Background: Last Saturday evening there was a wedding on Saturday evening at Christ Church Easton, so we moved our Alive @ 5 contemporary music service into the Parish Hall and served dinner at the end of the service. The band was in the style of MTV Unplugged and the Parish Hall was full of good food and fellowship. The Gospel from the lectionary last weekend was Matthew 18:15-20, where Jesus outlines how to deal with conflict/sin between people in the community. With our Rector/Pastor officiating the wedding, I preached at our Saturday evening service.
“Bearing With Each Other”
“Christian conflict resolution” is not a class that would have a waiting list to get into. It comes off a bit like a root canal—necessary, but not something to look forward to.
But when you look around society and how we deal with feeling wronged, we do need some guidance. These days there are a lot of passive-aggressive outlets out there. What are some notable passive-aggressive ways to not actually deal with conflict?
If your neighbor has done something to you, you might go through the neighborhood association, or contact the town. When a friend makes us angry, we might defriend or block them on social media, or write huffy, angry comments under something we disagree with. Politically these days, when someone slights or disagrees with someone, the goal is to discredit, belittle, shame, and have others pile on. Nothing is resolved. And resentment becomes more deeply rooted.
When someone wrongs us, when someone sins against us, we want things to be made right, for us. Our self-righteousness demands satisfaction.
That’s not what’s going on in today’s reading. Jesus is looking at this earliest church community, not society at large. And he is giving instructions for the benefit of the sinner, whose actions are pulling him/her/them outside of the community. Jesus is giving the disciples steps to restore that person, to keep the community together.
What an unmodern concept—to care about the sinner, and about the community, more than our own sense of justice.
This is a teaching about reconciliation, and it’s reconciliation based on love and forgiveness.
It’s not easy. It’s counter-cultural. It doesn’t make sense with how our laws are written.
But community can’t be built on the law. Legalism won’t save us. If you look at most laws, including those in Scripture, they’re drawn up around doing no harm. And that’s not bad—those kinds of laws help keep us safe.
When it comes to a faith community, safety isn’t enough.
Jesus doesn’t summarize the commandments by saying, “don’t harm God and don’t harm your neighbors.”
We’re called to love.
God doesn’t want us to coexist (though the sentiment on those blue bumper stickers is better than the alternative of wiping each other completely out of existence).
God wants us to thrive. To help one another. To be there for each other. To love one another.
Both Paul, writing today’s New Testament reading, and Jesus, speaking in today’s Gospel, want to make sure we get the message loud and clear.
When we love, we more than fulfill the law. And Jesus looks at conflict within the church community through love.
When there is conflict, where someone is going astray: deal with it, fix it, work it out. This is where things get hard for us, especially in a church. Historically, churches have publicly fallen on their faces with conflict resolution on big issues. Look at how many scandals and atrocities have been dealt with by the church, by transferring an offending clergyperson somewhere else—out of sight, out of mind, not our problem. That’s conflict, that’s crime, and that’s reconciliation on a different scale, but it’s real and something the church has to deal with in order to be the example it needs to be in the world.
As parishioners, on a much lesser scale, when it comes to having an issue with someone in the congregation, we might find it easier to find another church rather than work through something difficult when someone has wronged us.
Avoidance is an easier path than reconciling. And there is a cost to that.
Best-selling author, theologian and Bishop N.T. Wright says:
“Reconciliation is a huge issue today. We can see the results of not doing it: suicide bombs, campaigns of terror, heavy-handed repression by occupying forces. That’s on the large scale. On the small scale, we see broken marriages, shattered families, feuds between neighbors, divided churches.”
Jesus knows how hard it is going to be for the early church to stick together in community, especially once he is gone. And he goes straight at things, right up front.
He says, first, try to work it out between the two of you. If that doesn’t work, take a couple people with you. Expand that circle slowly. Allow the person to save face as much as possible.
Jesus doesn’t say—talk about that person, gossip, try to get everyone on your side. Instead, deal with it quickly and between the two of you.
Let’s remember the goal: bringing the sinner back into the fold, keeping the community together. All while dealing with what happened.
Here is N.T. Wright again:
“Forgiveness doesn’t mean saying “it didn’t really happen” or “it didn’t really matter.” Forgiveness is when it did happen and it did matter, and you’re going to deal with it and end up loving and accepting one another again anyway.”
We are sinners, all of us. We all mess up. We all fall off the path we are trying to walk. Forgiveness, grace, love—how God deals with us, is how we are to deal with each other.
What does the church need? Reconciliation (that’s our word of the night). The mission of the church is to reconcile the world to God. To do that, we have to model it in our midst. Not in some abstract way, but right down into the details of our lives and how we treat each other.
There’s a part of this reading that is easy to miss. Jesus tells the disciples that when an offender refuses to listen even to the church, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
Let them go, as outsiders.
What do we know about Matthew from the text a few weeks ago? He’s a tax collector. And Jesus still loved and restored him. Even in continued disagreement and going separate ways, the goal is still restoration.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer has a little book called “Life Together,” where he looks at Christian community. He says that when it comes to ministry in a community, listening, active helpfulness, and bearing with others are foundational. He says it is hard to bear the sin of another person because it breaks fellowship with God and with his brother.
“It is only in bearing with him that the great grace of God becomes wholly plain. To cherish no contempt for the sinner but rather to prize the privilege of bearing him means not to have to give him up as lost, to be able to accept him, to preserve fellowship with him through forgiveness… As Christ bore and received us as sinners so we in fellowship may bear and receive sinners into the fellowship of Jesus Christ through the forgiving of sins.”
And Bonhoeffer ties it together saying that “where ministry of listening, active helpfulness, and bearing with others is faithfully performed, the ultimate and highest service can also be rendered, namely, the ministry of the Word of God.”
If as a community, we aren’t oriented towards listening, actively helping, and bearing with others, we are going to have a hard time ministering the Word of God to others. Because where would it be found in our lives and our community?
And then we get to these incredible last lines of the reading: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
How many people have heard that line before? How many have used it in the context of gathering together? And how many realized that Matthew includes those words from Jesus, here, when he is talking about sin, disagreement, and reconciliation—not at the Last Supper, or the Sermon on the Mount, or some hopeful healing or miracle. It’s here, where or when we are struggling, maybe even divided, that we need to remember and call on his presence among us.
If we as the church are going to reconcile the world to God, we aren’t going to do it on our own. We need God’s help. Thankfully, God has already done the work, in and through Jesus, who is with us, always.
And if we are going to call on his name, and continue his work, we’ve got to work through the tough stuff, not brush it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen.
We’ve got to listen, we’ve got to help, we’ve got to bear with each other. That’s what love and forgiveness look like.
Amen.
Bonus quote, which we used in our Zoom discussion about the Gospel reading on Sunday morning. The quote comes from Padraig O’Tuama’s book, “Daily Prayer With the Corrymeela Community”–
“Listening is a sacrament when the topic is important, and when strife divides people in small places, the sacrament of listening is vital. So many people and so many places in the world have difficult relationships with difference. We seek to practice the art of hospitality in the places of hostility, and in so doing practice kindness in places the most in need of kindness.”
