This is a hard text;  it seems to bring a harsh word from Jesus.  Several weeks ago, for reasons I can’t remember now, I chose this text from the four offered by the lectionary.  I hate it when I do that to myself!

 

Jesus seems to be offering an easy 3-step process for dealing with church conflict. Step #1 – talk directly to the person who is in the wrong in private. And if that does not work,  step #2 is to ask a couple of other people to come with you and talk it out.  Finally, Jesus says, do step #3 – take it to the whole church and ask them to intervene.  If the person who offended you will not listen to the whole church, then what?  Then treat them like tax collectors and Gentiles.  1, 2, 3 problem resolved. 

 

Somehow I don’t think that your church or mine takes this process very literally.  That might be because we have known churches that took step #3 as permission to excommunicate people.  The churches that follow this process tend to be known for how many people they have kicked out, rather than those they have retained by this process.  Several years ago, a friend told me about a church that had adopted a new policy.  They had a tradition of having baby showers for every expectant mother in the church, but they made the decision that they would not throw a shower for anyone who was pregnant outside of marriage.  They announced it as their future and permanent policy.  I’m not sure whether they had this text in mind or not.  I suspect they thought knowing of this policy might deter some teenagers, but they were surely mistaken.  It was the home church of the friend who told me about it, and she was appalled.  She certainly saw it as shunning, as not extending forgiveness, as misapplying this text, even misapplying it in advance of any wrong-doing. 

 

That step #3 is problematic, partly because of the ways churches apply it and partly because how we interpret the language.  Jesus seems to say “Three strikes and you’re out.   If you won’t listen to one of your brothers or sisters, if you won’t listen to two or three together, then your last chance is the whole church and if you won’t listen to them, you’re like a tax collector and a Gentile – you are out of there.”

 

We remember that tax collectors were often considered the lowest of the low in Jesus’ day.  They were traitors, collecting taxes from their own people for the enemy Romans.  And Gentiles were unclean pagans who did not know God or keep God’s laws.  So when Jesus says that anyone who doesn’t listen after these three steps is to be regarded as a tax collector or Gentile, what does he mean? Does he mean to treat them like traitors and scum?

 

How did Jesus treat tax collectors?  What did Jesus do with Gentiles?  That was one of the things about Jesus that drove people crazy.  He ate with them, partied with them, celebrated with them.  He invited them to be his followers.  He included them in the kin-dom of God.  And so perhaps Jesus is not saying “three strikes and you’re out” at all.  Perhaps Jesus is saying, “when you have done all you can to fix the problem, you are still not off the hook.  You cannot write off your brother or sister as lost forever.”  When that happens, you are to start over, to treat them like an outsider, like someone who does not know how the family of God works. 

 

Most of our churches don’t take this 3-step process literally.  And frankly, I’m not sure we should, because our context is very different from the church that first received this instruction.

 

Matthew’s gospel was written at a time when Christianity was a minority religion, more of a movement than an institution.  Christians met as small groups in homes, sometimes in secret for fear of persecution.  That created the sort of intimacy found among people who have to trust each other, the sort of bond that forms when working towards a common goal.  I am not suggesting that the early church was an idyllic place where everyone agreed with each other and never was heard a discouraging word.  In fact, part of the good news of this text for me, is that there was conflict in the church as early as the writing of this gospel.  That’s good news because the church survived and thrived in spite of conflict, which means we can do so as well.   

 

­­It has been said that where there are three Baptists, there are four opinions.  I suspect that is also true of Methodists, Presbyterians and Reformed folks as well, but some of you have the sense not to brag about it.  It often seems that we celebrate our disagreements more than our unity.  We value our ability to stand firm for what we think to be right or important more than our willingness to seek reconciliation with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

 

It is that reconciliation that this text is about.   While we may not choose to apply this process in a lock-step fashion,  it can still speak to our needs for reconciliation and restoration.

 

I was very fortunate.  I made a friend on the first day of middle school.  Middle school is hard, but it would be even harder without a friend.  My friend helped me navigate that time in many ways, but I’ve never forgotten one thing she did for me.  She used to keep tabs on stuff going on in my life – school projects, weekend trips, etc.  We would see each other in the hallway between classes and she would remember to ask how that presentation I had been dreading had gone.  One day she told me that she was unhappy with me.  She was unhappy because she always remembered what was going on in my life, but she felt that I never remembered about hers. I listened when she told me things, but I never thought to ask on my own.

She was right; I was pretty caught up in my own world.  She taught me a couple of very important things  -- one is that friends remember to ask each other about stuff.  Friends ask even if the other person doesn’t bring it up.  And she taught me that, even when you’re friends with someone, you don’t always know what they’re thinking.  Until she told me, I had no idea that I was hurting her. What she taught me in middle school was that in healthy relationships, people trust each other with the truth and they care enough to confront.

