Proverbs 8:1-14
Matthew 18: 15-22
Immediately after
college I served as a volunteer in mission in New Mexico. While I was there the local church music
director offered to teach me organ lessons in exchange for working as her piano
accompanist for the music and voice classes she taught at the local community
college. It was my first experience with
the organ but after just a couple weeks, the music director called me one
Sunday morning saying she was very ill and would I play for her in church that
day. Well, as a very nervous new
organist I agreed. The service went fine
and afterwards people were very positive about how things had gone. Three days later I received a letter in the
mail. The letter was written by Sally, a
long term member, the widow of a Presbyterian Minister, and a fellow
musician. When I opened the letter the
first thing I noticed was that it actually was not addressed to me. Instead, it was a copy of a letter she had
written to the pastor, the music director, the worship committee, and every
member of the session. She wrote,
“I was appalled on
Sunday to hear the abominable organ playing done by Barbara Barkley. She was a disaster. I have rarely heard anything so disgraceful
in church. I’m writing to you in the
hope that you will see to it that such an atrocity does not again take place.”
She concluded her
letter by writing,
“In the future, I
would be happy to voluntarily serve as a substitute organist at any time. With love, Sally.”
As you can imagine,
I was devastated. Moreover, I was
humiliated. I had never before received
anything like such a letter, and I was absolutely cut to the quick. For a moment I thought it might be a
joke. But that idea was soon banished by
a phone call I received from the music director, followed by another from the
pastor. They each were kind and
reassuring in their own ways. The music
director assured me that Sally was just upset that I had been asked to play
instead of her. The pastor told me that
I should feel I had really made it in their congregation: I wasn’t really part
of the in-crowd at the church until I had received a devastating letter from
Sally, something he received on a regular basis as well as most of the
leadership in the church. He also told me
he thought I’d played well. But for all
their kind words, I still felt so ashamed that I wondered if I would ever again
be able to show my face at the church, let alone continue to study organ. A part of my confidence, my enthusiasm for
learning and trying new things, my spirit was broken, a part that it took a
long time to heal. Sally sinned against
me on that day. She was right to say how
she felt. But out of love, she should
have talked to me, alone and in person.
She was right to express her concerns, but in love, she should have been
more careful about the words she chose and how she chose to use them.
But actually, it
is not about Sally’s errors that I wish to focus today. Instead, it is my own sin and sins of my
cohorts at the church of which I want to speak.
It is about the lack of a loving response on my part, on the part of the
pastor and music director and yes, on the part of the session. Because we all responded to the letter - by
ignoring it. I ignored it, as I ignored
Sally from then on, out of fear. She had
hurt me once, what would she do or say if I actually spoke to her? The choir director ignored it because, as she
said, “Sally is old and set in her ways.
She can’t really change at this point.”
The session ignored it because they received so many of these kinds of
letters from Sally that they discounted them without a second thought. And the pastor ignored it in the name of “forgiveness.” “We need to forgive Sally,” he said, “by just
letting it go.”
But in our failure
to confront, each of us missed an opportunity for growth, and we failed to heal
the wounds. We also failed to prevent
future hurtful letters to be written by her hands. Most importantly, we failed to really hear
Sally and we missed an opportunity to care for her in one of the truest senses
of the word.
It is hard to
confront. It is hard to face people who
are angry with us or with whom we are angry or upset. And so we often choose to take the easy way
out and not deal directly with the hurts and wrongs others have done to
us. We justify this in a number of ways,
“It wouldn’t do any good to say anything” or “I can just as easily process this
with someone else and then let it go.” or my favorite, “I don’t need to
confront because I have forgiven them.”
But in today’s passage, Jesus does not say, “talk to those who have
sinned against you IF you are still angry with them.” He does not say, “Talk to them IF you think
it will do any good.” Jesus tells us to
confront those in our community who have hurt us. To act in a loving way, to act as a brother
or sister to one another necessitates telling people the hard truth about how
things affect us, how we feel, how another person’s actions have impacted us.
We confront to let
go of our own anger so that we can really see each other as brothers and
sisters. We confront to help one another
grow and walk together in our Christian journeys. We confront so that other brothers and
sisters are not hurt in the same way as we were. Most importantly, we confront as a sign that
we think the ones who have hurt us are important enough to deserve our
communication, our honesty, even our correction leading to our ultimate
forgiveness.
Jesus follows his
instructions on confrontation with the command to forgive one another. These two passages flow together: they are
part of the same act. Communicating hard
truths is a necessary part of forgiveness because it says that I love you
enough to not let anything come between us.
And I love you enough to want to work with you, together, in our
growing.
