The Secret to Reconciliation….

March 20, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor   “The Secret to Reconciliation. . . And Why It Almost Never Happens”              

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1937  "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross . . ."

When we started this church in 2008 it was the first time in my 30 year long career in ministry when I got to become the pastor of a church that had not just fired their previous pastor.  I think it is safe to borrow Henry Kissenger’s famous comment about politics on a college campus and apply it to churches:  The politics in “church” is so ferocious because the stakes are so small.

People are complicated and a whole of what we do, what we say, how we act, arises in us in entirely unconscious ways. People don’t set out to be irrational, mean, or cruel in most cases and yet it does happen altogether too often.

What is often very perplexing is that people are able to be good spouses, or good friends, or good employees in other settings but they show their darker side in just certain settings. 

When I came to Springfield in 1991, I was offered the chance to completely rebuild a church that had been though such a rough political blow up that not only had the senior minister been forced to resign, but the ugliness of the process had caused the associate pastor, the secretary, the office manager, and even the janitor to leave at the same time. 

There were three or four families that had been at the center of the dysfunction though none of them wanted to own their role in the unraveling of the church.  In fact, they all rushed to take my family out to dinner and make every conceivable gesture of support and friendship.

The wise old board chairman said something to me that I have never forgotten. He said, “A snake doesn’t have to bite you to be a snake.” It is a sobering thing to think about but it stands up to scrutiny.  The comedian, Dave Berry, once said, “If the person you are with is nice to you but mean to the waiter, the person you are with is a mean person.”

People are complicated. Good people do bad things. It is certainly true that no one is perfect and everyone has blind spots in their personal ethics but still, not to make these absolutes, but to be aware that situational ethics is approximately the same thing as no ethics. If a friend of yours is irrationally hostile towards a mutual friend, you should assume that the snake is just as likely to bite you, even if they have always been friendly up to that point.

A female friend of mine is a professional who has earned a Phd in counseling and is a person of some considerable responsibility in the hospital where she works. She comes from a third world country where she endured many horrors in her early life and these early traumas often come out very hostile, sometimes even violent, irrational conflicts in her marriage, in her relationships with her children, and with family and friends.

However, these outbursts never happen at work because, if they did, she would become immediately unemployed. I have given her a lot of extra grace because the things she has endured would make anyone more than a bubble off plumb but the fact remains that she knows when she can let her id show and when she cannot.

Though her condition is extreme, to some extent, we all do this. We know when it is safe to let out id out and when we have to be more restrained. Tenured professors who have no fear of losing their jobs but who often have tons and tons of unmet recognition needs, will engage in ego battles in college committee work that makes me very glad to have never been more than an adjunct professor in the colleges where I have taught.

But casual relationships and voluntary organizations, whether it is the Kidney Foundation, the Girl Scouts, or a church, are places where people often, albeit frequently unconsciously, allow themselves to express their power through very irrational ways.

We lost a member from our church a few years ago who had joined and quickly became very involved but then had an illness in her family that kept her away for several months.  She went to a hospital two hundred miles away, most weekends, to sit with her dying father.

I called. I sent emails. I texted messages of concern and support. I made several offers to go and visit her father myself. Sometime after her father had died, I reached out again and told her that we still missed her. She replied that she would not be coming back to church because her father had died and I never contacted her.  I reminded her of the many phone calls, texts, and emails and she said, “Well, yeah, you did that but you didn’t mean it.”

In popular psychological parlance, this is called “gas-lighting.” It is a form of intimidation or psychological abuse in which you twist facts to favor the abuser and to make the victim doubt his or her memory, sanity, or character.

Was she aware that she was gas-lighting? If I had to guess, I would say “no.” The operative emotion for her at the time was grief, which is often complicated by feelings of anger, powerlessness, regret, and pain. She was in pain and lashing out… now, she had the presence of mind to tell me not to show her emails to anyone else, at some level, she knew how inappropriate and irrational she was being, but at a conscious level,  she was hurt and wanted to hurt someone else in much the same way that a wounded animal will bite anyone who comes near them, even someone who is trying to help.

In more extreme cases, as with sociopaths or borderline personalities, they will sometimes have such an aversion to personal responsibility that they will actually convince themselves that they did not do what they had done but rather, someone else did it.

In this year’s political campaign, we are seeing people let their collective id out a bit as they surround Donald Trump with approving cheers. I had the chance to meet my first Donald Trump supporter in the flesh about a week ago and I asked him why he was supporting someone who has been demeaning of women, who has pledged to deport millions of Latinos, to stop immigration of all Muslims, to resume and ratchet up our military torture of prisoners and has even pledged to murder the family members of suspected terrorists… in short, I asked this man, “Why would you support a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobe?” His reply was, “I respectfully disagree.” That is, presented with the fact of indisputable racist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic statements, he simply chooses to deny the facts. 

