“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.”
Years
ago, a large statue of Christ was erected high in the Andes on the
border between Argentina and Chile. Called "Christ of the
Andes," the statue symbolizes a pledge between the two countries
that as long as the statue stands, there will be peace between Chile
and Argentina. Shortly after the statue was erected, the Chileans
began to protest that they had been slighted -- the statue had its
back turned to Chile. Just when tempers were at their highest in
Chile, a Chilean newspaperman saved the day. In an editorial that not
only satisfied the people but made them laugh, he simply said, "The
people of Argentina need more watching over than the Chileans.”
Arguments.
They are a part of life. We are humans and we will inevitably rub
each other the wrong way at times and end up in a disagreement. It
happens in families, at school, work...and yes, even in church. But
today's scriptures give us a blueprint on how to get along. The
challenge is following the plan!
This
lesson from Matthew is, first and foremost, about how we live as
Christians in community
with
one another, particularly when someone from our community has sinned
against us or wronged us in some way.
Most
people, when they hear the word “sin,” think about things they
have personally done that are wrong. That is because we think in
terms of me, myself, and I: My personal relationship
with Jesus, My desires, my needs, my
values, My sin as a private matter between ME and GOD
In
this way of thinking, sin involves only individual confession: I
confess my sin, God forgives me, and I am saved and can move on.
Jesus strikes at the very heart of our individualism when he says we
are wrong about this. He says that if we are one of his followers,
then it can no longer be all about ME; because the moment that we
enter in to his fellowship, our lives change, and it becomes all
about US. Remember he taught us to pray OUR
Father,
not MY
father.
Living in community is a challenging thing!
It’s
not just about sharing living space or stuff. At some very core
level, we don’t like to have others knowing our business. We don’t
want to air our dirty laundry or let others see our mistakes and
weaknesses. We don’t want to be held accountable for our actions.
Jesus
says that sin is very clearly a community matter. He suggests that
living in Christian community requires both accountability and
forgiveness. And the way we live out our faith in relationship with
one another affects our relationship with God. The way we treat one
another has everything to do with our relationship with God. When we
live in a spirit of Christian love and commit to accountability and
forgiveness a way of life, Jesus says that’s when God is there,
present among us.
Jesus
offers a model of accountability that we as brothers and sisters in
Christ might live by. In his model, there are three steps: From
Eugene Peterson's The Message, Matthew 18:15-17: “If
a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him—work it out between
the two of you. If he listens, you’ve made a friend. If he won’t
listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of
witnesses will keep things honest, and try again. If he still won’t
listen, tell the church. If he won’t listen to the church, you’ll
have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for
repentance, and offer again God’s forgiving love.”
Now
don't take this as an invitation to launch an attack on every person
that you disagree with! This is about people in the community of
faith. This is about people who have entered into an agreement to be
a part of community. Just like we do every time we share the Lord's
Supper. In the United Methodist Church's liturgy for the sacrament of
Holy Communion, we say that the invitation from Christ our Lord is
for all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin and seek to
live in peace with one another. We then confess our sins, hear words
of absolution, and share the peace with one another before sharing
the bread and cup. It is time that we take that promise
seriously...because it is important that we show unity in the church.
We live in a hurting world that needs to hear about God's love...but
it will be hard to trust in that love, if we don't show it within the
church. You see? They'll Know...They are going to know we are
Christians by our love.
I love
that hymn and I'm so grateful that your congregation has the Faith We
Sing so that we could share that hymn together. It is a wonderful
reminder of what we can accomplish when we are all pulling in the
same direction!
Sure,
we have to exemplify God's love in every aspect of our lives, but it
is critical that we show love within the church. This story was
related to me and it hit so close to home, it felt like a story I
could have told it myself. Sara wrote, “I became a Christian as a
teenager, and I immediately wanted to be involved in my church.
Hoping to channel that enthusiasm, the church leaders put me on the
committee which was planning the promotion for the church's building
fund. The adults were working on a brochure, which I was supposed to
help them write. It was exciting to be performing an important
service, and to be working along side a group of mature Christians-or
so Sara thought.
After
the first meeting it was clear that these "mature"
believers were more concerned about whether or not to have an air
conditioner in the new sanctuary than they were about spiritual
matters (in my church it was about round tables vs. rectangular
tables and red carpet runners vs. blue). They argued and fought
through the entire meeting. Sara got her eyes off the creator and
onto the creation, and it was discouraging. For 6 years after that
day she refused to go to church, read the Bible or even consider
anything relating to Christianity. "If that's what Christians
are like, why would I want to be one?" Sara reasoned.”
