Sunday, September 10, 2017 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Practicing

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 149
Matthew 18:15–20

Lord, can this really be?
Is this your church,
the people that I see,
who gather here and
worship you with me?
Is this the very place,
the school of love,
where we would see your face,
and through your Spirit
gain enabling grace?

William Rutherford, “Lord, Can This Really Be?”

Church is messy. And no, I am not talking about the bulletins that get left in the pews or the News and Opportunities inserts that fall on the floor. I mean that being a part of a church community is often messy work. My guess is that if you have been a part of this one for a while, or a part of any other faith community before, you already know this. You know just as well as I do that a church community tends to feel like a safe space for people, all people, to just let stuff fly. We let our love fly. We let our frustrations fly. We let our joy fly. We let our hang-ups and our grumpiness fly. We let our creativity fly. We let our need for power fly. Church is messy because the church is made up of people like us: regular, broken, wonder-filled people like you and me.

We see the messiness all throughout the New Testament. Paul was constantly writing to churches that were in the middle of a conflict or disagreement. He wrote to Corinth as they wrestled with the implications of their economic diversity. He wrote to the church in Galatia as they tried to figure out how to manage their cultural diversity, and as we heard last Sunday and will hear again next Sunday, Paul wrote to the church at Rome, which was dealing with a bunch of new theological diversity. I could go on. Many other messy church communities have a voice in the New Testament. It is clear that from our very beginning it has been messy work to be the church.

Frankly, I think it is particularly messy if you are Presbyterian. Those of you who have attended a new-member Fireside Chat will typically hear me say that if ambiguity is hard for you to live with, then it will be difficult to be Presbyterian, for we are a denomination with a theological tradition that thrives in messiness. Now, let me be clear: We are not relativistic with what we believe. We have central theological tenets—what we call essential tenets—but we do allow space and interpretive breathing room in how you understand and express those central beliefs.

The importance of maintaining this space or interpretive breathing room is why we have twelve statements of faith in our Book of Confessions, each belonging to a specific moment and time in history. We believe that as a denomination, as a theological tradition, we have not arrived yet. God is still at work forming and reforming us. Furthermore, God’s continual work on us means that we might come to new ways of hearing ancient scripture. Or we might arrive at a different understanding of a core theological conviction that we all hold dear. Even when we are at our best, we as a church, like our world, are always still just a work in progress.

The constant push and pull of being open to being reformed by God means that life together will sometimes be hard work. We won’t all agree all the time. You won’t agree with me, your preacher, all the time. Relationships might get stressed. Difficult conversations will inevitably occur. That is just the way church is. So we will just keep reminding each other that as long as our hearts are one in Christ, our minds don’t have to be (William Sloane Coffin). Unity does not have to equal uniformity, so we need to accept the truth that being church together will often be messy work.

That reality of the messiness of church brings us to Jesus’ words in Matthew 18. Over the generations, many folks have interpreted these words as Jesus’ protocol for church discipline. As a matter of fact, these steps have been incorporated in many church constitutions as an outline for disciplinary processes (E. Ramshaw, “Power and Forgiveness in Matthew 18,” Word and World, vol. xviii, no. 4, Fall 1998, p. 397).

But looking at these verses in that way, with that disciplinary lens, suggests that Jesus’ primary concern is the concern of maintaining order and symbolically cleaning up the church house. If that is your conclusion going in, then it very well might be that by the time you pull out these verses from Matthew, you have already given up on the person in question and you are just trying to figure out the proper way to get rid of her, to toss her out of the church community. So you follow the steps Jesus lays out:

Step 1: You confront the misbehaving member about her behavior or her beliefs. If she refuses to listen to you, then you move to step 2.

Step 2: You take a couple of other people with you—witnesses—and do it again. If she continues to refuse to listen to you even with the witnesses in tow, then you move to step 3.

Step 3: You drag her before the whole congregation and once again plead your case and demonstrate her guilt. (This reminds me of what a Presbyterian church in Atlanta did, way back in the day, when they heard that two of their members were caught dancing! They brought the two young women before the Session). And if the member still will not change, like the two dancers who refused to repent, then you are forced to move to step 4.

Step 4: Throw her out. Treat her like a Gentile (pagan) or a tax collector (traitor). The Atlanta church just barred the dancers from receiving communion.

But I am not convinced discipline is why Jesus spoke these words to his disciples and why he gave them to us. Given the reality of the messy incarnation—God getting down into the muck with us through the flesh and blood of Jesus—I am not convinced Jesus ever expected the church to be anything but messy. Rather, what if, instead of seeing this passage as a formula for discipline, we were to see it as a call, a dream, for reconciliation? What if, instead of turning to this passage as a way to break the relationship, we look at Jesus’ words as offering possibility of how we might try to bring people, love people, back in and make space for God’s Spirit to knit the community back together?

That interpretation is possible because of what comes immediately before these words from Jesus. It is Matthew’s version of the parable of the lost sheep. In Matthew, the sheep is a member of the community who has wandered astray and left the fold for one reason or another. Perhaps he did not like the latest vote of the Session or what his preacher had to say about the ending of DACA or protest movements. Regardless of why the sheep left, though, the shepherd (and, I would argue, the rest the flock, too) is charged to go and seek it out, to find it, to rejoice, and then to bring it home. The parable is not about locking the gate and being glad the troublesome sheep has finally moved on so you don’t have to have that same argument anymore. It is about trying to go and find out where that sheep wandered off to, to find it in order to have a reunion.

Thus when we move to this morning’s scripture with that parable in mind, then it seems to me that the whole goal of confronting a sibling in Christ who has offended us or hurt us is so that we can all move to reconciliation. The goal is not to show that person how wrong she was and then tell her she has to clean up her behavior or else. Notice that Jesus does not speak of repentance even one time in this passage. Rather, what seems to matter the most is the repairing of the relationship, the rebuilding of the community.

Perhaps that is why Jesus suggests trying to repair it privately first. We don’t want to add shame into the equation. But if our brother or sister in Christ cannot hear what we are saying, then we keep going back, again and again, bringing with us increasingly larger groups of people in the hope that our desire to make that relationship right might finally be heard and believed (Beverly Gaventa, “Costly Confrontation,” Christian Century, 11–18 August 1993, p. 773). Instead of bringing people with us to act as witnesses to his guilt, we bring people with us so they might be witnesses of Christ’s love and mercy, helping us pour it out in the deep hope of that relationship being made right again.

Now this kind of approach to conflict or to hurt is a whole different way of living as community. It is not modeled in our larger world or often in church life or even in our own lives. It is a way of communal life that is not about blame or shame but about grace and repair. It is not about who is right and who is wrong but about how the body is weaker without all its parts. It is not about cleaning up the messiness of being church but about living in it while trying to reclaim relationship as family in Christ as our primary identity as Christ’s body in this world.

What happens, though, if we actually do all of that, if we have the church community try to help love a person or a group of people back into the messy space of church, and it does not work? Remember step 4: Jesus tells us we are to let that one be like a Gentile, a tax collector, to us. In Jesus’ day both terms were code words for outsiders. That’s why Jesus’ words have been interpreted as a call to cut them off, to no longer consider them family. Yet when we remember how Jesus treated Gentiles and tax collectors, I don’t think we can do that. Those were the ones with whom Jesus hung out, ate meals, and called to discipleship. They became his people.

That’s why I believe Jesus’ call to treat people the way he treated the Gentiles and the tax collectors is actually an invitation—an invitation to keep pouring out welcome and love in the deep hope that it might one day soak in. It is a call to act with Sermon-on-the-Mount behavior, to love one’s enemies and to pray for those who persecute you, or, as we said in last week’s sermon, to not return evil for evil. Cutting someone off from the family of church or leaving behind a whole flock is actually the easy way out. Trying to love each other into reconciliation, trying to repair the relationship, is much harder and yet also more faithful and more reflective of our baptism.

Amy Butler, pastor at Riverside Church in New York City, and I were talking about this passage on Friday evening (exciting lives of preachers). She’s preaching on it, too. As we were tossing ideas around, I remarked that focusing on internal church relationships felt awfully insular in a month when we have experienced Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and now Jose; watched as hundreds of thousands of young adults called Dreamers have the rug of a safe future pulled out from underneath them; tried to wrap our minds around the increasing threat of North Korea, etc. “And we are supposed to preach on relationships within the church?” I asked at the end of my chaos litany.

Amy responded this way: “Look, when everything feels like chaos and we are not sure how we can be used for God’s healing, the first place we must begin is with each other within the church. If we can practice loving each other and being kind and compassionate to each other, no matter what, then we might be useful for God’s healing of the world. But if we cannot even get church right, if the messiness becomes an obstacle rather than an invitation, then we won’t be of much use to God no matter what.”

I agree with my friend. Perhaps one of the gifts of being part of the messy family called church is that we have a place, a community of people, with whom we can practice love, compassion, kindness, mercy. We have a place, a community of people, with whom we can explore how to live with each other even during the difficult seasons of life. We have a place, a community of people, where we can regularly ask God to help us look deeply at each other so we can see our common baptism shining in each other’s faces. We have a place, a community of people, with whom we can practice seeing each other the way Jesus saw the Gentiles and the tax collectors, the way he felt about that sheep who wandered off by accident or on purpose—as people God seeks, brings home, and loves, regardless.

So as we kick off this new church programming year, let us all rededicate ourselves to the hard, messy work of reconciliation and repair, whenever and wherever in the life of this body that it’s needed as we keep being church together. Not for our own sake, but for the sake of our practice, our witness—for Christ’s sake—so that indeed we will be able to be of use for God as God keeps forming and reforming, working for reconciliation and repair of our larger, even messier, world. For in the end, messiness might just have something to do with Godliness. So all you Gentiles and tax collectors, all you wandering-off sheep and going-to-find-them shepherds, let our practicing begin. Amen.