First United Methodist Church of Reno

⁸Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. ⁹The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

¹Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. ²Happy are

those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

³While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. ⁴ For

day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of

⁵Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will

⁶Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of

mighty waters shall not reach them. ⁷You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me

⁸I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye

upon you. ⁹Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding, whose temper must

be curbed with bit and bridle, else it will not stay near you. ¹⁰Many are the torments of

the wicked, but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the LORD. ¹¹Be glad in the

¹⁵“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.”

As we move closer and closer to actually electing our next president of these “United States” a couple of months from now, like many of you these past several weeks, I’ve been listening to far too many political speeches and the inevitable commentary which follows all of them. So I was reminded (yet, again, as I read the scriptures for this week) that we live in an immense web of relationships – the church is just one among many of them. Week after week we meet with usually the same people and do much of the same kinds of things. As we’re forced to live more intimately with each other, though, problems of all kinds begin to pop up, and we’re supposed to figure out what to do in the midst of these problems – of “red” and “blue” states, of rights and wrongs, what to do and what not to do, and how best to resolve all kinds of local and worldwide disputes.

The stories about Jesus come out of the same kind of web of relationships as you and I experience today – lived and experienced in local communities. So it’s no surprise that these stories are filled with a lot of advice and admonitions on how we’re supposed to live with each other. Jesus is always concerned with the daily ethics of what it means to live in community. Then, as now, people are going to hurt each other and cause problems for each other. Life is messy and the gospels can help us sort out our lives by paying attention to the kinds of ethical imperatives that are never aimed at just us alone, but that show concern for the lives of those around us.

Even if this passage from Matthew says more about what was going on in the early church than it does about Jesus, and as hard as it may be to actually follow each of these steps in sequence, the process is still worth hearing.^⁵ When the community is telling people what they ought to do when they cross each other, it’s establishing a way of trying to straighten things out. First you do this; then you do that; and then let’s hope it’s settled. But even Jesus would know that life can’t function around just following seven easy steps towards happiness. It’s much more complex than that. At least that’s why, if none of the first steps work, you’ve got to try something else. Then try again. Only after having exhausted all that it seems you can do, only then, do you let it go and leave it behind you. But before we get to that last point, we have a whole lot of work to do – work that’s not easy.

There’s a recurring formula within this passage from Matthew that challenges us to move progressively from a private to a communal point of view. It invites us to recognize that things like sin and forgiveness, accountability and reconciliation, always have communal dimensions. The first steps as well as the subsequent approaches between an offender and the offended are always attempts to preserve the community, to regain that other one in relationship, because sin always has social dimensions. “Two” is the basic unit of community life. Two is the unit at the initial level of any sin. It’s the minimal unit necessary for witness. It’s the foundation for any search for truth. Two is at the heart of any meaningful relationship – whether it’s with a member of your own family, with a neighbor, between you and a stranger, or between you and God.

With the overemphasis on individual rights, though, isn’t that structure totally off these days? Nobody wants to linger in or work through any troubled relationship for very long. Against the general lack of patience in our society today – that even has us in a snit at not being able to find a parking spot at church – the gospel is saying to us: linger a little while longer here with your brother or your sister before you say anything that you might regret later, before you quit this church, before you try to write off that neighbor from the community. No, we’re being told, try to work it out, go a second mile, try to find some room for understanding each other, dare to take a step closer and really listen to each other. That might be the toughest thing in the world to do, though, to move towards someone we’re at odds with and to move away from our self-certainties. We shouldn’t be so shocked or surprised, though. The “good news” that we’ve been given in Jesus, more often than not, demands us to do what we often do not want to do.

Psychiatrist, Eric Berne, who wrote the classic text, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, has given us a theory of personality and communication that’s called transactional analysis. Berne suggests that when we interact with others, we have at least three choices as to how to behave: we can take the stance of a Parent, an Adult, or a Child. When we become the Parent, we unconsciously mimic parental attitudes and behaviors. Like all parents, we can be caring; but we also, then, tend to speak with authority; we want to discipline, to teach, and to be in control. For all of those reasons a Parent can end up being judgmental and patronizing and is easily frustrated by the Child in another person. The Child state, Berne has pointed out, implies becoming childlike and beginning to rehearse many of those behaviors – good and bad – that we all had as children: laughing, teasing, and being adorable, but also sometimes testing authority and boundaries, engaging in manipulative behavior, while also feeling shame, anger, and despair. The Adult state, according to Berne, implies being able to take a step back and to think clearly and responsibly about what’s happening. The Adult is attentive, interested, doesn’t get anxious, doesn’t feel threatened. Where being a Parent takes on the “teaching” role in life and the Child the “feeling” role, the Adult is the one who is always “thinking” things through. What’s interesting is that all of these ego states are already present very early on in our childhood.

Communication is all about different transactions that happen between the Parent/Adult/Child in one person and the Parent/Adult/Child in another. Effective communication (at least transactional analysis claims) implies complementary communication: the Child state of one person speaking to the Child state in another, for example. Crossed-communication, say, where a Parent in one person speaks to the Child in another, or where the Adult in one person attempts to address the Parent in another, doesn’t work very well.

