When The Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave their report a couple of weeks ago, to many within the United Church of Canada, this was of little or no surprise. In fact, for many years the United Church has recognized its role in the truth and reconciliation purpose, and within the residential school’s program. Successive moderators of the United Church have publicly expressed apology. There have been services of reconciliation and healing well before the government gave its report. There was a way to reach out beyond the bounds. If you have read The Observer, if you have listened to reports, you will know that this is the case, and it is something that The United Church of Canada has taken very seriously indeed! However, after the collection of witnesses in The Truth and Reconciliation report, the extent, the nature, the gravity, the domain and range of what happened in the residential schools became clearer and in our own minds. It has shocked everybody.
In the midst of all of this, of course, there is always the political dimension, rhetoric and hyperbole, and there is language that is extreme on all sides. But if we strip all that away, as The Globe and Mail the day after the report had been given put in its editorial, the human part of it all becomes what is important. In the editorial, this question was posed to the readers, and I want to read a portion of it to you, because I think in a fair and a reasonable and a rational way, it puts this moment in Canadian history into perspective and into a timeframe. The editorial said:
Step back for a moment and try this exercise. Close your eyes and imagine that you are at home with your two children, a boy aged six and a girl aged eight. There is a knock at the door. It is a moment you have dreaded for weeks. You answer it, and there is a man from the government and an RCMP officer who order you to turn your children over to them immediately. The children are led away and placed in the back of the truck in which you can see other children crying. Your boy and girl are screaming that they don’t want to leave you, but the minute you show any resistance the policeman steps in to enforce the law. You are compelled to give up your children, because the state has judged you to be unfit as a parent on account of your race. That night, you are alone with your spouse at an empty house: broken-hearted, powerless, and without hope – everything that matters stolen by the state!
Now, imagine you are one of the children. You are driven hundreds of kilometres to a new school run by strangers, and when you arrive your hair is cut off, your clothes your mother made for you are taken from you and burned, you are punished every time you speak your mother tongue or cry for your parents. You are lost and confused. You are separated from your brother because he is a boy and you are a girl. You are underfed and you are cold. There is no playground outside, just a cemetery for the children who died in the care of the horrible place. And then, one of the teachers abuses you sexually, and the state turns a blind eye. Eventually, as a teenager, you are free to go, but go where? Your home has been destroyed. You don’t know who to trust. You don’t know who you are.
Can you do that? Can you imagine?
An estimated 150,000 First Nations Inuit and Metis children were stolen from their families over the course of a hundred years of Canadian history. This is the human dimension. And when you enter into the realm of human dimension, politics, time and cultures, everything evaporates. You come face-to-face with the reality of how one lives with one another in the world after such acts!
When you enter into the realm of human relationships, I believe you ultimately enter into the realm of divine relationships. There is a correlation between the human and the divine, and how we relate to one another goes right to the heart of what we believe and how we live. No one understood this more than the Apostle Paul. In the passage from Corinthians, he is talking about the power of reconciliation. In Romans, Chapters 5 and 8, which I hope you will read, it talks about the new life and the power of forgiveness that comes from reconciliation. Paul saw that reconciliation was a continuance of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It wasn’t a break from it. It wasn’t an addendum to it. It was a continuation of it! What Jesus had started in his ministry the Church is to continue under the power of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, if we are going to look at this issue of reconciliation, how do we put this in some theological, spiritual, biblical context? I think we need an image, and I have gone for my image to one of the great reconcilers in South African history, Dr. Michael Cassidy of Africa Enterprise, responsible for so many of the meetings when that nation was facing conflict. Cassidy suggests that what we need to do is look at this as a recipe for reconciliation. The first things you have in a recipe are the ingredients. He says there are two ingredients that we put into this necessary recipe. The first of these ingredients is the reconciling nature of the ministry of Jesus himself.
