Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 18 A - September 6, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 18 A - September 6,.2020

Exodus 12:1-14
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

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If we go to the Bible for practical advice, sometimes we can be disappointed.  Not this Sunday. Jesus lays out a step-by-step process for seeking forgiveness and reconcilation in the church (and I would say any other Christian community.)  If someone injures us, we should first of all go to them directly and try to work it out.  If that doesn't work, then try it with one or two others as witnesses.  And if that doesn't work, then bring it before the whole community.  It sounds very straight-forward and simple, doesn't it?

Well, it sounds simple, but is it really that simple?  Most of the time when someone injures us, we go to someone we can trust, and tell them what happened, trying to get an ally for ourselves in our pain.  If we tell enough people, eventually the person who hurt us starts getting a reputation for being a nasty person, and may not even know that what they did was hurtful.

Why don't we go to the person themselves to start with?  Well, if we really have been hurt, we may be afraid of getting hurt again, and out of self-defense, we seek an ally.  That might be OK if we stop with one person who we trust, and who has the wisdom to encourage us to deal directly with the person involved.  Otherwise we run the risk of creating division in the community, and once that has started it's very hard to undo the damage that it causes.

Jesus is talking about relationships within the Christian community, and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.  In the community, we can hope that everyone has the intention of “loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.”  In Christian community we would hope that no one sets out deliberately to harm another by their selfishness or lack of regard for others.  That might be unrealistic, but if I really want to live by Jesus' great commandment of love, then I need to be willing to give others a chance to know when they've hurt me, and give them a chance to apologize so that I can forgive them, and we can both move ahead in our relationship.

Paul makes this point so clearly in the section we heard from the letter to the Romans today:  “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”  He says all the commandments are summed up in the great commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  That's what it means to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”  We need to go beyond what might seem reasonable in our relationships with others to give them a chance to fulfill that same commandment of love.  

And we can trust that God will be with us in the process.  Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  We are gathered in his name, and we can trust that God IS with us, here as we worship, and as we work to create the Beloved Community that God desires for us.  Forgiveness and reconciliation may not be the “normal” or “expected” thing to do.  But it IS the Christian thing to do.