Bloomsbury Central
Baptist Church
2nd July 2022, 11.00am
2nd July 2022, 11.00am
Matthew 18:15-20 "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. 16 But 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. 17 If 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. 18 Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 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. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."
Exodus 20:17 You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.
Romans 13:8-14 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 The 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 neighbour as yourself." 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. 11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; 13 let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
The film Beyond Forgiving [1] depicts the journey of two South Africans
to bring healing and reconciliation to their country post-Apartheid.
Letlapa and Ginn
form an unlikely pair:
a black atheist man and a white
Christian woman.
In 1993,
during the post Apartheid years, Letlapa,
then director of operations for the
military wing
of the Pan-Africanist
Congress,
ordered reprisal massacres
in response to the
killing of black school children.
Ginn lost her
only daughter in one of these.
And many years later she met and
came to forgive Letlapa.
We’re going to
watch a couple of clips from the film now,
as a way into our consideration of our
passages for today
which take us to the hearts of sin
and forgiveness.
Beyond Forgiving Trailer
Beyond Forgiving clip
I don’t know
how the idea of Ginn forgiving Letlapa makes you feel,
but in me it stirs mixed emotions.
On the one
hand I’m deeply moved
by the transformation that her
actions have brought about;
not only in her life, or indeed his
life,
but in the lives of so
many others who they have affected
as they have
learned to work together,
telling the story of
their journey
towards
forgiveness and reconciliation.
But on the
other hand I find myself feeling unaccountably angry,
because it seems as if, somehow, the
rules of justice have been violated.
‘Where is the
righteous anger?’ I want to cry.
‘Why should he be free and laughing,
while her daughter is long dead by
his command?’
And therein
lies the complexity
of forgiveness and reconciliation.
It is never
straightforward, it is never comfortable, it is never easy.
And yet,
still, somehow, we have to learn to live with conflict,
we have to learn to live with anger,
hatred, and betrayal.
We have to
learn to live with emotions
that demand revenge in the name of
justice,
and we have to
learn to live with logic
that demands justice in the name
revenge.
There is a
tendency to divide conflict into two categories;
on the one hand we have conflict at
a community level,
which
encompasses everything from a riot to a war,
and where the people
involved have little or no personal knowledge
of those they are in
conflict with;
and on the other hand we have
conflict at a personal level,
which involves
particular disagreements
between people know each
other well.
Only some of
us will ever have direct experience of community-level conflict,
but my suspicion is that all of us
are well acquainted
with conflict that occurs at a
personal level.
We all know
the difficulties involved
in maintaining relationships over
the long term,
whether within a
marriage, or a friendship group,
or an intentional
community such as a church.
It is
all-too-easy for people to find themselves in conflict
with those whom they see regularly.
The sin of
covetousness,
of desiring that which is not ours,
is at the root
of so much violence and discord.
The
interesting thing about the story of Ginn and Letlapa, of course,
is that what started out as a
community conflict between strangers,
evolved into a personal conflict
between two individuals,
as part of its journey towards
reconciliation:
The communal became
individual.
But I think the same can also apply
the other way:
because individual
conflicts never occur in an isolation bubble.
A sin against the one, is a sin
against the many.
And so we come
to our passage from Matthew’s gospel,
which seems, on the surface at
least,
to simply offer a practical
mechanism
for dealing with
conflict when it arrives.
“If another member of the church sins against you…” Jesus begins,
and the
subtext here, of course, is that ‘if’ really means ‘when’…
I’m afraid there is no such a thing as the conflict-free
church,
and even
if there was, as the old adage goes:
‘if you
find it, don’t join it, because you’ll ruin it’.
The reality is that at some point, someone who you share
worship with,
someone
who you break bread and share wine with,
is going to say something or do something
which
will give you cause for grievance.
It’s going to
happen.
The question is, what to do about
it?
One route
might be to have a massive row,
to stand up for ourselves,
to fight back, bite back, make them
see how wrong they are.
Tempting… but,
perhaps, not very ‘Christian’?
Much more
likely, we will ‘take it on the chin’,
or ‘turn the other cheek’, to
misquote the sermon on the mount.
Much more
likely, we will take the anger into ourselves,
seething quietly within,
whilst never letting slip our
well-practiced ‘Christian smile’.
Much more
likely, if we are strategic and careful,
we will find ways of distancing
ourselves from the person,
walking away from groups
where we will encounter them,
maybe even to the extent
of leaving the fellowship altogether.
We divide
ourselves against ourselves and within ourselves,
taking for our own what is not ours
as we seek the
vengeance that is God’s alone to dispense or withhold.
Well, says
Jesus in our reading today, neither
of these are the right approach.
And so we get his famous and oh-so-practical
solution:
Firstly, try
at the earliest opportunity to resolve the difficulty one-to-one.
If that
doesn’t work, the second step is to take a couple of others,
to engage in mediation with a view
to restoring the broken relationship.
Only finally,
if neither of these work, does it become a public matter,
with the community becoming involved
in the discussion.
Simples, no?
Well, no, and,
yes.
The thing is,
if we try to apply Jesus’ advice in a mechanical way,
it can too quickly become just
another mechanism for social control.
Comply, or
you’re out.
If the pastor comes to see you, and
you don’t conform,
before you know it, everyone knows,
and you’re persona non grata.
From the
‘shunning’ practices of the Anabaptists,
to the Excommunication of the
Catholics,
this teaching
has been used down the centuries
to both require and enforce
compliance.
Which is, I
think, a long way from its origins.
The community
that Jesus is speaking to here
is a community seeking to hold
together great diversity and complexity.
It is a community
that is struggling to be inclusive
of those whom others would never
tolerate.
