From my time growing up, I can hardly remember a Sunday in which my family wasn’t at church. My parents took me to church for the first time when I was less than a week old. The church in which I was raised was more than a building to me and more than a place I was (at times) dragged wearing clothes that I complained were too uncomfortable on Sunday mornings. The church was family. Many of my closest friendships still today began in the preschool I attended at that church, were fostered in Sunday School classrooms, deepened during youth group retreats or Wednesday nights as a young adolescent contemplating life and God and faith.
My life and my faith were deeply formed by that church family: the Sunday School teachers who taught me the great stories of Scripture, the youth leaders who sought to know me and be a part of my life and showed me Jesus, the pastors whose sermons I can’t remember but no doubt shaped a growing faith and belief in God. I would likely not be who I am today and my faith not what it is without that church.
But my memories of that church and that church family are not all positive. When I was finishing eighth grade, seemingly out of nowhere, the church shattered. My parents and about half the congregation left because of conflicts among church leadership. Home no longer felt like home. Family – or at least the family of the church – no longer felt safe or loving. I had lost something core to who I was. Family had hurt me.
For years, I stayed away from churches. Even though I attended a new one with my family I didn’t get too close or involved to protect myself from getting hurt again. I have a book written in 2007 about young adults’ relationship with institutional Christianity on my bookshelf that accurately characterizes how I approached faith. The book is titled, They Like Jesus But Not the Church. I had faith, I believed in God, I tried to followed Jesus…but I wanted nothing to do with the church because the church was broken and painful.
For a while after that, I tried to find the perfect church. When I found it, that was going to be the one I got involved in. That was a church in which I was going to find my family. You may be surprised to hear this…I never found that church.
Over time, my belief about, my understanding of, and relationship with the church changed. You see, my childhood in a church, my disengagement, and then my search for the perfect church focused on me – my wants, my needs, my fears. My thoughts and feelings about church were shaped by how it impacted me – positively or negatively. Without knowing it, I had been shaped by the Enlightenment philosophy of individualism. Within that framework, the church is simply a gathering of autonomous, isolated individuals who all happen to be in the same place at the same time. Our connection and responsibility to one another is not primary.
But the whole of Scripture offers us a different vision of community, of relationship, and of the church. It is the image the Apostle Paul lays out of the church as the Body of Christ we have progressively heard over the last several weeks as we continue to make our way through the letter to the Romans. Two weeks ago: “…we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” Last week: within the Body of Christ, Paul’s instruction to “let love be genuine,” to “love one another with mutual affection.” And this week: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Our call, not as a group of individuals but as a community, a family, drawn together to make the work of God visible in our world, is to love one another, to make the well-being of others our concern. Paul makes this more explicit in his first letter to the Corinthians:
“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…God has so arranged the body that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”
You see, as Christians – as the church – we are not isolated individuals. We need one another. We are the Body of Christ – the visible embodiment of God’s continued work in the world. The church exists, not simply to meet our needs, but to care for others – both those within and outside its walls or fellowship. The church is family – interdependent, connected, responsible to and reliant on one another. And here is what I learned through the season of my life where I was hurt by, avoided, and then looked for the perfect church: the church global, nor any local church does this perfectly. The church is a family made up of imperfect people – priests and pastors and leaders included. The question is not whether conflict will arise in the church, but what we will do when it happens. Rather than the church being a place where we escape conflict, the church, at her best, is where we learn to deal with conflict.
The church of my youth is not the only church that has experienced a fracture. St. Luke’s over the last 120 years has experienced seasons of growth and unity, as well as seasons of decline and division. Countless churches nearby and far off have similar stories. And while these fractures often seem sudden, they rarely are. What I didn’t know at the time when my family left the church of my childhood was that the conflict that precipitated the division had been simmering for years.
