First Be Reconciled

There’s a particular kind of quiet a man can carry into church. He’s done everything right. He got here on time. He hasn’t raised a hand against anyone, hasn’t broken a single commandment you could name out loud in front of the congregation. And still, sitting there in the pew, he’s holding something against his brother, turning it over, keeping the account open. He’d never call it sin. He kept the rules.

Our Lord looks straight at that man this morning, and He isn’t impressed by the clean record. Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, He says, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. That’s the claim the whole day turns on, and I want to say it plainly before we go any further. The righteousness Christ requires isn’t the old law kept harder. It’s a new heart, poured full of a love we couldn’t manufacture, carried up out of a grave we’ve already passed through. It’s a gift long before it’s ever a demand.

We’re deep in the green season now, the long stretch of Sundays after Trinity where the Church stops marking the great events and starts asking quietly what they’ve made of us. And here the answer gets personal.

The Pharisees weren’t lazy men. Give them that. They were meticulous. They could keep the outside of the cup spotless. And that’s exactly the place our Lord puts His finger. He takes the oldest and clearest of the commandments, Thou shalt not kill, and He drives it straight past the hand and into the heart. Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. The contempt curled up inside the word Raca. The dismissal in Thou fool. You can keep your hands clean your whole life long and still be a murderer in the one place no one else can see.

That should stop us. Because it means the righteousness God is after can’t be built the way we build most things, from the outside in. You can’t legislate a heart. You can’t scrub resentment off with willpower and good intentions the way you’d wipe down a counter. And if the standard reaches that deep, then the honest question was never how do I try harder. The honest question is where on earth does a heart like that come from.

Saint Paul answers it this morning, and he doesn’t point us back to a better effort. He points us to our baptism. Know ye not, he asks, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? We were buried with him, Paul says, and raised, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

Hear what that means. The new heart the Gospel demands isn’t something you’ve got to go home and construct this week out of raw materials. If you’re baptized into Christ, it’s already been given. Your old man was nailed to His cross. The body of sin was broken. You came up out of that water a different person, dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. And so Paul’s command this morning isn’t try. His command is reckon. Count it true. Live as though the thing that actually happened to you actually happened. Sin has no more rightful claim on you than death had on the risen Christ, and death hath no more dominion over him.

Reckoning isn’t pretending. It isn’t standing at the mirror telling yourself you feel holy on a morning you don’t. Reckoning is taking God at His word about you when your feelings haven’t caught up yet. The temper still flares. The old grievance still knows your name and your phone number. But you aren’t its servant anymore. You can say no to it now, not because you’re strong, but because you’re His, and it’s already been put to death in Christ. That’s the newness of life Paul means. Not a mood. A fact you slowly learn to live inside of.

But I know how fast we can turn even that into one more thing we’ve got to pull off on our own. So hear the Collect, because the Collect stands guard against it. We prayed just now that God would pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire. Notice, we don’t promise God the love. We ask Him for it. The love by which we love God isn’t something we work up inside ourselves and hand across the counter to Him. It’s something He pours in. Even our loving Him back is His gift first.

Augustine once prayed a dangerous prayer. Give what thou commandest, he said, and command what thou wilt. Whatever God asks of us, God Himself supplies. He commands the exceeding righteousness in the Gospel, and then He gives it, poured into the heart, raised up out of the grave. That’s grace all the way down. And it’s the only reason we can hear a standard set this high without walking out in despair. We aren’t day laborers scraping to earn our keep. We come to this God as sons, made alive in His own Son, handed a love we could never have gone and found on our own. Encouragers, that’s the ground you’re standing on this morning. Not your record. His gift.

And here’s where all of it finally comes to rest. At the altar. Because our Lord doesn’t leave this hanging in the realm of the heart in general. He gets specific, and He gets uncomfortably practical. Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, He says, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

Think about where that puts us. Right here. This rail, this Sunday. Our Lord says there’s a way of coming to the altar He simply will not receive, the way that comes clutching a grudge and pretends the offering is clean anyway. The vertical and the horizontal are one motion. You can’t be at peace with the Father while you’re quietly at war with your brother and imagine He doesn’t notice the difference. That’s the Pharisee’s religion again, dressed in Sunday clothes, the spotless outside laid over the unreconciled heart.

So the Gospel sends us on an errand before it will let us kneel. First be reconciled. Make the phone call. Say the word you’ve been too proud to say. And not next month, when it’s finally convenient. Agree with thine adversary quickly, our Lord adds, whiles thou art in the way with him. The longer a grievance sits, the more it hardens, until we stop calling it a grievance at all and start mistaking it for who we are. And I’ll be honest with you, because a pulpit is no place to pretend. I’ve stood at this altar with something unsettled in my own heart and gone on offering the gift anyway, hoping no one could tell. Our Lord could tell. He isn’t asking us to be perfect before we come. He’s asking us to come honest, and reconciled, with the peace He poured in actually running back out toward the people sitting around us.

That’s the very thing the prophet promised. Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord; and I will heal him. The far off and the near, drawn near to God and near to each other at one table. Some of you came in this morning far off, carrying a distance you didn’t even choose. Some came in near and still restless. The promise this morning is the same for both. Healing, and a way home.

So let us come. Not as those who’ve kept the rules and earned the seat, but as those raised with Christ and given a love we never owned.

Lord, pour into these hearts the love we cannot make ourselves.

Teach us to reckon what Thou hast already done, dead to sin and alive to Thee.

Send us out to our brothers before Thou bring us to this altar.

Heal the far off and the near, and gather us to Thy table with clean hands and a quiet heart.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.