Matthew 21:23-32
September 25, 2011
Some passages in the bible lend themselves well to asking the question: Where am I in this story? Which character am I most like? This is one such passage. So, this morning, I’m suggesting we each take a little time to think about which character in this passage we are most like. It should go without saying that few if any of us will find ourselves in only one of the characters. We are complex creatures, and we will all likely see ourselves in each of the characters at any given time.
Having said that, let me introduce the characters in this story – and they kind of group together a little bit.
Chief priests and elders
Jesus and John the Baptist
A father and two sons
Tax collectors and prostitutes
Let’s start with the father and two sons. They’re in the parable Jesus tells. They are less characters and more like tools the author uses to illuminate other characters in the story. They are a part of a parable in which a father asks his sons to go work in the vineyard. The first son told the father that he would not go work in the vineyard, yet he ended up going. The second son said he would help out, but in the end was a no-show. Matthew has Jesus use these two sons to compare the chief priests and John the Baptist.
The chief priests and elders are like the second brother. They say that are going to do God’s will, and then they change their minds and do nothing of the sort. By virtue of taking on such a privileged and powerful role within the religious hierarchy of the day, they have a huge responsibility. They are saying to the people– committing to God and the Israelites – that they will fulfill the duties of these positions in accordance with God’s will. They say they will go to the vineyard.
But did they? Well, what were they supposed to be doing? Primarily, these folks were the ones that had the power to confer forgiveness on people. And forgiveness figured prominently in one’s status within the religious community. If you are forgiven, you are in. If you are not, you are out. They were responsible for helping people, by granting forgiveness, be restored to the community. Though there were probably some great priests out there, just as there are today, Jesus thought some had lost their way on the way to the vineyard.
For some, their job had become more about power than grace, more about exclusion than restoration and reconciliation. There were entire classes and groups of people who couldn’t even approach to ask for forgiveness, much less receive it.
For example, they were exclusive – only accepting people who were Jewish. They also had requirements for forgiveness that for some were impossible to fulfill; there were rituals that cost you money, or required travel for long distances. And they were legalistic. Unless you did everything right, or were completely free of whatever was making you unclean – even if you had no control over it, like leprosy, for example – you wouldn’t get forgiveness…which meant, of course, that you were on the outs. The priests may have claimed to be doing God’s will, but at some point, like the second son, they had lost their way.
In contrast, John the Baptist and Jesus are like the first son. They shunned the notion that they would call themselves priest or elder – neither of them tried to claim the power that came with these positions. Their power would come from a different source. Their authority, as Jesus explained, came from doing the work of God in the world, not from a title. They weren’t saying they were priests, yet they were doing precisely what the priests said they would do.
Quick quiz: Do you recall what John the Baptist, hint, hint, did for a living? That’s right! He baptized people. We think of baptism today as the front door into the Christian community. We focus on how it makes someone a member of our church or the Christian faith. But for John, baptism was first and foremost about the forgiveness of sins. It was about offering a new beginning. Refreshing people with the water of life. Even though John didn’t have the okay from the church, he was doing exactly what the priests should have been doing…
For everyone. We have no story, no record of John refusing to baptize someone. In fact, what we see in the bible is that crowds and crowds of people, from all walks of life, flocked to John out in the wilderness, and received a new life, forgiveness, not from the church, but directly from God. John was just the messenger – it was not his place to decide who would get in and who would not. If you came – if you wanted more than anything a new life, you were plunged into the water and when you arose, the old was washed away.
When Jesus used the parable to show what the priests should have been doing, it was probably more than enough to infuriate the priests and elders. But they were doing even more than that; Jesus wasn’t done with the lesson. He wanted everyone to know that he was expanding the job description – dramatically. Not only were they forgiving the sins of those who were repentant, and a part of the Jewish faith, as priests were supposed to do, they were letting all sorts of other people in as well.
Jesus didn’t require people to perform the rituals of repentance - to meet the requirements the church had created - in order to be a part of their community. And, to the shock of many, he expanded God’s love beyond Jewish community, not requiring conversion to a particular religion in order to be welcomed into God’s expansive realm.
Just in case the priests didn’t yet have steam coming out of their ears after they hear the parable that implicates them, Jesus says tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the realm of God before you.
Which brings us to our last two characters. Tax collectors and prostitutes were both despised by the religious authorities. They certainly weren’t eligible to receive the forgiveness of the priest. Tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes from their fellow Jews to give to the Roman Empire. They made their living – their income was derived – by charging more than they would then need to give to Rome. Some became extremely wealthy this way. They were considered traitors.
Basically, the tax collectors found themselves in a system that destroyed life more than it gave new life. It sucked them in. They didn’t resist it, they didn’t care that though they were quite comfortable, people were being crushed by the way things were. Why should they care? Everything was fine for them. They never challenged the Romans, never questioned their ethics – that would have upset their life, probably landed them in jail – for sure they would end up joining those who were suffering. I suspect these were not horrible people. They had simply succumbed to the culture of the day because it served them well.
It’s a little more difficult to know exactly who Jesus was referring to when he named prostitutes. We have a very clear picture when we hear that word, but it had a much broader definition in Jesus’ day. Certainly it included people who exchanged sex for money. And likely such people were – just like most prostitutes today – were doing this because of economic realities that gave them few other choices.
But many times the word was used to indicate that someone was a non-Jew…one who didn’t follow the moral codes of the Jewish religion. There was much distaste in the Jewish community for the sexual practices of the Gentiles. The Gentiles – simply meaning “non-Jew” – seemed to have sexual acts as a part of their religious rituals, including women who slept with a number of other men in some kind of cultic rite – women who Jews called prostitutes.
The bottom line was that when the Jews in Jesus’ day heard the term prostitute, they thought “outsider,” “not us,” “immoral,” unnatural. Unless such people were to convert to Judaism, follow the commandments, they were getting’ nowhere near that temple or the priests who ran it. Forgiveness was not an option. Inclusion was completely out of reach.
Now here’s the thing: if Jesus had hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes in order to preach to them, the religious elite might not have fussed. After all, who would have objected that tax collectors and prostitutes were forsaking their sinful lifestyle, making restitution, and seeking a life of righteousness? The priests believed that God offered forgiveness when sinners repented.
What infuriated the authorities was that Jesus was not explicitly or directly asking tax collectors and prostitutes to do any of this. Jesus seems to have accepted them as they were and was freely having dinner with them without requiring that they first clean up their lives.
So those are the players: Now we ask, “Where are we in this story? Who are we?”
Maybe we see a bit of ourselves in the priests. We call ourselves Christian but then act at times in ways that are opposite of what we say we stand for. There are times our actions alienate the very people we should be reaching out to. There are times we put up barriers that get in the way of people experiencing God’s grace and being a part of the community.
