Proper 18, Year A
Ezekiel 33:7-11; Psalm 119:33-40; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18: 15-20
Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
We value relationships here at St. Thomas. We consider
ourselves one big family, a family who sticks together through disagreement and
through tough times, a family who supports one another. I think that we do a
pretty good job. But here's a challenge. What if I stood up here in the pulpit today and said:
Instead of a sermon, we are all going to have a discussion about how Christians
should respond to same-sex marriage …. or gun control … or abortion … or any
other hot-button topic on which we probably do not all agree. As a church,
shouldn’t we all be able to talk with one another about the moral issues of our
time? As the Body of Christ, shouldn’t we be able to work on discerning right
from wrong without fearing a fight? Is it healthy for us to fret alone at home
about what is right and wrong in our world, instead of sharing with our
brothers and sisters in Christ? Why do we talk about things with friends that
we are afraid to discuss with our fellow Christians? Christian educator Carol
Hess describes what usually replaces true conversation in our churches: “Honest
and deep conversation is easily thwarted in communities of faith, sometimes by
harsh adversarial argumentation that silences some voices, other times by
polite affirming discussion that keeps conversation on a surface level.”[1] As
a leader in the church—a leader who does not particularly care for conflict—my
natural instinct is to stick to the polite affirming discussion. I am often hostage
to my fear that if we talk, then folks will get mad and leave! But I’m not so
sure that it does the community a service when we buy peace at the price of utter silence on anything of any importance to
our lives.
And then of
course it’s not only the controversial topics that we tend to avoid in church.
We usually avoid confronting one another all together about anything—at least
not directly. I know, for example, that when we clergy step on each other’s
toes, we tend to run to the nearest colleague with our beefs, rather than
confront the person who upset us. Psychologists call this kind of unhealthy
behavior, “triangulation.” In the church, we might call it “parking lot
conversation!”
“Can you believe that outrageous
thing she said at the meeting last night?!” we clergy gasp to a sympathetic
colleague, as we tell the third party all about the heresy, rather than simply
discussing it with the person who made the remarks.
“He struck me to the core with that
insensitive criticism,” we whisper to a group of friends, tattling on our
nemesis to others rather than going to the colleague who did the hurting.
I know that when I was the assistant
rector in a parish, everyone came running to me with all of the rector’s
failures and supposed misdeeds. They wanted me to make them feel better by
helping them to criticize the rector. It feels good to join in some juicy and
self-affirming “triangulation,” and it took discipline to refuse to join in,
sending the complainers off to meet directly with the rector, instead. I
suppose that I had learned my lesson back when I was a teacher and had
complained about the headmaster behind his back on an email to a friend.
Unfortunately, I had mistakenly hit “reply all,” and sent my triangulating
remarks out to the whole faculty. Ouch!
At work, at church, and at home, it
is so easy to avoid confrontation. Triangulating, sending off a nasty email, shouting
the other into silence, vowing never again to participate in the group, switching
parishes …. or just plain avoiding any
controversial topics of conversation. These are all too often the unhealthy
ways in which we humans respond to the inevitable hurts and conflicts of
community life.
In today’s
Gospel, Jesus is trying to show us another way: God’s way of humility, love,
and forgiveness. We know what God does when we mess up, when we disappoint God,
when we turn away from God. We know that our ever-loving God comes after us,
with the individual care and single-mindedness of a shepherd out searching for
his one lost lamb. And God forgives us and rejoices in our renewed relationship
with God when we are found. That’s what Jesus shows us in his life and death,
and that’s what Jesus tells the disciples right before the passage in Matthew
that we hear today. All too often, we take today’s text on getting along in
community as an easy formula to apply in order to shame backsliders and to
prove that the majority interpretation of things is the correct one. Or we use it
as a formula for getting what we want out of God in prayer. But that’s not what
Jesus is getting at. Jesus is trying to show us a gentle and humble pattern for
relating with one another. He’s trying to show us the importance of community—a
community in which he is always present in love and forgiveness. To treat those
who shut themselves outside of the body of Christ as “tax collectors and
Gentiles” is not to shun them—for Jesus treats even tax collectors and Gentiles
with love and open invitation. Neither
is the authority to bind and to loose meant as a heady power trip for the
Church. It is instead a caution that what goes on in our communities has deep
and lasting consequences. Love of neighbor is not something to dabble at.
At Pub Theology this week, we bravely
gathered to talk about the complex and controversial topic of the war between
Israel and Gaza. “How do we talk about this topic with those who don’t agree
with us?” we asked. It’s all about listening, we decided. One member of our
group pointed out that Jesus’ instructions in today’s Gospel all point us toward
deep listening—hearing the point of view of the other. The truth is always
somewhere in between our individual dogmatic points of view. New ideas and solutions
can arise only as we listen in love and let others challenge our own positions.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that everyone attending Pub Theology heard the
wisdom that unfolded in our conversation. You see, we were not able to get our
regular room at the restaurant this past week. So, with the gracious help of
the servers, we set up our discussion in a corner of the big public dining
area. Restaurants are noisy places: the accumulated discussions of dozens of
diners; the cries of young children; the chinking sound of dishes; the interminable
musak coming out of the overhead speakers. Over all of that din, we couldn’t hear
one another! We had to shout in order to be heard. Our ears missed words in the
middle of sentences that were probably full of wisdom. Many of us tightened up
our whole bodies in our struggle to hear. Others gave up in discouragement and
stopped participating.
Yes, God has a sense of humor. Isn’t
it interesting that a discussion about how to listen to one another happened
smack dab in the noise of the world, the noise of the busy world in which we all
live out our days and nights. If we are to solve our conflicts through
forgiveness-tinged listening, how do we find the silent places for that
listening to happen? If God’s power comes to us as we gather in the kind of
love that enables us to “hear one another to speech,”[2]
as Nelle Morton writes, then how do we as a community make the space for that
to happen?
I couldn’t
help but contrast the noise of our restaurant discussion with the kind of
communication that I have experienced at the old Wednesday Healing Services
that we used to have here at St. Thomas. Ed Parker, Tom Bailey, Tom Roseberry,
and sometimes others were the “group of two or three” who gathered with me
every Wednesday morning to pray. Before praying for one another, we listened to
the concerns that each person brought forward for prayer. In quiet, we listened
deeply. And then we took those words and stories that were shared, and we
offered them up to God in our own words. And Jesus was in the midst of us. And
the fear-making, stress-causing noise of the world was stilled. That’s all that
I do when I pray with you in the hospital or in times of grief or joy, you
know. I listen as deeply as I can to what you are saying, concentrating the
ears of my soul upon the words of your soul, and then I try as best as I can to
lend my own voice to those words in the presence of the Holy One who surrounds
us.
I think that’s
what Jesus is asking us to do when there is conflict, too. To gather in small
groups, as few as two or three of us, in holy quiet, and to listen, prayerfully
listen, to the feelings and opinions of the other—and then to speak those words
back in God’s presence, so that those words can be heard in love. Our decisions
about the way we should live out our faith are too important to trust to our own
prejudices, or to the biases of the media to which we listen, or to the latest click-bait
on Facebook. We need the rest of Christ’s Body, those with whom we agree, and those
with whom we disagree—those who affirm us, and those who drive us up a wall.
Don’t worry. Jesus shows us that this
larger Sunday (Saturday night) gathering is not the place to air our grievances
or to stir up discussion about some controversial topic. But we do need to make
room in our busy, noisy lives for those kinds of encounters to happen… where two
or three are gathered together in Jesus’ loving, forgiving name.
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