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Last week, Chadwick Boseman passed away from cancer. He was a young actor who had taken many historic roles, such as playing Jackie Robinson and Justice Thurgood Marshall. In popular culture, he is most known for playing King T’Challa of Wakanda in Black Panther.
Wakanda is a nation in Africa with technology far more advanced than anything we can imagine, and as a result, they have kept to themselves. At the start of the movie, one of T’Challa’s advisors and friends recommends changing that, but T’Challa isn’t ready to listen, or rather to listen and take in. As the film progresses, T’Challa realizes the threat to Wakanda comes from the way they have been doing things, mainly their self isolation from the world. He realizes Wakanda has been wrong. He realizes he has been wrong, and T’Challa starts to open up, listen, and change things for the better.
To actually improve ourselves, we have to be willing to listen. We have to be willing to accept that we are wrong and go on a different path.
This is not something we are rarely, if ever, ready and willing to do. That’s why we need things like fiction to tell us how we could be, if only we are willing to listen.
That’s what we need the words of Jesus who tells us this morning that if we sin against another, that person should first come and tell us what we did. This only works if we are willing to listen to what the other has to say. It only works if we are willing to change.
That is the very way Jesus puts it to us. The next steps in the grievance process Jesus lays out always come after the person doesn’t listen. But when the person does listen, reconciliation happens. Renewal of relationship happens. We can walk again with one another as one with each other.
This time of Pandemic is the perfect time to think through this process of listening. It’s a time when we have all had to rethink how we live in and interact with the world. It’s a time where we can practice stepping back and thinking about how we may have done wrong and take the steps to fix what we did. It’s a time where we can live into Jesus’ command by helping one another and calling each other out on what we are doing wrong too.
Open your hearts. Accept where you are wrong. Be open to change. Be reconciled to yourselves and your neighbor so that we might, perhaps even for the first time, all be able to live in peace with one another.