Faceless Reconciliation

As we start this New Year let me start by saying as our first resolution we accept your offer of reconciliation.

As any reconciliation begins with forgiveness, let me say that we apologize for an offense or slight caused by our past actions, (Actions made without malice or ill intent and in a clean conscience before God), and ask for your forgiveness.

We likewise, forgive any offenses and wrongs we have perceived as done to us by you.

Since when wrongs are forgiven they are to be forgotten, (Love keeps no record of wrongs) in our atmosphere of reconciliation moving forward we will not discuss and do not expect issues of the past to be remembered.

We acknowledge that your current state is one of contentment with great need, but God has not given us a leading to address this and consider this topic closed.

Today’s blog post seems an excellent start for a blog series that I probably won’t actually start, or continue, one called “Sunday Sermons via blog.”

If you look above at the long quoted document, you will see the response I got from an even longer letter I wrote as a Christmas gift to an estranged relative where our relationship was in deep need of healing.

Do you understand why I chose the title I did to this post? I offered reconciliation, he accepted it, but neither of us gets to, or has to, see the other’s face, much less the other’s deepest hurts and hopes.

It is like a form letter, without any of the personal information filled in. It is just missing the “(Fill in the Blank)” sections, as they are obviously unnecessary if you don’t intend to fill anything in.

Can anyone find me any example of Christ responding to anyone in the New Testament that way? To the Woman at the Well he was quite probative. And did she respond with a fill-in-the-blank form letter?

Yet today we have come to a reconciliation that doesn’t require either side to be curious about the other, to know a thing about the other, or to change anything about how they act toward each other. We can forgive, reconcile, and then repeat the offense. Because we can forgive, reconcile and not even knowing how we offended, repeat the offense.

That is not what Christ died for.

What concerns me most is that I passed the original to several elders in the faith, and none of them found a problem with this definition of forgiveness and reconciliation. None found the flaw. We are so linked to the tradition of the Pharisees that we don’t even realize how often we follow it. We are unwilling to wash out the cups, as long as the outside looks clean. But Christ came to clean from the inside out.

(Just don’t scour the seasoning off the cast iron pan!)