God does not leave
us simply with the difficult direction to lovingly confront. Jesus gives us guidelines on how we are to
deal with one another in our pain, how we are to lovingly confront. And yet, the directions that Jesus gives us
are not easy. The first direction is perhaps
the most difficult of all. When someone
has hurt or wronged us, the first thing we are to do is to go to the person
themself and face to face express our pain and our opinions. This is difficult. I would much rather write a letter, forget
about it, or get someone else to talk to the person for me. We often want, and too often choose, to
discuss the problem with other people.
Or at least process it with other people first. We want to get our thoughts together, we want
another’s opinion, we want support. But
whatever our good intentions in talking to others, often our conversations
become gossip. Our conversations with
others can intensify our judgments of one another, and can bring others into a
problem that is not their own. After
receiving Sally’s letter, I didn’t want to confront her, so I talked about her
instead to the music director, the pastor and anyone else who would listen and
care. My words about her expressed my
own hurt, but they were also condemning, critical and judging. And through my pain, I incited others’ anger
and judgment against her as well. It
wasn’t my intention to do this. But in
not dealing with Sally directly, these were the consequences.
In the church
especially, avoiding loving confrontation can be damaging. We are a close-knit community. And so when there is a problem and it is not
dealt with directly, the one hurt can end up bottling the pain. More often I think when someone in the church
is upset with something we have done, we will still hear critique. But it will come through a third party. But
there are many problems with this. First
of all, almost always when we are upset about something it says more about us
than it does about whatever we are upset about. The real problems cannot
therefore be addressed when issues are spoken about as coming from an anonymous
person. Secondly, when a person hears
critique out of context, they often are unable to know what exactly they have
done to cause the upset and so they can’t really use the criticism to fix the
problem or to grow. We can also focus on the other person’s failure to speak
directly about the problem and avoid looking at our own part. Also when we do not know exactly where
critique has come from we can feel that the church itself is judging us. The anonymous accuser becomes in our minds a
menacing group or even the church itself.
The church stops feeling safe or a place where we can trust and learn.
James Angell in
his book, “Yes is a world” wrote, “Church ought to be a set of moments when we
become most expansively, openly and honestly ourselves. Yet it is in the church where we often find
it hardest to be ourselves: where we are often the most guarded, the most
paranoid, the most unsure of being accepted and understood.” The church is a place in which, every Sunday,
we take time to acknowledge our broken-ness and our need for God’s forgiveness
to make us whole. But it still remains difficult for us to lovingly speak truth
to one another thereby helping one another grow towards wholeness.
In our legal
system we have rules that insist that an accused person has the right to see
and hear their accuser. Accusations are
not admissible in court if they remain anonymous. How much more so should this be the case in
our church? We are to be as family to one
another. The passage that we read today
uses the phrase, “if another member sins against you,” but the word translated
here as “another member” is actually “brother” in Greek. With family we don’t have to hide behind
anonymity. We are called to be fully who we are, to speak directly, to trust
that love will carry us through any conflict. And finally, when we do not want
others to know what we are saying, that may be a call for us to actually look
at what we are saying, to determine if it is really appropriate, true, and
helpful or if it is simply hurtful.
There are times
when taking the risk of speaking directly will lead us to nothing, when the
person who has hurt us will not listen. It is at that point and only at that
point that Jesus asks us to invite others in the church to witness and listen. But
the key words here are “witness” and “listen”.
The other church members are there to aid in the conversation, but they
remain observers. The discussion itself
still remains between the one hurt and the one being confronted.
The directions
that Jesus gives us for confrontation are not easy. But we alone suffer the consequences of not
following Jesus’ words. Because I never
confronted Sally, my fear of her and her judgment remained with me. It took me eight years after receiving her
letter before I could even mention the story with people who weren’t directly
involved in the situation. And while I
can share about it now, simply talking to her at the time might have saved me
years of shame and insecurity.
Was Sally wrong?
Was she unkind? Was she just unnecessarily cruel in her words and manner of
addressing this? Of course. We are called to be direct – a letter is not
direct. But more importantly, we are called to speak to one another in love.
Attacking words, an attacking posture, attacking, angry language is also not
okay. We are called to be direct, but still loving. And that must affect how we speak things, how
we phrase things, and the posture with which we speak. But recognizing Sally’s fault in this does
not, did not give us permission to act in a similarly unloving way. Failing to
talk to her, ignoring her unkindness, ignoring her was unkind, and I was the
one left scarred by that decision.
Jesus asks a lot
of us. And loving confrontation may seem to be one more difficult task for us
to take on. But, each of Jesus’ instructions are gifts to the person asked to
do them. So today we celebrate the gift that Jesus has given us in this request
to lovingly confront one another. We celebrate that we are family to each other
and we are called to love each other enough to risk telling the truth, face to
face, to our brothers and sisters. We celebrate that as we confront, we
ourselves will grow in our ability to care, to understand, to remember that
even those who hurt us are human and make mistakes just as we do. We will grow in our ability to forgive and
truly love one another.
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