Those times we are like the priests, we can remind ourselves of the radical nature of the realm of God. We can visualize all the people we hold in low esteem walking into the realm of God in great joy because of what awaits them there. Maybe we can see them dancing and laughing after being baptized and being released from judgments and expectations. Maybe we can see them so joyous that we only want to join them.
At times we are like John the Baptist – maybe even Jesus. Think about those times when someone you knew felt the crushing weight of judgment, and you responded with grace. Or the times you have given someone a fresh start, even when the world around you never would. We are like John the Baptist and Jesus whenever we see someone not through the eyes of our culture, but through the eyes of Christ.
And when that happens, we need to be aware of it. We need to name it, celebrate it, so that we know and remember what it feels like, so we can return to it time and time again.
Maybe we are at times the tax collector. Those are the times we find ourselves trapped in a culture that destroys…where every purchase, every action has potential implications for someone at the bottom of the ladder. Maybe we need clothes, so we buy something made in sweatshops, without even being aware. Maybe we want to be safe, so we agree to laws that take away the rights of minority groups. Maybe we want to remain comfortable, so we don’t challenge the status quo if we think it will affect us.
At those times, when we feel trapped, when we realize that there is no way to completely extract ourselves from the culture and systems in which we live, remember that we still get to dine with Jesus. We get to come to the table, and be a part of the realm of God…we get glimpses of an alternative world, even if we can never completely escape the dominant culture. We are never written off. We are loved. No elaborate ritual required. We don’t have to go off the grid, give up our way of life, before we are welcomed at Christ’s table.
And finally, I suspect we have all at times felt like the prostitute – not in the sense we think of, but as someone who feels so outside, so beaten down, so misunderstood, so judged simply for who we are, that we can’t imagine we will ever be accepted and loved for who we are.
But even when we are so beaten down and marginalized, and lonely, and hurting, if we find communities that reflect the one Jesus was building, we will find a welcome – we will find grace and love. No creed required, you don’t have to be the right religion. You just need the desire to be loved, and the deep yearning to be a part of God’s work in the world.
Jesus may have been talking to the chief priests and elders in this story, but Matthew was hoping the people who would read his gospel were the ones like the tax collectors and prostitutes. He wanted them to hear the incredibly good news that God’s realm is for everyone, and you don’t need people in power to grant you entrance. Finally, the people who Matthew was always writing to was the early church – and by extension to the Christian church throughout history. And the message is clear: be like the first son. Regardless of your title, regardless of what you call yourself or say you are about, what matters is how you act, who you welcome, and how much you reflect the love, grace, and radical inclusion of God. Amen.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Relentless Invitation
Matthew 20:1-16
September 18, 2011
Okay – I know this is a geeky pastor thing, but recently I was asked to write about my best guess of what the realm of God looks like. Actually, that’s not quite right. I was asked to write about the five things in our world today that look least like the realm of God. “Five worst things,” I called the Microsoft Word document.
The first heading in my “Five worst things,” was: “transactional.”
We assign value to things; all things. This includes people, labor, good deeds, apologies, gratitude…and then our interactions with each other are transactional – exchanges based on trying to swap things of equal value. I give you something and you give me something we have agreed is of equal worth. It goes to our fundamental sense of and need for justice. Most simply we might think of things like buying food at a grocery store, or paying someone for their work. But our culture of transactions runs so much deeper. We make moral transactions too.
I serve you food in the soup kitchen, you “owe” me a “thank you.” You wronged me, you “owe” me an apology. You bombed us, we owe you a proportional response. We even use transactional analysis to decide whether people are worthy of help. We see charity as having a value and then decide if a person is worthy of that charity – do they make good enough decisions in their lives, are they sympathetic enough, are they grateful enough, have they filled out the right paper work, waited in the line long enough, paid their debts to society?
“The realm of heaven is like a landowner,” the parable begins. And this is not like any landowner or farmer we know. This man goes out into the marketplace early in the morning and hires some workers, agreeing to pay them one denarius a day. They go to work in his vineyard.
Mid-morning, he looks over his vineyard and sees that more workers will be needed if the job is to be done, so he goes back into the marketplace where he encounters some people still standing around whom no one has hired. Even though a third of the day is over, he asks them to go to work for him, telling them that he will pay them what's right.
At noon, when he goes back downtown, he sees some guys hanging out on the street corner, and invites them to come to work in his vineyard, telling them that he will pay them what's right.
At three in the afternoon, he's back downtown where he spies a couple of young men with nothing to do and, even though the sun is beginning to move toward the far west, what the heck?....he hires them, promising to pay them what's right.
Finally, at five p.m., he goes back to town one more time. Now, there's almost no one left loitering on the street corner. After all, the day is almost over. But there are two slackers, leaning up against the wall of the unemployment office sharing a bottle of Diet Pepsi. Even though it's only one hour before quitting time, he hires them as well.
If you're keeping score, by the end of the day we have different groups of workers in the vineyard who have been there for twelve hours, for nine hours, for six, three, and only one hour.
Now, they will be paid. If you will recall, a wage was agreed upon only for those who got there first. A denarius. But this strange employer pays those who got there last, first. To everyone's amazement, he pays those who have only worked one hour a denarius. So that means that those who have worked for twelve hours, sweating in the vines all day long, will probably get....twelve denarii. Right?
No, they get what they agreed to work for, one denarius. There are murmurings of injustice. Is this any way to run a vineyard? No, they are told, the injustice is only apparent. You agreed to work for a denarius. You have been given a denarius.
This parable upsets any notion of a transactional world, at least as we know it – where the goal is equal, fair exchange of work, goods and services. Things do have value in the parable. A day’s work does have an agreed upon wage. But that’s not what the transaction is about. We see that the value lies not in the labor or the work of the person in exchange for the wage. The value lies – it always lies – in the simple fact that someone is a human being. And people are paid according to their need, not their worth. That is a big difference.
We like to reward hard work, innovation, intelligence. We don’t like to reward need. We’re afraid of that. We think it breeds complacency, dependency, laziness. Also, it’s just plain not fair to those of us who are hard workers, innovative, intelligent.
But the problem in a transactional world is that the end game is always assigning worth, and the gospel resists at every turn any system that deems some more worthy than others. It resists gradations of righteousness or value in people. Not only does it resist such things, it turns them on their head. The last is first, first is last, and all that. This is not a transactional world – this realm of heaven.
After writing my “five worst things,” the next assignment was to move from a negative vision – what’s wrong with this world – to a positive one. In other words, what is the antidote to a transactional world? I realized, when reading this parable, that it’s not so much a matter of finding the opposite of transactional, like some kind of gospel version of communism. Rather it’s finding a different starting point. And when we look again at this passage, we see that the alternative to a world that is transactional is a world that is invitational.
