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Reconciliation Time                        Isaiah 12: 1                   January 10, 2010

"You never get a second chance to make a first impression."

As words of wisdom go, that sentence is like many others. It's nearly impossible to be certain who said it first. Will Rogers often gets credited with writing those witty words - and they do sound like him. On the other hand, some literary scholars attribute them, instead, to the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whose quote it is. Like any other word of wisdom, it's the truth that the quote contains that is the important thing.

You could argue that the whole advertising industry has been built around the presumption that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. And anyone who has ever interviewed for an important job or stood before a group of potential buyers, pitching a product, would probably agree with whoever said it without hesitation.

First impressions are not just important. Sometimes - perhaps even most times - they are all that matters.

Malcolm Gladwell opens his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking with the story of an ancient Greek statue that came on the art market and was about to be purchased by the Getty Museum in California. It was a magnificently preserved work, close to seven feet tall, and the asking price was just under $10 million.

The folks at the Museum did all the normal background checks to establish the authenticity of the piece. After months of research by geologists and other scientists, using high-tech methods - microscopes and mass spectrometers and such, the Getty staff concluded the sculpture was genuine, and went ahead and made the purchase.

But then an art historian, affiliated with the museum, was taken to see the statue, and in an instant he decided it was fake. Soon after, another art historian took a glimpse and sensed that while it had the form of a proper classical statue, it somehow lacked what he called the "spirit." And then yet another said that he felt a wave of ''intuitive repulsion'' when he first laid eyes on it.

You know where this is going, I think. Further investigations were made, and finally, much to their dismay, the Getty Museum concluded that the piece they had purchased was not made 600 years before Christ, as they had thought. Forgers in Rome had sculpted it in the early 1980's.

The teams of analysts who did 14 months of research turned out to be wrong. The historians who relied on their initial hunches - their first impressions - were right.

Gladwell spends most of the pages of Blink demonstrating that we all have something in our brains that gives us the capacity to sift through huge amounts of information, blend data, isolate details and come to astonishingly rapid conclusions, even in the first two seconds of seeing something.

He demonstrates that first impressions matter and he also concludes that they are often the right impression.

I wasn't happy when I finished reading Blink. Don't get me wrong, it's well written, often entertaining and it's full of interesting stories that support Gladwell's case. In that sense, I liked the book.

But the fundamental premise of Blink is not good news.

After all, most of us make poor first impressions all the time! And sometimes, when we are on the viewing end, our first impressions of people are clouded by all sorts of preconceived notions and biases. Biases that require time and effort, on our part, to overcome.

So if our fundamental nature causes us to rely on conclusions that we make in the blink of an eye - first impressions - and if these first impressions are the ones that matter in the relationships we develop with one another, how can we live together? is there any hope for reconciliation? Reconciliation between us - or even more importantly, between God and us?

Fortunately, our text for today - our congregation's Watchword for 2010 - suggests that reconciliation is possible. That reconciliation is God's way of doing things and that reconciliation is God's will for us - the ones created in God's image.

The twelfth chapter of Isaiah, the passage that contains our Watchword text, is really a Psalm - a hymn of praise. It directly follows a collection of prophecies concerning the Lord's saving acts for God's people - the descendents of David. The Prophet predicts - as we read during Advent - a new age of peace and justice under the rule of what he calls "the shoot from the stem of Jesse."

Isaiah 12 speaks both of God's anger toward the people of Israel as well as of God's comfort for them. And it speaks of great joy at God's deliverance of God's people. "I will give thanks to you, O Lord," the Prophet writes, "for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me."

God, Isaiah, reminds us, does not make judgments in the blink of an eye. Nor does God hold onto first impressions.

When you and I make a mess of things - and we all do make a mess of things - we can stand before God knowing that God's anger will turn away. Knowing that we are forgiven. Knowing that with God, there is always time for reconciliation.

The meal we are about to share is the best reminder we have that God's forgiveness is accessible to us. It is the best reminder we have that Jesus - the one we know as 'God with us' - Jesus shed his blood and allowed his body to be broken in order to make reconciliation happen.

There is no place on earth where we can be closer to God than when we gather around this table. Not one.

This is the Day of the Lord, brothers and sisters. May we, with the Prophet Isaiah, declare this day: "I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me. Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation."

                                                                             AMEN

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