The gospel today can be very easily misunderstood and indeed has been by many in the Church. For those of us with experience in Risk Management, it might come across as an instruction for properly jettisoning recalcitrant members of the Church, being sure to cover (for lack of a better word) one's tracks, being sure to handle conflict, if at all possible privately, resorting to a cascade of subsequent strategies to that point that the impenitent are cast off and shunned, for the good of the community and the purity of the message.
It degenerates to this frame of mind, because the premise is forgotten -- If another member of the Church sins against YOU....
This is about interpersonal conflict, not about a perceived conflict between the conduct of a sinner and his or her standing within the Church. The reason Jesus first suggests a private encounter is not only for the matter of charity, but whether the one discerning fault is indeed clear about the problem, or whether he or she has just been ticked off with the other person, so that the real issue might have become blurred.
It's also interesting to note what the acceptable outcome is for Jesus -- not that the offender is rehabilitated. Jesus seems to be satisfied when two people are able to "listen" to each other. The progressive steps are not that the witnesses affirm the strength of an instigator's argument, but only that the prospective offender understands the concern of the person feeling aggrieved.
Jesus challenges those with broken communication, confirmed among the community of believers, the Church, to consider the other person as a Gentile or a tax collector. That seems rather cut and dry. That seems rather clear, until we factor in the great complaint about Jesus throughout his ministry -- that Jesus eats and drinks with sinners and tax collectors.
Consider, if you please, the somewhat cynical adage: Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer!
In the logic of the world, this of course means, "Don't let your enemies out of your sight, because of what they might inflict upon you, should they somehow surprise you."
In the logic of faith, I would suggest that keeping one's enemies closer keeps us and them from stewing in our own juices of rage.
In conflict, "out of sight" rarely means "out of mind." More often than not, when I shut someone out of my life, I give up on my talents and skills to cooperate -- to resolve conflict. And worse than that, I deprive the Holy Spirit the opportunity to work through either of us for a greater, more lasting and more significant good.
Again, look at Jesus' choice of words. We have usually thought of the word, "bind" to mean "blame," particularly in the legal sense of being held or being bound over for prosecution. In point of fact, binding usually means drawing things or people closer together than pulling things or people apart.
This is what becomes particularly corrosive in the life of the Church. In the Roman Church, we used to speak about the authority or the obligation of the Church to Guard the Deposit of Faith. Now Protestants or Anglicans may not have the same language, but I think people on the extremes of controversies within the Church today presume this same obligation. Liberals and conservatives are hell-bent (and I mean that pun to its fullest irony) they are Hell-bent on preserving the Church from the errors of the other. The radicals and the reactionaries create an environment of acrimony far harder to deal with than any heresy they purport or reject. The scandal of the Church is not our permissiveness or our strictness. The scandal of the Church is our acrimony. In the current conflict in the Church regarding morality and sexuality, we are not moving forward on the issues because we are too busy name-calling, because we refuse to talk with one another.
Some within the Anglican Communion think that many of our problems among the various problems would be resolved by the creation of a Covenant, defining minimum standards for membership.
We're already bound to a covenant. That covenant is Baptism. That covenant is not restrictive but expansive. That covenant presumes the good will of those who have presented themselves for Baptism, as they discern and submit to the all-encompassing power and love of a God who says that we WILL be his people and He WILL be our God. When we think of Baptism as a Rite of Christian Initiation, we run the risk of ignoring the equally important aspect of Baptism as a Rite of the Renewal or the Re-Invention of the whole Body of Christ with the gifts the newly baptized bring to the Table, if you will, to the Table of the Lord.
Remember, the Baptismal promises are not only those of the candidate to renounce Satan and to accept Jesus Christ. The candidate will not have much of an idea of how those promises might be tested over the course of his or her own life in the Faith.
The final question in that Rite is one that CAN be answered in light of the collective experience and strength of the congregation.
"Will you who witness these vows DO ALL IN YOUR POWER to support these persons in their life in Christ?"
It is then the People of God already baptized who profess the Apostles Creed, who promise to "continue in the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?"
We promise to persevere in resisting evil, to proclaim the Good News by Word and example, and to seek and to serve Christ in ALL persons. And finally, in the Rite of Baptism, it is we, and not the candidate, who promises to STRIVE for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being.
