Anyone here have
a brother or a sister? Or maybe cousins;
other family members your age who you spent time with growing up?
Did your brother
or sister or cousin or whoever ever, say, knock over your sand castle? Steal
your toy? Hit you, destroy a valued possession, call you names or anything else
like that?
What did you do?
yell for mom / get back at them / ignore
etc…
Now let’s fast
forward a bit. Have you been
hurt by anyone in the more recent past?
Been let down by
someone you counted on? betrayed? physically hurt? undermined at work or in
family relationships? Lost a valued possession or relationship to someone
else’s carelessness or destructiveness?
What did you do
then?
talk it out/ complain to someone else/
let it go?
Did you ever
bury the hurt, smooth it over?
Did that make it
go away?
There are a lot of
reasons I give myself when I bury or ignore a loss or hurt: I’d just get hurt
worse, it would upset the people around me, my feelings don’t matter as much as
getting along….
So I let it go.
I leave it
alone.
Maybe I forget. Or maybe I don’t.
But even if I forget the incident, I’m a
little less welcoming, generous, happy, or open around the people who hurt me,
or in the place I got hurt. Sometimes –
believe it or not – those people and places are the church.
That ever happen
to you? in the church or anywhere else?
Did you happen
to hear what Jesus said about that, today?
“When a sister
or brother sins against you,” he says, “you have to do something about it.”
First, you take
that person aside, privately, and you explain what went wrong.
“What you said
really hurt me.”
“When you didn’t
show up, it undermined something I’d been working on for
months.”
“The way you’re
using the classroom/car/coffeepot is destroying it for others.”
Doesn’t work?
It might not,
Jesus knows.
So you stop
worrying about privacy, and you get some witnesses. Not to condemn
the wrongdoer or defend you, but so that your
community knows you had this conversation, that you opened
the door for reconciliation with honesty and hope.
Doesn’t
work? You’re still not done.
You bring it to
the whole community. And if that doesn’t work, the community is
obliged to cast the wrongdoer out. “Let them be to you as a Gentile and tax
collector.”
(But you remember how Jesus treats outcasts and tax collectors, right?)
(But you remember how Jesus treats outcasts and tax collectors, right?)
Jesus talks
about bringing the sin to “the church” – to the tightly-bound community of
belief in Jesus after his death and resurrection; the community that represents
Christ in the world when Jesus himself is not here.
That’s why he
tells us that if you ignore the sin, try to be nice,
and forget, and not rock the boat, that’s like
sending the offender down the beach to kick down everyone’s sand castles, whether they’re part of the family, or
not. In fact, it’s
like kicking down a few defenseless and unrelated sand castles yourself.
If the church
doesn’t confront hurt, work intentionally and proactively for reconciliation, then just by
inaction, we feed the hurt and the destruction that can damage the world around
us and handicap our relationships with one another.
It’s
disturbingly easy to point to a generation’s worth of betrayal, hurt, and cover
up in the church. There’s a lot of news coverage of sexual abuse in the Roman
Catholic church, but no one’s innocent. We’ve had abuse and cover up in the
Episcopal Church, too – and in most religious organizations.
That matters
because abuse of trust, cover up, and denial within the church not only send
out offenders who can get away with it again, but also victims
who hurt other communities because they are too burnt and betrayed to trust
again, and brothers and
sisters who spread anger and rejection, whether they mean to or not.
The same pattern
happens in the neighborhood, nation and world, when we deny or cover up hurts
from institutional protection of racism, greedy business practices, or to
maintain the “niceness” of our community or church. “Business as
usual” and smoothing things over have left you and me uncomfortable in
conversations about race, wary about your mortgage, watching for air or water
or food quality alerts, uncomfortable sharing your faith, or unwilling to trust
leaders we’ve elected and appointed. All
sorts of little ways we close ourselves off or are afraid. So distrust, fear,
silence, or simple exhaustion spread from you and me.
When you think
about that, it’s a little scary how much Jesus empowers us. “Whatever you bind
on earth will be bound in heaven,” he says, “and whatever you loose on earth
will be loosed in heaven.”
Anyone else’s
shoulders sagging under all this responsibility right now?
Take a deep
breath and remember that Jesus isn’t expecting us to fix this all at once. Instead,
he’s reminding us that we have to work on it all the time.
It starts with –
and continues, every day, with – confronting the ways you get hurt by the
people and the communities that matter to you.
Not the person
on the street who you’ll never meet again. You don’t have to ritually confront
and forgive the person who cut you off in traffic.
But your
brothers and sisters: your co-workers, your in-laws, your dear friends, your
Calvary community, the village
of Lombard , and your
literal siblings – the people who
will still be around tomorrow, like them or not.
Hold yourself
and each other accountable for what hurts.
Solve it
privately if you can.
Get witnesses if
you need to – others who will see that you’re working toward resolution.
And don’t drop
it even if it means going public.
Because you
can’t have reconciliation without engagement.
You can’t get to
healing by forgetting.
And God knows
the world needs healing and forgiveness, beginning with you and me.
So what can you do this week?
What hurt or sin or pain have you ignored, that you need to speak out about? What chance for reconciliation have you brushed off?
What hurt or sin or pain have you ignored, that you need to speak out about? What chance for reconciliation have you brushed off?
There’s an
opportunity in your life and in mine to practice reconciliation right now.
Put it on your
calendar. Seriously.
Because you’re
not doing it just for yourself. You’re
doing it for God.
Trust, generosity,
welcome, and hope in the church and the world really do depend on you and on
me. On you and me seeking reconciliation one hurt at a time, and on
wholeheartedly responding when someone seeks reconciliation with us.
We have to do it, so it might help to remember
Jesus’ promise today “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there
among them.”
In every hurt we
try to heal, Jesus is there.
We’re doing this
for the world, yes, but you never have to do it alone.
Are you ready?
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