If someone were to ask you about the task of the church, no doubt you could give a reasonable response. You might say ‘worship’ – and you’d be absolutely right. If pushed, you might admit that the church is the place where people learn about God – and get to know who Jesus is. Again – full marks. If you were really feeling frisky, you might suggest that the church is the authority on how the Christian faith ought to be expressed – and you’d get little argument from me. But it only takes a shallow dive into global history to discover that the church has been much more than that.

People of faith have been deeply embroiled in some of the great debates in human history; debates that have shaped how we approach science, art, economics, culture, and – like it or not – politics. The church – in the name of faithfulness – has built centres of great learning, filled museums with magnificent expressions of Divine activity, developed centres of compassion and healing…and conquered nations, and changed the geo-political map of the planet a hundred times over. Many of these things have contributed to the betterment of humankind. Some of them have not. And we must – if we want to honour God’s call on our lives – face the uncomfortable truth that our collective attempts to ‘live faithfully’ can continue to have disastrous consequences.

It was out of this realization that the efforts at healing and reconciliation have developed here in Canada. And the Presbyterian Church in Canada has been actively involved since the late ’60’s.

That’s right – this isn’t some bold new thing that now occupies the faithful – this is what happens when the Spirit moves the church to reflect on our behaviour – and to act in light of the gospel.

We (the Christian Church) have a long, guilty history of acting badly towards those who are different. We ‘conquer in the name of Christ’ peoples and nations and cultures that we judge to fall short of the rules we describe for faithfulness. We refuse to “give the children’s food to the dogs.”

Did you wince a little when the gospel puts those words in Jesus’ mouth? You should. It’s a horrible, dehumanizing thing to say. But Jesus is reflecting that entirely despicable human tendency to dismiss what we don’t understand. Gentiles, pagans, lepers, women; those with different languages and customs and cultures; those who worship in ways we don’t expect or understand.

And the faithful who found the ‘new world’ (so called) populated with ancient peoples with strange languages and unfathomable belief systems declared these people ‘savages’ and decided they needed either to be civilized or eliminated.

Don’t give the children’s food to the dogs.

One of the most moving portions of the Churches confession to indigenous peoples in 1994 is this:

We confess that The Presbyterian Church in Canada presumed to know better than Aboriginal peoples what was needed for life. The Church said of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, “If they could be like us, they could think like us, talk like us, worship like us, sing like us, and work like us, they would know God and therefore would have life abundant.” In our cultural arrogance we have been blind to the ways in which our own understanding of the Gospel has been culturally conditioned, and because of our insensitivity to Aboriginal cultures, we have demanded more of the Aboriginal people than the Gospel requires, and have thus misrepresented Jesus Christ who loves all peoples with compassionate, suffering love that al may come to God through him. For the Church’s presumption we ask forgiveness.

We ‘demand…more than the gospel requires’ because of our insensitivity and our cultural arrogance. We fail to follow the most basic principles of Jesus’ message – a message that reaches back in time to find its roots in the only Scripture Jesus knew. Honour God by honouring one another; Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.

To imagine that any human being is somehow ‘less than,’ is to devise evil against them. And our ongoing process of healing and reconciliation is meant to address past evil and prevent a repeat performance. The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not just for the healing of those who had been harmed – it was to foster the redemption of those who did those harmful things.

Our faith proclaims healing and forgiveness for those who repent – and as we mature in the faith (some 2000 years on) we begin to see that we too require repentance – that we can (and should) learn from our mistakes.

The Bible is full of examples of cultural arrogance making fools of the faithful. The people of Israel are often chastised – or exiled – in those moments that they dared to imagine that they had achieved superiority by their faithfulness. We are starting to learn that our desire to be right is the most dangerous weapon we possess. In humility, we have confessed our wrong-headedness. In faith, we seek healing for those we wronged – and for ourselves – that together we might learn more about God in our differences that we would by asking everyone to ‘think and be like us.’