You Have the Right to Reconcile

Proper 18A: Matthew 18:15-20

If you have ever watched a police drama on TV or the big screen, you know that, when arresting a suspect, the officer is supposed to “read him his rights.” By which is meant “Miranda rights,” a set series of statements that most of us have heard so often that we can quote parts of it by memory: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can or will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney.  If you cannot afford one . . .” and so on.   It’s part of the legal system now in the United States. The procedure of reciting Miranda rights is so ubiquitous that the verb “to mirandize” is now even listed in the dictionary! “Did you mirandize him?” someone might ask a cop who has just brought in a robbery suspect. Failure to do so can lead to a miscarriage of justice as a judge might throw out a case on account of this.

In some segments of the Christian church, “Matthew 18” has become rather like “Miranda Rights.” When dealing with a seemingly recalcitrant sinner in the church, people’s first line of response is something like, “Well, did you ‘Matthew 18’ him? Did you give him the treatment, follow the rules, read him his rights as Jesus laid them out?” If the answer is “No,” the member with a grievance against another member is sent back to do their due diligence. If the answer is yes, then the church proceeds forward with some manner of formal discipline, distancing itself from the woeful sinner.

Reading this passage from the Gospel of Matthew, though, it strikes me that Jesus never intended his words to be taken that way, as a “pastoral police procedure,” a routine set of steps to be followed woodenly and legalistically before reaching the outcome. Yes, Jesus advises believers how we should deal with troubling situations and persons within the midst of his people, but it just seems so unlike Jesus to reduce the complexities of congregational life to a simple process that has all the nuance of HR compliance forms.

We can be glad then that we in Mainline churches don’t really do this. We would never handle sin so rigidly, so legalistically as that. No, our problem is the opposite. We are more likely to ignore sin altogether, thinking it impolite or bad taste even to bring it up. “Sure, she hurt me, but I don’t want to make a big stink about it.” It’s a handy strategy. If you don’t acknowledge the sin, then there’s no need for confrontation, no need for repentance, certainly no need for rebuke. We are so wonderfully gracious, we believe.

Such an attitude is not unique to “gracious” Christians like us. It has become the common attitude throughout our society. In fact, if there is one virtue that trumps all others today, it is to “live and let live.” If there are any moral absolutes, it is that there are no absolutes. Any judgment on the behavior of others is wrong. “All morals are equal, all beliefs the same, all lifestyles appropriate,” we are told. We just need to be more "open," "understanding," "accepting" of others.

Sounds quite virtuous, doesn’t it? Except that behind these high-minded calls for tolerance is an unspoken agreement, one where we promise, “I'll stay out of your life, if you stay out of mine.” If you don’t call me on my stuff, I won’t call you on your stuff. Accepting this agreement, we can all stay individuals, strangers at a distance, with no one challenging us or questioning our motivations, and no one getting close to us either. Which is bad enough, but it also leaves those who’ve been wronged, sinned against, without any redress, except to write the offender off.

To Jesus, nothing could be more destructive to the community of the church and to individuals than dismissing the reality of sin. Which is why in today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus rejects the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil attitude, and the Miranda-rights, police-procedural approach. Instead, he offers another way, a more healthy, more holy way of dealing with conflict.

The Church, Jesus accepts, is not a place without conflict. We’re attempting to live together, to grow spiritually, and work out our salvation. But we’re not there yet. And that means that there will be honest disagreements, but also sadly words spoken that shouldn’t have been said, slights, oversights, and even downright meanness and hurt. And so, when a brother or sister hurts you, sins against you, Jesus tells us that, instead of ignoring it, or worse going around telling others, "Do you know what stupid jerk did to me?”, we are to go and talk to that ‘stupid jerk’ about the hurtful thing they’ve done. Well, maybe Jesus didn’t use the words “stupid jerk,” but he did say the first thing we should do is to go and talk to the person, lovingly point out their offense, telling them how they hurt you. Many times, the wrong that we do to others is unintentional. And yet, it is still painful. That needs to be acknowledged before healing can happen. And healing is the goal here, not humiliation or revenge. The relationship has been broken, damaged, but because relationships are so important for us Christians, we can’t just write others off. Out of love we bring our grievance to them directly to give them a chance to make it right.

If they listen and acknowledge their fault, great! You’ve regained your brother or sister. If, on the other hand, they refuse to listen, if they blow us off—which, you know, does happen— then we are not to dismiss the fault: “Oh, well. That didn’t work. I guess that’s just the way they’re going to be.” No, we are to go back to them with one or two members of the church. They’re there not as backup, to gang up on the one who sinned, but as a witness. Often when we have to face up to a third party, we are more likely to behave properly. We don’t want others to think us stubborn and uncaring.

But, you know, sometimes even that doesn’t work, and ultimately the church, the congregation, has to get involved, not to punish but to acknowledge the seriousness of the breach, and to encourage reconciliation. Again, if they listen and acknowledge their fault, great! You’ve regained your brother or sister.

