The Killing Light

Propers: The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 23), AD 2023 A Homily: Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. At first glance, this is not a very sexy Gospel reading on which to preach. There are no miracles, no dramatic confrontations, no enigmatic parables. Why, there isn’t even a Roman, and those guys spice everything up. What we seem to have is a procedural, some basic nitty-gritty guidelines for dealing with the sticky wicket of congregational conflict. And that has all the excitement of reading the bylaws, doesn’t it? And yet—this is what love looks like in practice, in community. We’re all for hearing that God is love, the Law is love, in theory. High ideals always get us dewy-eyed, in theory. But when we have to live them out, in everyday life, with the sucker sitting next to us in these pews, that’s when the bloom is off the rose. Yet this is the world that we inhabit, and we must find Christ in it. We must find Him in our neighbor, even and especially in the neighbor whom we do not like. Lutherans call this Theology of the Cross: God finding us where we least expect to find Him. Bearing the Cross rarely means dramatic martyrdom, at least not nowadays. But it always means humility, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. And that’s hard. Because we have to swallow our pride. Not our dignity, mind you. But our pride. “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” Now I guarantee that this is going to happen. Likely it already has. Christ’s church is an aggregate of sinners in need of salvation. And when you put a bunch of sinners together under the same roof, by God, we will sin. Just you wait. But the response is not to call them out, to name and shame, to cancel. Jesus lived in an honor-shame society. To kill someone’s reputation was indeed a form of murder. To a certain extent, it still is, for who can escape from the internet? Rabbinical discussion in Jesus’ day often opined that those who shamed another held no place in the world to come. Yet the hurt must be addressed. As there is no truth without love, so there can be no love without truth. Thus the sin is brought up first in private. So many communal conflicts could be nipped in the bud with a simple, honest, face-to-face addressing of the wrong. Oftentimes it’s all a misunderstanding, a failure adequately to appreciate the other’s point of view. Yet if the wound persists, you’re not alone. “Take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” Now this is right out of the Torah, from Deuteronomy. Any matter of Law, any matter of communal justice, necessitates more than one witness. That way it isn’t simply hearsay. And you can check yourself against a trusted third party. “If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.” Now we come to the time to go public. You have been wronged; you have attempted to reconcile and to rectify the wrong; and you have asked for help. Now it’s up to the community. A healthy society operates above the board. There’s no sneaking around, no dirty little secrets. We’ve all known towns, especially in the Midwest, where some things are known but never spoken, save in whispered tones behind closed doors. I get that that’s because we’re conflict-avoidant. You have to get along with your neighbor, because you’ll need his tractor to pull out your car when you go into a ditch this winter. People are obliged to get along when nature’s your mutual foe, as indeed she is here in Minnesota. But it’s not healthy, even if it seems easier, to hide a festering wound. Sunlight sterilizes. Whenever a conflict is brought before the church—which is to say, the assembly, the community—our aim is truth and reconciliation, not to shame and blame. We have to be honest about that, because it’s easy to say that we just want what’s best, when really we just want revenge. Oh, to play the martyr with our crocodile tears. That’s the thing about the Bible, Christianity, religion writ large: it’s so easy to adopt the form without the function, the letter without the spirit; so easy to succumb to what Jesus calls hypocrisy, play-acting, the rituals and the robes without the justice and the grace. Religion’s a powerful force both in our psyche and our world, and power so readily corrupts. Should we go through all of this, at every stage being open and honest, at every stage checking our own motivations, checking our own pride, and still the sin persists—then the congregation may decide that the unrepentant sinner ought to leave this assembly. “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let them be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector,” that is, people in need of evangelization. It’s true that Gentiles and tax collectors were generally reviled by the good and God-fearing people of Jesus’ day, often for quite legitimate reasons, yet we must remember how Jesus treated Gentiles: as faithful, if often mistaken, children of God. Moreover, we are reading this account, you may recall, from Matthew’s Gospel, and Matthew was a tax collector, wasn’t he? The traditional author and Apostle of this Gospel is telling us to treat the public sinner as Christ once treated him. Removing someone from the assembly, as St Paul too attests, is intended to bring repentance, not exclusion. No-one is rejected from the church in perpetuity. For every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord. “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” That bit should sound familiar. Two Sundays back, Christ said the same thing to St Peter. Now He applies it more generally. That phrase, binding and loosing, has to do with rabbinic interpretive authority. If we follow Jesus’ teachings, if we do as He instructs us in these matters, then we have the blessing of God. We do our part, and trust that Christ is with us throughout the result. “Again, 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. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Those can be dangerous verses if one takes them out of context. Jesus doesn’t mean that He only shows up for small groups. God is most certainly with us even when we are alone. Otherwise, what good would be private prayer? Neither does He mean that God is bound to grant us wishes whenever a pair of us agree. This entire passage has been about how Christians ought to handle conflicts, discipline, and turbulence within our community, in a genuinely Christlike way. In that context, these are words of encouragement, reminding us that the body in which we are bound is the Body of Jesus Christ. And this is how a healthy body deals with division, with damage, with wrong. Sin is a disease within this body that we share. The cure is Christ! When we refuse to return evil for evil—including the evil of sweeping sin under the rug—but instead approach the problem in humility, love, openness, and truth, supporting one another through it all, then indeed we are Jesus together, even if we’re only two or three in His name. Lay it all out in the light, and if truth will kill it, let it die! Because that’s the flipside, isn’t it? We aren’t supposed to take revenge, nor are we to pretend that it didn’t happen, but if push comes to shove, then going our separate ways can be healthy. No-one should have to put up with abuse. And no-one should have to carry around a little dark ball of resentment. Let them be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector: in need of Jesus’ love, in need of Christ’s forgiveness, but living over there in a different community. Walk away; shake the dust off your feet. This too is Christlike behavior. This too is truth in love. So, yeah, not super sexy. Kind of uncomfortable, in fact. But how did we expect a cross to feel? Jesus is with us in the troubles of this life, empowering us, liberating us, to live with dignity, justice, honesty, truth, and a deep and unshakeable joy. Here is Christ in life. This too is the Gospel. And it raises us up from the dead. In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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