Sep 13 | “Forgiveness and Facing Mirrors,” (Sermon, September 10th 2017)

“‘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. ¹⁶But 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. ¹⁷If 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. ¹⁸Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. ¹⁹Again, 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. ²⁰For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’”

Matthew 18: 15-20

 

Who else’s heart rate goes up just thinking about taking a friend aside and saying, “Listen, we have to talk.” I think most of us remember what it was like to learn group dynamics, to eventually come to the conclusion that sometimes it really is better to be proactive and tell someone that what they’re doing is not helpful, or is in fact hurtful.

But MAN it stinks!

It stinks because we all know what it’s like when someone does that to us. It’s kind of like going to the dentist, isn’t it? Sure it’s healthy and necessary…but no matter how it’s done it’s also embarrassing and painful and a little invasive, right?

But think about how effective that conversation could be to change behaviour within a community.

Our friend David Lose asks in his blog post this week, “What’s more important: rules, or relationships?”

I find the question a bit simplistic. This passage looks like it’s about rules, but the rules wouldn’t work at all without a strong foundation of trust. It manages to lay aside defensiveness, power posturing, and the blame game for honest, open communication. It’s pretty remarkable advice for its time.

Consider too the beauty of the progression. You point out the issue when you’re alone. It’s not just to save face; it’s to allow for the possibility that you might be changed as well. You give the person the chance to explain themselves. You wouldn’t be likely to get an honest apology from someone if you yelled their sin out to everyone, or talked to other people about it behind their back. You can choose to respond how you wish, but you must give them this chance to explain themselves.

And if that brings about no change in either of you, you are invited to bring in two or three others –hopefully not to gang up on the offender, but for accountability and transparency. And if that doesn’t work, you reveal it to the community, rather than letting it poison things from the inside out. We all know what it’s like to be in toxic places, to be able to trace all of the poison back to one hurtful incident. The community is empowered to heal itself, because it cannot function unless group needs are being cared for.

And of course, the most beautiful part of the passage, even though it doesn’t look like it at first: “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector.”

Which of the disciples was a former tax-collector? Which of the people whose requests for healing were met by Jesus was a Gentile? How did Jesus respond to both?

They are healed, called, and integrated.

Two people try to repair a broken bond. If they cannot do so with any of the instruments available to them, the community is called upon to remind the offender of the liberation and love that called that person in the first place.

We can make this interpretive leap because of the context of this passage: it’s surrounded by stories of healing and forgiveness. The passage just preceding this one is the parable of the one lost sheep, a parable that rejoices in the all-encompassing love of the God who goes out into the midnight wilderness to search for us, the God who rolls away the stone of our pain in order to welcome us into daily resurrection.

And, most germane to today’s passage, Peter asks Jesus after today’s Gospel reading, “How many times should I forgive someone who sins against me? As many as seven times?” “No, seventy-seven.” That’s not a literal number, of course – it’s meant to be hyperbole. A million times a million.

Lest we think this calls us to be doormats, Jesus begins the chapter by impressing upon the disciples the seriousness of the consequences of sin. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away, he says. We should avoid bad behaviour, but when we slip up, there is still love and forgiveness.

You can cut yourself off from God; you can try to escape, but God will keep calling.

This is not, as the Apostle Paul says, an invitation to sin all the more. It is a reminder that we need to live into our true calling as God’s people: that what we bind on earth will be bound in heaven; what we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. When we embody love, love spreads. When we are together, Christ’s real Presence is among us, even we children of these latter years who have neither seen nor heard, and yet perhaps saw and heard in ways that his friends in first century Palestine never could have seen nor heard.

St. Margaret’s lives this out every day, in each of our individual lives, and here communally, together. We have this beautiful ministry of Hineni House, which today will start another new year of discernment, deepening spirituality, and inspiring souls to grow and be changed. If we look at Hineni House from a purely selfish perspective, they have a lot to teach us about community and the practices of forgiveness that we heard about this morning. Here are folks who sign on to live into it in a radical way. This is a gift that St. Margaret’s has given itself. Here is a community that embodies all of the joys, sorrows, and struggles of that early Christian community, that fledgling group of believers who weren’t always quite sure who they were and what they were doing, but were driven wholly by the desire to deepen their relationship with the one who made the stars of night, the force from whom all life and love flows out in streams of living justice across the universe. And in some ways Hineni House is even more precious, because those who are drawn to it come bearing threads from so many other tapestries of faith and experience. This is a group not made up only of people who would be familiar to us as Christians. This is a group that may never have crossed paths if not for Hineni, St. Margaret’s sacred well, if you like, and in that way they truly can be said to have been called by God.

St. Margaret’s could choose to simply observe this sacramental circle of people passively, gaining only knowledge to feed ourselves and our own dreams, but instead we choose to do more than learn and observe. We choose to not only support the House but to celebrate how they care for each other and for us.

That’s something to be proud of. Lots of parishes are willing to mourn the lack of young people in their pews, but not many parishes are willing to sign onto concretely supporting young people in their spiritual journeys freely, without knowing for certain if that young person is going to come out the other end a Christian, or even religious at all!

If we can affirm and celebrate that Hineni House shows us in miniature what a community called by God from all the corners of the world looks like, then it is incumbent upon St. Margaret’s to show Hineni House what it means to model that love in a Christian context, with a few more people and a story of the marriage that we proclaim took place between God and the cosmos. Our call is to live out loud this story of death and resurrection, of calling and forgiving, for each other and for Hineni House.

We are so lucky at St. Margaret’s to have this very tangible slice of the Kingdom, and we are lucky to be given this very concrete opportunity to show forth how Christ’s love makes us act in the world.

As we begin this new year at Hineni House and at St. Margaret’s, let us pledge to be like mirrors facing each other, within which the endless depths of the love of God are made manifest and reflected back, for the building up of God’s Kingdom here, in this place.