Editor’s note: the following is an essay on the Second Great End of the Church and was the basis of a sermon preached by Rev. Kim  September Stated Meeting of the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area, on September 12, 2009 at First Presbyterian in Shakopee, MN.

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.  And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

            From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.  So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.  So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.          – 2 Corinthians 5:14-20

In January of 2004 a group of mostly second generation members of a Korean immigrant congregation in Minneapolis was blessed by our “mother church” to launch a multicultural community called Church of All Nations.  We were chartered with great expectations by our presbytery and denominational leaders, but no one knew if one hundred mostly young Korean-Americans could actually become a Church of All Nations; many thought the name was a bit premature, if not presumptuous.

Today, we are a healthy, midsized congregation that is roughly 30% Asian, 37% white, 22% black, and 10% Latino, with more than twenty-five nations represented in our membership.  Our pastoral staff includes people from Korea, Kenya, Sudan, Brazil, China, Japan, Cote d’Ivoire and the United States (both Euro- and African-American).  Our session and board of deacons also fully reflect this diversity.

We are one of a handful of congregations in the U.S. with no ethnic majority and sizable groups of the four major racial categories of white, black, Asian and Latino.  But we actually have even more denominational background diversity than ethnic diversity, drawing as many Catholics, Episcopalians and Lutherans as we do Pentecostals, Baptists and Evangelical Free.  Our highly visible commitment to ecumenical unity may be one reason why, out of the twenty-five new members we recently welcomed, the vast majority had no Presbyterian background.  We also draw equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, and we address politics, racism, the economy, war and peace head on.

Our central mission is to live into the ministry of reconciliation, and it is happening in all kinds of wonderful ways here.  For instance, in January of 2006 we moved from our Korean “mother church” into the building of a declining white PCUSA congregation, Shiloh Bethany Church, which had plenty of room.  We rented space for a few months, but then Shiloh Bethany asked if they might merge with us.  At the end of July the congregation that was founded in 1884 was dissolved, and all of its members became members of Church of All Nations. (more…)

Gordon Stewart is the Pastor of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN.  This article originally appeared on Minnesota Public Radio .

Sometimes having a beer is a sacramental act. The president and vice president of the United States having a beer with Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley, at a round table in the White House backyard, strikes me as that kind of moment.

There was no bread and there was no wine.

There was no prayer and no elevation of the host or cup. There was beer.

Gordon Stewart

And a most unlikely congregation — the arresting officer who responded to a 911 call regarding a suspected break-in; the Harvard professor whose keys wouldn’t work, arrested in his own living room for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest; the vice president with blue-collar roots from Scranton, Pa., and the president, who, in the aftermath of the most debated arrest since Rodney King, had stumbled on his words, and who had brought them all together for beer, conversation, and a “teachable moment.”

What was the teachable moment? What was it teaching us?

Sacramental purists, teetotalers and partisan ideologues will not see it. Nor will those who accuse the president of a public relations stunt to cover over a confessed political blunder that captured the news for 10 days. Their biases will not allow them to see it.

We see the world through the eyes of our experience. As a child I believed that the call of the Christian life was a call to purity, the call to clean hands. We were “Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.” The world was a dirty place; our job was to clean it up in the march against evil.

Then, as a college student, I read Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

They pulled me down from my high perch into a radical crisis, a crisis that led me to the ideas of practicing Christian theologians Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, men whose faith did not suffer the illusion of the recovery of lost innocence, but rather took the form of responsibility for one’s behavior on behalf of a gospel of reconciliation.

This gospel of reconciliation has become the primary lens through which I see the world. I share this view, expressed in my tradition by the Presbyterian Confession of 1967, which made the shift from the paradigm of innocence to the paradigm of reconciliation as the work of the Christian life.

It calls the church to work toward the end of “discrimination based on racial or ethnic difference, real or imaginary … practice forgiveness of enemies and … commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace.”

The gathering of these four men in the backyard of the White House strikes me as a visible sign of such reconciling work. As in his speech to the Muslim world and in his historic Philadelphia speech on race, President Obama has brought to the White House a nonsectarian gospel of reconciliation.

Although they shared beer rather than wine, the scene of Gates, Crowley, Biden and Obama, each with his own dirty hands in a world without innocence, seemed like a reflection of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

“The Lord’s Supper is a celebration of the reconciliation of people with God and with one another, in which they joyfully eat and drink together at the table of their Savior … They rejoice in the foretaste of the kingdom … and go out from the Lord’s Table with courage and hope for the service to which he [Christ] has called them,” says the Confession.

Sometimes having a beer is a sacramental act, a kind of holy moment, a foretaste of the kind of world we seek, the dissolving of the divisions, community created boldly by grace out of the vain searches for innocence and the broken, rancorous claims of righteousness.