The Ministry of Reconciliation W/ LeMarr Jackson

My name is Lamar Chandre Jackson.

If you guys have already heard, and I'm sure you all know at this point, and from time to time I do this thing.

I'm waiting for you.

You are incredible.

Mr.

Fantastic, even elastic, you stretch.

From day to day when others expect you to break, you stand firm.

You are strong.

When some are left out, you write wrongs.

Pin poems, sing songs, it doesn't matter.

The point is that you have gifts.

And just as sure as the incredible hulk can lift, you help mountains of baggets to shift.

And you're not made of iron man, but you're resilient, absolutely brilliant, yet low-key.

The heart of Thor is what allows your organs to beat.

You are pure.

And yes, lightning can be striking, even frightening, but when calamity clashes in the midst of the ashes, you somehow find calm and unity.

And then you squeeze together for calm unity.

You are the leaders of tomorrow, the future captains of America.

You are super, and we need you in this very hour.

We marvel at your powers.

It is quickly becoming your turn to lead.

This generation is at need.

You are being attacked, assaulted, and revolted against.

The time is over to argue over whose fault it is.

Don't fall to this, stand up, step out and be heard.

The greatest weapon that you can use is your words.

Don't just sit back and observe, act out, and be absurd for a cause.

Stand for something.

Your fall for anything, and that's the difference between a hero and a normal human being.

You see, she stands for something, he stands for something, we stand for something.

And the gifts within you already exist.

Now find your courage and be heroic.

Cast away all of your doubts, your worries, your fear, and your past, and confront the villains that stand in your path.

And remember, you are incredible, you are strong.

When some are left out, you right wrongs.

You are resilient, extremely brilliant.

Your heart is pure.

You are the leaders of tomorrow.

So share your dreams with us.

You have the ability for greatness and the capacity for giveness.

So continue to give.

And there it is, your superpower.

You are the heroes, you are the incredible.

So what am I waiting for?

Something amazing, I guess.

Go and be the heroes.

Thank you.

I wanted this piece that I wrote so long ago to actually be our call to movement this morning.

And today I have a special task of I get to close out the four reaches.

We've done the four reaches, and now we do this fifth one to kind of this fifth sermon to kind of tie them all together again and hopefully to give us a call to movement.

A little bit of a recap.

We started with reaching out to share God's love near and far, and Al did an amazing job.

And he told us that Jesus does this really cool thing.

He renames and he remakes.

Even said this looks like redemption, but he's remaking impure people into pure people.

And he condemns the world of exclusion.

Then we went into reaching up to glorify God, and PA did this wonderful job of talking about how we are reformed and into alternative community.

She reminded us that kings take, but God gives.

That's the alternative community that he's inviting us into.

And we reach in to be transformed by his grace.

And then the body has movement.

Finally, P.E.

brought in reaching across to embody racial justice and reconciliation.

She told us that the movement of God is for unity, not for separation.

And this is the beautiful mission that God has invited us all to be a part of here at Madison Square Church.

I'm so glad that He brought me here to be a part of this mission.

And I'm gonna use a scripture, and this scripture is gonna have a heavy focus on reconciliation today.

And the point is that the four reaches are actually the tools that we get to use to bring about reconciliation in the world that we live in.

And when we think about this word reconciliation, I want us to think about it like this: a definition could be restoring harmony to that which was broken.

There's kind of like this idea of this glass window shattered in front of me.

Then reconciliation would look like that glass being put back together with no pieces missing and no cracks present.

That's reconciliation.

And some of you might be sitting here thinking that doesn't sound very easy.

Because you know I'm not talking about glass, I'm talking about the reconciliation of relationships, and putting those things back together are not very easy.

Some of us might even be thinking that what you just explained, Lamar, is impossible with man, but with God, but with God, all things are possible.

We need reconciliation in this world in so many different places.

Wherever we see division, we need to see reconciliation, and that's gonna take our lives.

But when this idea of reconciliation comes to my mind, I think about when I get wronged and how I tend to want to respond.

And actually found this out.

Maybe many of you also think this is true, or you you you've seen this in your life, that it's so easy for us as humans to remember when we're wronged.

And for some reason, it seems to be a little bit harder on average to remember the times that were good or easy, but those wrong things that people did to me, I can bring them up in a heartbeat.

And science actually has some suggestions as to why this is.

He said that I can use a movie metaphor for a lot of different things, and that just so happened to have one this morning.

And this is interesting to me because I almost never bring up my favorite director of all time.