Set aside for a minute the focus on what people did and didn’t get paid – and whether it’s fair, or what they need, or what they deserve. Look instead at the movements of the landowner. Play this story in your head…how does the landowner spend his day? Going back and forth to the market place to get people and bring them to his vineyard. The realm of heaven is like a landowner who goes again and again and again and again and brings people into a place where they are provided for, and cared for, regardless of who they are, how long they have been standing around, what they do with their time or money or life.
And all are invited without condition. The best, strongest, workers. The lazy ones. The ones who can’t do the work. The old, young, righteous, sinister, ill, healed, lonely. The positive vision lies in this going again and again and again to find people and bring them in.
Really, that’s the most startling thing about this story when you think about the behavior of landowner – not what the workers get paid at the end. After all, a denarius a day is not all that great a wage to begin with. While nobody knows the precise value of a denarius, we do know that it took about a denarius a day to support a laborer and their family at the level of bare subsistence. A denarius a day is not that generous. It's not as if this employer is throwing around money. The story has little to say about wages. It is mainly concerned with the comings and goings of the owner of the vineyard.
He goes out in the early morning and hires workers for the day and that ought to be it. But to our surprise, barely three hours later, he's back again. And then again at noon. And then again and again. We wonder why that owner of the vineyard was so bound, bent, and determined to hire everybody off the streets whom he could lay his hands on. Were his grapes already overripe? Did he know it was going to rain and the harvest might be ruined? Did he have a soft spot in his heart for the unemployed?
We don't know. The story doesn't say. All that it says, and with great detail, is that this particular grape farmer expended a great deal of gasoline going back and forth from his vineyard to town, picking up anybody off the street who would consent to go work for "what's right."
Well, what's right? For us, justice is a matter of giving people what they are worth. Let's see, you worked longer so you should get more. You stayed in school all the way through your BA, your MA and your Ph.D. You should get more. You have a higher IQ so it's only right that you should get more. That's justice for us.
But in the story, justice is determined, not by "what is right". No, it is the owner's repeated, relentless desire for laborers, for workers in the vineyard. It isn't that a denarius is all that generous. The generosity is in the owner's repeated, unrelenting call to come into his vineyard. The generosity is not in the transaction, but in the invitation. He just wouldn't quit going back and forth into town. He just wouldn't stop calling, wouldn't stop hiring, inviting, seeking, offering.
Here is a realm which is not structured on what we deserve, what's fair, what's earned. We may structure our realms that way, or at least we attempt to do so. Our statue of "Justice" over the courthouse door is a blindfolded woman with scales. Blind, dispassionate, impartiality and balanced objectivity. That's what we call “right”. But God's right is not our right. Persistent, intrusive invitation, not dispassionate justice, is the way God's realm is structured.
And of course because this is a vision of what the realm of heaven is like, it’s not just about what God is like with us, it is about who the church should be in the world. B. Rod Doyle calls the realm of God a world where “comfortable expectations are withdrawn, and the unexpected prevails.” Jesus helps those who were called first – the disciples – to comprehend the world into which they have been invited, and then to join him in inviting the last ones – the sick, the poor, the latecomers, the unimportant.
If our way of being in the world is invitational, first and foremost, then we resist and reject any notion that people have worth based on abilities, or station in life, or status, or socio economic condition, or cognitive capacity, or any other measure we like to use.
But here’s the catch when we choose invitation-based community over transactional community: it can be hard on the “firsts” in this world…hard on the ones who would normally be worth the most. Those who have been here longest, contributed the most, set the rules, served on committees, cleaned the kitchen, cooked the meals – in a transactional community, the ones who put in the most – the most time, money, energy, wisdom – they are the ones who get called, “the church.” In an invitational community, new people with different ideas and values and ways of doing things are just as much a part of the community as the ones who have been here since the break of day working in the field from moment one. And that changes the rules of community. And it can be hard, and it requires a spirit of generosity on the part of the first comers.
In my experience, this is an invitational community. This community is generous in loving people, inviting people, making people feel from day one that this is as much their church homes as those who have been here for decades. What a gift! What an alternative to the transactional world we experience day in and day out. Can we do better? Sure. We’re not yet the perfect realm of God. But we do pretty darn well, and for that I give thanks to God. Amen.
September 18, 2011
Okay – I know this is a geeky pastor thing, but recently I was asked to write about my best guess of what the realm of God looks like. Actually, that’s not quite right. I was asked to write about the five things in our world today that look least like the realm of God. “Five worst things,” I called the Microsoft Word document.
The first heading in my “Five worst things,” was: “transactional.”
We assign value to things; all things. This includes people, labor, good deeds, apologies, gratitude…and then our interactions with each other are transactional – exchanges based on trying to swap things of equal value. I give you something and you give me something we have agreed is of equal worth. It goes to our fundamental sense of and need for justice. Most simply we might think of things like buying food at a grocery store, or paying someone for their work. But our culture of transactions runs so much deeper. We make moral transactions too.
I serve you food in the soup kitchen, you “owe” me a “thank you.” You wronged me, you “owe” me an apology. You bombed us, we owe you a proportional response. We even use transactional analysis to decide whether people are worthy of help. We see charity as having a value and then decide if a person is worthy of that charity – do they make good enough decisions in their lives, are they sympathetic enough, are they grateful enough, have they filled out the right paper work, waited in the line long enough, paid their debts to society?
“The realm of heaven is like a landowner,” the parable begins. And this is not like any landowner or farmer we know. This man goes out into the marketplace early in the morning and hires some workers, agreeing to pay them one denarius a day. They go to work in his vineyard.
Mid-morning, he looks over his vineyard and sees that more workers will be needed if the job is to be done, so he goes back into the marketplace where he encounters some people still standing around whom no one has hired. Even though a third of the day is over, he asks them to go to work for him, telling them that he will pay them what's right.
At noon, when he goes back downtown, he sees some guys hanging out on the street corner, and invites them to come to work in his vineyard, telling them that he will pay them what's right.
At three in the afternoon, he's back downtown where he spies a couple of young men with nothing to do and, even though the sun is beginning to move toward the far west, what the heck?....he hires them, promising to pay them what's right.
Finally, at five p.m., he goes back to town one more time. Now, there's almost no one left loitering on the street corner. After all, the day is almost over. But there are two slackers, leaning up against the wall of the unemployment office sharing a bottle of Diet Pepsi. Even though it's only one hour before quitting time, he hires them as well.
If you're keeping score, by the end of the day we have different groups of workers in the vineyard who have been there for twelve hours, for nine hours, for six, three, and only one hour.