You
see? They'll know! They will figure it out before we even get the
chance to tell them about Jesus and the unfathomable love he has for
every single person.
If we
are going to be a Christian community, we must commit ourselves to
working through our differences in healthy ways. I can’t make it
work by myself, no matter how much I want it to. I can’t do it
alone. None of you can do it alone either.
It
takes all of us, speaking and listening and then speaking and
listening some more, over and over, for as long as it takes. Every
one of us has to be willing to listen and to learn from one another
and from our differences. That’s the only path to true community.
Scripture
reminds us that this love thing is tricky and that we, as humans,
will take this simple command and screw it up. We will carelessly
call our brother 'idiot' and thoughtlessly yell 'stupid' at a sister.
Even in the church.
We
can be reassured by the fact that the difficulties we face as members
of the body of Christ are not so different than those difficulties
faced by the early church. In Colossians 3:13-14 Paul tells that
church (and us) that we need to “be even-tempered, content with
second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and
completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you
put on, wear love. It's your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be
without it.” After listing all the ways we can bless each
other, Paul wrote these words because he recognizes that sometimes we
fall short. We're going to irritate each other, so we'll need to put
up with each other.
How
many of you have had times in family or romantic relationships when
you just needed to put up with each other? Church relationships are
no different. Accepting each other is an important key to making this
“marriage” work. At some point you say to yourself, you know
what? I love him, I love her even though he/she is not perfect. There
are things that cause pain and require a measure of grace to be dealt
with. If we are to move beyond those things, we have to remember
there are six words that are as important as any spoken in a marriage
or relationship: Those six words are “I am sorry” and “I
forgive you.” If you're unable to say those words, you have no
chance of making a friendship, a family relationship, a marriage or a
church last. It's that simple.
The
key is love. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, is talking about love
not as a feeling, but as an action. Love is what we owe our
neighbors. Love is the fulfillment of the law. Love is not doing
things in the dark that we don’t want others to see, but rather
putting on the honor of light and living honorably as in the day.
Living in a way that nothing needs to be hidden.
Love
is not a feeling here. It is something that we do. Let's shift our
attention for a minute to the passage from Romans we heard – and
bring out three key points. 1. Believers should be "debt-free"
in relation to others, except with regard to love. The Message states
verse 8 in this way: “Don’t
run up debts, except for the huge debt of love you owe each other.
When you love others, you complete what the law has been after all
along.”
The law was a very big deal to the people of Israel. Often, the Torah
(the first five books of the Bible) is referred to as the Law. More
literally it means instruction or guide. This was the center of
Jewish teaching, culture and practice. The Torah consists of the
origin of the Jewish people: their call into being by God,
their trials and tribulations, and their
covenant with
God, which involves following a way of life embodied in a set of
moral and religious obligations and civil laws. Paul knew his
audience and THEY knew the law. He's turning it into something
personal: When you love others, you complete what the law intended to
accomplish. That takes us the point 2. The
commandments can be summarized and fulfilled in one statement, "Love
your neighbor as yourself."
Or as one of the members of my youth Sunday school class puts it:
Don't
be a jerk.
He's a real philosopher! But Paul is right...if you take all the
don'ts...don't kill, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't
covet...they can all be covered by “love your neighbor as
yourself.” You don't want any of these things being done unto
you...don't do them unto anybody else! I could wander off on a
tangent here about maybe people DON'T love themselves much – and
how that might cause them to BE jerks. But I'll save that for another
visit.
Point
3. Christians should be motivated to goodness because of agape and
the approaching Second Coming of Christ. Agape. A different kind of
love. That
is a love that comes from compassion. God looks on us with compassion
and despite our human-ness, loves us more fully than we can
comprehend. Why else would he send his son to die on a cross for us?
God
can get tiny if we're not careful. Too often we fall into the trap of
God being made in our image – instead of the other way around. We
relate to God in our human understanding, putting God in a box that
he simply can't be contained in! But God is bigger than that. This
wild, untamed God has a deep and abiding love for us.