But sometimes even that, even the voicing of community concern, is not enough. In that case, for the good of everyone, there needs to be a parting of ways, as much to keep the offender apart from the one they’ve hurt, as to acknowledge that sadly, regrettably the offender has put themselves outside of the group. They no longer share in the community of reconciliation, the community of the forgiven and forgiving. They are to be treated as a Gentile and tax-collector.

Now, hearing that, you may be tempted to think, Ok, here’s where the rubber meets the road. We’ve read them their Jesus Miranda Righs and they won’t listen, so we can write them off as a “Gentile and tax collector.” Gentiles and tax collectors, you understand, were bums, lowlifes, undesirables. They had no place among God’s chosen people, no seat at God’s holy table. So, to treat the unrepentant sinner as “a Gentile and tax collector,” that means that we are to have no more dealings with them. End of story. We can wash our hands of the whole matter and have as little to do with them as possible, right?

Now, if it had been anyone else who said this, then I think that would make sense. But this is Jesus, and so we have to ask, how did Jesus treat Gentiles and tax collectors? Did he shun them, ignore them, disparage them? Or were Genties and tax collectors not the very people Jesus appealed to, the ones he went out of his way to share the Good News with? Wasn’t that in fact why he got in trouble with the religious establishment, eating with those shunned by polite society? And was not Matthew himself, the author of this Gospel, a tax collector Jesus sought out to bring into his ministry? I think it’s safe to say then that Jesus did not see “treat them as a Gentile and tax collector” as a license to exclude, but rather a summons to pursue. We can’t act as if unrepentant brothers and sisters are beyond our concern, as if, after we’ve read ‘em their rights, we can be done with them. As Jesus showed, God does not leave us alone when we’ve done wrong, God reaches out to us even then.

So, far from being a Miranda rights kind of thing, this passage is, we see, less about conflict resolution and more about cultivating a culture of reconciliation. This is it for Jesus, for the church. We may think it better, easier to ignore it when we’ve been hurt, but for the good of the church, sin needs to be addressed. Because, contrary to our usual attitude, sin is not a private thing, something just between the sinner and God, or between the sinner and the one sinned against; it has consequences for everyone in the church. You see, when we in the church ignore sin, deny it, sweep it under the rug, we’re not exhibiting “grace”; we are instead undermining our witness, our witness to the truth.

The church, you see, is to be a place of truth-telling—telling the truth about God, about the world and about ourselves. In particular, the church teaches us to tell the truth about sin, our own and the sin of others. And it gives us the resources, the support we need to tell the truth to each other, and to hear the truth from one another, in order that the witness of the church might be maintained.

When we turn a blind eye to sin, we are failing to live up to the truth. We are not being graceful, but in fact we are keeping the community from embodying the life of grace that we’ve been given through Jesus. This is why we in the church can’t simply ignore sins, can’t keep everything cheerful and superficial, and act as if nothing has happened. The world needs us to be the church, needs us to tell the truth, needs us to show a different way than the way the world deals with conflict. We need to learn to fight like Christians in the church so that we can fight like Christians in the world, with truth and grace. The world on its own doesn’t know how to do this, doesn’t know how to create communities where people care enough about each other to tell the truth, to bring things out into the open for the whole community to see, and to practice forgiveness with one another. That’s what the church is about.

Jesus points to this when, in the context of church conflict, he says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Did you catch that? Jesus is not to be found just in sublime moments of ecstasy, but in the nitty-gritty of working through of church conflicts. Present not only in times of peace, but in times of pain, not only in the calm but also in conflict, when we risk deeper relationship, when we dare to tell each other the truth, when we acknowledge our faults, seek forgiveness, and make the sometimes slow, aching journey toward reconciliation —that’s when Jesus is present.

What a thought! How many people do you know can say, “Yeah, I see God when I have fight with others in my church or when someone calls me out when I’ve done wrong”? As odd as that sounds, that is exactly what Jesus is promising us. He is saying that he is present in just those times, when we decide to stay in relationship with each other, and thereby maintain our witness to the truth while calling to account those who refuse to live up to that standard.

It’s sad to think of how many times we miss out on this gift, how often Christians, churches, and whole denominations have rejected Jesus’ promise of his presence because they care more about being seen as gracious, tolerant, and forgiving even before any sin is acknowledged. They don’t understand that judgment, the acknowledgment of genuine injustice, the naming of real hurt, is not only the most honest, the most truthful thing to do, but it can also be an act of the deepest love. I love the truth enough to tell it. I love you enough to risk telling it to you.

I know how Jesus’ approach to sin in the church is challenging. It’s not how people normally do things. In our culture, we are expected to “live and let live.” But, Jesus calls us instead to “love and let love.” And sometime love means confronting others when they’ve done wrong, when they’ve hurt us. And sometimes it means being confronted when we’ve hurt others. For that is the nature of true community, of the Church that Jesus has called us into, where Jesus promises to meet us. Thanks be to God!