Now, they will be paid. If you will recall, a wage was agreed upon only for those who got there first. A denarius. But this strange employer pays those who got there last, first. To everyone's amazement, he pays those who have only worked one hour a denarius. So that means that those who have worked for twelve hours, sweating in the vines all day long, will probably get....twelve denarii. Right?
No, they get what they agreed to work for, one denarius. There are murmurings of injustice. Is this any way to run a vineyard? No, they are told, the injustice is only apparent. You agreed to work for a denarius. You have been given a denarius.
This parable upsets any notion of a transactional world, at least as we know it – where the goal is equal, fair exchange of work, goods and services. Things do have value in the parable. A day’s work does have an agreed upon wage. But that’s not what the transaction is about. We see that the value lies not in the labor or the work of the person in exchange for the wage. The value lies – it always lies – in the simple fact that someone is a human being. And people are paid according to their need, not their worth. That is a big difference.
We like to reward hard work, innovation, intelligence. We don’t like to reward need. We’re afraid of that. We think it breeds complacency, dependency, laziness. Also, it’s just plain not fair to those of us who are hard workers, innovative, intelligent.
But the problem in a transactional world is that the end game is always assigning worth, and the gospel resists at every turn any system that deems some more worthy than others. It resists gradations of righteousness or value in people. Not only does it resist such things, it turns them on their head. The last is first, first is last, and all that. This is not a transactional world – this realm of heaven.
After writing my “five worst things,” the next assignment was to move from a negative vision – what’s wrong with this world – to a positive one. In other words, what is the antidote to a transactional world? I realized, when reading this parable, that it’s not so much a matter of finding the opposite of transactional, like some kind of gospel version of communism. Rather it’s finding a different starting point. And when we look again at this passage, we see that the alternative to a world that is transactional is a world that is invitational.
Set aside for a minute the focus on what people did and didn’t get paid – and whether it’s fair, or what they need, or what they deserve. Look instead at the movements of the landowner. Play this story in your head…how does the landowner spend his day? Going back and forth to the market place to get people and bring them to his vineyard. The realm of heaven is like a landowner who goes again and again and again and again and brings people into a place where they are provided for, and cared for, regardless of who they are, how long they have been standing around, what they do with their time or money or life.
And all are invited without condition. The best, strongest, workers. The lazy ones. The ones who can’t do the work. The old, young, righteous, sinister, ill, healed, lonely. The positive vision lies in this going again and again and again to find people and bring them in.
Really, that’s the most startling thing about this story when you think about the behavior of landowner – not what the workers get paid at the end. After all, a denarius a day is not all that great a wage to begin with. While nobody knows the precise value of a denarius, we do know that it took about a denarius a day to support a laborer and their family at the level of bare subsistence. A denarius a day is not that generous. It's not as if this employer is throwing around money. The story has little to say about wages. It is mainly concerned with the comings and goings of the owner of the vineyard.
He goes out in the early morning and hires workers for the day and that ought to be it. But to our surprise, barely three hours later, he's back again. And then again at noon. And then again and again. We wonder why that owner of the vineyard was so bound, bent, and determined to hire everybody off the streets whom he could lay his hands on. Were his grapes already overripe? Did he know it was going to rain and the harvest might be ruined? Did he have a soft spot in his heart for the unemployed?
We don't know. The story doesn't say. All that it says, and with great detail, is that this particular grape farmer expended a great deal of gasoline going back and forth from his vineyard to town, picking up anybody off the street who would consent to go work for "what's right."
Well, what's right? For us, justice is a matter of giving people what they are worth. Let's see, you worked longer so you should get more. You stayed in school all the way through your BA, your MA and your Ph.D. You should get more. You have a higher IQ so it's only right that you should get more. That's justice for us.
But in the story, justice is determined, not by "what is right". No, it is the owner's repeated, relentless desire for laborers, for workers in the vineyard. It isn't that a denarius is all that generous. The generosity is in the owner's repeated, unrelenting call to come into his vineyard. The generosity is not in the transaction, but in the invitation. He just wouldn't quit going back and forth into town. He just wouldn't stop calling, wouldn't stop hiring, inviting, seeking, offering.
Here is a realm which is not structured on what we deserve, what's fair, what's earned. We may structure our realms that way, or at least we attempt to do so. Our statue of "Justice" over the courthouse door is a blindfolded woman with scales. Blind, dispassionate, impartiality and balanced objectivity. That's what we call “right”. But God's right is not our right. Persistent, intrusive invitation, not dispassionate justice, is the way God's realm is structured.
And of course because this is a vision of what the realm of heaven is like, it’s not just about what God is like with us, it is about who the church should be in the world. B. Rod Doyle calls the realm of God a world where “comfortable expectations are withdrawn, and the unexpected prevails.” Jesus helps those who were called first – the disciples – to comprehend the world into which they have been invited, and then to join him in inviting the last ones – the sick, the poor, the latecomers, the unimportant.
If our way of being in the world is invitational, first and foremost, then we resist and reject any notion that people have worth based on abilities, or station in life, or status, or socio economic condition, or cognitive capacity, or any other measure we like to use.
But here’s the catch when we choose invitation-based community over transactional community: it can be hard on the “firsts” in this world…hard on the ones who would normally be worth the most. Those who have been here longest, contributed the most, set the rules, served on committees, cleaned the kitchen, cooked the meals – in a transactional community, the ones who put in the most – the most time, money, energy, wisdom – they are the ones who get called, “the church.” In an invitational community, new people with different ideas and values and ways of doing things are just as much a part of the community as the ones who have been here since the break of day working in the field from moment one. And that changes the rules of community. And it can be hard, and it requires a spirit of generosity on the part of the first comers.
In my experience, this is an invitational community. This community is generous in loving people, inviting people, making people feel from day one that this is as much their church homes as those who have been here for decades. What a gift! What an alternative to the transactional world we experience day in and day out. Can we do better? Sure. We’re not yet the perfect realm of God. But we do pretty darn well, and for that I give thanks to God. Amen.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Accountability and Forgiveness: Part II
Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:15-20
September 11, 2011
I first looked at the text assigned for this Sunday about two months ago. Ever since, I’ve been asking myself, “What do you say about forgiveness on the 10th anniversary of September 11th?” The juxtaposition, while I know it’s not possible that it was intentional, seems provocative. At the very least, to talk about forgiveness this morning is to certainly come up against some of the most complicated aspects of forgiveness: a concept that plays a starring role in pretty much every world religion.
Last week I began a two part series on forgiveness and accountability. I said these two things should never be talked about separately. Forgiveness without accountability is empty and can lead people to tolerate abuse and injustice in the name of being a good Jew, or Christian, or Buddhist or whatever. And accountability without forgiveness becomes rigid legalism void of empathy and compassion.