Although, if you have conversations with me and we ever talk about movies, you'll probably hear me bring them up.

But the thing is, I I could preach the gospel through this man's movies thoroughly.

But there's this one movie that he that he made not that long ago about a guy named Oppenheimer.

And Oppenheimer is the guy who helped to make the atomic bomb.

And in this movie, it's all about this debate of creating this weapon of mass destruction because if we get this power first, we can just end the mighty war that we're in right now.

But then they're like, or is there another way?

And that's the dilemma of the whole movie.

And I'm not here to tell you what was right and what was wrong about World War II and all those things, but what I want you to see and notice is that human nature was on full display.

And throughout our whole human existence, we see this idea of this human nature of holding on to these negative things, so I respond negatively just throughout all of our existence.

So often it just leads to violence, and then it's violence that begets more violence, and it's a vicious cycle, and the God way is so often counter to the human way, it's counterintuitive for us to defend with forgiveness rather than our fist.

I was thinking, like, what if I use the reaches as punches instead?

Which could be done.

But that's not the Jesus way, it's counterintuitive for us to seek reconciliation instead of annihilation when we get wronged.

Yet, time and time again in scripture, God actually tells us that He will forget our sins, He'll forget our wrongs.

He says it in Hebrews, he says it in Jeremiah, he says it in Isaiah, he says it in Psalm.

It's actually all throughout scripture this idea that I will remember your sins no more.

What kind of God is this?

Because he is a just God, one who must dole out consequence when we mess up and do things wrong.

Yet he's a forgiving God, a saving God, a compassionate God, the God of reconciliation, the mending that which is broken.

He's unlike the ways of this world.

And he's raising up a people who are unlike the ways of this world.

Al said he's renaming and remaking.

PA said he's reforming.

PE said he's shaping us.

The old us is just like the world.

We were trained by the world, and when we grew up, that's all we ever knew.

It's like some twisted bang quote.

I was born in the darkness.

But then Christ steps in and he renames, remakes, reforms, reshapes, and renews us and invites us to be a part of reconciliation.

We get the garden before sin.

We get to go back to how it was all planned.

There was a song, I guess Downer Lawrence sang it, let's get back to Eden and live on top of the world.

Ironically, I used to think that the song said, Let's get back to eating and live on top of the world.

And I thought actually, that's kind of a funny analogy for exactly how the world presents.

The ones who are on top of the world are the ones who get to eat.

But the counterway, the God way, is actually different.

It's a place where we all get to enjoy and profit from.

So I'm going to read a passage of scripture.

I'm not just going to get up here and talk to you.

Um, I'm gonna read a passage of scripture and just uh a few more words for us about this ministry of reconciliation.

And so we're gonna read 2 Corinthians chapter 5.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

I'm gonna read verses 16 through 21.

And I want you guys to have a fun exercise to do in your head.

Uh as I read this passage, I want you to think about oh, that's one of the reaches, oh, that's one of the reaches, that's one of the reaches.

Where do you see the four reaches in this passage of scripture reaching up, in, out, and across?

So if we can stand in acknowledgement of the reading of the word of God, those who are can and able, stand in body and or spirit.

Second Corinthians chapter 5, starting with verse 16.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

So from now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view.

We don't see y'all like the human way anymore.

Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.

The old has gone, the new is here.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them.

And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.

We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated.

Really quickly, so we have this new spiritual perspective because we don't regard people as only humans now.

We don't judge people by their status or the status of human standards.

We've been reformed in our minds.

See, Christ's death and resurrection establishes a new order in which people aren't finally or finitely measured by their status, their ancestry, their wealth, their weakness, their reputation, or even their own past sins.

Because that's not even how you bring value to the kingdom of God.

You bring value to the kingdom of God by simply being loved by the creator of the universe.

It's just who you are.

You carry the signature of the creator of the universe in you, and thus you have value.

It's not about what we do and what we bring to the table that makes him love us, he loves us first.

Because of this, the church now looks at people as renewed people by God.

We don't see them the way that the world sees them.

We don't seek to find divisions that that the that the outside world actually uses to divide us.

Because in Christ, there's no Jew or Gentile, there's no slave or free, there's no male or female, there's no Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative.

Not in Christ.

All those things and people have equal standing with him.

It's part of heirs of his promise.

It's a spiritual perspective, God's will over my own societal norms that I've learned over years.

But this means that we, we, us, we are not defined by our guilt, our shame, or our sin.

What we once were, we are no more.

The old self was crucified with Christ, and its patterns, its lifestyle are all put to death.