If we look at Jesus words in Matthew’s gospel before us today about what to do when you are hurt by someone else in the church, it is clear the point isn’t to be “right,” to “win,” to get justice or revenge. In some churches over the years and in some traditions – perhaps even our own, at times – this passage has been used for a process for church discipline, for justification in excommunicating someone, for punishing someone for their wrongs. Oftentimes, the justification has been a desire to maintain the purity, the faithfulness, of the body, the church. What that approach forgets is that none of us are perfect – we are all sinners who are prone to our own faults that hurt those around us.
The point of Jesus’ instruction then – rather than justice or punishment – is reconciliation. Reconciliation is a process rooted in what God has done in Jesus through the ongoing work of the Spirit to restore persons and communities in renewed relationships that reflect the wholeness of God’s kingdom. That is what we do – and continually learn how to do – as the church. And it is oftentimes hard and messy work. We seek relationship with those who have wronged us or the community. We don’t just ignore things when we have been harmed, hoping they will resolve on their own. We don’t have conversations in the parking lot after church, complaining or gossiping about others. Neither of these – nor the many other behaviors in which we tend to engage to avoid conflict and confrontation – move us any closer towards renewed and restored relationship with others. Instead, we are called to tell the truth and to name harms in the context of relationship.
South Africa, in the years following Apartheid, gives us an example of how telling the truth, telling our stories – and doing so in community – offer a path towards reconciliation. Following 50 years of institutionalized and crushing racial segregation, South Africa – as a county and as a people – had a choice: move forward without acknowledging and atoning for the past by simply hoping a new chapter would come into being, or do the hard work of honest reflection to choose and make possible a different future. South Africa chose the latter and embarked on a six-year journey of truth telling, accountability, and restorative justice known as the Truth and Reconciliation commission. This commission gave space for both the victims and perpetrators of violence and human rights violations to tell their story, to acknowledge the gravity of what had been done, and, together, seek reconciliation.
In Jesus’ instructions, it does not need to begin there. But honesty and direct engagement with one who has harmed us is still necessary.
Start by speaking to that person. If that doesn’t work, involve a few others. And finally, if the conflict is still unresolved, involve the whole community to seek reconciliation and wholeness together. Whether or not the process described by Jesus is prescriptive for all times, places, and circumstances isn’t the point, though. The point is that reconciliation is always the goal. Direct engagement is more effective and honors the other more than passive-aggressiveness, gossip, or leaving the community
Sometimes, though, reconciliation doesn’t happen. Sometimes one who has harmed us or the community wants out of the relationship and does not want to be reconciled. One way to read Jesus’ instruction at this point is we are to make them an outsider. Excommunication is the next step. We are to close ranks by making them to us “as a Gentile and a tax collector.” But that conclusion forgets Jesus life, witness, and ministry. It was the Gentiles, the tax collectors, the sinners, the ones who were already ostracized from community that he sought, dined with, made part of his community. To make that point even clearer, this passage comes right after the parable of the lost sheep when Jesus leaves the 99 to go after the 1 who is missing. If we follow Jesus example, we are never to give up on one another, we are never to stop pursuing relationship with each other. We are never to stop loving one another.
I’ll admit, this is easier said than done. We, the church, don’t always get this right. And that is why I said earlier: the church is not where we escape conflict, the church is where we learn to deal with it. This community, this family, is where we practice this sort of reconciling relationship. It is where we engage in the work of reconciliation again and again. It is where we try our best and, in those moments we fall short, we continue to show up and love one another.
When we do that, we show the watching world what God’s kingdom is like. Not a place of perfection, but one in which love is the way, forgiveness possible, and reconciliation a reality. Our call as the church is to be an example – a foretaste – of God’s kingdom, here and now. And we’re not alone as we do that. Because where two or three are gathered, Jesus is with us. Where two or three…that is community. So let us continue to love one another even when it is hard. Let us continue to seek one another in the moments it would be easier to go our separate ways. And in doing so, let us show God’s reconciling love to others.
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