Last week’s passage from Matthew was about how the Christian community should respond when someone has done something to hurt another person or the community. We looked at how, in a church community, we can hold one another accountable only if we remember that the goal is always reconciliation and forgiveness. But, for the sake of that discussion, we set aside dealing with the most egregious and heinous sins people commit, recognizing that such things need a discussion all their own.
September 11th reminds us that there are some actions which can make forgiveness seem, if not impossible, then inadequate. As we remember those who died in that attack, as we remember the families, friends, and colleagues that still grieve, as the terrible images of the day reappear in our minds’ eye, is it even appropriate to talk about forgiveness? Is it even appropriate to talk about what it might look like for us to forgive such a thing when most, if not all, of us were not directly affected? Do we have the right to forgive? Who exactly are we forgiving and to what end?
I read a book a few months ago called, “The Sunflower.” Simon Wiesenthal wrote this book as an attempt to work through issues of repentance, forgiveness, and justice in light of his experiences as a Jew who lived in the concentration camps of Nazi, Germany. Wiesenthal begins his book describing what happened to him during his time of living hell in the camps. We know the stories, and they horrify us.
He then describes the events of one day, when he and other prisoners had been taken to a hospital to work. One of the patients in the hospital was an SS guard, named Karl, who was within hours of dying. Karl asked a nurse to bring a Jew to his room – any Jew. Wiesenthal was selected randomly from the group. He was led to the guard’s room. The guard then proceeded to describe to Wiesenthal his participation in a great atrocity; he told Wiesenthal about standing by, watching, doing nothing while local Nazis locked hundreds of Jews, including children, in a house, and then set the house on fire.
The man was obviously, by Wiesenthal’s account, tormented by his actions. He expressed sincere remorse. He was facing death, he was Christian, and he was looking for absolution. He believed it was the right, moral, thing to do to ask a Jew for this absolution since it was Jews he so egregiously wronged. He asked Wiesenthal, as a Jew standing in for those who lost their lives, to offer him forgiveness before he died. Wiesenthal was unable to do so.
The questions raised by this terrible, real, and thought provoking experience are numerous, to say the least: What is the relationship between justice and forgiveness? Who has a right to ask for forgiveness? Who has the right to forgive? What is required before someone can be forgiven? Are there some things that can never be forgiven?
This experience haunted Wiesenthal for years and years. After he wrote his book describing his experiences in Nazi Germany and the event with the SS guard, he sent the manuscript to over 50 people asking them the same question: “What would you have done?” Then he published the whole thing with their responses. These people are well known ethicists, religious leaders, theologians, justice workers, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, people from countries all over the world. People like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Dorothee Soelle, Martin Marty.
One thing that is clear from reading this book, or even just contemplating scenarios like this, is that forgiveness seems infinitely complicated. There was widespread agreement among the writers that the Nazi committed another sin by even asking Wiesenthal for forgiveness – he was totally unaware of how unfair and unjust is request was. But beyond this agreement, each author had a different take, different and conflicting thoughts, different answers.
“If God chooses to forgive Karl,” Henry Cargas writes, “that’s God’s affair. Simon Wiesenthal could not; I cannot. For me Karl dies unforgiven.”
“The question of whether there is a limit to forgiveness,” writes Cardinal Franz Konig, “has been emphatically answered by Christ in the negative.”
And Harold Kushner writes, “I’m not sure there is such a thing as forgiving another person, though I know there’s such a thing as being forgiven.”
Given the extreme nature of Wiesenthal’s experience, it shouldn’t surprise us that the answers were so different. But even in less extreme situations, many of us have experienced the complexities of forgiveness, even as we believe forgiveness to be a basic Christian virtue we are morally obligated to practice.
And our passage from Matthew today doesn’t necessarily simplify things much. It is packed full of hyperbole – extreme exaggeration – which alone makes it difficult to know exactly how to apply it to complicated situations in our lives. Jesus first says forgive not just as much as the religious law requires, but more times than you can imagine forgiving. Seven is the number for everything, infinite, complete, whole. Seventy-seven times means countless, no end in sight.
Then he tells a parable in which he indicates that you should not only forgive someone over and over and over, even though presumably they are repeating the same offense, he says you should forgive the huge things – things beyond our imagination. In the first example, where the ruler was owed money by a slave, the amount owed is so big it is clearly meant to symbolize an unforgiveable amount. One talent is the equivalent of 15 years wages for the typical laborer of that day. And here we’re talking about 10,000 talents: 150,000 year’s wages. This was a debt the slave would never be able to accrue, much less pay off. It’s a metaphor for debt to large to imagine.
If we take this exaggerated situation as an allegory, the debt represents the biggest deepest darkest sins, and God, represented by the ruler, forgives even those. As the parable goes on, we are shown that since God forgives all of our sins, we are to forgive others theirs as well.
But this parable, this allegory, leaves us with more questions than answers. The disparity in the size of the two debts might mean that we are to forgive lesser things, but not required to forgive the unimaginable – only God can do that. We might wonder if debts are, in fact, analogous to sins.
As one person in our Friday noon bible study pointed out, maybe the whole message of this passage is less about how we should forgive sins and more about the impossibility of forgiveness when the system itself is so broken: slaves indebted to masters and one another with debts they could never pay off in a system that didn’t allow them fair wages, that exploited them, and they had no control or ability to change the system. Maybe this is Jesus excoriating those who benefit from the economic system of his day.
And of course there’s the disturbing end of this passage, which confronts us with a difficult question: Will God forgive us if we don’t forgive another person – no matter what the offense? Is not forgiving the unforgiveable sin? These aren’t easy things to figure out.
This parable doesn’t seem to begin to answer something like Wiesenthal’s question, or the question of forgiveness in the face of something like 9/11. Read all by itself, we might think the moral imperative in this passage is to forgive anything anytime, no matter what. But in the face of some things, that just doesn’t work. Or, if we make the mistake of reading this passage in a vacuum, without seeing it in the context of the whole gospel, or bible or that matter, we run the risk of concluding the God of love is also the God who tortures those who fall short of an ideal.
To answer the complicated questions, we have to draw on far more than just one passage in the bible. We have to remind ourselves yet again that this passage sits in the midst of passages that are constantly balancing accountability and forgiveness, and ultimately sits in an entire chapter devoted to the idea that reconciliation should be a relentless, never-ending pursuit of Christians. And this is all based on God’s relentless, never ending grace offered to us.
Can we forgive September 11th? Should we? No one is really asking, are they? What does forgiveness even look like, or feel like? Certainly in this case, offering any kind of forgiveness without accountability is inadequate, if not immoral. But forgiveness must enter in if we take the bible seriously – and I think the place it enters in is in how we hold people accountable. Or more precisely in why we hold people accountable…what is the goal?
