2023.02.22 | Be Reconciled
“Be Reconciled”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nerhing
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA 94541
Ash Wednesday
As the Senior Pastor here at Eden Church, I spend a tremendous amount of time on reconciliation--but not in the way that you might imagine.
Those in our congregation who grew up in Roman Catholic traditions may think that I spend a lot of time hearing confessions like the priests in the parish where you grew up. But that is actually not the case.
Protestants don’t have a formal liturgical practice, which is now known as the Sacrament of Reconciliation, like the Catholics practice. Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, liberated us from the notion that a penitent needed to make their confession within earshot of a priest, and then pray the rosary, and be absolved by a priest in order to get right with God. Nope. Luther taught us that every penitent is fully capable of going directly to God with our confessions and requests for forgiveness.
Those in our congregation who grew up in Evangelical traditions may think that I spend a lot of time admonishing sinners for their sins. Those who identify as Recovering Evangelicals may have even opted out of tonight’s worship service for fear that I would be preaching a Hellfire and brimstone message that might trigger a trauma response in them. But, spoiler alert--you won’t be hearing that from me.
No thanks to COVID-19, the tremendous amount of time that I have spent on reconciliation these past three years has had more to do with the material world than the ethereal world.
This is so because shortly after the Public Health Order went into effect, some of our ministry partners in the Bay Area entreated us--entreated, that’s a word the Apostle Paul used in today’s epistle lesson. Some of our ministry partners entreated us to rapidly scale up our emergency food ministries and other community services to address the COVID-19 economic and public health crisis that unfurled in our community and that led to much higher incidence of disease and death among Black and Brown people, and that moved our zip code (94541) into the the lowest income zip code slot in Alameda County.
At the time of our “call up,” Eden Church did not yet have the staff, supplies, equipment, or accounting or human resource staff and systems fully in place to do what we did, which was to quintuple the scope of our ministries in the Eden Area. So we have had to build our plane while we were trying to fly it, and as a consequence, I have had to spend part of every day--and some times all day--staring at spreadsheets, reconciling debits and credits.
This work of reconciliation has not been easy. Do not try this at home! When the pandemic unfurled, Eden was in the midst of changing accounting systems and bookkeepers. We had never handled a six-figure public contract before, and we had never needed to participate in a single audit for the federal government. We barely knew what a single audit was.
To make matters more challenging, we also had to cope with epic swings in cash flow, and lengthy “draughts” between the times when we were promised public contracts, and times when RFPs, signed contracts, and reimbursement checks actually hit our email inboxes and the Church’s checking account.
II
COVID-19 has been quite a ride, and unfortunately, so far as I know, no one has invented a motion-sickness medication that is effective for treating the effects of this emotional and spiritual rollercoaster.
Nevertheless, we have survived, and even in some ways, thrived despite our weaknesses (Rom. 8:26), and I thank God for that fact. I also thank our forward-thinking elected leaders for the gutsy way they’ve shown up these past three years, and I am thankful for the indefatigable dedication of our staff who have kept our parish and our outreach ministries going at full tilt this whole time.
Part of our secret sauce as an organization has been our ability to quickly hire up young people who have participated in our ChYLI program--and their siblings and cousins, and leaders who have been part of our Compañeras Ministry and Padres Unidos--and their friends.
We have also been fortunate to have engaged an external CPA firm to help us build out our new accounting system, train our in-house staff in AR and AP procedures, and prepare for four audits and successfully complete three. We are in the midst of the fourth right now.
In addition we have been blessed to win a $100K capacity building grant from ARPA Funds (administered by Alameda County Housing and Community Development) that is funding a consulting engagement between Eden Church and a national nonprofit firm that is helping us do the organizational equivalent of “pilates”--so that we are stronger at the core.
Our goal with the capacity building effort is to gain fiscal and organizational strength so that we can continue to address emergency needs in our community, and eliminate the root causes of social disparities that adversely and disproportionately affect BPOC.
III
I am also thankful that my mother made my sister and me enroll in an accounting class in the 10th grade. I wasn’t totally enamored of the idea at the time, but Mom insisted that we take typing in 7th grade and accounting in 10th grade. She said that we would thank her one day, and she was right about all three: the importance of being able to type, reconcile the books, and express gratitude to her.
Accounting didn’t come as easily to me as it did to my friend Tammy Geisking. She regularly zoomed through every assignment in class, while the rest of us were tearing our hair out and pounding on our desks in frustration when our accounts didn’t balance. (Tammy’s a bigshot banker in Phoenix now. We should have seen that coming.)
Flashing back to Mr. Messerley’s 10th grade accounting class at Reinbeck High School, circa 1979, I remember my friends and I begging Mr. Messerly for mercy. “Please, Mr. Messerly, can’t you give us credit for the assignment. We’re so close. We’re only off by a few pennies?”
The answer was always the same: “No.”
By the end of the first week of class, we knew what Mr. Messerly would say if we asked again about partial credit for our assignments. We could deliver his follow up speech ourselves. It went like this: “I can’t give you credit for your assignment unless you’ve reconciled your accounts. Your assignment is either right or it’s wrong. There’s no middle ground.”
Those of you who studied accounting back in the day when everything was pencil and paper, and calculators (if you had one) weren’t allowed in class--you feel my pain.
Our Eden Church bookkeeper’s experience, by contrast, is so different. She was born well past the time when calculators were ubiquitous in classrooms, and nowadays, she (like most people including me) can download our bank and credit card activity into a software package on our desktop computers and reconcile several accounts in less than a minute. Amazing!
I would never want to go backwards with accounting technology, because this technology has made my life--and the lives of a lot of other people--much easier. I don’t, for example, miss spending the better part of a Saturday once a month reconciling the household checking account, estimating whether we were saving enough money to pay my quarterly income taxes, and updating my cash-flow forecasts.
Nevertheless, the old school way of keeping the books, and Mr. Messerly’s sermonettes about reconciliation have never been lost on me, and they are useful in explaining what the Apostle Paul is talking about 2 Corinthians 5:10b-6:10.
Here, Paul was saying, from a spiritual perspective, the same thing that Mr. Messerly was saying, from a material perspective: the spiritual accounts between God and human beings would be perpetually out of balance--irreconcilable--were it not for God’s gift of grace extended to us in the person and work of Christ.
The fact that reconciliation is possible is because Christ intervenes for us.
Stated negatively, there is nothing that human beings can do to reconcile accounts between us and God. Were it not for God’s grace, we would always be at least a penny off. And you know what Mr. Messerly would have had to say about that.
Stated positively--and this is what I want you to hear loud and clear tonight--God through Christ--offers us a full measure of grace that brings our accounts into balance. All we are asked to do is to receive it and extend it to others. Amen.