In the story from Exodus, we become so obsessed with the task of the Avenging Angel and the proscriptions of the actions of the Passover, adorning the lintels with the Blood of the Lamb and eating the meal as a people in flight, we lose the impact of this perpetual memorial and the significance of some of the foods.
While bitter herbs, roasted lamb, and unleavened bread symbolized urgency, they were natural foods of two different kinds of people -- nomadic herdsmen and crop farmers and their families. Herdsmen didn't have too many vegetables, so they tended to rely on the value of herbs they could carry around easily to infuse the meat of the animals they roasted. Yeast used by householders, landed people, was vital to their production of sustainable and storable products like bread and yoghurt, but yeast risked contamination, so from time to time, women would toss old culture for new. There were those times when the starter yeast cultures would not be ready, when the old cultures were being discarded. So the householders had to make do with what they had.
The covenant of the Israelites was galvanized by the ingenuity people from different backgrounds in Egypt that would sustain them 'til their arrival in the Promised Land and would sustain them through trials and pogroms to our own day.
The Passover was also a celebration and the empowerment of a people. The people assumed a priestly role. Sacrifice usually was made by the priestly caste, but not in this instance. Each household was to kill the Lamb and scatter its blood. While the benefits were to be personal, the memory was to be collective, so much so that smaller families were to seek out another family to share the lamb with to assure that as little as possible would be wasted.
I believe it was George Bernard Shaw, who is attributed as saying,
"Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language."
I would suggest that the Anglican Communion is thirty-eight provinces divided by a common faith. This is our genius, and this is our curse. This is the Mystery of Faith. Look at the final words of this gospel today as both an assurance AND a challenge:
"If two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven."
In Romans today, Paul sets but one prescript, "(Nothing but) to love one another."
He continues,
"Love does no wrong to a neighbor."
Think about the simple power of these two ideas from Paul and go back to the prior sentence from the gospel:
If two of you agree...about anything, (it) will be done for you....
How will this happen? From without or from within? I don't know, but in your meditation, don't underestimate the power and the ingenuity of God.
In the ways of the world, we know about the energy generated by soldiers, colleagues, parents, fellow citizens, and others who put their heads together for a common purpose. They're virtually unstoppable.
How much more so in the walk of faith? If we believe that by God's gift and call, we possess the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, doesn't it make sense that when we allow ourselves to agree with one another about something important, we allow the Spirit dwelling in each one of us to unite, creating a power, an energy, a potentially miraculous catalyst that will forge a cause, facilitate healing, and change hearts?
It degenerates to this frame of mind, because the premise is forgotten -- If another member of the Church sins against YOU....
This is about interpersonal conflict, not about a perceived conflict between the conduct of a sinner and his or her standing within the Church. The reason Jesus first suggests a private encounter is not only for the matter of charity, but whether the one discerning fault is indeed clear about the problem, or whether he or she has just been ticked off with the other person, so that the real issue might have become blurred.
It's also interesting to note what the acceptable outcome is for Jesus -- not that the offender is rehabilitated. Jesus seems to be satisfied when two people are able to "listen" to each other. The progressive steps are not that the witnesses affirm the strength of an instigator's argument, but only that the prospective offender understands the concern of the person feeling aggrieved.
Jesus challenges those with broken communication, confirmed among the community of believers, the Church, to consider the other person as a Gentile or a tax collector. That seems rather cut and dry. That seems rather clear, until we factor in the great complaint about Jesus throughout his ministry -- that Jesus eats and drinks with sinners and tax collectors.
Consider, if you please, the somewhat cynical adage: Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer!
In the logic of the world, this of course means, "Don't let your enemies out of your sight, because of what they might inflict upon you, should they somehow surprise you."
In the logic of faith, I would suggest that keeping one's enemies closer keeps us and them from stewing in our own juices of rage.
In conflict, "out of sight" rarely means "out of mind." More often than not, when I shut someone out of my life, I give up on my talents and skills to cooperate -- to resolve conflict. And worse than that, I deprive the Holy Spirit the opportunity to work through either of us for a greater, more lasting and more significant good.
Again, look at Jesus' choice of words. We have usually thought of the word, "bind" to mean "blame," particularly in the legal sense of being held or being bound over for prosecution. In point of fact, binding usually means drawing things or people closer together than pulling things or people apart.
