Exodus 12:1-14, Psalm 149, Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
I think most of us are inclined to hear this reading from Matthew and immediately think, “conflict resolution.” Jesus seems to offer a prescription for how we deal with conflict between church members. If another member of the church sins against you, go talk to them one-on-one. If they don’t listen to you, take a couple of people with you. And if they still don’t listen, tell the whole church. Too often, though, we skip ahead to treating one another life a Gentile or a tax collector and post on social media or simply gossip about the other person to our friends and neighbors.
Most of us do not handle conflict well, much less follow what Jesus seems to be saying in Matthew 18. But I wonder if we are missing the point when we read this passage primarily through the lens of conflict management.
Though Jesus talks about what to do if another member of the church sins against you, his deeper message seems to be about what it means to belong to one another.
People will disappoint us. They will misunderstand us. They will say things they shouldn’t. They’ll make decisions we disagree with. They’ll fail us. And sometimes, we will be the ones who do all these things.
Years ago, I made a thoughtless comment that deeply offended a friend and fellow church member. She went to our priest to process through her anger, but in the end, she felt like the harm was too much, and she asked him to tell me that she no longer wanted to be friends. I was caught completely off guard. We had been joking around, and I had no idea that she had been offended by my words. The news that she was ending our friendship stung, but I respected her decision and distanced myself from her and our friend group, as she was still quite active in it.
Years later, and completely out of the blue, she called me and asked me to go to lunch. I said yes, and we met the next week. We talked about life and Selma and children and church and work. She never mentioned the incident, and neither did I. At the end of lunch, she asked if we could meet for lunch once a month. I agreed, and we continue to meet for lunch once a month to this day.
The past harm and hurt done to each of us hasn’t been forgotten. But it has become less important to the relationship. Sometimes, we can release the conflict and the need to determine who was right or wrong and simply appreciate one another again. I think this is part of what Jesus is trying to tell us.
Jesus seems to know that when we live in community, eventually we are going to hurt one another. And he offers us a way back into relationship. He doesn’t say, “Find a better church.” He doesn’t even say, “Kick someone out.” He gives us a way to remain in relationship.
All those years that my friend and I were estranged, we kept showing up at the same rail every Sunday to receive the Body of Christ together. We prayed the same prayers and sang the same hymns. We heard the same sermons. And, eventually, we found our way back to one another.
The church is not the place where everyone agrees—and it doesn’t have to be. The church is the community that has learned what to do when we don’t agree.
Here at Ascension, we have built a culture of relationship and shared ministry. We work to invite, engage, and empower one another in the mission of our church. That culture grows out of what we do every Sunday morning. We pray together, we sing together, we break bread together, and then we go out into the mission field beyond our doors together.
When we disagree, we are called to do so without destroying one another’s dignity, because we recognize that we are all beloved children of God. In Romans, Paul tells us to “owe no one anything, except to love one another,” and that all the commandments are summed up in this word: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is at the heart of what Jesus is trying to tell us. I don’t think Jesus is simply concerned with whether we resolve our conflicts. He is concerned with how we treat one another while we are trying to resolve them.
Are we binding one another in anger, hatred, and fear? Or are we loosing love, compassion, and joy on this earth? That binding and loosing is our great responsibility, because Jesus reminds us that whatever we bind or loose on earth is also bound or loosed in heaven.
We don’t have to agree with one another. We don’t have to release one another from accountability. But we do have to love one another and treat one another with grace and mercy.
And then Jesus makes us an extraordinary promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Jesus is right here with us in our prayers and songs and communion. He is in the midst of us when we celebrate baptisms and weddings or bury a beloved one. He is with us when we feed people or tutor them. He is in the halls of ADS and the walls of this nave. But he is also with us in the harder places.
He is in the midst of us when we disagree and try to work things out. He is in the uncomfortable conversations. He is in our struggles to forgive one another. He is present when we are trying to find our way back to one another.
Maybe God’s presence isn’t most obvious when everything is going well and life is harmonious. Maybe God is most present in the difficult space between us where we are trying to love one another.
When my friend called me out of the blue all those years after our falling out and asked me to have lunch, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to say yes. But deep down, I knew that God is always calling us into relationship with one another, and that God is present even when that relationship is difficult. My yes was less about redeeming an old hurt or reconciling a soured relationship and more about trusting God. And maybe that is what Jesus is really trying to tell us.
The hurts and the harm we do to one another in the church provide the lessons we need to learn to love people we don’t always like, to listen to those we don’t agree with, and to discover that we are all nourished and made whole through Jesus.
Amen