 In my early years of ministry, there was a trend running through faith circles to ask forgiveness for the sins of the past. Not one's own past, mind you, but rather the society's past. Or that of a people group, or a certain community. The pope apologized for the crusades. American families that owned slaves 4 or 5 generations previous asked forgiveness of the slaves' descendants. Canada asked forgiveness for their involvement in the Boer War (look it up in Hansard!). I'm still not sure to whom we apologized, and for what, exactly. I imagine in a hundred years we'll be apologizing to Afghanistan for the terrible sin of building schools, fighting terrorists (this one is admittedly, enlightened self interest) and securing some measure of freedom for women under the veil. Donald Miller in his book Blue Like Jazz tells a story about his college's Christian students group setting up a confessional booth at a campus festival. It was not meant to be a confessional for drunken students (good luck with that) but was meant to confess the sins of the church to anyone who would sit down to listen. I don't get all this apologizing.
In this week's MacLeans magazine, Brian Bethune's article entitled "Why didn't you do something?" talks about the modern German experience of lived out guilt over the holocaust and the events leading up to and including the Second World War. For the article, Bethune interviewed German judge and author Bernhard Schlink (think The Reader). Defining the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, Schlink says this, "To ask forgiveness for someone else's guilt is cheap." At some point we all live in our own skin. We are the one's responsible for our actions, attitudes, beliefs. It is from our own soul stature that we all must approach God. Anything else is disingenuous. Admitting to our sin is authentic. Confessing the sin of another we never knew to people who never knew them either is inauthentic. To echo Schlink, that's cheap.
This world, so filled with conflict, is in desperate need of reconciliation. Abraham chose a wife over a concubine, one son over another, and look at the Middle East now! Israel need not approach their Arab neighbours with confession over the ancient past, but assertions about the future. That is a step toward peace. The reverse is true as well. Those who are still living out the consequences of some generations-old deed need to be freed by the power of reconciliation. This is a power that says, "Even though you have been my enemy for longer than either of us have been alive, I won't hurt you, I won't kill you. I will let go of the lies and hate and the ignorance, and choose to live with you in peace."
For some of us, living at peace means being forgiven and forgiving. Forgiveness is both an act of the will and a spiritual discipline. I can forgive, but I need to keep forgiving from the soul until all the heat and bile lose their sting. To be reconciled means to live together in some sort of ongoing relationship, as hard as that can be. When I am called in to do marriage counseling, the first sessions are all about forgiveness; the rest are about reconciliation. I can forgive with a plan of never seeing, never trusting, that person again. To be reconciled means that I'll be forced to look that person in the eye ball again, and probably on many occasions. The church does forgiveness pretty well. I wonder how well we do reconciliation?
Know anyone who left a church pissed-off? Me too. As pastor, I'm probably the one who pissed them off. I've heard the talk of forgiveness from these folks, but they still leave. "I forgive the pastor, the leadership, the congregation, but I just can't go back there." Fair enough. Then why do they run away in the mall when they see someone from their old congregation walking their way? Hmm. Could be a lack of reconciliation (or they just lied about that whole forgiveness thing, but that's for another day). Instead of spending time confessing the sins of others, lets work on something much harder: trying to live with each right now.
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