Today’s gospel lesson is about our life together and how we are to live and love within the Christian community, especially when things go wrong. And because we are talking about human beings living in community, we can be fairly certain there will be times when things will go wrong.
One of the reasons God came among us, as a flesh-and-blood human, is to be with people face to face. Imagine the healing power present in the moment when Jesus looked Peter in the eye and asked, “Peter, do you love me?” Or when he cupped in his hands the face of the woman caught in adultery and said, “Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.” When he healed the man born blind and the first thing the man saw was the face of Jesus looking at him with eyes of love. When Jesus appeared, face to face, with the women outside the tomb on that first Easter morning and said, “Do not be afraid.
These face-to-face encounters were not to end when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. One of Christ’s gifts to us is the gift of community, where we meet our brothers and sisters heart to heart, spirit to spirit, and face to face. Christian community is that place, that way of being, where we know, and are known by Christ who is the center of our community. It is Christ that calls us to reach beyond ourselves and know that we are connected, woven together into one body, the family of God. Together, in Christian community we can share grief and joy, sorrow and victory, sadness and celebration. Christian community is our gift.
But it’s a gift we don’t fully accept. Living in community is hard. As that growing sector in our society, the spiritual-but-not-religious folks might put it, “Churches have too many people to deal with; we’d rather just be spiritual on our own.”
But Jesus taught that faith is not a private matter. Our faith is not something we can go off and do alone, sitting by a stream or walking in the woods. Those things and times of private devotion can feed our faith, but our life in Christ happens when we are gathered together.
It has been said that, “no man or woman is an island, unto him or herself.” For centuries we have considered a person living totally alone to be a hermit. But more and more we are discovering that even in densely populated cities loneliness is a chronic, debilitating, and an all too common condition. Solitary experience is contrary to human nature because we are social animals. For all human history life has been lived in the context of communities of one sort or another; for good or ill.
The bad is easy to recognize, because the history of human kind is as much as anything a history of war and conflict. We read in the record of the past and see in the news of our day that humans have great difficulty getting along with one another—whether it be in the neighborhood, village, city, state, nation, or world. As Christians we see the negative side of community life. Yet we do not give in to the dark side; we make no peace with the powers that divide community and isolate individuals. The primary prayer of the Christian faith, the Lord’s Prayer, begins—OUR—not “my,” but “our.” It is a shared prayer for a shared faith. We understand ourselves as part of a family in which we all are brothers and sisters. We recognize that our lives in the context of community must be mutually supportive.
Today’s Gospel makes it clear that in our link to one another through Christ, there is a power in our community that unites the values of God to our values on earth. This is how Jesus enables us to use God’s power for making healing and life-giving love more effective among God’s people. We come together, we stay together, we work together—in our Lord’s name unleashing the power of the Spirit to transform our lives and the lives of all God’s children.
This teaching is really reconciliation and restoration of a brother or sister to the community. It is not about pointing out sin for the sake of pointing out sin. It is not about making us feel better or proving a point. It is about regaining a brother or sister. It is about living together as one family.
In some families, the illusion of harmony is more important than anything else. In some families, confrontation is to be avoided at all costs. In some families, the way hurt is dealt with is to pretend nothing happened, sweep it under the rug. In some families, silence is golden. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, and if there’s a problem, keep it to yourself.
However, Jesus’ instruction for his family is very different. In the Christian household, when your brother or sister sins, you go talk face to face in private. And if that doesn’t work, keep going back, taking other people along the next time and again for as long as it takes. Unfortunately in some churches this text has been used to excommunicate those who have been falsely accused by the powers to be in the church. That is a destructive use of this gospel and it should never be interpreted in a way that would exclude a member of the church community. It is meant to build community not break it apart.
Ours is a faith community – of twos and threes and fours and more – but never of one. We act together so we can help one another, multiplying our resources and abilities to do what God calls us to do. Our community is the lifeline for others to experience God and the power of God moving among God’s people.
While a private spiritual and prayer life is important for each of us, it is likely to become dry and turn inward if it is not infused with regular doses of shared worship and connection with others, gathered in Christ’s name, and for his sake. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” This promise of Jesus is not to be understood as a defense of poorly attended worship experiences. Two or three is not to suggest a spiritual quorum of how few it takes for Jesus’ presence to be felt, but rather how many. The presence of our Lord Jesus Christ is not realized in any one individual, but definitively, in the fellowship or interaction that takes place between individuals.
As members and friends of Christ’s faith community here, let us remember that Jesus is always in our midst. Let us all rejoice because we have this opportunity to worship in community with each other. Amen.