Yesterday I was blessed to represent our congregation at the installation of our new Bishop of the Upstate NY synod. We gathered a whole lot of singers and prayers and musicians, including representatives from our sister synods in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Bishops from the other regional synods of New England and Pennsylvania and Metro New York, ecumenical partners from the Episcopal diocese… it was a sight to behold, and a choir to hear.
It was a long drive there and a long ride back, but to gather with all of those people for such a celebration was well worth the trip. I wish you could have been there! Trumpets and tympanies and french horns and a string trio and more than enough food and drink for all. It was a beautiful liturgy and a joyous occasion.
The Presiding Bishop - who represents the denomination as a whole nationwide body - had some good words for us in the sermon which were too good not to share. She quoted the Lutheran theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote many letters and delivered many lectures, who lived and died in Germany during the second World War, and is still a man we study and honor and marvel at today.
She called on Bonhoeffer’s words yesterday to illustrate the sort of work we are all called into by the Spirit. I don’t have the reference directly before me, but the quote went something along the lines of, “nothing kills a community more certainly than service to the ideal of the community, rather than the reality of it.” We can hope and dream that our community is the kingdom of God lived here and now, and we can have a vision of what that looks like, but unless we see who is right before us, who is sitting next to us, who is in reality in this time and place part of the community, we will never have a thriving community.
Sounds like common sense, but how many times do we pine for the good old days or wish for revitalized new programming for a bright future, and in that process miss what and who we do have in the present moment? How often have we looked forward to vacation only to be so disengaged from work we lose track of what we are doing?
Loving the reality of the lived community among us is not an easy task. But it is the reality of the Incarnation, of God with us. In Christ Jesus, we are saved from the power of sin, death, and the devil, but that does not mean we have an easy escape from life. Bills still need to be paid, votes cast, people cared for, and conflicts resolved.
Which brings us to this morning’s gospel reading. Life in Christian community isn’t always easy, and Jesus knew there would be miscommunications, fighting, insecurities, and that thing we talk about in seminary as the most common struggle: triangulation. It happens when one person hurts another, accidentally or on purpose, and rather than talking directly, a third person is brought in, almost for gossip. Usually because we can’t gather up the courage and trust the possibility of forgiveness shared. So, almost out of habit, we fester in our hurts by talking to everyone else about our pain, but not the person who inflicted us with that pain.
But that breaks down community, and when we are hurt, we tend to hurt each other. We have these words of Jesus and still we’re not very good always at telling someone directly, and I don’t know if it’s because we’re trying so hard to be nice that we’ve grown afraid of conflict in the church, or because we’ve seen the ways conflict in the church has done such damage in the past that we don’t want to touch it. But we still have those final words of Jesus in today’s Gospel: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.”
Christian community is where we come to lay open our wounds and our failings and to give and receive grace for mutual healing. It is where we confess our sins and receive forgiveness. It is where those confessions and that forgiveness are real and personal, not just some empty ritual that we act out because we ought to. It leaves us vulnerable in front of each other, which is a difficult posture to maintain without some small level of anxiety, especially if we are a guest in someone else’s church. Where we spend so much of our time trying to be our best, hiding what we think are our flaws, making excuses for our failings, church is where we stop pretending we ever were perfect or ever could be, where we let down our guard and let it be known that we are sinners saved by grace. We do this, of course, because we have a God who has known what human life is like from the inside and who has forgiven us, time and again.
So when we get these ‘how to treat the sinner in your midst’ texts, as often as we like to see ourselves as the one who has been right and has to go confront the one who was wrong, let’s look at it from the point of view of the one who has done the wrong. From what seems like the lower position of the two - although Jesus calls the offender ‘your brother’ to make clear there is no distinction between us.
What grace there is in being told directly of our wrong, to be given the chance to ask forgiveness! This is not the accusing tone of someone ripping us apart for being late with paperwork or having said something offensive in polite company, it’s an open, forgiving, honest statement of pain received. It does give us some power to make things right again, doesn’t it? And to have welcome extended to us again and again, first by one, then by two, then by the whole community, seeking reconciliation.
The tough part is when reconciliation doesn’t seem to work. Or the outcome we want is not the outcome we get. But remember that promise again. Jesus is the great reconciler, the one who has not only shown us how to live, but freed us to do so through the blood of his cross. He says that if the brother who has sinned against you refuses to listen even to the church, that one ought to be treated like a Gentile and a tax collector - and have you heard how he treats those folks? Just as full a welcome as to anybody. Doesn’t mean we’ll behave as Jesus wants us to all of the time, if even some of the time!
But it does remind us that, no matter what a mess we make of things, Jesus is among us to bless our work of reconciliation, our coming together again and again to offer confession and receive forgiveness, to be the source of our life of faith together. And to do this as we are, not as any book or study or statistics say we ought to be.
Living together in real transformative community can be a struggle, and Jesus knew it. He also knows what it’s like to love a people who are all over the map and tougher to handle than a herd of cats. But he didn’t come to ‘handle’ us, he came to heal us. To welcome the sinner. To embrace the outcast. To bring together a bunch of misfits who might not even be aware of how much he has done for us, so that we might be instruments of his healing one to another.
We’ve got our service project focus today. Tip of the iceberg stuff for how deeply poverty and hunger affect our communities. Awareness raising stuff. Advocacy stuff. Holy community building stuff. Remembering that there are a lot of struggling people in the world, including us, and that living into the kingdom of God takes work. But it is God’s work, the Spirit in and through this mission. Jesus has promised to be with us when we do his work. When he does his work through us. And so he is. And so he will be, on into the ages of ages.
Amen.
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