It seems to me a spirit of forgiveness – relentless forgiveness – shifts the goal of holding people accountable from vengeance to reconciliation. And this shift affects our decisions and actions. We hold people accountable for their actions, but not to punish them. Rather we hold people accountable to offer a path to reconciliation, which is an act of extreme generosity – in some cases certainly generosity beyond what someone deserves by any equation of moral accounting. This may not work – reconciliation cannot be one sided. If someone is not willing to walk the path with us, to take responsibility, feel remorse, change their ways, convert their hearts, they continue to thwart reconciliation. Forgiveness is sometimes not possible, even if we are willing to go that route. But offering it is always possible.
I honestly don’t know how I would answer Wiesenthal’s question – I’m not sure I have the right to given my experiences don’t even approach the reality he endured. But as a Christian I do need to contemplate the limits of forgiveness. And such contemplation yields some bottom lines for me:
First, we live as forgiven people. God forgives beyond what we can imagine, beyond what we deserve;
Second, because we’re forgiven, we’re asked to mediate that same grace to others – to forgive past any limit we might try to lay down. We’re asked to offer paths to reconciliation that include loving accountability, even when reconciliation is the last thing we want with someone;
Finally, we’re asked to resist vengeance in any form and witness to another way – not of cheap grace, but also not punishment for its own sake.
In response to Wiesenthal, Martin Marty, a Christian ethicist, writes, “I am in search of grace in this world. We have to see potentials in the lives of even the worst people, and we have to see that it is we who can dam the flow of grace.”
So on this Sunday, I find myself reflecting not just on September 11, 2001, but also on the days, weeks, months and years following that. In response to the attacks, we saw, I think, the best of humanity, and the worst. Compassion for those most affected by the terrorist attack gave way to a spirit of vengeance. Any notion of accountability turned to punishment, revenge, torture, war.
We made decisions not in an effort to allow for some future reconciliation, but to assuage our anger, hurt, pain and indignity. It’s totally understandable. How can we ask people to do anything different when their pain is so huge and so appropriate? Yet it seems we are asked to take a different route – a hard one, a counter-intuitive one, a more complicated one – one that balances accountability and forgiveness, and one that is infused with a relentless pursuit of grace and reconciliation in this world. Amen.
September 11, 2011
I first looked at the text assigned for this Sunday about two months ago. Ever since, I’ve been asking myself, “What do you say about forgiveness on the 10th anniversary of September 11th?” The juxtaposition, while I know it’s not possible that it was intentional, seems provocative. At the very least, to talk about forgiveness this morning is to certainly come up against some of the most complicated aspects of forgiveness: a concept that plays a starring role in pretty much every world religion.
Last week I began a two part series on forgiveness and accountability. I said these two things should never be talked about separately. Forgiveness without accountability is empty and can lead people to tolerate abuse and injustice in the name of being a good Jew, or Christian, or Buddhist or whatever. And accountability without forgiveness becomes rigid legalism void of empathy and compassion.
Last week’s passage from Matthew was about how the Christian community should respond when someone has done something to hurt another person or the community. We looked at how, in a church community, we can hold one another accountable only if we remember that the goal is always reconciliation and forgiveness. But, for the sake of that discussion, we set aside dealing with the most egregious and heinous sins people commit, recognizing that such things need a discussion all their own.
September 11th reminds us that there are some actions which can make forgiveness seem, if not impossible, then inadequate. As we remember those who died in that attack, as we remember the families, friends, and colleagues that still grieve, as the terrible images of the day reappear in our minds’ eye, is it even appropriate to talk about forgiveness? Is it even appropriate to talk about what it might look like for us to forgive such a thing when most, if not all, of us were not directly affected? Do we have the right to forgive? Who exactly are we forgiving and to what end?
I read a book a few months ago called, “The Sunflower.” Simon Wiesenthal wrote this book as an attempt to work through issues of repentance, forgiveness, and justice in light of his experiences as a Jew who lived in the concentration camps of Nazi, Germany. Wiesenthal begins his book describing what happened to him during his time of living hell in the camps. We know the stories, and they horrify us.
He then describes the events of one day, when he and other prisoners had been taken to a hospital to work. One of the patients in the hospital was an SS guard, named Karl, who was within hours of dying. Karl asked a nurse to bring a Jew to his room – any Jew. Wiesenthal was selected randomly from the group. He was led to the guard’s room. The guard then proceeded to describe to Wiesenthal his participation in a great atrocity; he told Wiesenthal about standing by, watching, doing nothing while local Nazis locked hundreds of Jews, including children, in a house, and then set the house on fire.
The man was obviously, by Wiesenthal’s account, tormented by his actions. He expressed sincere remorse. He was facing death, he was Christian, and he was looking for absolution. He believed it was the right, moral, thing to do to ask a Jew for this absolution since it was Jews he so egregiously wronged. He asked Wiesenthal, as a Jew standing in for those who lost their lives, to offer him forgiveness before he died. Wiesenthal was unable to do so.
The questions raised by this terrible, real, and thought provoking experience are numerous, to say the least: What is the relationship between justice and forgiveness? Who has a right to ask for forgiveness? Who has the right to forgive? What is required before someone can be forgiven? Are there some things that can never be forgiven?
This experience haunted Wiesenthal for years and years. After he wrote his book describing his experiences in Nazi Germany and the event with the SS guard, he sent the manuscript to over 50 people asking them the same question: “What would you have done?” Then he published the whole thing with their responses. These people are well known ethicists, religious leaders, theologians, justice workers, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, people from countries all over the world. People like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Dorothee Soelle, Martin Marty.
One thing that is clear from reading this book, or even just contemplating scenarios like this, is that forgiveness seems infinitely complicated. There was widespread agreement among the writers that the Nazi committed another sin by even asking Wiesenthal for forgiveness – he was totally unaware of how unfair and unjust is request was. But beyond this agreement, each author had a different take, different and conflicting thoughts, different answers.
“If God chooses to forgive Karl,” Henry Cargas writes, “that’s God’s affair. Simon Wiesenthal could not; I cannot. For me Karl dies unforgiven.”
“The question of whether there is a limit to forgiveness,” writes Cardinal Franz Konig, “has been emphatically answered by Christ in the negative.”
And Harold Kushner writes, “I’m not sure there is such a thing as forgiving another person, though I know there’s such a thing as being forgiven.”
Given the extreme nature of Wiesenthal’s experience, it shouldn’t surprise us that the answers were so different. But even in less extreme situations, many of us have experienced the complexities of forgiveness, even as we believe forgiveness to be a basic Christian virtue we are morally obligated to practice.
