September 27, 2009
Mt. 5:38-48; Rom.5:6-11; II Cor. 5:38-48
We are concluding our sermon series today on “what is an Anabaptist Christian?”
For this month of September we have been reflecting on our identity as Anabaptist Christians. On who we are and on what is most central to our faith in the world.
In 1943 Harold S. Bender gave a lecture to his colleagues on the central core values and beliefs of Anabaptists from the 16th century.
The three core convictions he identified were:
- Jesus is the center of our faith. The central belief that Jesus’ life was just as important as his birth, death and resurrection.
- The second core value he identified was that “community is the center of our lives”. The Anabaptists believed that God created us for community and that in community we learn what it means to grow in Christlikeness.
- The third core conviction, and the one I want to talk about today, is that “reconciliation is the center of our work”.
There is probably nothing that describes our core identity as Anabaptist/Mennonite Christians more – than our understanding that reconciliation, peacemaking, and overcoming evil with good is what we are called to do as followers of Jesus.
We have gotten it wrong many times and we often don’t practice what we preach about reconciliation, but it is still central to our identity in Christ.
I was reminded, in a powerful way three years ago, of just how much reconciliation is a part of our Anabaptist DNA.
Most of you know the story about the Amish girls who were killed while in school, but I think it bears repeating.
On the morning of October 2, 2006 Charles Roberts, who had delivered milk to the Amish for many years, stopped at the little one room Amish school house and took everyone hostage.
He let all the adults and boys leave, but he kept ten little Amish girls. He tied their hands and feet so they could not get away.
Then he told them how angry he was at God and that he needed to punish them to get even with God.
Incredibly, two girls – Maria Fisher (13 yrs. old) and her sister Barbie (11 yrs. old) asked that they be shot first – in hopes that he wouldn’t kill the other girls. Maria was killed, but Barbie somehow survived.
In all – three girls died at the scene and two girls died the next day. The other five girls survived but some were severely wounded. In the end, Charles shot himself.
But the thing that literally shocked the world, beyond the brutal killings of these innocent girls, was how the Amish responded.
In just a few hours after the shootings – a group of Amish went to the Robert’s home to comfort the family.
They didn’t accuse them. They didn’t yell at them or seek revenge in any way. Instead, they went offering forgiveness and they told the Robert’s family that they had already forgiven them.
On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered girls even warned some younger relatives not to hate the killer. He said, “We must not think evil of this man.”
The Amish, though, didn’t only offer words of forgiveness – they embodied the forgiveness they gave.
- Charles Robert’s father, when the Amish came to comfort him, collapsed in the arms of an Amish man. The Amish man literally held him and comforted him for over an hour.
- After some of the Amish families had buried their own children – they went to Charles Robert’s funeral too.
- And then later, when money poured in from around the world – almost $4.5 million dollars – the Amish set up a charitable fund for the Robert’s family.
The Amish have no health insurance and so they needed the money to pay for the huge medical bills, but out of their love they wanted to make sure the Robert’s family was taken care of too.
A few weeks after the shootings the widow, Marie Roberts, wrote a letter to the Amish community thanking them for their forgiveness, grace and mercy.
She wrote – “Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Our hearts are broken. Many hard days are ahead of us, but we will put our trust in the God of all comfort and hope. Gifts you have given us have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing the world, and for this we sincerely thank you”.
But the Amish didn’t stop there. Almost a year later, when they learned of the Virginia Tech killings, many of them traveled to VA Tech to comfort those people in their grief.
The Amish even gave the VA Tech families a “comfort quilt” that had been given to them in their time of grief.
Now, the Amish are a fairly closed community, but their act of forgiveness literally touched the world. Most people – including most Christians – could not comprehend what the Amish had done.
Forgiving a murderer made no sense to them. It was not rational behavior. And forgiving so quickly – on the same day – was beyond their comprehension. Most people thought they were simply living in denial – that they had to be angry, bitter, and resentful.
The Amish know that forgiveness is a journey and that it doesn’t take away the pain. They struggle with giving forgiveness as everyone else does.
At the same time, forgiveness for them is not just a belief; it is woven into the fabric of their lives as followers of Jesus. They have been formed in a life of forgiveness.
Most of us today are formed in a culture that nourishes revenge. Hockey fans complain they haven’t gotten their moneys worth if the players only skate and don’t fight.
Movie plots often revolve around heroes who avenge wrong with merciless killings.
The common wisdom of our culture is that we live in a dangerous world and the answer to violence is more violence.
The Amish could forgive the Robert’s family – because they were formed in the Christian practice of forgiveness. They know that Jesus forgave his tormentors while hanging on a cross.
They know how Stephen and other early church martyrs died for following Jesus.
And they know well the story of the Anabaptist, Dirk Willems, who ran from his enemies across a frozen lake. When his enemy broke through the ice, Dirk Willems returned to pull him out of the icy waters and then was promptly captured by him and later killed.
The Amish are also formed by the Martyr’s Mirror, a book that tells the story of over 4000 Anabaptists who lost their lives for following Jesus.
So, for the Amish to forgive the Robert’s family was not out of character. They were simply living out their faith.
I tell that story this morning because more than anything I can say today, it illustrates how reconciliation and nonviolence is at the heart of Anabaptist/Mennonite faith.
This Gospel of reconciliation and nonviolence is deeply rooted in God’s grace for us.
Our scripture today from Romans 5 is one of Paul’s many attempts to express the depth of God’s love for us.
Paul begins in verse 7 by saying – “rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – but maybe, just maybe, someone might die for a good person”.
Today, we hear about people who donate a kidney or a part of their liver to another person so they can live. But these are usually given to people we love and care about.
