I feel a bit like we’ve fallen into a management or self-help book this morning:
If someone in your organization is causing a problem, address it directly, one-on-one.
This is pretty standard advice for a starting point, whether you are getting it from an organizational dynamics guru or Jesus the Messiah.
If that doesn’t work, bring in a small group of trustworthy folks and work toward resolution together;
use public accountability to the whole group, or to the highest authority, if necessary….
What we hear Jesus say two thousand years ago and half a world away is not all that different from advice we might hear now in our workplaces, families, schools, and of course, churches.
And, as conflict-resolution advice, I hear what’s good about it, and it makes me tired and anxious.
Because – I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, or if it’s just my experience – but multi-stage, healthy, responsible, smart conflict resolution is so much more work than venting to a friend, or just avoiding the problem.
(At least for a while.)
And there’s something about the particular method Jesus is describing that looks like it could be used to protect abuses – keeping “offenses” private as long as possible, trying to make sure the offender stays in community – this is all stuff that has made it easy for sexual predators, emotional bullies, and other dangerous types to keep their position in the church particularly, and a lot of other organizations generally.
And I am NOT here for processes that protect abusers.
When I take even a tiny step back to look at the context of Jesus’ teaching, though, I can be very confident that Jesus and Matthew are NOT trying to describe a process that protects bullies and abusers. The opposite, in fact.
This little snippet of teaching we read today comes on the heels of Jesus teaching his community that care for “the little ones” – meaning the folks most vulnerable and least honored, which includes children – is much more important than business as usual. So important it’s worth losing your own life.
So I suspect that this process of prioritizing direct and quiet resolution is really aimed more at ensuring the vulnerable don’t get lost than at protecting the reputations of the powerful.
And more than that, I think this isn’t so much meant to be a teaching about “conflict resolution” – about how to manage differences of opinion, or individuals causing trouble in the congregation – than it is about keeping the church focused on Jesus’ core mission: to redeem the whole world. Not just the people who are good at doing church. Or good at “being good citizens”. To redeem the problem-children, too. (Especially?)
Jesus’ priority was never conflict resolution. He causes plenty of religious and social conflict himself. His priority is saving lives. Ensuring no one is cut off from the love of God and the kingdom of heaven that starts here and now.
The community-management advice we’re reading today is predicated on the truth that God wants every single human to be part of the holy community.
That, in fact, we need everyone to be part of the holy community.
And Jesus tells us we do that not by ignoring the faults, offenses, and irritants of our siblings, but by addressing the faults, getting offenders to justly repair their offenses, healing, and working out the irritants, to keep the holy community whole.
A recent article in The Atlantic magazine reported that when people separate from the church they – we! – get more divided. When the church loses people – when people lose the church – those people are taking some of the values we learned in church, and become politically rigid and divided around those values when we leave. That’s true across both major US parties and all types of Christian church. Becoming disconnected from the church community means more and more of us are unable to find – or even look for – common ground to build the common good.
It turns out reconciliation within the church has positive consequences for the life of the world, even in our lightly-Christianized, mostly-secular context here and now.
We do need each other. Even the irritating others.
We do need to be together. To stay together.
We need to jointly, together, hold the bullies accountable in a way that makes it impossible to bully anyone among us, encourage and strengthen the folks whose “sin” is finding it easier to follow money, or public opinion, than to follow Jesus.
(I mean, it is easier.)
We need the strength of holding together to be strong enough to stay with Jesus.
Staying together in the church as God’s chosen family, holding together in the church as the interconnected Body of Christ, is how we are each and all part of the kingdom of heaven, of making God’s love, justice, healing, and glory a here-and-now reality for everyone.
I think that’s part of what Jesus is saying when he tells the “church” – the community of his faithful followers – that “what you bind (or release) on earth is bound (or released) in heaven”.
And I know that I don’t want heaven – now or ever, off-earth or on-earth – to be a place as divided and inflexible as this decade’s US politics.
I want heaven – now, on earth, as well as wherever and whenever else – to be a lot more like the last thing we heard Jesus say to us this morning: “When two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
I want heaven to be that assurance of God’s presence.
I want us to go ahead and help God shape a world where the love and care and inspiration of God are constantly near us, with us, in us.
Perhaps it’s an accident of Matthew’s editing – or of the editing of the folks who choose what scripture readings we hear this week. Perhaps it’s the heart of Jesus’ teaching shining through. Perhaps it’s neither of those things.
But there’s definitely some commentary on prayer attached to the comments on how to manage “offenses”. That prayer-teaching is how we get reminded, today, of Jesus’ assurance that God will be with us when we are together.
And that makes me think that the teaching about community conflict resolution may also be teaching on prayer. On the practice of the presence of God.
Because if any time two or three of us – two or three of the followers of Jesus connected to one another in the church – are together, Jesus is there, well, then going to talk to the “member of the church” (the sibling) who is troubling you or the community means that two are gathered, and, so: Jesus is there.
Same for the next step: Two or three others of the community gather with the troubled and troubling. So Jesus is present.
And prayer is, at its heart, every way – any way – that we invoke and enter the presence of Christ, of God.
What if, in fact, every honest engagement with someone else in the faithful community is a form of prayer?
What if every time we come together to manage a trouble – trouble between one another, or trouble that comes to the whole community together – guaranteed the listening, loving, all-knowing presence of God in our midst?
What if every time we came together to support someone else doing a difficult task we experienced the presence of Jesus?
We could expect the unmistakable assurance that Jesus is guiding, strengthening, correcting, encouraging, leading us, every time we take our courage in our hands for a hard conversation.
We could expect the tangible assurance that God is with us, every time we come together to do something difficult
What if we expect the reality of God among us every time we come together, period?
I’m not sure, of course. But I think that doing hard things – any hard things – might feel much more possible. Might become attractive and exciting. I think that conflict-resolution might feel more graceful and energizing than exhausting and anxious.
Might even become just what we do – instead of ignoring trouble, we get close to the trouble, to heal it – just like Jesus told us to do.
And that “doing” may just be the everyday, here and now, practice of experiencing, even shaping heaven.
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