Agents of Reconciliation: Bill Pannell Speaks at Ash Wednesday Chapel

Dr. Pannell speaks on the ministry of reconciliation at All-Seminary Chapel :: 02/13/13

The sounds of worship wafted across Fuller’s Pasadena campus on February 13 as students, staff, and faculty gathered on the mall under the noonday sun for a special Ash Wednesday chapel service.

Fuller community members congregated to hear a powerful message delivered by Senior Professor of Preaching Bill Pannell. The scripture was from 2 Corinthians 5, in which the apostle Paul tells the people of Corinth that God reconciled them to himself through Christ in order that they might be ministers of reconciliation.

That message, Pannell said, rings truer still for people today, because we live in a world wracked by alienation.

Quoting Fuller’s former Professor of Theology and Ethics Lewis B. Smedes, Pannell said one of the toughest Christian challenges of the time is “how to understand the persistent alienation of people in our world.”

He pointed to the many instances of alienation and violence that we see in our world today from the first act of violence in Genesis when Cain killed his brother Abel to the “banality of the police force looking for a lone murderer.”

“One of the surest, consistent strands of reality is the pain, the puzzlement, the mystery, the reality of alienation,” Pannell said. And when he reads further to see what the apostle Paul says God can do about this, the answer is Christ’s love.

“What does God do with alienation? He sends his son in the likeness of sinful flesh and he displays there, splayed against a cross in a darkened sky, a love beyond knowing,” Pannell continued. “[God] looks at a broken world so painfully divided in so many different ways and he tells that broken world that he loves it, and the extent of his love is the gift of his son.”

But there are many times that Christians fail to recognize how deep the pain of alienation and sin really is, which in turn diminishes the work of Jesus on the cross, Pannell told the crowd.

Examining the texts and historical records and observing the pulse of contemporary life, he said, will reveal that the pain is more profound than people know.

“Every man and woman born in all of history shakes his fists in the face of God and defies his authority and tells him to get lost,” Pannell said with a loud voice, adding that it is no wonder that there are conflicts in the world.

“So how does this work itself out?” he asked. “You got to start over. You got to start in something radical. You have got, really, to find a way over against that reality to create a different kind of people in the earth, and you have to arm them with a different set of yardsticks.”

Pannell explained that cultures, ethnicities, gender, systems of education, and various aspects of society make up yardsticks that people measure others against. However, the apostle Paul says that Christians shouldn’t be measuring with human yardsticks anymore.

To illustrate, Pannell told the crowd that he had watched television footage of the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans. And as he watched a man dance, he said, “The truth of the matter is beneath all of that frivolity, beneath all of the costume, and beneath all of that, there is a certain phoniness about that event that belies and betrays what’s really beneath it all which is banality; beneath it all which is boredom; beneath it all which is the awkwardness of trying to dance to a rhythm that your spirit simply cannot grasp.”

He noted, “The genius of redemption is the God who brings a new song and a new spirit that enables us to dance to that song and to that music, and we do it together without the yardsticks.”

Pannell told the crowd that the church is to be the one to first put away yardsticks and to open fellowship for men and women unimpeded by rationalizations and yardsticks.

“Here at Fuller, we say we are preparing men and women for the manifold ministries of Christ and his church,” he said, emphasizing that the ministry is one of reconciliation that is compelled by the love of Christ.

“Jesus is alive and he’s alive in me and he’s alive in us,” Pannell said. “We are picked representatives of the new humanity. We are overcoming alienation and we are agents of good news. We are agents of reconciliation.”

He then urged the community that when they receive the ashes on their foreheads to proclaim that they are no longer their own, but are under the management of Christ who died and rose again.