Matthew 18:15-20
“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.”
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To be human
is to have conflict, within ourselves and with others, and while this is
obvious, probably, it is hard to accept, because it requires admitting that things
don’t always go as well as we’d like; not all our relationships are going well;
not all of our growth has happened peacefully. I was reading a piece about the
poet Christian Wiman this week, who writes about faith and experience, and he
says that if you believe the same thing at fifty that you believe at fifteen,
you haven’t lived, and so to live is to have conflict, conflict between what
you once learned and what you now experience, between who you are and who you
want to be, between how you act and how others act.
This may
sound weird for me to say, but I count it as one of the main reasons that I
believe in Jesus, that I take him seriously, that the Bible, the primary
revelation of truth about who God is and who we are . . . the Bible does not
tell us to avoid conflict. So much of what passes for popular religion these
days is all about avoiding conflict. Just go search the religion section in a
bookstore and you’ll find all sorts of nonsense about avoiding conflict, and I
think that comes from this feeling deep within us that while we all have
conflict, we wish we didn’t. That’s not to say that we wish we were more
wishy-washy, that we don’t want to believe things very deeply. It’s to say that
we wish everybody else would be more wishy-washy and willing to change their
very experience and understanding of the world to bend to what I believe, who I
am, what I have experienced to be true.
We do not
like conflict because it reminds us that the world does not revolve around me.
When I have conflict, I am reminded that my beliefs about the ways that the
world works, understandings which I hold to be deeply true and important, are
not the only beliefs and—this might shock you—they might not be the only true
beliefs.
The church deals
with this kind of thing just as much as anybody, maybe even more so. We’re not
immune from conflict, because while it is true that we are the body of Christ,
we’re also fundamentally human. And I have discovered that when it happens,
when conflict happens, humans respond in one of three ways, only one of which
is at all holy, at all faithful.
The first
way is to say, “I don’t have a problem with conflict; I just disagree,” and
leave it at that, as if simply disagreeing with someone and leaving it there
does anything but make conflict worse. It is true, of course, that everyone is
entitled to his or her opinion, but it is decidedly not true that saying to
someone, “I disagree” without making the effort to understand what it feels
like to wear their skin and walk in their shoes, does anything to diffuse
conflict. It just makes it worse. And all that sort of thing does for you,
spiritually, if you’re interested in growing spiritually, is that it builds a
wall between you and everybody else. It keeps you from being in authentic
relationship, of course, but worse than that, it worsens conflict, makes it cut
more deeply, without any possibility of resolution because, well, you just
disagree and that’s all there is to it. That’s not faithful, because it isn’t
the kind of thing that can be worked out, not that you wanted it worked out. I’m
not saying you need to give up your beliefs. I’m just saying that if you hold
so fast to your understandings of what it means to be a person of faith, a
follower of Jesus, that your own stubbornness gets in the way of the Holy
Spirit, you’ve created an idol out of your own beliefs that keeps God from
working in your life. It isn’t righteous to live that way, because it’s all about
you and your beliefs, not about anybody else, and if you haven’t caught on yet,
let me very clear that one of the central messages of the Christian Gospel is
that it’s not all about you.
Now, the
second way some of us react in the face of conflict is to say, oh, it’s fine,
everything is just as right as everything else, nothing is more important than
anything else, all viewpoints, no matter how destructive or graceless or
embittered are equal, and this is a particularly insidious response, because it
disguises our intolerance in something that looks like tolerance, clothes our
unwillingness to admit that we might be wrong in the false idea that what you
believe doesn’t matter as long as I am allowed to believe what I want. Do you
see the problem? By refusing to have conflict under the guise of living and letting
live, I don’t have to change. I don’t have to be challenged. And then when I am
called on it I get to act like Captain Tolerance, and while tolerance is good,
and true, and virtuous, it is not the same thing as running away from conflict
so that I don’t have to be challenged, myself. That’s cowardice, not tolerance.
And it’s not what Jesus calls us to, either.
