The Reconciling Church
by Barbara Schmich
Assembly Vol 12:5, June 1986
To understand reconciliation in a Christian sense is to understand it ecclesiologically. To be reconciled is to belong to a people fundamentally at peace with God and with each other, made so by the life and death of Jesus Christ. In a very real sense, reconciliation is not something the Church does; it is something the Church is.
The work of bringing that reconciliation to bear upon the here and now is not, for the Church, an option. It is not to be undertaken one year and laid aside the next in favor of a newer agenda. It is to be, like Jesus, ever more at one with God and to bear that at-one-ment in the everyday world. It is to go about, as Jesus did, doing good -- healing, teaching, forgiving, disturbing the status quo, comforting, eating and drinking with friend and stranger alike. His was not the occasional act of an arbitrator or a facilitator; it was a way of life.
And so it is for the Church, that community of the reconciled who have experienced his compassion and have been made to share in his graciousness. The reconciling Church will never lack for work, for everywhere there is confusion, disintegration, brokenness, entangled relationships, oppression, hatred. These have not gone away in two thousand years; they will not go away with the completion of the next five-year plan. They are indeed the perennial questions to which the Church is the perennial answer.
This is not to imply that the Church possesses reconciliation and then somehow dispenses it. A cursory reading of Acts reveals the early Church as anything but a tranquil group of people enjoying the full fruits of their unity in the Spirit. There was, even then, diversity of opinion and practice, the taking of sides, heated discussions, fallings out and the like. And this reality has been present throughout the history of the Church right up to our own experience of local Church. Perhaps it is an illusion to think that this sort of thing can or even should be done with once and for all. Perhaps it could be appreciated, this diversity, as that which makes us go deeper and discover the profound level of interconnection we have in Christ.
In this view the greatest threat to realizing our reconciliation is not bickering or quarrelling, but silence. It is the retreating into corners, the acceptance of division, the freezing of positions that is deadly. Whether it comes from defeated weariness or stony pride, silence is the great enemy. It reflects the conviction that there is no longer any reason to assemble, to hear one another, to search for new levels of unity. It alone makes Eucharist impossible.
If this is true within the Church, it can also apply to its mission in the world. Even though its voice may be ignored or deemed insignificant, it cannot give up describing how the world might be were we all to live out the reconciliation won for us by Christ. It must go on addressing the issues that threaten our world -- the nuclear race, the destruction of the earth, the tension between peoples, the injustices of the first world, to name but a few. The Church must make its appeal to the imagination, not just offering an alternative, but making the alternative seem possible and desirable.
This is where the liturgy has its place, rehearsing the Church in the vision of Christ and reenacting its great reconciling action, the Eucharist. This issue of Assembly deals with the Church's reconciling mission and the stories and rituals which support it. May it nourish your imagination and your work.
