Channing Memorial Church

Unitarian Universalist
Ellicott City, MD 21042
The Reverend Susan LaMar, Minister

March 21, 2004

"The Spirituality of Reconciliation"

First Reading Excerpts from "A Treatise on Atonement" (1803)

Hosea Ballou

"Atonement by Christ was never intended to perform impossibilities; therefore it was never designed to make men agree and live in peace while they are destitute of love one to another; but it is calculated and designed to inspire the mind with that true love which will produce peace in Jesus. . . atoning grace produces all which the Bible means by conversion, or being born of the Spirit. . . . and this love is not confined particularly to names, sects, denominations, people, or kingdoms."

Musical Interlude

Second Reading Excerpt from "Reconciliation" Howard Thurman

The quality of reconciliation is that of wholeness; it seeks to effect and further harmonious relations in a totally comprehensive climate. The concern for reconciliation finds expression in the simple human desire to understand others and to be understood by others. These are the building blocks of the society of man. . . every man wants to be cared for, to be sustained by the assurance that he shares in the watchful and thoughtful attention of others - not merely or necessarily others in general but others in particular. He wants to know that - however vast and impersonal all life about him may seem, however hard may be the stretch of road on which he is journeying - he is not alone, but the object of another's concern and caring; wants to know this in an awareness sufficient to hold him against ultimate fear and panic. It is precisely at this point that life becomes personal and the individual a person. Through it he gets some intimation of what, after all, he finally amounts to, and the way is cleared for him to experience his own spirit.

Sermon

I have not seen Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. I have read a great deal about it, though, and have had some conversations with some of you about it. It certainly is a cultural phenomenon. Here is my brief response to it, strictly from a theological perspective. I'll put it in a question and answer format - sort of like a brief catechism:

Question: What do you think about the Mel Gibson movie?

Answer: It's about vicarious atonement - vicarious reconciliation - and we [Unitarians and Universalists] rejected the doctrine of vicarious atonement hundreds of years ago.

Question: What? You mean you don't believe that Christ died for our sins?

Answer: That's right. We believe that Jesus and other avatars [remember, an avatar is a manifestation of the divine in human form - a word borrowed from the Hindu] . . . we believe that Jesus and other avatars lived, live, and will live for humanity's righteousness and [here comes the most important part] -- that we [all of humanity] can, too.

Notice the shift from doctrine - something that is to be taken as true - to practice -- something that must be lived. "We reject the doctrine of vicarious atonement and we believe that Jesus and other avatars lived, live, and will live for humanity's righteousness, and we can too."

That's quite a mouthful! . . . so I'm going to spend some time today unpacking it. I'm going to use as a vehicle for unpacking it another movie - Freaky Friday, the movie I won last month at the auction when I guessed the number or Hershey kisses in a jar. This might at first seem like a strange juxtaposition of films. But I don't think so.

In the film Freaky Friday, the mom, Tess, and the daughter, Anna have the testy relationship of most mothers and teenage daughters, with two added emotional charges. First, the Dad in the family died three years before, and all are at different stages of grief. Second, Tess has fallen in love with and become engaged to Ryan. Young Anna is growing up and pulling away, developing new interests and skills -- most especially, music. She plays guitar in a band.

The plot emerges when Anna's band unexpectedly gets an opportunity to audition at a local club - on the same night as her mother's wedding rehearsal. The family is out to dinner together when Anna drops the bomb that she wants to perform at the audition. The two of them - mother and daughter - are standing in the restaurant screaming at each other:

There they are in a standoff, sparks flying, when the elderly mother of the restaurant's owner comes by at just this moment and offers them each a fortune cookie, with the following words:

"A journey soon begins; its prize reflected in another's eyes; when what you see is what you lack, then selfless love will change you back."

The next morning - Friday - they wake up in each other's bodies and the audience is treated to a rollicking good time watching them learn to see through each other's eyes.

If I had a teen-age daughter, I can just hear her saying, "Oh MOTH-ER!!! Do you have to find theological significance in everything??? It's just a movie!!!"

