Mission Reconciliation and Restoration
Mission Reconciliation and Restoration
One of the most important passages of the entire Bible is in today’s reading from Genesis — The LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I shall bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you; and in you all the nations shall be blessed.”
Around four millennia ago, a man and woman we know as Abraham and Sarah heard an unseen God who didn’t claim partial sovereignty of the sun or the sea or the soil telling them to leave their country, their clan for a destination they would only know when they got there. But free from the demands of country and clan, they would be free to claim all the peoples of the earth as their own under the one and only God who has sovereignty over everything.
A 4,000 year line runs from that passage to the only mission statement we need as a church — Q. What is the mission of the Church? A. The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. Our mission from Abraham to today is restoration and reconciliation.
But in our particular country today are a people whose history is officially recognized in the month of February, but I’m not sure how honored it really is, because to runs counter to the majority history. Most of us might see a connection to Abraham and Sarah in our ancestors who chose to come to an unfamiliar land because that seemed better than the alternative of staying where they were. But for African American people, they were brought here, brutally, and then treated brutally for the better part of four and-a-half centuries, with perhaps 1964-65 being the turning point, maybe.
So, when we consider the Church’s mission in that historical context, reconciliation is the end result of restoration. Where unity has been broken, those who broke the unity, or who benefitted from the broken unity, must pursue the restoration of what was broken. Just as our Catechism states that the Church can only “pursue” its mission, not accomplish, so we can only pursue restoration. Some broken things can be put back together; others cannot.
When we as individuals, as families, as dioceses, as parishes, as nations, acknowledge what has been broken — even when we cannot fix it — then like Nicodemus, we are closer to understanding Jesus when he says, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” The Greek can also be translated, “born again,” the more familiar and much misunderstood.
March 1st, 2026
The Second Sunday in Lent Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick