Sermon by Rocky Supinger | September 10, 2023

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 10, 2023

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Matthew 18:15–20

When Sinead O’Connor died last July, all of the tributes to her musical legacy centered on “Nothing Compares to You,” the song for which she was best known (and for good reason). But the song I thought about first was “Take Me to Church,” a song from the last studio album she ever recorded, in 2014.

You might have missed “Take Me to Church,” because it came out the same year as another song with the exact same title that become something of a juggernaut; Sinead’s “Take Me to Church” has more than 2 million streams on Spotify, while the other one has more than 3 trillion.

Not in my library, though. I played Sinead’s to death the year it came out. I couldn’t get the chorus out of my head, and ever since last July it’s been back in my rotation:

Take me to church. / I’ve done so many bad things it hurts. / Yeah, take me to church / but not the ones that hurt / ’cause that ain’t the truth / and that’s not what it’s for.

Take me to church. Amen.

This is church. It may be church as you are generally used to it — if church is something that you’re generally used to. You might feel quite comfortable with church in a sanctuary like this or with church on a livestream. You might recognize this table behind me and the elements on it as part of what makes church church, the Sacrament of Communion. You might hear in the prayers and the songs words that resonate with you, with your experience, and with your sense of how church ought to feel and sound.

Of course, you also might not quite be connecting with this as church — yet. I don’t know, today may be the first time you ever set foot in a church; this big space and this printed order of service might feel very foreign to you and not like what you think of as church. Or you might have been really used to and really comfortable with afternoon church here in Buchanan Chapel at 4:00 and be reserving judgment about church, in here, at 2:00.

Wherever you’re coming from and however church in this way feels to you, you are welcome. We are all welcome at church, because church is more than the Bible reading and the sermon. It’s more than the songs and the prayers and pews or whatever the seating arrangement might be. Church is more than whatever you’re seeing on your screen. Church is more than an-hour-a-week worship service.

Church is a body. It’s arms and legs, hands and feet, eyes and ears. That’s the New Testament’s way of describing the church, like in the letter to the church in Corinth: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. There are many members, but one body.”

The Bible’s way of talking about church as a body is just another way of saying that people in church are connected to each other. The relationship of people in church to other people in church is different from their relationship to everyone else.

It’s like your relationship to your family a little bit, which is why Jesus talks about “brothers and sisters.” But not exactly. It’s maybe similar to school students’ relationship to one another when they study under the same teacher. After all, Christians are called “disciples” and “followers” of Jesus. But that’s not exactly it either.

Members of a church, like members of a body, belong to one another. None of them can be what they need to be or do what they need to do alone, without all the other members. Church is where you’re not your own but belong to a larger whole and where that larger whole belongs, together, to God.

So we’re doing church here today. If that really connects for you and you feel like a member of this congregation (or another one), great. If that’s something you’re interested in exploring, let’s talk after over coffee in the Narthex.

You should be warned, though, that church ain’t perfect. Church knows better than most that we are not what we ought to be. Somebody I used to work with here said, “Church people will give you a prayer life.”

Like all human enterprises where people come together and risk relationship with one another for the sake of some larger purpose, church can hurt.

Sin is the term we use for this, because it’s the term the Bible uses for it, including Jesus here in the passage we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew. But it’s not a simple term. In the Hebrew scriptures, sin tends to mean behavior that transgresses the covenant that Israel made with God after the Exodus; the 10 Commandments are the most succinct presentation of what sin is: murder, idolatry, covetousness, etc. Those things aren’t “sinful” in and of themselves, but because God describes them as ways of living that go against what God desires for the people God freed from bondage.

Sin is used in the Gospels a lot too, very often as an accusation against Jesus. He’s called a sinner for healing people on the Sabbath, for blasphemy, and for associating with people — like tax collectors — who were understood to be sinners. But Jesus reframes sin language in terms of love of neighbor, and the epistles to the early churches vividly demonstrated what that looked like in practice.

In one case sin looks like wealthy church members are coming to communion carrying massive picnic baskets filled with feasts for themselves while poorer members are going hungry.

In another case sin is a church member having a romantic relationship with his father’s wife — not his own mother, but still.

And in another the sin is that certain members are doing any work to help out but are eating more than their share of the coffee and cookies, if you know what I mean.

OK, so what is sin for us?

I don’t have a list in my pocket of actions that classify as sins. I hate to disappoint you. No, I don’t hate to disappoint you there; none of us want a sin checklist that we’re being measured against. Jesus has some pretty strong things to say about passing judgment on one another, and such a list would make Jesus’ teaching on that score quite hard to follow.

Rather, we have some helpful theological descriptions we can appeal to in considering where and when we might be dealing with sin. One that I’ve always found useful is from the Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, who described peoples’ sinful state as being curved inward, in upon ourselves, cutting ourselves off from mutual relationship with our neighbor and with God.

The Black American theologian James Cone elaborated to say that “to be in sin is to deny the values that make the community what it is. It is living according to one’s private interests and not according to the goals of the community. It is believing that one can live independently of the source that is responsible for the community’s existence. To be in sin means to deny the community.”

We need to be honest about the sin and hurt it causes in church, both to one another and to those outside. That’s why a prayer of confession is part of our worship, to maintain a posture of honesty and humility about the presence of sin in church. Jesus talked to his disciples about sin because he knew it would be a feature of life in church.

Church is honest about hurt but not resigned to it. Church confronts sin.

This is one of the toughest elements of being church, the fact that church is more than just a group of likeminded individuals who get together once a week but then whose lives don’t have anything to do with one another the other six days of the week. Church is a body, so what happens to one member affects the whole.

The actions of one member impact the whole body.

So Jesus lays out a process for what to do when a member sins — when they sin against you, yes, but also maybe not just when somebody sins against you personally (the words “against you” in verse 15 are not in all of the manuscripts we have of Matthew’s Gospel).

This process is a gift, and It’s a simple enough: Go to them privately at first. Don’t shame them. Definitely don’t call them out on social media. If they aren’t hearing you, then take one or two people with you, to keep everybody on the up-and-up, and, finally, if it’s absolutely necessary, take the matter before the whole church. If that doesn’t work, well, then the matter was already decided.

Church is not the place to simply live and let live, because what I do affects you and what you do affects me and what we do together affects the world God loves. “You do you” might serve as a useful motto for fashion, but not in church, because if I am curved in upon myself and you notice it, if my being that way hurts you and you don’t confront me about it, that means that you must be content to abandon me to that state.

And that’s kind of cruel. What would it say about how well we love one another in church that we aren’t willing to speak truthfully to one another because it’s difficult, because it’s awkward, because we’re aware of our shortcomings. No, being church means telling each other the truth, including when it’s hard.

Clearly this can go wrong. If we feel we’ve been harmed in church, we might react out of a desire to return the hurt in kind; I’m not above that. We might stumble too far in the direction of punishment rather than grace and reconciliation. That could happen. Confronting sin, we might be tempted to sin ourselves: pride, vindictiveness, gossip.

That’s all possible, though not inevitable.

Because Jesus promises to be with us. So it’s not entirely up to us do this right every time. What’s up to us is to risk relationship with one another in church, trusting that when we hurt one another (which we surely will), God has not abandoned us to muddle through the aftermath. Rather, Jesus promises his very own presence to bring about reconciliation and redemption.

The Gospels are full of stories about Jesus’ relationships with people who were thought of as sinners. He chose to have relationships with them, and it was his presence in their lives that changed them. Perhaps the best example is the story of a notorious tax cheat named Zacchaeus, who was so transformed by Jesus’ time and attention that he pledged to pay back any person he had defrauded four times over.

Jesus is not only in church when things are harmonious and peaceful. He’s present in conflict and pain, too. Wherever church comes together in truth to confront hurt and harm in its midst, Jesus is with us. “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name,” he promises, “I am there among them.”

And what else does it mean to gather “in Jesus’ name” than to do so after the manner of his example: gracefull, seeking the will of God, ready to forgive.

We will celebrate communion in this worship service each week. That’s why we called the service “The Gathering: Communion at 2:00.” If you’re worshiping online, we’ll do this together with elements you have wherever you are.

The reason for this is to experience each time we gather the presence Jesus promised us — no matter the circumstances or conditions, whether we feel really connected to church that day or whether something’s weighing on us and we’re not really feeling it. Jesus promises to be present all the same, in this bread and in this cup, whether we think we want him to be or not.

We’re also going to offer our gifts each time we worship. And it seems to me that we can receive Jesus’ confrontation process in the spirit of an offering. Because if we’re willing to be the kind of community that Jesus calls us to be, one that impacts the world around us for compassion and justice, then we must offer ourselves to that work of ministry. And if we can do that, then we can surely offer ourselves to one another in truth-telling, in listening, and in being restored to one another. We can offer to take each other to church. Amen? Amen.