The Ministry of Reconciliation

An Evensong Sermon at Pembroke College, Oxford

Our first reading tonight captures the sense of spiritual possibility Christianity has inspired across the centuries: new creatures, new life, new epochs of love and light.

In Christ, all things are new. As our Dominican Brother John Church noted in his sermon two weeks ago, the repeated biblical accounts of new beginnings can inspire our hope that divine creation is not past, but present. It is ongoing in me and in you and all around us if we can but see it. Here is the originating language again, but in Robert Alter’s poignant recent translation:

“When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”¹

I treasure that ancient image of God “hovering” over waste and deep, setting off creative abundance by speaking light into darkness. The American naturalist and wilderness prophet John Muir could not help but agree. He had been brought up in the Wisconsin prairies and polished in the rocky cathedrals of California’s mountains. After a remarkable life reading God’s signatures on the landscapes of the American West, he wrote:

“We live in ‘creation’s dawn.’ The morning stars still sing together, and the world, though made, is still being made and becoming more beautiful every day.”²

Our second reading reinforces the truth with language from my tradition that divine creation recurs in every human life. Christ’s light illuminates all space and each human story, no matter how painful. Successive generations—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers—reverberate with divine potential and promise. Though seemingly obscured through pain or loss, those with eyes to see learn to trace God’s autograph on every human face.

Returning to our first reading, Paul gave direction to his “new creation” language in 2 Corinthians by describing Christ’s mission as one of reconciliation. In the logic of this ancient letter, God reconciles humanity to himself in and through the gift of his son Jesus. But part of what makes Christian life new rests in Paul’s conviction that we are ourselves called to the “ministry of reconciliation.” We are both to adore the divine gift and participate in it. In Paul’s choreography of redemption, as we move towards God we simultaneously move towards the people around us. If the world suffers from alienation and from ruptures of relation all around—and who can deny this has ever been the case?—then Jesus and, by extension, his followers, are to interrupt and overturn that reality for a new one.

The great scandal, of course, is that Christians have not only often failed to heal the wounds, we have sometimes inflicted them or have made bad things worse. The ministry of reconciliation has proven to be hard work indeed. In a caricature rooted in some very hard truths, Jesus’s modern followers are widely considered obstacles to reconciliation, not practitioners.

But the call still stands.

Thirty years ago, I was a teenaged Latter-day Saint missionary, far from home and just starting to experience the newness of life promised in the New Testament. Like the West End’s theatrical parody of missionary life, I was eager, I smiled a lot, and I was more than a little naive. The West End play, however, captures neither the fear endemic to missionary life, nor its loneliness. And, sadly, I quickly learned that those who professed Jesus loudest would often treat us harshest.

One day early on, we waved hello to a well-dressed middle-aged man looking at us through the front window of his tidy, middle-class home. We saw him again moments later when we turned the corner, only this time he was holding a rifle, pointed directly at my chest. We moved quickly up the street but he silently kept us in his sights until we were safely out of range. We learned later that he was a committed Christian and active in his congregation. That was by far the most egregious encounter, but it numbered among many others where I learned how deeply I was despised by some who professed Christ. This was not anything like what others have suffered for their faith, I know, but for my purposes here it is significant that, somewhat imperceptibly to me, my heart hardened along my detractors’. I probably said disparaging things about “those people.” I certainly thought them. I had been treated like an enemy and that sense of alienation stayed with me for a very long time.

Then, in 2004, I was shown a better way. That fall, a Calvinist theologian and evangelical seminary president named Richard Mouw stood before a large group of my church members and said, “We ... have sinned against you.... We have even on occasion demonized you.” He apologized for the pain his community had inflicted. He expressed repentance for any false witness born against us.

This pious man, at a far end of the theological spectrum from myself, in an instant made things new for me. The “enemy” became a friend. We’ve spent two decades in conversation since. We pray for each other. We listen to each other. We love each other. I was shown what a ministry of reconciliation looks like.

In the early sixteenth century, William Tyndale invoked a new English word in an attempt to capture the work of Paul’s reconciling Christ. He translated that 2 Corinthians passage this way:

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away, behold all things are become new. Nevertheless all things are of God, which hath reconciled us unto himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given unto us the office to preach the atonement. For God was in Christ, and made agreement between the world and himself ... and hath committed to us the preaching of the atonement. Now then are we messengers in the room of Christ ... So pray we you in Christ’s stead, that ye be at one with God.”³

Again, atonement or “at-one-ment” here is multidirectional. An alienated and broken humanity becomes one with God through Christ. Then, Christians themselves rush to the brokenness around them in love as “messengers in the room of Christ.” Not only recipients of God’s reparative work, we become the agents of it.

A world riven by violence and hatred and hypocrisy on every side can sap motivation to even start, I know. With the shattering images from Gaza or Ukraine or any number of other calamities in view, a kind of helplessness can set in. It is easier to retreat into whatever entertainment and comfort one can get, I suppose. The way to begin is clear enough, though. There is work enough at hand. “But I say unto you, love your enemies.”⁴ Who is the enemy? From whom are we estranged? Who stands apart? There God hovers, and there we begin, again, in Christ’s name, Amen.

This sermon was given at the Pembroke College Evensong service in Oxford, England, on February 18, 2024.

J. Spencer Fluhman is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University and former executive director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He is currently at work on a biography of LDS apostle James E. Talmage.

Art by John August Swanson.

1. Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation and Commentary, 3 vols. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2018), 1:17.

2. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938), 72.

3. Tyndale’s New Testament, ed. David Daniell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 266. See also Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “atonement (n.), sense 3.”

4. Matthew 5:44 (KJV).