Problems With Each Other

"Problems With Each Other"

Matthew 18:15-20
September 7, 2008

“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the
two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if
you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may
be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen
to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let
such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you
bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed
in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it
will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my
name, I am there among them.”

Now, over the years, I’ve preached a lot of sermons, hundreds at this point, and likely
thousands by the time I end my ministerial career, sometimes in the next thirty years,
but today’s text is probably one of the more difficult ones, though I am actually very
familiar with it personally. The reason this text is so familiar is because of some training
I received in the Healthy Congregations model of understanding congregations with Dr.
Peter Steinke, who is a bigwig when it comes to understanding congregations as
emotional systems, as places where people live out their familial backgrounds in the
context of a larger, chosen family, the church family. I recently shared some of that
training with the church council some months ago, and with the larger congregation, in
the class on creating healthier personal relationships we did sometime last year.
Matthew 18 is one of those texts that people like me go back to because it affirms one
of the central tenets of family systems theory—that it’s very important for people to deal
with each other directly, to talk one-on-one with each other when things become difficult
between them. Many of us have a tendency to talk around people rather than talk to
them—that is, we talk about them to other people, we share our pain, our anger, our
sense of betrayal, our outrage, whatever, with everyone else, but the very person that
we believe has caused us pain or anger, or who has offended our sensibility.

To give you an example, a couple in leadership at another congregation I pastored
some years ago disagreed with me on how to do outreach to the larger community—we
had a spirited conversation at our planning committee, and I shared some ideas about
what I would be willing to do and what I was unwilling to do, in terms of outreach, and
the meeting seemed to have come to consensus on how we were going to grow the
congregation. But afterwards, I kept hearing that this couple was seeking out other
members of the steering committee and complaining about my unwillingness to
implement their specific ideas on how to grow the congregation—they had felt
dismissed because I had not agreed with them on how to do evangelism and reach out
to visitors. And yet, to the credit of the planning committee, they kept telling this well-
meaning couple to go talk to me in order to express their frustration to me directly
rather than triangulating the other steering committee members into a disagreement
they simply were not involved in anymore.   It really wasn’t in the nature of these folks to
seek face to face resolution, so I never did hear from them, but I was really proud of the
committee, because they got the truth of a passage like the one before us today—one
that calls us to deal directly with each other when we believe we’ve been wronged by
others, which is something that is very difficult for many of us to do.

But that difficult work is what is spoken of here, in these words of Jesus, or perhaps of
that late first century community that gave birth to the Gospel of Matthew. Whoever
recorded these words, what strikes me is that almost immediately in this ancient
Christian community there was a need to deal with moments that we encounter every
day around here, that every church and community deals with—that is, those moments
when we have been sinned against, when someone has done us wrong, when
someone has hurt us, or at least we feel as if we have been hurt by them. I know we
know this, but I’m going to say it again—the first century churches were by no means
much different from our community when it comes to dealing with the pain of being a
community of faith. There was no special aura around them that let them off the human
hook of having to deal with difficult people and imperfect people, people like you and
me. Perhaps their zone of privacy was very different than ours—in fact, for them there
really wasn’t a sense that there was a difference between a private matter and a public
matter—all things were public matters, and if you did the wrong thing, you were going to
be called out about it by the larger community. Now, let me be honest, I like the way
things are now, where privacy really matters to most of us, but I suspect that is because
you and I have been raised in a highly individualistic culture, a culture that prizes the
individual in ways that this first century community of Christian faith would not have
understood.

Now, don’t get me wrong—obviously, there is an emphasis on the individual here,
because the formula given here for how to deal with disagreements and the sins of
others begins with a one-on-one encounter.   You start with the person you feel has
wronged you and you go to them directly and share with them what you have
experienced—it starts there, sure enough, but then if that person doesn’t see the
errors of her or his ways, then it becomes the community’s issue, and witnesses are
called—not folks who are there to agree with you or allies or supporters, but simple
witnesses, like the way we use it today, those who are there to simply testify to what
they saw, something called for in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 19.   There is a
lot of wisdom in these moves—to go privately to a person to begin with, in order not to
shame them publicly, and if no reconciliation is made, then to do something a little more
public, but with folks who see you dealing with the issue, the witnesses, so that they
know what the disagreement is, and that you and I are being fair about our issue with
this other person—they can be witnesses to the approach and the reaction of the
person being confronted. But then if there is no reconciliation at that point, then the
matter truly becomes the community’s issue, and so in verse 17 it says: If the member
refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even
to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

Now, most of us have never seen anything like what is being recommended here in this
text—perhaps in some distant past in our own congregation, a person might have been
called before the congregation for some public sin, but I highly doubt it. But I do know
that it does still happen in some conservative congregations—I’ve had some gay
friends who were quite literally called before their charismatic or fundamentalist
congregations and told to repent publicly of their homosexuality, or face
excommunication from the church they had grown up in. I think that should remind us
that sometimes churches get it wrong when it comes to the sins they confront others
on, and that just because a community says its wrong, doesn’t always make it so.
Think of divorce or interracial marriage some fifty years ago—these would have been
considered a sin by many.