And the
insight that come to us, [2]
is that if we are to be a community
of genuine inclusivity,
encompassing not just
the strong but the weak,
not just the powerful
but the vulnerable,
then we cannot afford to overlook
the sin that seeks to take hold in our midst,
because if we do, it has
the capacity to destroy
the good which is coming
into being among us.
The
confronting of sin, and the challenging the person trapped in it,
is not about enforcing compliance,
but is rather about
offering compassion.
The threat of
making a person ‘like a tax collector or a gentile’
is not about shunning or
excommunicating them,
it is not about throwing
them out of the church,
rather, it is the issuing of a stark
call to them
to return home,
and to be reconciled to
the community that they have wounded.
Whether or not
we have the resolve and courage to seek reconciliation
with the one who has sinned against
us,
is therefore a mark of the kind of
community we are.
To put it
another way:
Do we love each other so intensely,
that we refuse to risk
ignoring the one who is going astray?
Do we refuse to harbour resentment,
seeking instead the more
difficult path of reconciliation?
This is not
about eliminating the conflict that comes from sin,
or suppressing it, or ignoring it,
or denying it.
It’s about
dealing with it,
because the community that it
threatens to destroy
is too precious to us to abandon to
the destructive power of sin.
Christians
must take seriously what it means to confront their enemies well,
because this is the only way in
which the damage already done,
stands any chance of
moving towards healing.
It is the only
way in which the vulnerable
will ever receive justice,
and it is the
only way in which the perpetrator
can be restored to their proper
place within the community.
Too often,
when we talk of forgiveness,
we think of it in terms of ‘papering
over the cracks’,
too often we
define forgiveness in terms of ‘forgive and forget’,
as saying to the perpetrator of hurt
that it doesn’t matter, that it’s
forgotten.
But this is
not what Christian forgiveness is about.
Because sin and hurt, and pain and
wrong, do matter,
and they cannot always be
forgotten.
But they can
be addressed,
carefully, and with good process.
And from that
process, there is the possibility
that genuine forgiveness
can emerge,
which has the potential to liberate
those entangled in the mess of sin
from
the chains that bind them to hurt and pain.
Only through
such process can the path to peace emerge.
And the peace that Jesus offers,
is not simply the peace
that emerges from the absence of violent response.
The peace that Jesus offers is not
the peace of the capitulator,
nor is it the peace of
the person so bullied and coerced
that they have lost
their capacity to fight back.
Rather, the peace of Jesus
is nonviolent because it
is based on truth,
and on the
telling of truth.
As Desmond
Tutu and Nelson Mandela discovered in South Africa,
with the establishment of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission.
Only truth has
the capacity to effectively counter violence.
Only truth can un-spin the web of
deceit which ensnares the unwary
in its violent embrace.
Covetousness
is a secret sin of the heart,
the desiring of that which is not
ours,
whether that is land, power,
possessions, or status.
But truth
brings that which is hidden into the light.
Even love, if
it is love without truth, can be as dangerous
as any open hostility.
If peace
between the brothers and sisters of Jesus
is to be real, it must be peace
without illusion.
Truth is key
to reconciliation,
which is why Jesus instructs the
person who has been wronged
to take with them ‘one
or two’,
so that together they form the ‘two
or three’ witnesses
stipulated by the book
of Deuteronomy (19.15)
as necessary for the
establishment of truthful testimony.
Truth-telling
in the face of conflict,
is a gift that the community of
Christ’s people can offer to the world.
If we can
learn to model it between ourselves,
and learn what it is to inhabit the
peace of Christ,
then we become
equipped and prepared to live that peace into being
in all areas and spheres of our
lives.
How can the
world be changed?
How can we make any difference to
the conflicts that divide humanity?
Well, says
Jesus, it begins with us, here and now.
It begins with those who follow him,
as we learn what it
means to relate in new ways,
as we see relationships transformed,
and healing brought
through truth to those who are divided.
And yet, the
truth is often the last thing
most of us want to know about
ourselves!
We may say
that the truth saves us,
but in fact we know that any truth,
particularly the truth
that is in Jesus,
is as disturbing, as it is
fulfilling.
How will we
react,
if someone comes to us,
to point out to us the error of our
own ways?
How will we
respond,
when someone tells us how much we
have hurt them?
Self-righteousness
is only ever a small step away,
as the shutters come down,
and we retreat to our world of
illusion
where we are the stars
of our own little universe
with everyone else
playing merely supporting roles.
And even those
who take seriously the journey towards truth,
those who take Jesus at his word
when he says
that ‘the truth shall set you
free’(Jn 8.32),
will find that
the truth is often painful,
and that the revelation of our own
inner capacity to harm others,
and to engage in acts of
destruction
against those we love,
as well as those we hate,
is a truth that comes only by great
effort,
and by the grace of God.
But this is
why Jesus insists that those who would follow him
cannot let sins go unchallenged.
If we fail to
challenge one another in our sins,
we in fact abandon one another to
our sins.
We show how
little we love each another,
when we refuse to engage in the hard
work of reconciliation.
And yet, says
Jesus, we cannot afford to ignore this,
because our actions here today have
eternal consequences.
When we loose
someone from the chains of sin,
when we cut the bonds of behaviours
that bind people into destructive
patterns,
then we loose
them for eternity.
When we cut
someone free from the web of deceit
with the sharp edged sword of truth,
they are free indeed.
The kingdom of
Heaven breaks into our midst
when people take decisive action to
bind the Satan’s power
to deceive, distort, and
demean.
And Heaven and
earth collide
when people find release to the new
life
that is theirs in Christ Jesus
[2]
What follows draws on Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew,
SCM Theological Commentary, pp. 165-166.