But the fact is that Freaky Friday is a perfect parable for true reconciliation, and it is set precisely in our own culture, which is what makes any parable most effective.

The Biblical Greek word that is translated as reconcile has as its root a word meaning "to exchange", and this in turn is derived from a word meaning "the other." "The words thus carry with them the sense of exchanging places with 'the other' and therefore being in solidarity with rather than against 'the other.'"¹ Reconciliation has to do with coming back into solidarity with one another - and in the context of a larger community. Something has to function as a bridge.

"The best way to speak about reconciliation," according to one theologian, "is through story-telling". . . Reconciliation is something that occurs through the interplay of speech, listening and action motivated by hope and love." ² It is story-telling that facilitates this process. Speech, listening and action motivated by hope and love.

Let's take a closer look at Freaky Friday. First, there is a community (in this case a family) - a household -- that has been broken by an earthshaking event -- the death of a parent. This little piece of humanity has been hurting - each member in its own way. Losing a spouse is different from losing a parent, but both are traumatic. That little community has fallen out of "righteousness" - out of rightness, out of completeness, out of wholeness - and it is unhealed.

Neither Tess - the mother, nor Anna - the daughter, can see or hear the other's story. Each is living for themselves. It has become a contest of wills in a context of pain.

I'm going to leave Tess and Anna inhabiting each other's bodies for a few minutes, to move us deeper into that story as parable. It is easy to stay in the most literal level in a story like that, because it is so familiar to all of us. But the humor and the absurdity prepare us to go much deeper.

Reconciliation is extremely serious business. It is not easy to find oneself in solidarity with a profoundly different "other." It is not easy to live for another's righteousness - to give one's life for the long term benefit of humanity as a whole. So I am going to take us into some more difficult territory - the territory of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. A time and a place where exchanges took place in order that people could begin to learn to live for one another's righteousness.

I have been reading a recently published book called A Human Being Died That Night, by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela is a clinical psychologist working with victims - survivors and family members of apartheid death squads. In 1996 she was invited on to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Human Rights Violations Committee. There she listened not only to victims, but to perpetrators of monstrous violence against anti-apartheid workers.

She decided to interview, many times over a number of months, Eugene deKock, commander of one of the government-sanctioned death-squads. You may remember that deKock was nicknamed "Prime Evil" because of the sheer brutality of his acts and the number of them. Yet he was also one of the perpetrators who seemed to show remorse during the hearings. Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela wanted to try to understand evil and forgiveness. She wanted to try to find the humanity inside this person who had committed unspeakable acts - acts against her people.

Her interest was piqued because of an incident of forgiveness she observed by a victim, a widow of a black policeman killed in an incident known as the Motherwell bombing. DeKock had asked to meet with the widows privately so that he could apologize to them. A few days after the meeting, Ms Gobodo-Madikizela met with the widows during a weekend of debriefing. One of them Mrs. Faku, said of the meeting with deKock: "I was profoundly touched by him. I couldn't control my tears . . . I hope that when he sees our tears, he knows that they are not only tears for our husbands, but tears for him as well. . . . I would like to hold him by the hand, and show him that there is a future, and that he can still change."³

What an extraordinary statement! It was a statement that provoked Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela to embark on her series of interviews with deKock.

[Describe the interviewing room.]

She asked him to talk about that meeting with the widows.

"His face immediately fell, and he became visibly distressed. I could hear the clatter of his leg chains as he shuffled his feet. Sitting directly across from me in the small prison consulting room, his heavy glasses on the table that separated us, he started to speak. There were tears in his eyes. In a breaking voice he said: 'I wish I could do much more than [say] I'm sorry. I wish there was a way of bringing their bodies back alive. I wish I could say, 'Here are your husbands'" he said, stretching out his arms as if bearing an invisible, body his hands trembling, his mouth quivering, "but unfortunately, I have to live with it."

