Mt 18:12-17
12 "What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? 13 And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. 14 In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.
These are the stories we like don’t we. The ‘Blessed-are-the-poor-in-spirit’ stories. Many of us connect with them somehow. Blessed are the people who get laid off at 50, blessed are the single mom’s struggling to pay the rent, blessed are those crushed in credit card debt, blessed are those been to re-hab… over and over again, blessed are the high school drop outs, blessed are those called loser, failure, unfit… There is something comforting about knowing you are in the presence of people who will find a new name for you, a new way of describing you, that doesn’t call to mind past failures and present struggles, but future victories. Find that one place on earth where you are valued and valuable. And there is something inspiring about being THAT community… that group of people who in the name of Jesus, find the worth in those whom the world calls unworthy, who remember the forgotten and love those whom other’s ignore and judge.
This is what I enjoyed the most about the beginning our Visioning Process, which still continues. We started the process with people stories and we heard so many stories about ‘I felt unloved, but here I was loved. I didn’t feel like I had anything to offer, but here I feel important and valuable. I was looking for a family, and I found a family here. ‘
Gathered around Jesus, as he preached this sermon, we know it as the sermon on the Mount, were hundreds of outcasts, the expendables, these were the little ones he referred to… who suddenly heard that the kingdom of heaven was for them, that the God who created the Universe chose them to reveal his love and his power. Suddenly they were no longer the left-over or the left-out… suddenly, Jesus proclaimed… they were vital to God’s purpose and plan, an integral part of Jesus ministry in the world.
But just as we were feeling SOOOOO GOOOOOOD
Comes an IF, Walter Brueggeman coined this phrase ‘the Earth-Shattering If’
He was talking about an IF in Deuteronomy but I think it applies here.
15 "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.
This is an earth-shattering if because it pulls us out visions and dreams and parables of lost sheep and the comfort of theory, back into the everyday reality of living a shared life together in community.
Recently Isaac started taking drum lessons. You see we have this game we play at home, the boys and I. We put on a CD or a Live DVD of one of our favorite bands and jump around and play rock band…air guitars, air bass, air drums. Isaac loves air drums. He flails his arms and kicks his feet and has a great time. THEN he started taking drum lessons… learning the basics of reading music and breaking down the rhythm of a song. He had to stop flailing and kicking and start practicing the basics, One and Two and Three and Four, One e and a, Two e and a, Three e and a, Four e and a….
I give him credit, he did it, and he even practiced… but the practice was much different than dreaming about being a rock star and playing air band with dad and brother.
It is to this place, the difference between dreaming and doing, Theory and practice, that Jesus’ word, IF, takes us to. And it takes us to the very heart of our peace-making mission in the world. As radical as it is to welcome and accept others who have a past of writing bad checks or cheating on their wife or loosing job after job… it is even more radical to forgive them when their human failures affect us directly. If your brother sins AGAINST YOU …
Our witness of peacemaking, the very core of our witness to the watching world of the love of God starts when we sin against one another… when we hurt one another, disappoint one another, fail one another. The gathering of lost sheep, rejected sheep, begins in this moment, it begins in that fearful moment of direct conversation.
Its hard for me to even decide where to start because there is just so much to talk about in just this one sentence.
Jesus doesn’t command the person who is wrong, who has sinned to apologize… His command is toward the one wronged, the one hurt, the one sinned against is given the command to go and repair what they didn’t even break.
What do you think? Why would jesus want the process of conversation in the midst of conflict to start this way?
The second aspect of this sentence that I think challenges us is the phrase ‘just between the two of you.’
We don’t do that well do we? We call someone else who is not involved and talk it all over on the phone. We have conversations at coffee hour or in the parking lot with those not involved. Why? Why do we do this?
Because its natural that is why. When we feel hurt or wronged we do not want to be alone in that feeling so we go to someone else so that we don’t have to be alone. As a matter of fact, when you think about the first part of today’s reading, being alone, being the lost sheep is baaaad. Seriously, we see ourselves as those who comfort the hurt and the lonely and the rejected and so our first instinct is to what? To listen, to sympathize, to support.
Now jesus isn’t trying to short circuit that process of supporting one another when we are hurting. BUT. What can also happen when we are hurt is that we can try to gather support… when we are hurt we can want to hurt back and bring others along so that the hurt we give back is greater than what we received. We may not like the terms gossip… or revenge… but these phenomena do happen. We experience them at work, perhaps within our extended families, in the various group we belong to in the community, the school improvement team or business association or what have you.
Why does Jesus push us to go, at least at first, to the individual who has wronged us? To preserve their dignity. So that we do not become a community where there is gossip and whispering and rumor mongering.
And this leads to the third piece of this sentence that is SOOOO different from the world. What is the end result of this Christian conversation process? ‘You have won your brother or sister over. What is the end result? Not punishment but repair. Reconciliation.
What has Christ told us about the lost sheep? That God’s will is that they not be left alone, but sought after and brought back… God’s will is that they are won. The person who has hurt us is the lost sheep who needs to be found and rescued.
Do I really need to say what is so different about the conversation that Christ is teaching us? The end result is healing and a continuation of the relationship.
So let’s just make sure we are all tracking this... Jesus is telling us that the great mission of seeking the lost sheep begins here, at home, in the church, among our brothers and sisters. That the process is a conversation that the hurt or the wronged person begins, initiates. That this conversation is one on one. And does not involve others at the start. And that the end result is not vengeance… it is not making sure that they get their’s… it is winning the person who has hurt us back… So that the body of Christ, the community of faith maintains its full integrity, so that the relationship can move forward.
Now what if we are not heard, or there is no reconciliation what happens?
16 But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.'
This is important, but it does not change the values that Jesus has infused our conversational process with. We are still working for the dignity of the one who has been wronged, while preserving the dignity of the person in the wrong, by limiting the number to whom we speak. And the end result is still reconciliation. The one or two others bring an objective opinion to this impasse. The one or two other’s ensure that each party, sinner and sinned against get to speak their piece appropriately and are heard and understood by the other. The one or two others may judge that the accused sinner, has not sinned. This may be a difference of opinion with no one clear solution or answer, so The one or two others seek to find peace that both parties can move forward together, with.
Now if peace cannot be created at this point we hear…
17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church ; and if he refuses to listen even to the church , treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
Jesus is probably imagining a smaller church than even we have. I think we could honor this third part of the process by going to the deaconate and not airing an interpersonal problem before eighty or ninety folks. But the point here is that there are three steps in which a dispute, through open and honest dialogue is reshaped into peace and reconciliation.
The greater point is that there is a specific process for dealing with controversy or conflict in the church… conversation, dialogue and there is a particular shape, a Christian way of having a conversation that Jesus is teaching us, so that we will teach it to the world.
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