What these
two ways of being have in common, of course, is that they protect me from
having to change, from having to reconsider anything, and it’s not long before
you’re fifty and you realize you believe the same things you did when you were
fifteen. There’s no growth there, and the life of faith is about growth. Shoot,
life in general is about growth. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. And yet
growth is so difficult that we build these walls around us to keep us from
having to change, to reevaluate, to acknowledge that even difficult people may
have something to teach us. Sometimes, the reason we find people to be
difficult is that they have a word for us that we don’t want to hear, but know
that we should. Every time I am in one of these situations with difficult
people I remind myself that Jesus was a difficult person, so maybe I ought to
get past my own stuff and try to listen. It’s not easy.
And so the
third way, like most third ways, is the hardest, but it is the most faithful, and
the most productive, and it happens to be exactly what Jesus lays out for us in
this morning’s scripture lesson. If someone sins against you, Jesus says, go
and work it out when the two of you are alone. If the other person listens,
you’ve preserved a relationship. If not, take someone with you to work it out.
And if the person with whom you have a conflict still doesn’t listen, get the
church involved, and if even that doesn’t help, let that person be to you as a
Gentile and a tax collector. Shake the dust off your feet, brush your shoulders
off, and move on.
Now, this
is all very hard for a number of reasons. Mostly it’s hard because there’s no
provision here for gossip. You don’t get to say, listen to what Dalton did to
me the other day, even if all you are trying to do is blow off some steam. The
line we so often use is “I just need to vent,” and venting is ok, but when
you’re talking about somebody specific, you don’t get to spread that around
like a virus. You go directly to the person. Some days I wish it weren’t so,
because I don’t like dealing with this stuff head on either, but my experience
is that when you do it, when you follow Jesus’s words here, healing can be
born. It doesn’t happen every time, and it doesn’t happen right away, but
you’re certainly not going to save a relationship by gossiping about it,
whether the sin is legitimate or not.
Which
brings me to the next thing, which is that you don’t get to do any of this
anonymously. Jesus doesn’t say, write it all down and leave your name off. It
doesn’t matter how mad you are, or how embarrassed, you don’t get to do this
anonymously. You are not going to find Jesus offering a provision for sending a
nasty, anonymous email. That’s not how we are to behave. Now, I recognize that
putting your name to criticism takes guts, but I want you to know that as a
professional Christian and a semi-professional receiver of complaints, I have a
very strict policy about this stuff, and it’s been born out of experience. When
I receive a letter, the first thing I do is to see who signed it. If the answer
is “nobody,” I throw it away unread. I do this every single time I open a piece
of mail. Maybe this seems harsh, but if we are to act as Jesus calls us to act,
we have to be willing to go to the person with who we have a conflict and deal
with it right there, face to face, name to name, and that’s all there is. Yes
it takes guts to sign your name, but nobody ever said the Christian life was
easy.
I’ll end
with this. I realize it seems like what Jesus is telling us is to do one of the
hardest things we can imagine, which is to face someone who has caused you
heartache, pain, hurt. But none of what I’ve already mentioned is the hardest
thing, however. You want to know the hardest thing? Jesus says that if you go
through all these steps, you go to the person, you bring somebody with you, you
use the church for its intended purpose of reconciliation and you still can’t
get resolution, you are to treat someone as you would treat tax collectors and
Gentiles. I’ll be honest, that sounds like great fun, like if you go through
all these steps you finally get to treat the person who has sinned against you
like they ought to be treated, like a wretched, crooked tax collector, like an
outsider, and that’s all well and good until you remember who Jesus was, how he
ate with sinners, how he counted tax collectors and prostitutes among his
friends. You don’t go through the steps of conflict so that you can get to the
fun part. You go through the steps because in the final analysis, unless you
are open to learning from others, unless you are open to acknowledging that
there may be some areas in which you need to do some growing, you aren’t really
living. And if it is true that resentment is allowing somebody to live in your
head, rent-free, maybe we all ought to take a page from Jesus’s playbook and
find ways to love, at all times, in all places. It’s not easy, but it’s a whole
lot cheaper than having to keep up maintenance for a renter who will never,
never get caught up on his rent.
In the name of the father, the son, and the
holy spirit. Amen.
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