The Distance Between Us

By Cal Cook

So here I set in downtown Columbus in a hotel room, staring at a blank screen…I’ve got nothin’! I shouldn’t say nothing…I’ve got something but no idea where to go with it. Karma is at a conference for school and I’m supposed to be writing my second sermon this week on the same set of scriptures. I’ve read John Wesley’s sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:16 and was somewhat surprised and intrigued on his point of view…yet that’s not where I was planning on going. I had selected verse 20 of 2 Corinthians chapter 5:
So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” 2 Corinthians 5:20

As I prayed and meditated on the verse I decided to go for a walk since the sun was peeking through the clouds. It’s almost Spring! I could feel it in the air as I walked in my short sleeve shirt and yet only feeling a slight chill. I tried to stay in the sun but the tall buildings block most of it. I turned the corner seeking out the rays and noticed the corner stone of the building: Body, Mind and Spirit in triangle over the Chi-Rho (PX) symbol for Christ. It was the YMCA taking up almost an entire block downtown. As I walked on I noticed quite a few people standing out front smoking and I wondered what was going on? As I walked closer and saw the ‘Residents Entrance’ sign I thought, “Oh maybe they live here and they’re not allowed to smoke inside.” Yet they were a bit beyond the entrance…then I saw the sign that said, “Substance abuse recovery” or something of the sort. One of the men setting on the ground talking to others looked kind of familiar to me…yet it was hard to tell with the overgrown beard and tattered clothes layered one on top of the other. I smiled and nodded at them as I walked by and said one more time, “Lord what I am going to do with this statement of ‘Come back to God!’”

The statement itself implies a couple of things: first that we started out with God; secondly that we have a distance between us and God to bridge, when suddenly the image of the Father running to his son exploded into my mind (Luke 15:20). That distance, that gap is bridged by the Father running with His arms outstretched! The son determined in his mind that he was better off at home even as a servant and started for home…when:
while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him. Luke 15:20b

Jesus is clear in the parable…any distance between us and the Father is bridged by Him! We determine to go to Him, and He meets us from a long way off! That is what Paul is proclaiming in his message of reconciliation:
2 Corinthians 5:19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.

This word ‘reconciling’ speaks in the original Greek of an exchange:
Katallassō: to change, exchange, as coins for others of equivalent value.
Christ on the Cross made that exchange for us…He exchanged His Holy Body and Blood for our sinful ones, His Righteousness to pay for our sin. As the next passage so eloquently puts it:
2 Corinthians 5:21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So that those men and women standing outside the rehabilitation clinic smoking on Long Street in downtown Columbus might be able to turn to Him. And even though they may feel like the distance is great between them and God…the gap is closed not by them, but by the Father running to them. The distance between them is bridged by the cross, reconciling them back to God…no matter where they’ve gone no distance is too great, and no chasm too wide. The exchange was made so that even a sinner like me, might step into the warmth of the sun and experience the reconciling of the world to its creator, savior and friend.