And our passage from Matthew today doesn’t necessarily simplify things much. It is packed full of hyperbole – extreme exaggeration – which alone makes it difficult to know exactly how to apply it to complicated situations in our lives. Jesus first says forgive not just as much as the religious law requires, but more times than you can imagine forgiving. Seven is the number for everything, infinite, complete, whole. Seventy-seven times means countless, no end in sight.
Then he tells a parable in which he indicates that you should not only forgive someone over and over and over, even though presumably they are repeating the same offense, he says you should forgive the huge things – things beyond our imagination. In the first example, where the ruler was owed money by a slave, the amount owed is so big it is clearly meant to symbolize an unforgiveable amount. One talent is the equivalent of 15 years wages for the typical laborer of that day. And here we’re talking about 10,000 talents: 150,000 year’s wages. This was a debt the slave would never be able to accrue, much less pay off. It’s a metaphor for debt to large to imagine.
If we take this exaggerated situation as an allegory, the debt represents the biggest deepest darkest sins, and God, represented by the ruler, forgives even those. As the parable goes on, we are shown that since God forgives all of our sins, we are to forgive others theirs as well.
But this parable, this allegory, leaves us with more questions than answers. The disparity in the size of the two debts might mean that we are to forgive lesser things, but not required to forgive the unimaginable – only God can do that. We might wonder if debts are, in fact, analogous to sins.
As one person in our Friday noon bible study pointed out, maybe the whole message of this passage is less about how we should forgive sins and more about the impossibility of forgiveness when the system itself is so broken: slaves indebted to masters and one another with debts they could never pay off in a system that didn’t allow them fair wages, that exploited them, and they had no control or ability to change the system. Maybe this is Jesus excoriating those who benefit from the economic system of his day.
And of course there’s the disturbing end of this passage, which confronts us with a difficult question: Will God forgive us if we don’t forgive another person – no matter what the offense? Is not forgiving the unforgiveable sin? These aren’t easy things to figure out.
This parable doesn’t seem to begin to answer something like Wiesenthal’s question, or the question of forgiveness in the face of something like 9/11. Read all by itself, we might think the moral imperative in this passage is to forgive anything anytime, no matter what. But in the face of some things, that just doesn’t work. Or, if we make the mistake of reading this passage in a vacuum, without seeing it in the context of the whole gospel, or bible or that matter, we run the risk of concluding the God of love is also the God who tortures those who fall short of an ideal.
To answer the complicated questions, we have to draw on far more than just one passage in the bible. We have to remind ourselves yet again that this passage sits in the midst of passages that are constantly balancing accountability and forgiveness, and ultimately sits in an entire chapter devoted to the idea that reconciliation should be a relentless, never-ending pursuit of Christians. And this is all based on God’s relentless, never ending grace offered to us.
Can we forgive September 11th? Should we? No one is really asking, are they? What does forgiveness even look like, or feel like? Certainly in this case, offering any kind of forgiveness without accountability is inadequate, if not immoral. But forgiveness must enter in if we take the bible seriously – and I think the place it enters in is in how we hold people accountable. Or more precisely in why we hold people accountable…what is the goal?
It seems to me a spirit of forgiveness – relentless forgiveness – shifts the goal of holding people accountable from vengeance to reconciliation. And this shift affects our decisions and actions. We hold people accountable for their actions, but not to punish them. Rather we hold people accountable to offer a path to reconciliation, which is an act of extreme generosity – in some cases certainly generosity beyond what someone deserves by any equation of moral accounting. This may not work – reconciliation cannot be one sided. If someone is not willing to walk the path with us, to take responsibility, feel remorse, change their ways, convert their hearts, they continue to thwart reconciliation. Forgiveness is sometimes not possible, even if we are willing to go that route. But offering it is always possible.
I honestly don’t know how I would answer Wiesenthal’s question – I’m not sure I have the right to given my experiences don’t even approach the reality he endured. But as a Christian I do need to contemplate the limits of forgiveness. And such contemplation yields some bottom lines for me:
First, we live as forgiven people. God forgives beyond what we can imagine, beyond what we deserve;
Second, because we’re forgiven, we’re asked to mediate that same grace to others – to forgive past any limit we might try to lay down. We’re asked to offer paths to reconciliation that include loving accountability, even when reconciliation is the last thing we want with someone;
Finally, we’re asked to resist vengeance in any form and witness to another way – not of cheap grace, but also not punishment for its own sake.
In response to Wiesenthal, Martin Marty, a Christian ethicist, writes, “I am in search of grace in this world. We have to see potentials in the lives of even the worst people, and we have to see that it is we who can dam the flow of grace.”
So on this Sunday, I find myself reflecting not just on September 11, 2001, but also on the days, weeks, months and years following that. In response to the attacks, we saw, I think, the best of humanity, and the worst. Compassion for those most affected by the terrorist attack gave way to a spirit of vengeance. Any notion of accountability turned to punishment, revenge, torture, war.
We made decisions not in an effort to allow for some future reconciliation, but to assuage our anger, hurt, pain and indignity. It’s totally understandable. How can we ask people to do anything different when their pain is so huge and so appropriate? Yet it seems we are asked to take a different route – a hard one, a counter-intuitive one, a more complicated one – one that balances accountability and forgiveness, and one that is infused with a relentless pursuit of grace and reconciliation in this world. Amen.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Accountability and Forgiveness: Part I
Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20
September 4, 2011
The passages from the gospel of Matthew this week and next deal with two very related subjects: accountability and forgiveness. Today we are given a model for how to respond when you feel wronged by someone, and next week Jesus will answer the question, “How many times should I forgive someone?” One way to look at this is to say that the first passage is about how to hold one another accountable and the next passage is about forgiving people. But, that would be a misreading. Given that these two passages are only separated by our lectionary – not in the text itself – we must assume they are both about accountability and forgiveness together.
Which makes sense, because any discussion of one without the other is an inadequate discussion to say the least. Forgiveness without accountability is not only empty, it leads to terrible outcomes. It can encourage, for example, people to stay in abusive relationships – forgiving each abuse without requiring the abuser to change their ways, because it’s the Christian thing to do.
Accountability without forgiveness leads to rigid legalism and a world without empathy or compassion for the human condition. It is the birth of grudges and bitterness, and often when accountability without forgiveness is practiced, it is full of misuses of power.
So, while it might be nice and neat, I am not going to talk about accountability this week and forgiveness next week. Instead, lucky you, you are going to get two sermons on accountability and forgiveness: This week will be about how a community of people – i.e. the church – should function when someone has acted in a hurtful way. Next week we will look at accountability and forgiveness in cases where forgiveness seems out of reach and maybe even unjustified.
