I remember being a little kid and my Mom would occasionally make apple pies. Nobody makes a better pie crust that my mom, in my opinion, and when she made apple pie she’d weave strips of pastry in a lattice laid over the sugared apple filling to make a pie that was both delicious and beautiful.  

As much as I love her pastry, what makes an apple pie so great are the apples. Can you imagine making an apple pie without apples? I can just see some reality TV cooking competition where the contestants are given the challenge to make apple pies and then told they will not be allowed to use apples! Can you imagine their startled and incredulous faces?  It’s just not possible to make an apple pie without the primary ingredient.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day here in the USA, and Dr. King’s bright dream for a unified vision of human dignity among the races in this country is still shadowed by the nightmare of racism. It is easy to despair that any such vision might ever really take root deeply enough to bear a sweet fruit, knowing the state of the wounded soil of our culture, where so much blood cries out from the ground like Abel’s. 

Over the last year or so I’ve thought more about it, and I’ve thought more about apple pie, too. What’s the connection? Well, I’ve been considering ingredients. What is the recipe for reconciliation? What ingredients are necessary to prepare the shared meal of peace Dr. King dreamed of? 

For starters, just like you need apples to make an apple pie, you’ll need a real reason to start seeing that other person as somehow joined to you in a shared dignity that transcends but includes you both. Siblings call each other brother and sister, because they see themselves as belonging to the same family. Likewise, Paul can say in Ephesians 3:14,15,  “I kneel before the Father from whom every family on earth derives its name.” And also, “Here there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.” (Col. 3:11)  

Christianity supplies the apples for the apple pie; in Christ there is a transcendent basis for a unified vision of shared human dignity, regardless of race, class, or any other divide, because, if you are a human, you bear the dignity of the Image of God. That dignity, bestowed by God, goes higher than all our climbing and deeper than all our falling. Which, incidentally, is why Christianity is the most inclusive of all systems – race, family, background, criminal record, nationality, bank account, physicality, class, pedigree, achievements or failures – none of that matters; the only requirement for eligibility is that you’re a human being. 

This is the genius of Dr. King’s approach to healing; he understood that the recipe for reconciliation required certain ingredients, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ could supply them. So it’s worth asking whether our culture has the resources, or ingredients, to adequately address its own wounds? For instance, does a purely materialistic, evolutionary worldview provide for our healing? Or are there no apples on that tree? If the basis of reality is just survival of the fittest, then all we’ve got to fill our pie is the competition between strong and weak, rich and poor, powerful and vulnerable – and whoever is stronger, richer, and most powerful, according to that system, has the right to do whatever they want to those less fit than themselves.  

What about moral relativism? Say there’s no God to provide an external, transcendent moral example to which we are all called to reach for, but instead, each person makes their own truth. Can this provide the resources we need to heal? Relativism obstructs relationship, because it obscures any shared vision of reality; how can we bake a pie together if we can’t even agree on what apples are? 

The last of our cultural resources I’ll mention in this much too short essay, is legalism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Christian who was persecuted under Russia’s Communist Regime last century, describes legalism in his 1978 speech at Harvard,  

‘Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

 

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure’.

Solzhenitsyn affirms the legal system in one sense, but also points out that it’s not enough because we tend to equate right and wrong merely with legal and illegal. That devolves into a battle of technicalities, where as long as we’re doing what’s legal we don’t have to feel any guilt about doing what is ultimately unloving. In other words, legalism becomes a way to excuse ourselves from the call of God to always be reaching toward the highest good for our neighbor. After all, the man in Luke 10:25 who asked Jesus “who is my neighbor” was an expert in the law.  

Paul goes into more depth in Romans and points out that even that good Legal system given by God himself in the Old Testament to the Jews at Sinai could not in itself supply the ingredients for the necessary transformation of the human heart. The letter of the Law is a kind of temporary guardrail and an indicator of our need for a better resource that can bring real reconciliation and healing – namely, the forgiveness achieved by the dying Jesus and the Holy Spirit breathed into us by the risen Jesus. 

“For he is our peace, the one who made both groups into one and who destroyed the dividing wall of hostility, when he nullified in his flesh the law of commandments in decrees. He did this to create in himself one new man out of two, thus making peace, and to reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by which the hostility has been killed. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, so that through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Eph. 2:14-18) 

That’ll make a good apple pie. In Christ a new thing can happen, a new resource for healing and reconciliation that supplies a real basis for seeing one another with a unified vision becomes available to us. Suddenly, we can love our enemies, because we understand how we, enemies of Christ, have been loved so well and forgiven so much. We can look at those who look so different from ourselves and recognize the same blessed image bestowed upon us both in the deepest part of our being. We realize we both are being called to learn a language of love that is as awkward and difficult to us as our sin is comfortable and easy. 

The Cross of Christ does not belittle but takes very seriously the evil we have done to one another, the blood we have spilled, the deadly words we have hurtled, and the comfortable detachment from righteousness we’ve secured for ourselves whether it’s through legalism, moral relativism, or materialism’s denial of a transcendent and holy God. And, the Cross of Christ offers the supernatural ingredient of grace and companionship with God that can rebuild the human heart from the grave up. Impossible things become possible with God. 

And at the Table King Jesus sets, you will see faces from every tribe, language, and ethnicity seated together in a beautiful vision of absolute harmony, absolute unity and love. I’m praying today that the vision Dr. King caught of Jesus’s Kingdom might be caught again by us here in America – that we could sit and smile beside one another at the table as we taste the shared goodness of that sweet apple pie. 

The following two Prayers, written by Dr. King, are taken from “Thou, Dear God: Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits”.

2)  In unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life

O God, the Creator and Preserver of all mankind; in whom to dwell is to find peace and security; toward whom to turn is to find life and life eternal, we humbly beseech Thee for all sorts and conditions of men; that thou wouldst be pleased to make thy ways known unto them, Thy saving health unto all nations. We also pray for Thy holy Church universal; that it may be so guided and governed by Thy Spirit, that all who profess and call themselves Christians may be led into the way of truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life. Finally, we commend to Thy Fatherly goodness all those who are in any way afflicted or distressed in mind or body. Give them patience under the suffering and power of endurance. This we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.  (p. 57)