Committed to Getting Back Together
the Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis
March 30, 2025
Text: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
I’m not sure many of you know this, but I was a prodigal son for about two years. Not a prodigal in the sense of being a squanderer or a spendthrift, but rather as one who was absent and estranged from his family because of anger and homophobia. This was the period after I came out to my parents as gay at 24 years old. I had just gotten my first job on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and Kareem and I had secured our first apartment together. Happy and independent, I thought it was the perfect time to tell my parents the truth about who I was. I did not know what to expect, but for ten years, I had been preparing for the day I would come out to them, including the possibility that they might reject me entirely. My revelation didn’t go well at all, and for about two months after that, every call they made to me was filled with angry words, accusations, and exhortations to change. It got so bad that I told my parents I could no longer endure it. I asked them to let me go. I told them I would be okay if they forgot that I was their son and didn’t recognize me, especially if doing so would spare them embarrassment as officials in our denomination.
For two years, with minimal contact from my parents, I was estranged, unrecognized, and alienated. Then, one day, I received a call from them. They told me that they could no longer abide by the separation. I was their son, and they loved me. There was no way they were going to let me go and act as if I was not their child. There was no demand for me to change. There were no conditions on being brought back into the fold. There was no articulation of or theological justification for their disapproval of homosexuality. There was no blaming me for their negative response to my disclosure. Just an unwavering declaration of love and welcome, including for my partner. This was the most vivid demonstration of reconciliation I had ever experienced.
It was also a demonstration of reconciliation that gave new meaning to Jesus’ familiar parable, which we know as the prodigal son. Thankfully, the story has been recently re-tagged as the parable of the forgiving father, for good reason. After my experience of reconciliation initiated by my parents, I saw how powerful the story truly is. Remember, the younger son had taken his inheritance and squandered it only to find himself hungry and destitute. When he lost everything and returned to his home, even before he could form the words to ask for forgiveness and to be treated as a servant, the forgiving father offered an unwavering declaration of love and welcome, demanding nothing from a beloved son he thought was dead. Instead, the forgiving father with a reconciling spirit runs to greet his lost son, organizes a grand feast to celebrate his return, and clothes him in the finest garments. This is reconciliation in its purest sense—restoring a relationship by reducing the often-expected hostility to ensure the opportunity for getting back together.
Paul was eager to restore his relationship with the church in Corinth by emphasizing the importance of reconciliation. He feels estranged from the congregation he founded. Amid the factionalism that arises, some accuse Paul of being boastful, manipulative, and cunning, while others believe he lacks other preachers’ impressive and articulate nature. Paul dedicates much of what we have canonized as the second letter to the Corinthians to defend his ministry and apostleship. His weakness and foolishness for the gospel of Jesus Christ and the setbacks, struggles, and conflicts he faces can’t shake his confidence in God’s call, purpose, and promise. As Paul faithfully testified, “We walk by faith, not by sight . . . We are well known to God, and I hope we are well known to your consciousness . . . For the love of Christ urges us on . . .” (2 Cor 5:7, 11). This love of Christ makes restoring the relationship possible. Because of God’s unconditional love, God in Christ is reconciling the world back to God.
In our scripture lesson, Paul acknowledges how the human point of view clouds our judgment and hinders the God-reconciling spirit within us. The human point of view is the shadow side of the human condition—anger, envy, jealousy, enmity, idolatry, and dissension—that rends the fabric of unity and relationship with God and each other. It was that shadow side that made Paul once a persecutor of the followers of Jesus. Because of God’s revolutionary act of reconciliation, that human point of view gets re-shaped, re-cast, re-conceived, and yes, even replaced by something new—a new creation, a passing away of the old, and the coming into being of something new. Everything Paul has done, all that he has endured, suffered, and accomplished, has been in faithful service to a God who reconciled all things back to God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That’s why Paul can say he’s been entrusted with the message of reconciliation, that he is an ambassador of Christ, and exhort the church to be reconciled to God. Paul’s zeal and confidence come from knowing that God is committed to getting back together with God’s beloved.
In this time of fear and recrimination, this is our time to embrace anew the good news of God’s revolutionary act of reconciliation. When the shadow side of the human condition—anger, envy, jealousy, enmity, idolatry, and dissension—is rending the fabric of the body politic, a reconciling spirit may be the most potent antidote to the ugliness we’re seeing now. We know the impact and dangers of the human point of view and why it makes it hard to reconcile with God and others. It is the human point of view that causes some to see inferiority, criminality, and pathology in the immigrant, the transgender person, or in Black and Brown bodies. The human point of view turns a political opponent into a permanent enemy to be vanquished. It is that human point of view that hardens our hearts against our neighbors experiencing poverty, homelessness, and addiction. It is that human point of view that leads far too many to resist the natural emergence of empathy and compassion for the slaughtered innocents in Gaza and Ukraine.
I hope we remember God is reconciling us to God’s very being because of our belovedness to God. Perhaps we can bear that message of reconciliation more loudly and more lovingly by accepting our belovedness to God and the belovedness of others, by remembering that we are already known and named by a God who is committed to getting back together with God’s creation. I’m talking about embracing reconciliation so thoroughly that we actively adjust our thinking, countering that stubborn human point of view with what Rev. Osheta Moore describes as the work of “rehumanizing those who have been dehumanized,”[1] including ourselves. We can be the messengers of reconciliation, rehumanizing the immigrants, the LGBTQ community, the Palestinians and Ukrainians seeking refuge from war and genocide, and every other part of God’s beloved community that needs love, compassion, and liberation.
This isn’t a new calling for us. Paul wasn’t the first and won’t be the last ambassador for Christ bearing the ministry of reconciliation. Many people failed to see it, but Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of those ambassadors for Christ who understood that the new creation that God effected with God’s revolutionary act of reconciliation called all to be reconciled to God. King’s message of love and nonviolence was an effort to make reconciliation present and active in a nation debased by racism, poverty, and militarism. As he once told over 300 ministers at a conference of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends.”[2] That’s why King refused to hate the white people who hated and abused him and his people. Be reconciled to God so we can be messengers of reconciliation.
Years ago, when my very identity ran counter to what my parents believed and how their religious tradition shaped their responses, they overcame the tendency to regard me from a human point of view. God’s reconciling power overwhelmed their biases and judgments. I believe they heard the spirit’s call to be reconciled to God. That revolutionary act of reconciliation compelled them to restore their relationship with their son. I pray we lead, serve, and act in the world with that message of reconciliation. Allow God’s revolutionary act of reconciliation to renew within us a commitment to restore relationships, release the hold of the human point of view that makes us see only threats and enemies in others, and reduce the hostility that rends the fabric of the beloved community.
[1] Osheta Moore, Dear White Peacemakers, 96.
[2] Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma,” Address delivered on 25 April 1957 at the Conference on Christian Faith and Human Relations in Nashville.