So this week – how Christians should deal with sins, hurts and disagreements within the community of the faithful. Now, when I say “sin,” I don’t mean murder or rape – that’s next week. But neither do I mean disagreements over the color of carpets in church sanctuaries. When Matthew takes up the issues of accountability and forgiveness within the church, he is looking at cases where something has been done or happened that truly threatens to tear at the fabric of the community in question. He addresses situations that might lead to divisions in the church – even to people leaving the community. And such things do arise within churches – ours and others. It’s pretty much a universal reality. There are disagreements about how to use resources, disagreements about what the faithful course of action is. At times we feel betrayed by someone. And, at times, usually inadvertently, we hurt one another.
Matthew, through the voice of Jesus, is recommending to the church community a process for settling such things. When you feel someone has wronged you, he says, you first go to that person and see if you can settle things between you. If that doesn’t work, the two of you go to one or two other people – a neutral third party to settle things. Finally, if that doesn’t work, then the whole church community is to be consulted.
I know this is going to come as a huge shock to you – community is hard. True community. Community that goes beyond surface level. Community that really tries to be honest, faithful, deep, and whole – is at times really hard. We all say we want community, but we rarely talk out loud about how hard it is.
One of the things that plagues most Christian communities (and other communities no doubt) is the inability to handle confrontation, disagreement and our mutual accountability when it comes to sin or hurt or disagreement. And this is because all of us are sinners. Pointing out hurtful behavior in another is really hard because it’s almost always on some level hypocritical. We have all hurt others. We’ve all made mistakes. What gives us the right to point out the speak in someone’s eye when we have logs in our own. Being honest about difficult things also makes us vulnerable to the same treatment…if we’re going to hold others accountable for their actions, then we have to expect the same – and this is scary. Often our preference is to abide by an unspoken pact: If I don’t point out your shortcomings, then you don’t point out mine.
This passage is about how to be in community even though we all are human – all sinners. So, how do sinners confront one another? How do we hold each other accountable? How do we practice forgiveness when people get hurt and when we encounter destructive behavior?
I think this passage gives us four principles we can follow: Be honest, be humble, get help, and forgive.
First, gather your courage and try being honest. Even though it’s hard, even though it’s probably hypocritical, even though it makes us vulnerable, we still need to do it. Because, as Matthew knows, to not do this means a community is un-reconciled – silence in the face of disagreements either leads to divisions sustained by bitterness, to a lack of intimacy and closeness, or to outright fracture and dissolution of relationships. It does take courage to go to someone who hurt you and tell them so. Of course it does. But if we really do want community – Christian community that reflects the realm of God, then we have to take the risk and be honest with one another.
Second, if you are going to be honest – if you are going to confront someone – be humble. Issues of disagreement and wrongdoing are rarely cut and dried. Yes, there are some obvious cases of evil in this world. But, most of the time, though we might think someone is responsible for their actions of wrongdoing, it almost always “takes two to tango,” so to speak. Nuance matters.
We can never approach another without remembering that we too are sinners. We have likely done the exact thing we accuse another of. And, if someone has hurt us, there is a fair chance that we are not entirely blameless. Humility is essential.
Even when we have courage and are honest, and even if we’re humble, the third important principle is that the community helps. This passage is less about the two parties involved in the dispute and more about how a community should function together. It’s about helping one another work through really hard and complicated things that come up when we are in relationship with one another – so that we might be reconciled to one another, not separated.
Each step of the process for Matthew brings in more people from the community. When the two people involved can’t agree, they turn to others as witnesses – not of the original wrongdoing – but of the process. The witnesses we’re talking about can’t adjudicate the offense – they weren’t witnesses of that. Instead, they are witnesses to the process. By witnessing the process between the two people, they help guide them to reconciliation rather than division.
The bottom line is: When we can’t agree – we often need help sorting it out because things are complicated – rarely black and white. And in the church, we get help sorting it out using God’s love and grace as the model – which brings us to the fourth principle: When we’re honest, when we’re humble and when the community helps shepherd the process, the goal – the end result – is forgiveness and reconciliation.
Reconciliation is the basis and priority of this whole passage. In the first interaction between the two parties, we see that the point is to win back a brother or sister…to become reconciled to our fellow Christians in community. That’s the goal…that’s the goal all along. This comes right after the parable of the lost sheep – the parable that says you never give up on keeping people in your community. And it comes right before Jesus says you should forgive someone 490 times. This is not just about accountability, but about forgiveness as well.
Sadly this passage has been used as a literal model for a process that leads to ex-communication for recalcitrant members. I have seen this happen first hand with devastating effects. We don’t even have to go outside this passage to realize it’s not about excommunication of people who just won’t admit what they did was wrong. We need only look at the brilliant, possibly humorous twist at the end of the instructions: the very last thing Jesus says is that if the person who you believe wronged you does not give in, treat them as a gentile or tax collector…and we all know how Jesus treated tax collectors and gentiles – heck, we know Matthew was a tax collector. So this is not a play-by-play for excommunication. When all is said and done, Jesus says, “When you have tried, when the small group has tried, when the whole church has tried, and someone still doesn’t get it, still doesn’t admit it or apologize, love them anyway – even if you don’t want to. Forgive.
It’s radical, actually, to believe so strongly in reconciliation. Remembering that we aren’t talking about egregious things, prioritizing reconciliation over being right, being affirmed, being justified, is pretty hard for most of us. Our instinct is to sever ties or distance ourselves from someone when we get hurt or when someone disagrees with us and won’t back down. When our pride has been dented, we don’t feel particularly compelled to reach out to the one who dented it and invite them back into community. But that’s what Jesus did and that’s what we are called to do. It’s not always possible – sometimes it’s more hurtful to try to stay together than to separate. But, reconciliation should always be the ideal – the goal.
This passage ends with some powerful statements about communities that follow these principles. Jesus follows all this with talk about the power of agreement, saying that anything that is agreed upon by two on earth will be done for them by God in heaven. But notice that this is not where Jesus ends. Jesus says, "where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them." There is no question of agreement at this point. Christ is present, really present, where two or three are gathered in the Divine Name, not just where two or three agree in Jesus' name, but where two are three are gathered; presumably this includes the two who cannot listen to each other about a matter of sin, and how to handle it. Even there, perhaps especially there, Christ is present.
When we come to this table, when we gather together around this table – we come as sinners, we come as people who have at times hurt one another, disagreed… we come as an imperfect community. But we gather, and so we meet Christ…and that encounter compels us to allow the divisions to fall away and leave only our oneness is Christ. The bread is broken to symbolize how we approach the table, but we share one loaf, a common cup, to symbolize that in Christ we are made whole – not just as individuals, but as a community. Then, assured of that wholeness, we can, with great humility and the help of the community, be honest with each other in ways that deepen our relationships, deepen our faith and bind us ever more closely in the love and grace of God. Amen.
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