Reconciliation

Matthew 18:15-20

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?)

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?

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?