Reconciliation
Sunday
22 September
2013
Saint
Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Propers: Isaiah
40.25-31; Psalm 19; Philippians 4.4-9; John 1.1-18
In May
of 1987 I travelled from South Bend, Indiana to Vancouver to attend my first
meeting as a member of the faculty of Vancouver School of Theology. Just a few days prior to my departure, a
young man had run a stop sign and hit my car broadside on the passenger
side. The physician had prescribed some
major pain-relievers as well as a mild calming drug to ease my healing. So, as you can well imagine, most of the
meeting passed by without leaving too much of an impression on my memory.
What I
do remember is that this was a historic meeting of the faculty. We tend to over-use the word, ‘historic’, but
this meeting did mark a change that will be remembered in the life of the
School. It was at this meeting that the
faculty voted unanimously to accept the invitation of the Native Ministry
Consortium to create a Master of Divinity degree programme for aboriginal and
non-aboriginal people serving in First Nations’ communities. In a nearby room the Consortium was meeting
at the same time as we were, so the faculty, accompanied by the beating of a
drum, processed from our meeting place to the Consortium’s to announce our
decision. Joy filled the space and a few
tears were shed.
What no
member of the faculty realized was that our decision was a decision to
die. In the years to follow we faced the
criticism of our colleagues in more traditional programmes, the scrutiny of the
Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada and the
constant challenge to address the implicit racism and classism within the
academic world we inhabited. We had to
find ways to honour the oral cultures of First Nations, a difficult task given
the power of the written culture in which all of the faculty had been trained. Our students were often critical of
assumptions built into our courses, so the faculty were regularly adjusting the
curriculum, reviewing how to evaluate student progress and pondering how best
to bring First Nations cultures and values into a conversation with the Western
Christian tradition. Sometimes months of
work would be abandoned when we realized that what we had designed was
inappropriate.
But our
willingness to die to the traditional expectations of graduate theological
education has led to tens of graduates who are now part of the on-going
reconciliation between First Nations and the so-called ‘settler’ peoples of
Canada. Because we were willing to die,
the School now has students throughout Canada, the United States and the world
who are learning that culture is not an enemy of the Christian faith. We have learned how to identify the benefits
that our diverse cultures bring to our discipleship as well as the liabilities.
Last
week I spoke about what I understand forgiveness to mean, a conscious decision
to end our hostage to the wrongs of the past in order to envision a new
future. While I mentioned in passing the
fact that forgiveness requires courage, I may not have mentioned that
forgiveness, the keystone of reconciliation, means dying. The last verse of a hymn I grew up singing in
the United States goes like this: “The
peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing --- the
marvellous peace of God.” Reconciliation, the peace of God that is no peace,
means closing the conflicts of the past in the sod, so that the shoots of the
new life can spring from the grave.
Dying
and rising is at the heart of the good news of God in Jesus of Nazareth. Earlier in his letter to the Philippians Paul
writes that Jesus died to the prerogatives of being God’s Beloved in order to
reconcile us to God. But dying was not
God’s last word for Jesus nor for us.
God raised Jesus from the dead and we who are Jesus’ disciples can face
dying, whether our physical deaths or the deaths of long-standing ways of being
church, with the conviction that death is never God’s last word for us nor
God’s last word for the gospel movement.
This
past week our city and province have participated in many events associated
with the visit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Today thousands of people, Christians and
non-Christians, are marching through downtown Vancouver in an act of
solidarity. What I wonder is whether
they know that genuine reconciliation only occurs when one is willing to die to
the past in order to be raised for the future.
For
non-aboriginal Canadians reconciliation with aboriginal Canadians means many
little deaths. The first death is dying
to the idea that we, the Canadians of the past two or three generations, are
not responsible for the present plight of aboriginal people. Non-aboriginal Canadians have benefited from
the loss of land, culture and language the aboriginal Canadians have
experienced over the past four hundred years.
The property on which this church is built was once part of the
traditional lands of the Musqueam people.
We must lay in the sod our naïve innocence in order that we might rise
to a renewed commitment to justice and to the dignity of every human being.
We must
lay in the sod the quiet belief that our way of doing things in not only the
best way of doing things but the only way of doing things. I have learned from aboriginal people the
importance of hearing all the voices at the table, not just the ones who speak
the loudest and are able to hold forth for the longest. It is a lesson that I am still learning,
trained as I was in the cut and thrust of western academic seminars. I have learned the importance of listening to
hear what someone is saying, not listening in order to formulate my
rebuttal. It is a lesson that I am still
learning, trained as I was in the western traditions of debate.
We must
lay in the sod our sense of isolation from the needs and concerns of aboriginal
Canadians. Their concerns about the land
and how we respect this gift from the Creator is surely a shared one. Just this July the General Synod added a new
commitment to the baptismal covenant: “Will you strive to
safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, and respect, sustain and renew the
life of the Earth? I will, with God’s help.”
Aboriginal concerns about adequate and safe housing are surely shared by
those of us who know that homelessness has become a corrosive condition in the
fabric of our metropolitan area despite constant assurances that we are living
in the best place on earth.
My
friends, dying and rising is not unfamiliar to the Christian people. In baptism we celebrate our dying to the old
life of sin and separation and rising to the new life of reconciliation and
communion with God. In the eucharist we
remember the death of Christ by breaking bread and pouring wine, elements
gathered from the natural world, and then sharing in that bread and wine so
that we might become the green shoots of Christ’s risen life in our own time
and place.
Reconciliation
is not without pain nor is it achieved overnight nor during the term of one
Commission. Reconciliation is a life-long
commitment, a generations-long commitment, to living out our baptismal promises
- to persevere in resisting evil
- to repent and return to the Lord
- to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ
- to seek and serve Christ in all persons
- to love our neighbour as ourselves
- to strive for justice and peace among all people and
- to respect the dignity of every human being.
These are good words, solid promises, but they are
costly. They require a change in
perspective, a new way of looking at the world through God’s eyes rather than
our own. They require dying, but they
promise resurrection to new life. May
God give us the grace to live these words so that we and all God’s children may
be free. Amen.
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