So when we read today’s lesson from Matthew as we might as a Child, we may very well begin to feel judged, condemned, and ultimately rejected. We’ll challenge anybody, by God, who has power over us! It’s very easy to become overly defensive as a Child. Maybe reading this text awakens the Parent in us as we see how quick we are to judge others and to try to control them. The Parent in us will try to define the “sin” and then we’ll assume a lot of responsibility for convincing the other person that they’re in the wrong. An Adult reading of our text, though, would recognize that this portion of the Gospel According to Matthew is speaking about how living in community is absolutely dependent upon ties of love. It’s about discerning mutual concerns while working toward restoration and forgiveness. It offers us a promise even as it describes a process.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; [but] when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; …I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; [but] the greatest of these is love.^⁶

Our lesson from Matthew’s Gospel today, though, ends on an interesting note as it has Jesus saying this:

“…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.”

Now, for far too long the assumption has been that the only thing important about being the church was us being “gathered” here in Jesus’ name. Then we just hold hands and sing “Kumbaya,” right? Have you ever noticed, though, that the context for all of this gathering was honest-to-God fighting with each other? I suggest that that puts an entirely different spin on this scripture passage.

Jesus is trying to do some preemptive damage control, here, by reminding us all of the most important points about living in community. As soon as the disciples start quarreling with each other about which one of them is going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, he knows they’re already daydreaming about which of them is going to get a corner office and which one is going to make partner. He can see it in their eyes: they think this disciple-internship is just a stepping stone to that grand and glorious day when everybody else in the church is going to defer to them about everything, and they will rule the church – with a firm but, of course, just hand.

What’s just as interesting about this teaching is not that the conflict will be resolved easily or early, but that it will, in fact, probably get worse before it gets better! It’s almost as if Jesus is trying to prepare the disciples for the realities of what it’s going to be like for them when they begin to serve on any committee or board in the church – with all its dissension and struggles, all of its squabbles over both mountains and molehills. It’s almost as if he’s reassuring us, too, that we will have an important role to play, but it’s not going to be easy.

It’s important for us, then, not to miss the context for this whole passage: we are always going to be fighting about something. Always. But – and hear this – we are always going to be doing it in the name of Jesus, no matter what the fight is about: whether it’s about gay marriage or the nature of God, about clergy salaries or the divinity of Jesus, about Sunday School curricula or whose biblical interpretations we’re going to follow, which mission or ministry gets our hard-earned money or what color carpet are we going to have in the Fellowship Hall? There’s always going to be fighting about something; but we better do it for Jesus, and in his name – so help us, God.

That’s why we’ve come to say that at least this community – called the 1^st United Methodist Church of Napa – is a place where we care enough to confront each other. We want to be the kind of community where bridges are built, not burned; we want to be a church where people walk toward, not away from each other; we want this to be a place where relationships are restored, not written off. So when you find yourself in a situation where – real or imagined – you believe that somebody around here has crossed you, remember this lesson from Matthew. Then work the process, carefully and yet confidently, and see what happens.

1 According to Paul, love sums up all of the commandments we might find in the Bible. At other places he’s described love as patient and kind, without envy or jealousy, neither arrogant nor rude, neither irritable nor resentful, never prone to anger nor brooding over either real or imagined injuries, but rejoicing in goodness and truth (all of these, of course, seen in the well-known 13^th chapter of 1^st Corinthians). We as Christians have the responsibility – Paul even uses the imagery of indebtedness here – to love each other. Like all of our readings for today, this one speaks strongly of our obligation to not only create but to preserve the life of the community – an obligation that’s both individual and communal.

2 While this particular psalm is not listed as the one chosen for the lectionary, I believe that it’s a good fit with the theme that connects Romans 13: 8-10 with Matthew 18: 15-20, and that is the very real joy that comes whenever moments of understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation are experienced. It’s been said that this was early church father and philosopher, St. Augustine’s, favorite psalm; Martin Luther referred to it as “one of the Pauline psalms” (Pss. 51, 130 and 143 being the others). And while this psalm ends up sounding more like a psalm of thanksgiving, it’s considered to be the second of seven, so-called, “penitential psalms” (Pss. 6, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143 being the other six). For no other reason, its message is interesting in that it says we can run, but we can’t hide from our sins.

3 You might be curious, as I once was, about what this word, se’lah, means – particularly as I’ve isolated it here from the rest of the psalm (which is not the way that it’s noted in most Bibles). The word literally means “interlude” and since the Psalter was originally the songbook for worshipers (a response to scripture, actually, rather than a part of scripture itself) it’s a musical notation – an indication for the striking of a percussive instrument like a cymbal or bell – that would interrupt the otherwise even flow of the chanting voices. The word was probably, at first, just a marginal notation that, over the course of centuries, has crept into the text and simply stayed. It occurs 71 times in 39 different psalms. Possibly its most expressive example comes in the combination of Higgai’on Se’lah of Psalm 9 following verse 16; there it’s to indicate the end of the main thought by a soft whispering of strings followed by a clash of cymbals.

4 As we’ve seen in the earlier readings, the Bible is constantly calling our attention to the responsibility that we have for each other, and that includes the ways in which we deal with the reality of each other’s faults – our “sins” if you will. The real importance of recognizing sin, though, is not at all about determining, then, who’s in and who’s out – who’s going to heaven and who won’t – but that sin (individually and collectively) is ultimately responsible for the destruction of the life of the community. It doesn’t just become a stumbling block for one’s inner experience of God; it can lead to the death of an entire community.

5 Like a lot of the teachings “put in the mouth of Jesus,” this one has deep roots in the ancient Jewish community: cf. Leviticus 19: 15-18 and Deuteronomy 19: 15-20, for example.

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

September 7, 2008