So, it still does happen, these excommunications, but thankfully, at least in my opinion,
not so much anymore. And I say thankfully not because I don’t think there are things
we should all be called on the carpet for, but because usually the Protestant church
has tended to use the these type of public excommunications almost exclusively on
those it found guilty of sexual sins, especially recently in some conservative and
fundamentalist settings—let me put it this way, you rarely have people being
excommunicated for being envious, prideful, or lazy, or any of the other so-called
deadly sins. The Brother Bobs of this world rarely gets excommunicated for being
greedy, and being less than generous—can you imagine what would happen in many
of these churches if something like that was ever attempted? And maybe its best that
we don’t do those same things now, though I don’t want to miss the principle behind the
last part of the formula given here—that we are interconnected, that we are not just
individuals on a spiritual journey, but, for those of us who have decided to go with
others on the journey, we are a people who are responsible and accountable to each
other. How we understand that accountability, and how we practice it…well, I don’t
have any easy solutions, except that we owe each other the truth, at least the truth of
our experience of hurt, as painful as it might be at times to say, in those one-on-one
moments when we seek to be reconciled with each other.

Of course, the important thing to remember is what kind of community we really are,
something that Martin Luther remembered when he wrote a prayer that said, “O Lord,
deliver me from Christian churches with nothing but Christian saints in them. I want to
remain in and be a part of a church which is a little flock of faint-hearted people, weak
people, who know and feel their sin, their poverty, their misery, and they believe in the
forgiveness of God.”   We are part of a less than perfect community of faith, a human
community, who does, ultimately, believe not in judgment as much as we do
forgiveness, in reconciliation, which is really the whole point of this passage, and the
whole Gospel, for that matter. And the last few verses of this passage hint that how we
act out that truth in human community, whether we end up being a community of
forgiveness or a community of judgment, will ultimately be how we are eternally dealt
with—if we are people of mercy, we will receive the mercy we have given to others and
if we are people of judgment, we will receive the judgment we have placed upon others.
But there is one final intriguing piece of this puzzle that I think we need to look at again,
something that we might have overlooked or passed over too quickly—certainly I did
when I first really delved into this passage. I want us to note in verse 17, the verse that
goes If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender
refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax
collector. When I first read that passage this week, I must admit that I did a double
take, because of the last part of the text, where the reader, the listener, is told to treat
the one who does not wish to be reconciled or to admit that they have done anything
wrong, like they were a Gentile or a tax collector, that is, as an outsider and, in the case
of the tax collector, the worst kind of sinner—a robber, a thief, a traitor. In the first
century, the Gentile was seen as unclean, a non-Jew who was to be avoided if at all
possible, and the tax collector was to be vilified and avoided except when one had to
pay one’s taxes. So, it would seem that the prescription in this verse is to treat these
folks the same way the larger Jewish culture treated the Gentiles and tax collectors in
the first century—to avoid them at all cost.

And yet, and yet, who was it that Jesus was always talking to, and having dinner with,
and being attacked for associating with? It was exactly these kinds of people, the
people everyone was told to avoid—the tax collectors, the Gentiles, the sinners, the
prostitutes, the nobodies. And it couldn’t have just slipped Jesus’ mind or even the
minds of that early Matthean community that these people were the very people Jesus
treated so well, at least compared to the larger Jewish culture around him. Eugene
Peterson, the pastor and scholar who did a paraphrase of the Bible, puts that verse I
just shared with you a second ago this way: “If he won’t listen to the church, you’ll have
to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance and offer again
God’s forgiving love.” Now, friends, that is something very different then
excommunication—that is about not giving up on each other, that’s about still being in
community with that person, still inviting them to the table just like Jesus did with those
tax collectors and Gentiles, that’s about being persistence in our efforts to reconcile
with each other. That is radical love, to include in the community the one who does not
see his or her sin, his or her meanness, or ungratefulness, or bitterness, or whatever.
You don’t give up on people, this text from Matthew seems to say, this text that is often
called the Rule of Christ by early Mennonites.

Now, that makes a difference, but it actually makes this text even harder to follow,
doesn’t it? Isn’t always easier to give up on each other, to toss people out on their hind
quarters and get rid of them? I know I’ve felt that way a few time, and I know a few folks
have felt that way about me—just get lost and leave us alone!   And yet, that isn’t what
Jesus does with those sinners, those tax collectors, those Gentiles, the unwanted and
vilified people of his generation. He walked with them, he kept inviting them to the
table, he surrounded himself with those kinds of people, people like you and me, who
need us much grace as we can muster up on this side of eternity. I know there are
times when people need to leave a community of faith, or have to give up on a
relationship, or move on in their lives, or whatever—I’m not denying the reality of that
need sometimes…but I just want us to remember that though its something that we may
need to do in the most extreme of circumstances, I just want us to remember that its
something that God chooses not to do with us, that is, to give up on us. And if that is
case, then maybe we need to give each other a few more chances to sit across from
each other and do the hard work of telling each other our difficult truths. It’s a lot more
difficult than giving up on each other, but if God hasn’t given up on us, then maybe we
ought not give up on each other. Amen.