The Apostle Paul, in the Book of Romans, suggests that at one time, because of our sin and disobedience, we were enemies with God. It was as if there was a break, a tension, between God and ourselves, a broken relationship that needed to be mended. Paul talks about the nature of that reconciliation. He says it is as if now we have peace with God. It is interesting that the word Paul uses for reconciliation in both Romans and in Corinthians is a word that was used by secular authorities to describe a peace treaty. Reconciliation is a peace treaty. Reconciliation, says Paul, has been brought about through Christ. In a magnificent passage from Romans six, “Christ has died that our sins might be forgiven.” Christ has mended that which is broken, and now we have peace with God through our Lord, Jesus Christ. In other words, the reconciliation between ourselves and humanity and God has inextricably been mended by the work of Jesus of Nazareth. Christ becomes the first ingredient in reconciliation. It is his action that becomes our bona fides for the next thing, which is the life-giving power of the Spirit.
Paul says that not only has Christ reconciled the broken relationship between God and ourselves, but he has made us new creatures. He has placed his Spirit within us. And, as the Corinthians passage suggests, we no longer look at one another even from a worldly point of view, but rather through the eyes of the Spirit. When we look at others through the eyes of Christ, Paul says we then must carry on that ministry of reconciliation for it is as if Christ himself is making an appeal to a broken world and we are the ambassadors. We are the ones who deliver the news of the peace treaty, to use the language of law and politics. We are the ones who mend what has been broken, but we do it in the name of Jesus Christ and under his power.
Reconciliation then is a change in us that has been brought about by Christ, but therefore should lead to a change in the world by the way that we see one another. At the heart of reconciliation there is seeing people differently; through the eyes of Jesus Christ. The moment we look at people through the eyes of Jesus Christ we see them, says Paul, in a whole new way. Not in a worldly way, not in a cultural way, not in a racial way; we see them through the eyes of Christ, who gave his life for the sake of a broken world. These are the ingredients, says Cassidy, we have to work with. These are the things Christians have to play with and have in their minds when they deal with getting the ingredients, and mixing them together to create the final product.
What are the factors that go into creating a new and different world? Well, he suggests the first is forgiveness. When you put it all down on the table, everything is about forgiveness. When human relationships are broken, when people are being hurt, when innocent people are being accused, when people are frightened and uncertain, when they hear things they don’t like, when they feel condemned, it is about forgiveness. While the debt of forgiving is owed to others on our behalf, there is also a point in which we too should ask for forgiveness. It is not just us who do the forgiving; it is rather that we ask for forgiveness for ourselves. Jesus made this abundantly clear. He said, “If you have anything against your neighbor, before you go to the Temple, go and talk to them.” Sort it out before you come into the Temple, and then you present your worship and your gifts. Deal with that broken relationship first! Is there ever a tension, is there ever a moment in our lives when relationships that needed to be healed did not require someone to act in a forgiving way? That is why so much of what Jesus taught and so much of what the Apostle Paul experienced were based on forgiveness.
I read one of the most touching things that I think that I have seen in years by Robert Seiple of World Vision, who went years ago to the City of Da Nang in Viet Nam on Holy Week. After the cataclysms and the wars between the United States and Viet Nam, he felt it was important to go there and worship with Vietnamese Christians. He saw more than he could ever have imagined. He was having dinner in a couple’s house, and they were involved in the local church. Their little boy sang some songs in praise of his nation, love songs about Viet Nam. This little boy sang his heart out, but it was obvious the little boy was not physically perfect. Indeed, Robert discovered that he was blind and developmentally challenged. Yet, hearing this little boy sing was a glorious moment, the room lit up with the beautiful singing!
He later found out from talking to the mother and father over dinner that the little boy probably wouldn’t have survived. You see, in the last days of the war, the mother had had an affair, and when she realized that she was pregnant she was guilt ridden, so utterly repulsed by this child and what she had done that she abused him in order to kill him. She was ashamed! Just as she was about to bury this child after having beaten it, the husband grabbed the child out her arms. At this time, the physical damage to the little boy had already been done, but the father embraced the child, adopted him, and made sure that the child was given a name. When the woman was so concerned that she would be rejected and despised by her husband, she was overwhelmed with the spirit of forgiveness he showed. The little boy that was about to die was singing the songs on Holy Week and bringing tears to everyone’s eyes! Paul says, “Sometimes forgiveness saves.” I think in the brokenness that so many people feel after what has been shown in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, forgiveness is the only path forward.