I'd
like to read a story for you from Tattoos on the Heart, a book by
Jesuit Gregory Boyle who began Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, a
gang intervention program in the gang capital of the world. Pastor G,
as the homies call him, spends a great deal of time visiting with
incarcerated youth – conducting services and just sitting and
talking with these kids on the margins of society (you don't get much
more “They” than that. In this instance he is at Camp Paige, a
detention facility and is meeting with Rigo, a fifteen year old about
to make his first communion. They have about ten minutes to kill and
Pastor G asks him about his life and family. He gets around to asking
about Rigo's father.
“Oh,”
Rigo says, “he's a heroin addict and never really been in my life.
Used to always beat me. Fact, he's in prison right now, barely ever
lived with us.” Then something seemed to snap in him, an image
brings him to attention.
Rigo
continues, “I think I was in the fourth grade...I came home one
day, sent home in the middle of the day. Got into some trouble at
school Can't remember what. When I got home, my jefito was there. He
was hardly ever there. My dad says, “Why they send you home?” And
cuz my dad always beat me, I said. “If I tell you, promise you
won't hit me?” He just said, “I'm your father. 'course I'm not
gonna hit you.” So I told him.
Rigo
is caught short in the telling. He begins to cry, and in moments he's
wailing and rocking back and forth. Father Greg put his arms around
him. He was inconsolable. When Rigo is able to speak, and barely so,
he says only, “He beat me with a pipe...with...a pipe.” When Rigo
composes himself, Father Greg asked, “and your mother?” He points
some distance across the room at a tiny woman standing by the gym's
entrance.
“That's
her over there.” He pauses for a beat. “There's no one like her.”
Again, some image appears in his mind and a thought occurs to him.
“I've been locked up for more than a year and a half. She comes to
see me every Sunday. You know how many buses she takes to come here?
To see my sorry self?”
Then
he sobs again with the same ferocity as before. When he reclaims
breath he gasps through his tears. “Seven buses. She takes...
seven...buses. Imagine.”
Imagine.
The expansive heart of this God – greater than God – who takes
seven buses, just to arrive at us. It is that agape love and the
promise of Jesus' return that Paul says should move us to goodness.
Jerome,
in his commentary on Galatians, tells that St. John continued
preaching in Ephesus even when he was in his 90s. Even when he was so
enfeebled that he had to be carried in on a stretcher, he would lean
up on one elbow and deliver his message, “Little children, love one
another.” Then he would lie back down and be carried out. One day,
the story goes, someone asked him why he said the same thing week
after week. John replied, “Because it is enough.” It is
Christianity in a nutshell.
We
are called to love one another. To show that we are Christians by our
love. Because They'll know. And they are going to know we are
Christians by the love we show to them. But who are THEY? Who is my
neighbor?
With
storms and natural disasters or even human-caused crises, I often
hear about neighbors taking care of each other. People shoveling each
others' walks in snow storms, giving rides to people, checking on
each other to be sure they are okay. These neighbors are important.
But we know from scripture that our neighbor is more than the guy who
lives next door with the chainsaw when wind takes down a chunk of
tree. The whole world is our neighborhood!
Suddenly
– They and them are more clearly defined.
They are the people on the outside who are
just waiting to be invited in. In another part of Tattoos on the
Heart, Father Greg tells about the instance in scripture where Jesus
is in a house so packed that no one can come through the door
anymore. So the people open the roof and lower this paralytic down
through it so Jesus can heal him. Although the focus of the story is,
understandably, the healing of the paralytic...there is something
more significant happening. They're ripping the roof off the place,
and those outside are being let in.
We
need to rip some roofs off. We need to go outside and see the people
who are hurting and need Jesus. We need to find every way possible to
get them connected to the one who loves them – and let them know
that he does. We are tasked with showing God's love to the world. Are
we doing our job? And are we doing it with a Christ-like attitude?
There
are people who are hurting out there. People who need to see the love
of God. We have neighbors who don't have enough to eat, who need a
listening ear, who need a helping hand to get back on their feet,
neighbors who face barriers that we can dismantle.
They are counting on us. But they will
experience God's love through the love we show. And they will be able
to tell if it is genuine. They will know if we are helping them out
of a sense of obligation or if our helping them is just an extension
of the joy we have in being loved so much by God.
Let
our story be about how we ripped off roofs to introduce a hurting
world to the love of the one who knows our name. Who can't wait to
see us face to face. Because when we dive into the depths of that
unfathomable love, then we start to see the people around us
differently. And this love thing starts to spread. And this just
might catch on.
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