On the first night of my teaching about Paul in the context of Empire Grove Camp Meeting vespers, I realized that Brother Matthias Tanner's’ and Catherine Anderson’s Sunday reflections about being alert for the presence of God in our week together had provided for me a wonderful way to transition to what Paul teaches us about the relationship of perception to our ability to recognize God’s presence, how sin creates our sense that God is far away from us, and how reconciliation and forgiveness, especially that which is enacted in the death and resurrection of Jesus, can open our hearts and all of our portals of perception, to better perceive and experience God’s closeness and caring for us.
When my children were teens, one of our favorite family television shows was “Friday Night Lights”, an optimistic drama centered on the fictional rural town of Dillon, Texas, where winning the state football championship is prized above all else. Coach Eric Taylor and his wife Tammy, a counselor at Dillon High, help one another guide a high school football team through pressure-filled seasons while dealing with struggles relating to their own family. My most cherished slogan from the show was the team’s motivational chant, “Full hearts, clear eyes, can’t lose.” The apostle Paul would totally get that, and be able to connect it to how the brokenness of sin blinds us, silences us, enslaves us, and divides us. Paul uses the Greek verb Katalasso, and its noun form, katalegge, meaning reconciliation, to express the goal of our lives in Christ. In fact, in the in his Second Letter to the church in Corinths, Paul asserts that reconciliation is the foundational ministry which all followers of Christ should share.
And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. (2 Cor 5:18-21)
Unfortunately, the word “reconciliation” is weighed down with many historical accretions, well intentioned distortions that end up distorting our perception of who God is and what it means to be human. For Paul, Jesus IS reconciliation itself ( indeed the whole “Katalasso of fish”), but to get to Paul’s understanding of katalasso’s meaning and importance, we need to consider the very nature of sin, especially the relationship of the major disconnections of idolatry, alienation, and addiction and sin to our ability to perceive whether or not God is near and whether God is truly our greatest good, like a mother who can’t forget us, but only forgive us, or like a father who would do anything to provide for us and guide us on a life giving path.
For Jesus’ apostle Paul. called and sent by the Risen Jesus the greatest of the very good news flashes that he wants to tell us about God is that our relationship with God is restored. Indeed, from the perspective of God’s loving heart, it never was gone; it was we who seemed unwilling or unable to grasp that God could delight in us.
In church history, the meaning of this concept of reconciliation has been fraught with legalistic explanations of the machinery of this process, including such extreme distortions as penal substitutionary atonement, which in its darkest expressions, implies a God so angry, offended and disgusted by humanity’s sinfulness that he demands a cosmic retribution in the form of the death of his son. This seems to me a spectacular misunderstanding of Paul’s and a tragic reversal of the message Jesus embodies of an unfailing tender God. It is natural to feel revulsion and horror when Abraham is about to slaughter his son Isaac to prove his faithfulness to God. Even as little children we are broken hearted, even traumatized, at the realization that a little, unblemished baby lamb must have its throat cut to make for our sacred meal. So should we trust our God knit hearts and spirit lighted minds to reject the idea that God is a brutal bully like an enraged feudal Lord. I understand that the biblical language of sacrifice, ransom and atonement requires much reasoning and interpretation, but our engagement with awe, wonder, and mystery, should not be silenced by the reproach to have “faith”,. a demand for assent to a legalistic formula. This understanding of faith is an affront to the teaching of Jesus and the prophets about the faithfulness and steadfastness of God’s love.
The exemplary biblical scholar, pastor and prolific writer N.T. Wright summarizes Paul’s perspective as a teacher deeply immersed in the scriptures of Israel in this Way:
“ According to the prophets, Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem, had departed from the Temple, leaving it open to invasion and destruction. But the prophets didn’t leave it at that. They promised a great restoration. Two of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, focused these long-range promises on the assurance that the One God, having apparently abandoned his people to their fate, would return. (Wright, N. T. Paul: A Biography, p 44).
In this light, it is more helpful to think of Jesus’ mission as restoration, rather than reconciliation with its bitter aftertaste of propiation, the attitude to the gods at the heart of pagan theologies of the ancient world. Propitiation is rooted in postures of pleasing, placating, appeasing. Restoration is the liberating revelation of God’s justice that the prophets of Israel so famously reveal. Restorative justice is the prophetic game changer for worship and social relations. not the retributive justice of getting even, or the transactional reward and punishment of coercive behavior management (it’s Pavlov’s DOG, not Pavlov’s GOD).
A counter point to the Dillon High School confident slogan about triumphantly full hearts is a more pragmatic and poignant lyric in one of folk musician John Prine’s most treasured songs, “Souvenirs”. The speaker laments, “Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see; that’s why las night and this morning always look the same to me.” Here again, Paul would understand and explain further how sin is the chief heart breaker and window smearer in our lives. Next, we will explain how idolatry, addiction, mental health and social dysfunction work in ways similar to sin in distorting not only our sense of perception, but also breaking and blurring our lived experience of who God is,who we are, and how best to be connected to one another and the rest of creation.
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