Special Note: On this Sunday, all four of the independent congregations that worship and serve together at Cliff Temple, Union Cathedral, the Well, Misión Central as well as the Cliff Temple family, participated in a Community Ministries Celebration Sunday. Each church presented music and each pastor spoke for five minutes. A young lady from Pakistan was ordained to the Gospel Ministry and Cliff Temple received its annual Spring Thank Offering. It was a sight to behold!

All Scriptures quoted are based on The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

When Bob first saw me, he didn’t like me. It wasn’t because he knew me, but because he was afraid he knew me. It wasn’t the color of my skin or my social status that threw him off at all. We are both white, and though his natural dark tan betrays his Italian heritage just one generation removed, we are both middle class and very spiritual, though somewhat irreligious, and both of us are employed in religious professions. He does have more hair than I do and is much more athletic. Apart from that, in many ways, we could be twins.

Nevertheless, when Bob first saw me, he didn’t like me and I knew it because he would not look me in the eye. To him, I was not me. I was what he thought I was, just another Baptist preacher who, like every other Baptist preacher before me, would abuse him in some way or another given half a chance. What little conversation we were able to have that first time we met was wooden and forced, awkward and halting. Some mutual friends had introduced us to each other about fifteen years ago at a dinner party. He didn’t like me, and, like my usual self, I was passionately committed to having everyone love me all the time, no matter what. So, we didn’t have much ground in common.

Only the grace of God could have possibly bridged that gap. Guess what! It did! Over time, as we began to confess our humanity to each other, we were also able to confess to each other the Christ we had in common. As we did, our hearts opened to each other and then, with our eyes, we saw each other differently than before.

Since that dinner party fifteen years ago, Bob and I have become the closest of friends. To each other, we have made confession of our darkest sins. We have prayed each other through some of the toughest passages of life’s cold, dark, backwater swamps. To this day, if things fall apart, Bob is one of the first people I reach out to in this human family.

This is what we are told in scripture about this new way of seeing others. “From now on, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”

What I have come to discover is that kind of reconciliation where the human family, separated from each other because of our broken humanity and then coming together as one in Christ, often presents itself in some very challenging and very difficult ways.

Nancy and I had dinner this past weekend with some friends we had not seen in almost ten years. He has had a very lucrative career; she has not even had to work outside the home, even though their daughter is in a private university, and their son is on the way. However, when we met them, we found out she’s going back to work after all these years because, as of July, the company he has been serving and working with all these years will almost certainly be closed and he will be unemployed. We asked him, “What are you going to do?” He said, “I don’t know. But what I do know is that the God who has seen me through this far and has provided for me in every other circumstance of life will provide for me from now on.”

We talked on about how every single crisis we have ever experienced, without exception, has been nothing but the backdrop against which God played out the drama of reconciliation for us in our lives, in our families and our faith communities. With our eyes we see only the surface, the color of a person’s skin or perhaps behaviors that, to us, seem odd or different. Only with the reconciled eyes of Christ, can we look deeper into the heart of a human being and see in him the work that God is doing to reconcile this world to himself, even in, especially in, the midst of conflict.

We receive our annual Spring Thank Offering this morning. We should not give to the offering because we believe by giving this money we are going to forever fix all of our budget problems, remove all of our financial conflict. That is the last reason we should give. The first and only reason we should give to this Thank Offering is as an expression of gratitude to God for the privilege of being on this reconciliation journey with him in this world, even in and through the conflict. We should give in gratitude to God for giving us the privilege of being able to watch and see what he is going to make of it.

Some of my dearest friends didn’t start out as good friends. Some of my dearest friends started out as people who didn’t like me, or I didn’t like. But, as we made our common confession in Christ, we have come to find that, in him, we have more in common than not. This is the Kingdom of God!

When we all get to heaven, will it be a day of rejoicing, as we sing it will be? I sometimes wonder. If, in this world, we close our eyes in prejudicial indifference to those around us, what makes us think that just dying is going to change that? Before some of us will be able to see the full glory of heaven, we are going to have to do some remedial work. Either we need to do it now, or we may have to start when we first see Jesus.

This is what is also written in scripture. “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you” (Baptist and Methodist, black and white, Republican and Democrat, liberal and fundamentalist, ignorant and well-educated, rich and poor) “are one in Christ Jesus”(Galatians 3:26-28).

We may as well start celebrating that now or I wonder if heaven will be everything we thought it would be. As I have come to understand it, we will not start eternity when we die. We started eternity the first time we took this supper and accepted into our lives the person of Jesus.

This is eternity, right now. We are in it. The Kingdom has come! It is present in us and among us! This is the kingdom of heaven on earth! This is the kingdom! Thanks be to God!