Cassidy says that there is also need for restoration. It is no good just saying you’re forgiven, everything is right, if things aren’t restored. They need to be put back together. Who showed that better than Jesus? When Zacchaeus was in the tree looking down on him, didn’t Jesus say, “Come on, Zacchaeus, I know you are a money-grabbing parasite, I know that you are a tax collector, I know people don’t like you, but I am going to have dinner at your house tonight.” This man who was broken, who had come looking for him, looking for forgiveness, wanting to see what Jesus would do, was restored. Paul talks about that nature of reconciliation creating new beings in the process of the restoration. When you restore something that has been broken and you hold it close, you give the opportunity for the forgiveness to manifest itself in a new relationship. What is needed in this nation after The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a new relationship. One can spend a lot of time going back and retreading old ground. Retreading old ground is painful for a lot of people, but it seems to me this is now the moment when we move forward.
After the terrible civil war in Rwanda in 1994, Cassidy was deeply moved to go to Rwanda. When he was there, he met Deborah, a Tutsi whose son had been killed by a Hutu. Within a hundred days, a million people had been killed in Rwanda, and the carnage and the pain was unbearable. Even to this day it is still there. Deborah told a story about a young man who about two or three years after the slaughter came and knocked on her door. The young man, who was really only a child in many ways even still, had been kidnapped to fight in the Hutu army, said, “I can’t live with myself anymore! I killed your son. You can hand me over to the authorities. You can do with me as you please. I have seen your pain. I have watched from a distance how this is damaging you, and I can’t stand it anymore! Please hand me over. Let me face the consequences.” Deborah, realizing the pain in the young man’s eyes, realizing his sense of remorse and guilt and grief, decided that even though she had lost her son she would make this young man her son and she adopted him.
Cassidy says, “Is that not exactly what Jesus of Nazareth in his entire ministry wanted us to do/” To take that which is broken and adopt it and bring it unto itself and to heal it? Is that not the ministry of Jesus, and is that not our ministry to the world? It is not for us in restoration to talk about the other, but to talk about ourselves, to not talk about “them” but to talk about “us” and to see “them” through the eyes of Christ. Does that not also have a burden on us that we should live a godly life as a result of it? Paul says, “We do not go on sinning just because of grace and forgiveness.” In fact, we stop doing those things that are appalling in God’s eyes. There is no antinomianism here, there is nothing against the law, rather there is now an obedience that is required, and how we live a godly life.
In 1997, when I was a nominee for Moderator and I was at the General Council in Camrose, the issue of reconciliation and forgiveness was on everybody’s minds. The delegates who had come from the First Nations and the Metis and the Inuit communities were there, small in number compared to everyone else. We spent time around coffee tables talking and laughing and praying. It was the best part of that General Council for me. This was because I realized how profoundly and deeply Christian these representatives were at our General Council. They had grown up through so much that I would never understand or be able to see myself hold on to their faith in Christ throughout it all. I thought “Who am I that my faith should even be contemplated when those who have lived in the conditions that many of them have come from still believe in their heart of hearts in the grace of Jesus Christ, and what is more, see Him as their only hope!”
If our reconciliation means anything, it is that we honour the faith of those First Nations, Metis and Inuit people, who share in the same Lord as we do, and who look at us not from a worldly point of view, but through the eyes of Christ. When I saw them there, I swore that I would do anything in my life to help them, to strengthen them, to protect them, and to struggle for them to finally have justice. When we see people not as the world sees them, not as a foreign culture or nation or language, we see them through the eyes of Christ, a true reconciliation occurs. It is a fantastic recipe, and it is our opportunity now to make it come to life. Amen.