Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Yes.
Where two or three are gathered to break bread and give thanks, celebrate a new birth, or observe a rite of passage, Christ is among them. Where two or three are gathered to “tend the sick, soothe the suffering, bless the dying,” Christ is among them.
All true. All good. And often we say the “two or three” phrase when there are just a few of us at a service, or just two or three of us tackling a big project. It’s a way to encourage ourselves that Christ is here, whether we’re a big happy group or a small clutch of die-hards. We’re not wrong about that.
But what Jesus really means is this:
Where two or three are gathered to confront a wrongdoer, Christ is among them.
Where two or three are gathered to grapple with a painful truth, Christ is among them.
Where two or three are gathered to draw a sharp boundary, even if that boundary separates an unsafe person from the community, Christ is there among them.
People join a faith community for lots of reasons. There’s good music, splendid icons, intricate liturgical movements — the aesthetics of faith. There’s deep silence, solemn prayers, intriguing insights — the profundity of faith. There are companions, friends, pastors — the consolation of faith.
But Jesus shapes a faith community that goes further, and painfully so. Christ is among us when we gather, but he is among us as a prophet. Christ provokes. Christ confronts. This is the challenge of faith.
In 2020, this parish readily responded to the pandemic catastrophe, closing our doors and setting up online worship. That was good and right to do, and we are taking our time as we carefully re-open. But St. Paul’s took up another task in 2020: that was the year when Mr. George Floyd was murdered, and we focused more intently on anti-racism efforts. We would do well to renew that work now, since it’s all too easy to let things like this slide. And if we confront and challenge ourselves to do this, Christ will be among us.
We also acknowledge clearly, in our bulletins, on our website, and soon on a plaque in our entryway, the fact that our church stands on stolen land. We give thanks for the Coast Salish people, especially the Duwamish, including all of their descendants who continue to form a living, marginalized community in this region. We give a modest amount each year to Real Rent, a program that financially supports the Duwamish, and we work year by year on mitigating the damage humans have done to the land itself. All good. We should acknowledge the first peoples to live here, and we should steward the gifts of creation for everyone’s benefit. But where we push ourselves even further to atone for the atrocities of both past and present, with the knowledge that this work is never done — where we push ourselves to do more, Christ will be among us.
These examples — protecting those vulnerable to the ravages of disease, confronting our participation in white supremacy, building our allegiance with our Indigenous neighbors, caring for the earth — are all beyond reproach, and plenty difficult. If we stopped here, that might feel like enough. It is a lot. But today’s Good News from Matthew goes even further.
It gets personal. It reads as something like an instruction manual for correcting a particular person in the community who has misbehaved in some way. The person is someone who “sinned against” the community. What is this sin? It could be any violent or dishonest act of course, like assaulting someone or stealing from the common treasure. But it could be other things. Perhaps the person has forgotten the mission of the community, or even turned against it. Perhaps they have betrayed the community in another way: misrepresenting it to others, maybe, or somehow letting the group down. There are plenty of historical examples of heretics being confronted by the faith community: we might do well, in this era of abundant tolerance for individual beliefs, to point out when someone’s theology is harmful. (For example: telling a grieving person that “God has a plan,” so therefore they should not grieve. Please don’t say that to anyone.)
So, it’s personal: A particular person needs to be confronted by another particular person. Others are brought in if that fails. Finally the whole community takes up the issue, and if the person can’t be, or doesn’t want to be, reconciled, then they are set outside the community. Now, this is not as harsh as it may sound. When Jesus says, “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector,” that can sound in our ears like a pretty nasty rejection. Except that Jesus ministered to non-Jewish Gentiles, and he ate with tax collectors. He means that the person is no longer in the community as they had been, but they still receive the community’s positive regard, and may even stay in some form of relationship.
But notice how, again, this is awkwardly, painfully personal. Our faith doesn’t just challenge us to work on complicated abstract issues of justice and peace — though it certainly does do that. Our faith also challenges us to enter into constructive conflict with one another. If I mess up, if I do the wrong thing, if I betray or harm the community, someone should confront me. In our Episcopal structure, that someone should probably be the senior warden, if the rector is the wrongdoer. But it could be someone else, really anyone else. I hold a powerful position in this community, and therefore the ethics of our Christian identity compel me to listen humbly to any human being who is concerned about me.
And these ethics apply to all of us. If you say or do something harmful, you should be confronted. Someone in this community should engage you in a “crucial conversation,” as they’re called in a popular book from the business world. That book’s title is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. There are plenty of other resources. Our own diocese has created materials to help church leaders, lay and clergy alike, learn how to handle conflict. There are many skills to learn, but remember: it’s not just about skill-building. It won’t work unless we consciously choose to be brave.
But we also consciously remember once again — with relief — that where two or three are gathered, Christ is among them. We confront one another as Christ would confront them. Jesus challenged his peers, sometimes with quite a lot of heat — “You blind Pharisee!” we hear him yell a few chapters later in Matthew’s Gospel. He cleansed the temple with a whip. And yet those are examples of Jesus confronting the privileged and powerful, and in Matthew’s same Gospel Jesus describes himself as “gentle and humble in heart.” In John’s Gospel he confronts his companion Peter after Peter’s threefold denial of him, and the confrontation is upsetting for Peter, but Jesus does not raise his voice, and he reminds Peter that he is being reconciled to the Jesus Community not just for his own sake, but so that the “lambs,” the “sheep” — the vulnerable ones in the community — might be fed and tended.
So we do not just push each other around. We don’t indulge ourselves in careless conflict. We discern together. We work on this together. When the time comes to confront someone, we do it with great care and emotional maturity; we do it in the name of Christ.
Paul reminds us today of God’s command that we love one another. “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”: this is a summary of all the ethical obligations of our faith tradition, all of which are grounded in our love of God with heart, mind, and all our being. We love God fully, and this readily forms us to love one another fully, including and especially when we are in conflict, remembering that all human beings are made in the image of God.
And so it is, friends — and it is in this precise way — that I love you. I love you. I love you so much that when it is necessary, I will tell you the hard truth; when it is incumbent upon me, I will confront one or more of you; and when you have the need, always I will listen when you have something difficult to say to me about something I have done, or something I ought to have done but did not do. This is how we practice the love of Christ in this beloved community.
And so we gather now around this Table, and as one of our Eucharistic prayers says so well, we gather to eat together “not for solace only but for strength, not for pardon only but for renewal.” We gain strength and renewal at this Table, strength and renewal to do the hard work of profound love that anchors us firmly in the reconciling presence of Jesus Christ.
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Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18A), September 10, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 149
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20