I know. The Berlin Wall was a symbol of division and suspicion, a concretisation of enmity, such an offence to human ties of family and friends and such a denial of freedom, that people died trying to escape from behind it. So it seems an incongruous symbol of the Gospel. But in one sense it is just that. It represented, and still represents in the memory, that which the Gospel of Jesus Christ intentionally contradicts, that which Good News of liberation, reconciliation and new creation subverts with the patient persistence of a love from all eternity. And the breach of the berlin Wall 20 years ago remains for me an unforgettable portrayal of what it means when a dividing wall of hostility is dismantled and it is possible to look into the face of the one who is no longer an enemy.
God has given to the Church a ministry of reconciliation. In Jesus God was reconciling the world to Himself, God's purpose being to reconcile all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross. (so 2 Corinthians 5 and Colossians 1) And everywhere walls are dismantled, that radical and subversive Gospel of reconciliation is enacted, proclaimed amongst the rubble of demolished prejudices and hatreds. And conversely, wherever Christians build walls that shut others out, or maintain walls intended for their own safety, or defend walls that exclude and diminish 'the other', then we give comfort to the culture of division, we choose the way of the world, we contradict the realities of the cross, and we lose all claim to be good news for anybody.
So today I celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall.
But I also pray for the dismantling of those walls out there that still stand, that are fiercely defended, that provide ramparts for our prejudices and battlements for our fears.
And I pray for the undermining and overtoppling of those walls in my own heart behind which I hide, and which represent my own strategies of exclusion, separation and self-defence at the cost of the other who is my sister and brother.
And I pray for the courage to confront the ugliness and brutality, the divisiveness and diminishment, the inhumanity and futility, of those walls that seem permanent, those intolerable structures of power we tolerate.
And by such confrontation, to follow faithfully after Christ, the crucified reconciler, embodying a ministry of reconciliation and peace-making.
As Robert Frost said in his unintentionally theological poem 'Mending Wall', "something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down."
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