Matthew 18:15-20
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Alright, let’s see what we have this week… We’ve got “Oh wicked ones, you shall surely die!” from the first lesson. A bit dark but alright. Let’s try the second… “reveling, drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness…” sounds interesting. And in the Gospel we’ve got “If another member of the church sins against you…” So, sin it is, and if it's going to be sin, we first need to completely throw out our “helpful” Puritan ancestors’ warped ideas about “sin” and we need to ignore everyone who preaches about sin with perfect teeth in fancy suits. Instead, we need to do this radical thing called “read the Bible” because what’s in the Bible is WAY different than the puritanical or fundamentalist notion of sin.
In all three of these lessons, the particular details of WHAT someone has done is very much beside the point. The POINT, is that SIN is anything that creates a rift, a separation, or a falling out between you and another person, between you and your community, OR between you and God. Think of it this way. You order a dozen hot wings and eat them all. Is that a sin? Biblically it could go either way at this point. IF you ordered them for yourself and you ate them all that’s not a sin. BUT if you and your friend ordered 12 wings to share and you ate them all before they got even one… THAT’S a sin. It’s a sin, not because hot wings are sinful (thank God), but because eating the whole dozen when you were supposed to share creates a rift between you and your friend!
What makes ANYTHING sinful depends ENTIRELY on whether or not a separation, a rift, or a falling out has happened as a result. God genuinely cares absolutely nothing about this or that particular act. God genuinely cares entirely about the state of the relationship between people, within communities, and with God. In Bible times the state of a relationship had literal life or death implications. Living apart from others, you simply didn’t have the food, shelter, clothing, or the protection you needed to survive. In Bible times sin led not to some eternal torment or existential death, but to genuine, keel over and kick the bucket, death.
Now, over the years folks have agreed that there are some things that pretty much always end up wrecking a relationship. There are even lists. Killing, for example, is a genuine relationship wrecker. Adultery also not good for a relationship. But even with those, it is the broken relationship, the separation, that grieves God the most.
Broken relationships grieve God because, as all these lessons and all of Scripture bear witness to, “alone” is not how God created us to live. It’s unfortunate that all too often it takes disaster and horrible tragedy to remind us we really aren’t made to go it alone. We’ve always been and still remain today, deeply dependent on one another for any sort of life that is actually worth living.
You and I were created to be deeply dependent upon one another. That’s not a flaw, as the “rugged American individualists” would have you believe… it’s not a human shortcoming… it’s the way God created us to be! We were dreamed up, designed, and loved into being to be interdependent… to live in relationship… in community… together and not apart.
That's why all these lessons tell us how to do that… how to live together… AND they tell us how we can go about mending the rifts that inevitably happen as we work our way through life. The key to that repair should not be a surprise… it’s love. The kind of love that drives us to do the hard and sacrificial work of living for the other, and doing whatever is in their best interest.
This is the kind of love that understands that forgiveness is not forgetting someone ate all the wings before you got even one! This is the kind of love that is strikingly honest with the other about the rift that has been created, AND being open and willing to work relentlessly to find a way that you can share some wings with one another once again. This is the kind of love that speaks hard truths… sets clear, firm boundaries… and offers healthy, mutually respectful ways back, and not ways that bury the past, or ignore the other.
We live in a world that seems each day intent on creating division, widening rifts and digging the chasms that separate us ever deeper and deeper. Those divisions, rifts and chasms… THOSE are the true and horrible sin of the world. As Christians, we're called to show the world that the way to abundant life is not separation and kicking people out, but to treat people the same way Jesus treated tax collectors and gentiles. See them, welcome them, sit with them, talk with them, eat with them, and work to restore the community to wholeness so there will be life for all.
I know, that feels like an insurmountable task! But over the last few years I’ve come to understand that focusing on the entirety of the world's sin, nearly always leads not to healing, but to despair. Jesus reminds us in this Gospel that our calling is not to start globally, but to simply gather two or three together, sit in some rainbow chairs at the fair, or under a tent on the AT, or make people smile as you hand them a barbecue sandwich. It is in those seemingly insignificant acts that Christ is present with us… holding us, guiding us, and leading us into even more ways we can bring life out of death and genuine healing to our sin-sick world. Amen.
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