror." A black man from Minnesota had been shot and killed by a police officer in a mere traffic stop for a broken tail light. It was the second fatal police shooting of a black man in as many days, the other occurring in Louisiana. Then, when I picked up the newspaper the next morning, the banner headline read, "Dallas in Shock." A man with a rifle, looking to avenge the week's earlier deaths, turned a peaceful protest into a blood-bath -- shooting twelve police officers, killing five of them. How do we effectively address such violence, such anger, such injustice? Where does it end?
My father's ministry began in the Boston area during the racially turbulent 1960s. On the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., my father preached a sermon he simply titled, "Reconciliation." There, Dad said that racial reconciliation has two key ingredients. The first is justice: "Justice is making up for past wrongs. It is everyone getting what is deserved and enjoying equal rights and equal opportunities." My father said that "[e]very muscle of our bodies and every cell of our brains and every dollar in our pockets must be strained to the limit to achieve justice in our society."
As vitally important as he believed justice to be, my father saw that justice alone is insufficient to bring about true reconciliation: "So many leaders will tell us falsely that 'justice' is the be-all and end-all of reconciliation between the races, or any other at-odds groups, of which there are so many. They are wrong! Justice alone will never bring reconciliation because, strictly speaking, as long as men are men and sinners, there will never be total justice. ...
"You know, there are some debts we owe to other men that we just cannot pay. There are other debts that we can only begin to pay. At the point where my ability to pay my debt to you falls short, that is where you must begin to forgive. And only because you forgive can we be reconciled. Forgiveness is the meat of reconciliation, its main ingredient. Dr. King realized that the meat of reconciliation is forgiveness -- thus his philosophy of non-violence. ...
"Men are human; they sin against each other. Even in a perfectly ordered society, they hurt each other. And so if there is to be peace, there must be a constant flow of forgiveness. The history of the church -- from the day Stephen was stoned to the day Martin Luther King was shot -- shows us that sometimes no reparation is possible and forgiveness is the only practical action which can be prescribed. We must recognize that we are indebted to each other. If we want to live together and work together, we must learn to forgive."
So where do we go from here? From the evil, loss and division we witnessed last week? My father believed that, "as Christians on this day, we have the audacious right to proclaim that unless the divided world recognizes and understands the word of reconciliation spoken by God at the cross, it is without hope of survival in any sense."
"What does God do at the cross that reconciles us to him? He forgives. He forgives. In Christ, God bears our sin and suffers. Loving us with unfathomable love, he forgives us the thousands of misguided ways we have attempted to be masters of our own fate. He forgives. By the cross, God shows us that he forgives the great corporate and social evils that we have helped set in motion, but over which we no longer have control. He forgives. ... There is nothing I can do to pay the debt I owe God for what I have done to my neighbor and therefore to God himself. But God loves me, and so he forgives. ...
"Who would think that the cross would give us the pattern and the source for ordering our social relations? But I submit to you that if it did not, what would it be worth?
From "Reconciliation"
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Preached Good Friday, 1969
Adams Shore Community Church, Quincy, MA
P.S. - For more from Bill on Christian faith and racial reconciliation, I urge you to read the post: Bill on Martin: A Call to Action.
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