Sermon - 14th Sunday After Pentecost (9/6/2020)
Ezek. 33:7-11; Ps. 119:33-40; Rom. 13:8-14; Mt. 18:15-20
Like many of you, I’ve worked for the government and some other large organizations, and you know that one of the standard things that happens in any large organization is the annual evaluation. Human resource departments are usually very good about making sure evaluations get done and the forms are filled out and turned in on time, but whether the evaluations are actually useful depends on what people put into it.
When I worked as a government lawyer, our office did not put very much into the annual evaluation process. In fact, my supervisor had the odd practice of having us all write the first drafts of our own evaluations. It saved him a lot of work, I suppose, but it really limited the amount of feedback that we would get from the process.
And nowhere was this more clear than in one of the questions that was on the form every year: What percentage of this employee’s legal advice was correct? And every year having to answer this question about myself would cause an existential crisis. In my opinion, how many of my opinions are correct? Well, all of them. That’s why they’re my opinions – because I believe they are correct. If I didn’t believe they were correct, they would not be my opinions. So of course, as far as I am concerned, 100% of my legal advice is correct.
Now, I’m not so arrogant as to think that I can never be wrong. I mean, I’m usually right, of course. I do my best to make sure that I’m right. I’m pretty confident that all of my opinions are correct. I suppose it’s possible I could be wrong about something – but if I am, I will be the last person to know which of my opinions is wrong. So this was my existential crisis – what am I supposed to put down on my own evaluation? To actually write down, in an evaluation that I expected my supervisor to sign, that I am right 100% of the time – well, that seemed presumptuous. HR will never believe it. But to write down anything less felt like I was admitting to not having confidence in my own work, or in my own opinions. I tried turning in the evaluation with that question blank, but it would come back to be as incomplete. And I didn’t know what to write. This would keep me up at night.
We all have our view of the world, our own perspectives on life and what’s important and meaningful. We have these views because we believe in them, because we believe that they are right. And yet none of us is perfect, none of us knows what it’s really like to walk in somebody else’s shoes, none of us has the whole picture, none of us is as detached from our own wants and fears as we think we are. And so, in any group of individuals, we have differences of opinion, we have conflicts and disagreements, we fall short of truly loving our neighbors and treating them with the respect and attention they deserve – especially when we disagree with them.
Because when I disagree with someone, by definition, I think I’m right and they’re wrong. If I didn’t think that, we wouldn’t disagree. And if I’m right and you are wrong, then isn’t my job to convince you that you’re wrong? Shouldn’t I try to win the argument? And if you refuse to see the error of your ways, what then? Should I go and put something on Facebook about how wrong you are? How do we deal with the inevitability of conflict and still maintain our relationships?
This has never been an easy question. It comes up in families all the time – one person treats another wrongly, and when the harm is pointed out they refuse to listen. What do you do? Sometimes people choose to put up with harm to preserve the relationship, but what kind of relationship is that? Yet accepting that the relationship is broken can be so painful, such an experience of grief and loss, that we try to avoid it at all costs. I’ve experienced this myself. Not to share too many details publicly, but in my own family, people went decades without speaking to one another because one person won’t accept that their actions caused serious harm to others. I know from my own experience, it is extremely difficult. I constantly ask myself, and I know others in our family constantly ask themselves, have I been doing the right thing, is there something else I can to do repair the breach, can I accept that this may never get resolved in this life? These are difficult questions, questions that have really kept me up at night.
In these days, the question of how to deal with conflict comes up in our public life, perhaps more acutely right now than in any of our lifetimes. We are ready to believe the worst about the people whose political views we disagree with, we listen to perspectives and information that support our position and dismiss what we disagree with. And it’s even more difficult when so much of what is tossed around in public discourse today is arguments made in bad faith – statements and positions not intended to persuade or convince someone who has a different view, but to confuse and provoke the other side in order to stoke the fires of passion on one’s own side. I was in a meeting at my day job this week and several people were saying how when they saw something on the news that made them angry – which was quite often these days – they went online and found another Senate candidate to donate to. So it’s working.
In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us advice about dealing with conflict in the church. Because – let’s face it – we Christians who are supposed to love one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to believe that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another, we Christians seem to argue with one another a whole lot. This has always been the case – in our Bible reading group we just finished reading through the letters of Paul, and it’s startling to see how often Paul talks about how we are all one in Christ, we are one body with many members, how God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self and erasing the differences between us through the cross – and yet how many enemies Paul had, how often Paul had profound disagreements and conflicts with others in the church, how direct and harsh Paul could be to those who saw Christian faith differently than he did. If you don’t believe me, look up Galatians 5:12 some time. So conflict and reconciliation is something that has always been part of being in Christian community.
The advice that Jesus gives is, on one level, straightforward and practical. If someone has offended you, take it up with them directly, don’t triangulate, don’t complain to a third party. Don’t go to somebody else in the congregation and say, It really bothers me when the pastor does X – tell the pastor directly what bothers you. I know that none of you do that, which is good. And don’t go to the pastor and say, It really bothers me when so-and-so does this, you should tell them to stop. Fortunately I know that’s very rare in this community too. Any family counselor will tell you that addressing conflict indirectly makes everything worse.
And Jesus rightly says, if you go to someone and they listen to you, you will have won a friend. Not that you will have won an argument – Jesus doesn’t care about winning arguments, that’s not the point. Winning friends, restoring relationships is what it’s all about.
And yet it’s important to recognize that the advice of Jesus is specifically for conflict within the Christian community – it’s advice that presupposes two people who are both committed to the lordship of Jesus Christ, a commitment that is more important to both of them than whatever they may be in conflict about. Outside that context, this advice may not work. When someone is confronted with wrongdoing and says, I’m not going to respond to that because my lawyers tell me it will risk my $10 million severance package – well, this is not a conversation about Christian reconciliation. It’s about an employment contract that has broken down and everyone is looking out for their own interests.
And I think it’s essential to point out that someone who has been abused – someone who has been manipulated and taken advantage of by someone with power over them – should never be expected to go one on one and confront their abuser in private. Again, without going into too much information, I’ve tried to go one-on-one to confront someone with authority over me, and walked out feeling gaslighted and ashamed for having given in once again – it’s a terrible thing and Jesus doesn’t expect it of anyone. Because a relationship where one person is using their power to manipulate another is not a relationship of two Christian disciples who have both placed themselves under the authority of Jesus. To ignore that is simply to perpetuate the harm.
In fact, Jesus recognizes that this method of listening to one another and seeking reconciliation and the restoration of relationships may not work. If it doesn’t work, Jesus says, stop treating the offender as a fellow Christian. Instead, treat the offender like a Gentile or a tax collector. And how are we supposed to treat Gentiles and tax collectors? Well, we’re supposed to love our enemies, right? Sometimes that’s the best we can do, when someone we have a relationship with hurts and offends us and refuses to listen – we can love them, but from a safe distance. And put the matter in the hands of God to resolve.
But when genuine Christians are in conflict with one another – people who both know that they are saved by grace alone, who both know that they are sinners who are perfectly capable of being wrong and doing wrong to another, who have both learned to stop trying to justify themselves to God and the world and accepted that we are loved and valued by God even when we are wrong – when such people truly listen to one another’s stories, truly hear about the harm they have done with sorrow and repentance without getting defensive, truly seek forgiveness from one another – this is how the kingdom of heaven becomes real for us. It is a rare gift that we receive and give to one another in Christian community. For when two or three are gathered together in this way in the name of Jesus, he is truly present there in their midst.