This is what becomes particularly corrosive in the life of the Church. In the Roman Church, we used to speak about the authority or the obligation of the Church to Guard the Deposit of Faith. Now Protestants or Anglicans may not have the same language, but I think people on the extremes of controversies within the Church today presume this same obligation. Liberals and conservatives are hell-bent (and I mean that pun to its fullest irony) they are Hell-bent on preserving the Church from the errors of the other. The radicals and the reactionaries create an environment of acrimony far harder to deal with than any heresy they purport or reject. The scandal of the Church is not our permissiveness or our strictness. The scandal of the Church is our acrimony. In the current conflict in the Church regarding morality and sexuality, we are not moving forward on the issues because we are too busy name-calling, because we refuse to talk with one another.
Some within the Anglican Communion think that many of our problems among the various problems would be resolved by the creation of a Covenant, defining minimum standards for membership.
We're already bound to a covenant. That covenant is Baptism. That covenant is not restrictive but expansive. That covenant presumes the good will of those who have presented themselves for Baptism, as they discern and submit to the all-encompassing power and love of a God who says that we WILL be his people and He WILL be our God. When we think of Baptism as a Rite of Christian Initiation, we run the risk of ignoring the equally important aspect of Baptism as a Rite of the Renewal or the Re-Invention of the whole Body of Christ with the gifts the newly baptized bring to the Table, if you will, to the Table of the Lord.
Remember, the Baptismal promises are not only those of the candidate to renounce Satan and to accept Jesus Christ. The candidate will not have much of an idea of how those promises might be tested over the course of his or her own life in the Faith.
The final question in that Rite is one that CAN be answered in light of the collective experience and strength of the congregation.
"Will you who witness these vows DO ALL IN YOUR POWER to support these persons in their life in Christ?"
It is then the People of God already baptized who profess the Apostles Creed, who promise to "continue in the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?"
We promise to persevere in resisting evil, to proclaim the Good News by Word and example, and to seek and to serve Christ in ALL persons. And finally, in the Rite of Baptism, it is we, and not the candidate, who promises to STRIVE for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being.
In the story from Exodus, we become so obsessed with the task of the Avenging Angel and the proscriptions of the actions of the Passover, adorning the lintels with the Blood of the Lamb and eating the meal as a people in flight, we lose the impact of this perpetual memorial and the significance of some of the foods.
While bitter herbs, roasted lamb, and unleavened bread symbolized urgency, they were natural foods of two different kinds of people -- nomadic herdsmen and crop farmers and their families. Herdsmen didn't have too many vegetables, so they tended to rely on the value of herbs they could carry around easily to infuse the meat of the animals they roasted. Yeast used by householders, landed people, was vital to their production of sustainable and storable products like bread and yoghurt, but yeast risked contamination, so from time to time, women would toss old culture for new. There were those times when the starter yeast cultures would not be ready, when the old cultures were being discarded. So the householders had to make do with what they had.
The covenant of the Israelites was galvanized by the ingenuity people from different backgrounds in Egypt that would sustain them 'til their arrival in the Promised Land and would sustain them through trials and pogroms to our own day.
The Passover was also a celebration and the empowerment of a people. The people assumed a priestly role. Sacrifice usually was made by the priestly caste, but not in this instance. Each household was to kill the Lamb and scatter its blood. While the benefits were to be personal, the memory was to be collective, so much so that smaller families were to seek out another family to share the lamb with to assure that as little as possible would be wasted.
I believe it was George Bernard Shaw, who is attributed as saying,
"Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language."
I would suggest that the Anglican Communion is thirty-eight provinces divided by a common faith. This is our genius, and this is our curse. This is the Mystery of Faith. Look at the final words of this gospel today as both an assurance AND a challenge:
"If two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven."
In Romans today, Paul sets but one prescript, "(Nothing but) to love one another."
He continues,
"Love does no wrong to a neighbor."
Think about the simple power of these two ideas from Paul and go back to the prior sentence from the gospel:
If two of you agree...about anything, (it) will be done for you....
How will this happen? From without or from within? I don't know, but in your meditation, don't underestimate the power and the ingenuity of God.
In the ways of the world, we know about the energy generated by soldiers, colleagues, parents, fellow citizens, and others who put their heads together for a common purpose. They're virtually unstoppable.
How much more so in the walk of faith? If we believe that by God's gift and call, we possess the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, doesn't it make sense that when we allow ourselves to agree with one another about something important, we allow the Spirit dwelling in each one of us to unite, creating a power, an energy, a potentially miraculous catalyst that will forge a cause, facilitate healing, and change hearts?