Men and women, 2 + 2 = 4 no matter how much you may choose to respectfully disagree with math.  A madman cannot blot out the sun by writing the word “darkness” on his cell wall. Facts are not liberal or conservative. Reality is not Republican or Democrat.  Reality may be, as Einstein said, and illusion but it is a persistent one.  Facts can be very persistent though I’ll warrant that very few of Trumps supporters would want to self identify as racists or misogynists or xenophobes but the facts are in. You don’t have to wear a swastika to be a fascist.

Now, I don’t say that to label Donald Trump as a sociopath. In very real terms, Donald Trump is not my problem. My concern is with the collective social id that he is revealing. My concern is that as the United States has become much more diverse and white northern European descendants will no longer be a majority in the United States, we are seeing a resurgence of something we had hoped was long dead and buried but is, sadly, still very much a part of the fabric of our nation.

During my graduate school work, I was the chaplain in a VA drug and alcohol rehab unit and I learned more about psychology in those days of working with addicts than I ever did in my classroom lectures on counseling. One of the things that the A.A. program is emphatic about is unvarnished honesty.

The Al Anon program stresses to the family members of addicts that they are not doing the addict any favors by pretending to believe their lies or in allowing them to twist reality to make others responsible for their addiction.

It is a very basic tenet of either parenting or, if you can make an adjective out of any noun, adulting, is that you reward the behaviors you want to encourage and you never reward behaviors that you don’t want to encourage. The politics of exaggerated curtsey will some times make you feel like you should pretend to believe the lie, or reward someone for their petty and irrational ego demands. Sometimes it is easier just to cave into the expectations of a borderline or a sociopath, just to keep the peace.

But when you do that, you are encouraging people to just go deeper into their pathology, their addiction, their delusions and unhappiness.

Our wisdom lesson today is probably the singular quote for which Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the most famous. In sum, he insists, that forgiveness without confession is cheap grace.  This is the point where I often have to part company with many of my liberal peers in ministry.

Because we have dismissed neurotic religious guilt and fear, we have jettisoned any belief in a harsh, judgmental Sky Father, we often fall prey to the popular pop psychology of a previous generation that tells everyone that they are OK.  We progressives often tend to engage in both amnesia and denial, pretending that harmful or even irrational behavior is not what it clearly is…. Harmful and irrational. It makes us ethically irrelevant and morally either ineffectual or, sometimes much worse, literally encouraging evil behavior.

This is why, in spite of all that we have rejected from our traditional Christian roots, that we still have a prayer of confession in our liturgy. They are not traditional, and, in fact, I have to write them myself every week because what you find in books of liturgy are all of the “mia culpa” sort, asking the Sky Father not to give you the punishment that you so richly deserve.

Ours are attempts at an orientation to reality, befitting a fact based faith community. If you are watching this sermon on line, you can write to me and I’ll send you a sampling of these prayers.  Sean and Barry have talked about setting some of them to music but having heard the prayers of Kierkegaard set to music, I might ask that you not do that.

We have kept prayers of confession because we are trying to make our spirituality real, relevant, and honest.  It is one thing to say that you are spiritual but not religious but, to be fair, if you are not sincerely trying to live in harmony with other people, to be reconciled to the earth, to future generations, to other nations and races… then it might be more accurate to say that you are neither religious nor spiritual. To be spiritual needs to mean that you are seeking a spiritual life, trying to be different, better than we might otherwise be.

I often think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission used in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. After years of a violently oppressive white minority government that abused and impoverished the black majority in South Africa, it was reasonable to fear that the collective anger of the black population might erupt in violent revenge.

The creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave people a chance to publicly confess their sins against their victims and in exchange for their honest confession; they were forgiven rather than punished. Those who refused to confess were still held criminally responsible for their offenses.

Now, you might think that this wouldn’t work but in most cases, the victims were willing to forgive their abusers… all they wanted to hear was a sincere confession, and acknowledgment of what they had been through.

Bonheoffer’s point is that when forgiveness precedes confession… when you try to exercise reconciliation through amnesia or denial, the reconciliation is rarely real.  We don’t want to just look spiritual or talk as if we were spiritual… we’re digging in to get at the real thing.

Men and women, let me say this in my most authoritative pastoral voice… if liberals will allow me such a moment:  Always be willing to forgive. Never let anything become so big in your mind or in your heart that reconciliation is not possible.  Don’t dispose of family members or friends, but as far as it lies with you, seek peace and sincere love. But do not deny reality. People don’t have to agree with you, but you don’t have to pretend to believe in lies, or fairy tales, to be subjected to other people’s twisted imagination of the villain they want for you to be.

Be honest, but be yourself. Engage in reality, but choose to infuse reality with love. That’s my opinion anyway, I hope that you agree.