This show of emotion caused a reaction in Ms Gobodo-Madikizela, a reaction - an exchange -- that stunned her. She continues:

"Relating to him in the only way one does in such human circumstances, I touched his shaking hand. . . I [then] tried as best I could to carry on normally, to maintain my professional composure. And yet I felt guilty for having expressed even momentary sympathy and wondered if my heart had actually crossed the moral line from compassion, which allows one to maintain a measure of distance, to actually identifying with deKock."⁴

A few days later, deKock had been brought to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's offices to participate in a hearing. To Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela's surprise, he asked for her, and she went to the room where he was being held. She continues:

"He rushed through the obligatory exchange of greetings . . . [and then] with an expression that seemed to reflect genuine amazement, he said, "You know, Pumla, that was my trigger hand you touched."

What a complicated bridge was being built.

The symbolism of the hand that had caused such horror.

The very human reaction she had felt toward someone showing remorse.

The complex reactions that deKock was showing during the interviews, as he himself tried to come to terms with his past, with the evil he had done.

And Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela's ability to feel empathy, to sense his humanity. She says: "But for all the horrific singularity of his acts, deKock was a desperate soul seeking to affirm to himself that he was still part of the human universe." [Emphasis added]⁵

The truth-telling and story-sharing that occurred through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was truly an exchange - an exchange that began to give back the humanity of each side. Perpetrators of violence often dehumanized their victims in order to execute the violence. By expressing remorse, the perpetrators gave victims their humanity back - they saw them as humans, harmed by evil.

And . . . as Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela discovered, [quoting again] "the decision to forgive can paradoxically elevate a victim to a position of strength . . . the victim becomes the gatekeeper to what the outcast desires - readmission into the human community. . . [Forgiveness] does not overlook the deed: it rises above it. 'This is what it means to be human,' it says. 'I cannot and will not return the evil you inflicted on me.'"⁶

In South Africa the community is a nation. A nation and a society in which whole populations share a horrendous history, and yet must, somehow, move forward and live together in totally new ways. A nation and a society with a history for which the word "righteous" can barely be uttered, it was so broken and filled with suffering. And yet a nation and a society out of which emerged avatars - people like Nelson Mandela and Desmund Tutu - who could live for the righteousness of all of humanity. A society out of which something new is being born. Human to human.

What makes any of this a spiritual exercise and practice - no matter the scale? Why is it important to focus on the spirituality of reconciliation?

It is a spiritual exercise and practice because it happens at the level of one another's deepest humanity while leaving lines of accountability in place. It does not mean, for example, that deKock should ever be let out of prison. It means that his humanity is restored even as he remains in prison for his deeds.

It is a spiritual exercise and practice because it is a profound act of the imagination. The bridges are formless, shapeless, intangible, yet ever so real. Enemies must come out of themselves and take on the humanity of one another entirely through an act of the imagination.

It is a spiritual exercise and practice because it requires a profound receptivity to the story of another.

It is a spiritual exercise and practice because it brings parties back together, moving a household, or a community, or a whole nation toward wholeness.

It is a spiritual exercise and practice because what emerges is something completely new - and unknown.

It is a spiritual exercise and practice because it has to do with "the moral transformation of the world."⁷

We have to do it with ourselves and those closest to us if we are going to be able to do it on a national and international scale.

Let's come back to Tess and Anna, a scale of community probably much closer to that faced by most of us. We left them in each other's bodies, with a wedding rehearsal dinner and a rock band audition in the offing.

Well, as the verse on the fortune cookie told them - "selfless love will change you back." As they each make room for the other's reality, something new is born. A new family, new household, a new community.

Whatever the scale, it comes down to human to human connection. Whatever the scale, it comes down to speaking, listening, and acting with one another. Whatever the scale, it comes down to each one of us - each member of humanity - living, speaking, listening, and acting for the righteousness - the wholeness, the healing, and the benefit --of the household, the community, the society, and the world. Whatever the scale, it comes down to an affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

May it be so.