 

That is the first step in Jesus’ reconciliation process.   He says, “If someone wrongs you, go talk to them privately and tell them.”  Notice that Jesus doesn’t say, “if someone makes you mad, call up your best friend at church and tell them about it.”  He doesn’t say, “If you get offended, stay at home and stew waiting for the person who offended you to apologize.”  Jesus understands that people are not mind-readers.  We don’t always know when we have hurt someone else. Other people don’t always know when they have hurt us.  So, Jesus puts the burden on the person who has been hurt to take the initiative. 

Go to your brother or sister privately and tell the truth in love.  For many of us, that is so much harder than calling up a third party to vent or sitting home to stew, or even pretending like nothing is wrong. 

“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”  Did you ever hear that?  Some of us learned that saying really well.  We learned that getting along is the most important thing, even when you weren’t really getting along, but you seemed to be, because no one ever said anything that wasn’t nice.  In this text, Jesus doesn’t ask us to be nice.  He asks us to be loving and truthful  And that’s hard work. 

 

In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes hell as a huge, grey city.  It is a city that is only inhabited at its outer edges with rows and rows of empty houses in the middle. They are empty because the people who used to live in them fought with the neighbors and moved, and fought with the new neighbors and moved again, leaving empty streets full of empty houses behind them.  Lewis says that that is how hell got so large, because everyone in it chose to move away instead of staying to confront each other and work things out.

 

I have known some churches like that.  Churches where some people literally moved away because there were never any solutions to the fights.  Churches where some people were physically present, but they might as well have left because there was no reconciliation between them. 

If hell is about conflict and separation, then perhaps heaven is characterized by seeking and maintaining relationship in spite of conflict.  In Jesus’ first step, one person goes to another person and the text says, “if the person listens to you, you have regained that one.”  It doesn’t say, “if the person apologizes” or “if the person promises never to do it again,” but just “if the person listens to you.”  Sometimes what we need most is to know that we have been heard and understood.  This might be the most readily transferable part of Jesus’ teaching, but it may also be the hardest to apply.  Listening is one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines.  On the rare occasions, when someone is courageous enough to tell us the truth, to tell us that our actions have been harmful, how long do we listen?  As soon as we get the gist of what they’re saying, do we start to become defensive?  Do we start looking for ways to justify or excuse our actions?  Or can we simply quiet all that internal noise and just hear the truth being shared with us? 

Jesus is giving us concrete instructions on how to love like grown-ups.  We are not supposed to pretend nothing is wrong.  We are not supposed to start smear campaigns.  We are supposed to take the first steps toward making things right, by caring enough to confront and by really listening to what our sisters and brothers have to tell us.

 

Anna Carter Florence is a preaching professor at Columbia Seminary.  She suggests translating vs 20 as “For where two or three are fighting in my name, I am there among them.”  In most church fights, those on each side believe that they are on the side of the angels.  If we remember that these are our brothers and sisters in Christ, if we care enough to confront, if we trust enough to listen in love, then, she says,  Jesus will be present with us.[1] 

 

At first glance, this text seems to be a rather straightforward excerpt from Matthew’s Book of Church Discipline, but in reality, it offers us an opportunity to reflect on the kind of community we want to be. 

 

Community seems to be a big buzz word these days.  We sometimes talk about the FOCUS community.  Many of our churches describe ourselves as communities of faith.  Political groups, united by a common agenda, are often called communities.  But somehow I think the community Jesus is describing offers something harder to come by, something deeper.

 

Sister Joan Chittister has some wonderful thoughts on community.  I invite you to listen to her words,

 

“Community . . . calls us to the kind of relationships that walk us through minefields of personal selfishness, that confront us with moments of personal responsibility,  that raise us to the level of personal heroics, and lead us to the rigor of personal compassion day after day.   It is when we see in the needs of others what we are meant to give away that we become truly empty of ourselves.  It is in the challenges of the times that we come to speak the Spirit. It is when we find ourselves dealing with the downright intransigence of the other that we understand our own sin.  It is when we recognize in the world around us the call of God that our response to the human race becomes the measuring stick of the quality of our souls.” 

 

“When anger rages in us unabated and unresolved, we obliterate the other in our hearts.  When months go by and we never speak to our neighbors, never seek them out, never stir ourselves out of our hermitages to admit their existence, we deny creation.  When advice is something we resist and questions are something we avoid in life, God has no voice by which to call us. . .”[2]

 

“When advice is something we resist and questions are something we avoid, God has no voice by which to call us.”  God speaks to us through our sisters and brothers in community.  When we speak the truth in love and listen to the truth in love, we may find ourselves speaking and hearing the Spirit of God.   May it be so among us.  Amen and amen.