But Paul, as he builds his case here, says that God “proves his love for us in that while we were enemies of his – not his close friends – Jesus died for us to reconcile us to God.”
God could have knocked off those who were killing his son, but he didn’t.
God dying for enemies is at the very heart of the gospel. Paul’s point here is that God loved us preemptively. God loved us even while we were still rebelling against God.
No matter how much we have hurt God, or hurt others or what we have done – God keeps right on loving us. God suffers with us and for us. God’s love of enemies is what compels us to love enemies.
Jesus, during his ministry told his disciples the same thing. In Matthew 5, Jesus says to his disciples, “it is nothing to love those who love you.”
Jesus is saying – it is easy to love someone who thinks like you, looks like you, smells like you, has the same education as you, drives a car like you, eats the same kind of food, and loves Steelers football.
You see, it doesn’t take much to love the lovely!! There is nothing Christian about that.
Jesus says, we are to be like God and to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. When we forgive others, when we love our enemies – then we are acting like God acts. Then we are – as Jesus says – Children of God.
In Second Corinthians 5:18 Paul writes again about God’s love. He says – “All of this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is – in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us”.
As new creatures in Christ – we have been entrusted with this message of reconciliation. It really isn’t optional for us. Just as God forgave us – we are to forgive others. Just as God loves his enemies – so we are to love our enemies.
We love our enemies not because it is the heroic thing to do or because it will somehow bring us God’s favor. We simply do it because that is how God has treated us.
So, reconciliation is the ministry God has given to us. It is our work in the world as followers of Jesus Christ. We are ambassadors of peace and ministers of reconciliation.
However, sometimes we lose our focus along the way.
- Sometimes in our history our focus has shifted from being ministers of reconciliation to being “behavior police”.
Mennonite have encouraged modesty in dress. We have wanted to be modest in our dress, but sometimes we have ended up fighting over the color of our scarves. So we ended up with the “no scarves group”, the “drab scarves group” and the “colorful scarves group”.
Or at another point we had to decide if we should dance or not. Well, we ended up with the “no dance group”, the ‘sometimes dance group”, and the “dance all you want group”.
We laugh now about these things but we still struggle with these kinds of things. Today we have the “hymnal only group”, the “hymnal plus STJ and STS group”, or the “no hymnal group – only sing off the wall group”.
So, it is easy when we lose our calling as ministers of reconciliation to turn to legalism.
- At other times we get lost by saying the peace Jesus was talking about is only an inner peace with God. It certainly is about inner peace, yet the NT clearly says that peace with God and peace with each other are inseparable.
Reconciliation with God is deeply entwined with interpersonal reconciliation. The peace that Jesus gives dismantles dividing walls and brings people together across economic, ethnic, gender, and racial barriers.
So the ministry of reconciliation is about healing the hurts that divide us and working for a just world.
- However, we can also lose our way when we primarily make peacemaking into a social and political strategy to bring about change.
Nonviolence is right, not because it works or is successful, but because it is the way of Jesus. Jesus chose the way of the cross as the clearest expression of how God confronts and deals with human evil.
Even if our enemies do not change or return our love – we are to keep on loving them because that is how God loves us.
And our witness to Jesus’ way of peace is to be more positive than negative. We reject violence, we oppose injustice, and we refuse to go to war, but at the heart of our peace witness is a joyful affirmation of God’s redemptive love for us and the world.
Instead of cursing the darkness, we go around lighting lamps of love. We are not naïve about evil or the pain that comes from encountering injustice – but we do it because we know the power of God’s love to transform our lives.
So peacemaking is not so much a political strategy as it is a response to God’s suffering love for us and our world.
- And then I think we also lose our way when we primarily focus our peacemaking on being against war.
As Mennonite we often think we are being peaceful people when we don’t go to war. What we forget is that war is simply the end result of our lack of love and forgiveness for one another.
The ministry of reconciliation has as much to do with how we treat each other in our homes, in our work places, in our neighborhoods, and in the church as it does in dealing with conflict between nations.
The biblical idea of peace – which is captured in the word shalom – is concerned for our total well-being, our wholeness, our healing, and a deep sense of harmonious relationships.
The ministry of reconciliation with which we have been entrusted will always be concerned about peace with God, peace with each other, peace with our enemies, and peace with creation.
And we must always be careful when we say that we are a people of peace – to point people to Jesus. Too often when people ask us why we don’t go to war we say – “because we are Mennonites”. But that is the wrong focus.
The reason we don’t go to war or the reason we love our enemies or the reason we forgive those who harm us like the Amish did – is because we follow Jesus – not because we are Mennonite. Jesus is the reason we can love and forgive others.
We want to point people to Jesus and not to our ethnic heritage. As Mennonites we teach peacemaking but it is all because of Jesus.
The Anabaptists were probably the most evangelistic movement of the 16th century. They went all over Europe proclaiming the Good News of peace that through Jesus people could be reconciled to God and to each other. And thousands joined the movement.
Reconciliation is still the center of our work and calling today.
We continue to live in a world of organized fear, institutionalized greed, rationalized violence, and socially accepted hatred. Our calling, as ambassadors of Christ, is to invite people to be reconciled to God, to each other, and even to their enemies.
And the reason we share this good news with others is because we know the “amazing grace of God that loved us even when we were enemies” and we want to extend that same grace to others who have done nothing to deserve it.
We can’t do this reconciling work on our own, but by the power of God’s Spirit at work in us we can be God’s agents of healing and reconciliation in our world.
May God give us great, great joy in being ministers of reconciliation and agents of hope in our world. Amen.