There's a saying that I heard once as a young man in church.

Somebody said, charge it to my head, not my heart, after they had wronged someone.

And it's this idea that saying, in my mind I can make mistakes because I'm human.

And I might miscalculate or not see how something might hurt or harm you, but it's not my heart.

This is the wrong that I've committed to you wasn't intentional, wasn't on purpose.

That's not who I am.

I might mess up, but it's not who I am.

And as Christians, we are meant to operate in this way of seeing people in this new light as new creatures.

When I look at you, I don't see the old you, I see the redeemed you defined by our relationship with Jesus, not by our relationship with sin.

And because of this, he's giving us new life or we have new life, and it reflects the character of Christ.

Love that the scripture calls this the ministry of reconciliation, this mending things that are broken.

I learned a long time ago that God isn't asking us anything that he isn't willing to do himself.

He asked us to live in community.

Well, he exists in community in the Trinity, and so on and so forth.

But this idea of reconciling or seeking reconciliation when we're wronged, well, no, God did it first.

It started with him reconciling us to himself when we wronged him because we choose and chose sin and we turned away from him, etc.

Keep filling in the blank there.

Yet he didn't define us by those things.

He begins to put the broken glass back together, and he sends his son to provide a way for us out of death.

And then he says that my people are going to be those who mend broken glass.

This is your ministry of reconciliation, and the tools of which are the reaches that we get to use here at Madison.

But as personal recipients of reconciliation, we're called to seek reconciliation in our personal relationships, and then also in how we reflect God's love and forgiveness to the world.

Now notice this I said the world.

The world includes people from every nation, tribe, people in tongues.

Sounds like reaching across.

It's not one nation alone.

And this is the fulfilling and fulfillment of the promise that was said about Abraham's seed.

That they would bring blessings to all peoples.

And I love the extra word that's thrown on here.

So I get to my clothes.

It says that we are ambassadors.

I love this word ambassadors because it actually said it's telling us that our primary citizenship is not here.

I'm sorry, our primary citizenship is not in the good old US of A.

Our primary citizenship isn't it isn't even in Canada.

Shout out to my Canadians out there.

I know I love y'all too, you know what I'm saying?

Or wherever else the countries that we claim allegiance to down here, that's not your primary citizenship.

Your primary citizenship is in heaven.

We're here in this country, in this land, on mission.

And that mission is actually reconciliation, the mending of broken things.

We're called to represent the kingdom of God in a world that is so often at odds with this countercultural way that we operate.

Because even when we're wronged, we seek reconciliation.

Because we wronged him and he sought reconciliation.

We have this profound responsibility to reach in and be transformed by his grace, to reach up and glorify God, to reach out and spread his love wherever we go, and to reach across to build bridges instead of walls.

This is what it looks like to seek reconciliation.

This passage ends with verse 21, which is our communion text for today as well.

While we get to be at this table, all of this sin can only be erased, and this new life that I have can only exist because of what was accomplished by grace for me on the cross.

Where Jesus becomes sin for us, and he takes the consequence and punishment that we deserved upon himself, and he says it is finished.

Now we can be made righteous and be reconciled with the Father.

And this table is in remembrance of that sacrifice.

We take it, but we don't let it just sit in us.

We go out and live it.

Now say this to close today.

After we take communion, we're gonna sing a song, the blessing song.

You're gonna hear it being sung over you.

And I want us to listen to it maybe with new ears this morning.

Because there's some lyrics in here that I feel like could easily go overlooked.

But it's this idea that Abraham's seed will be a blessing to all peoples.

Well, God says he's gonna give me a blessing, and it could be so easy for me to just say, That's so great.

I have the blessing, I'm good now.

But we receive the blessing and it doesn't stay within us, but spills over to those that we meet outside of these walls.

The song lyrics say his favor spreads from this generation to the next, and then to the next, to the next, for a thousand generations.

The song continues on saying that the blessing is gonna bless your family, but not just your family, but your children, but then not just your children, but their children and their children and their children and their children.

The blessing doesn't stop with you, it travels with you.

Because that's what ambassadors of God's way look like.

Let's go before the Lord in prayer.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for being a God who took the first step.

Even though we messed up and we wronged you, you still sought reconciliation.

So help us to seek reconciliation with those around us, especially in those places where it's hard because you know that it's hard.

The cross wasn't easy for you.

So we thank you for going through hard things and then giving us strength to help us go through hard things on earth as well.

Help us to be good ambassadors, ministers of reconciliation.

Through your Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus, we pray and we thank you, Lord.

Amen.