The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
A middle aged woman, single mother! Faithful to her Church, active from her birth! Raising her two young boys and doing the best she can! Bright and cheerful, pleasant and lovely. This woman could be seen at any moment of time pouring lemonade or coffee at any given “coffee hour” at church. Or she could be seen leading the Sunday school children from Children’s Chapel into worship. Or she could be seen on Wednesday nights for bible study. Or she could be seen setting or clearing the altar for worship, preparing the altar with fresh cut flowers taken from her yard! Or she could be seen taking her part on the food ministry that provided young men dying of AIDS with a bit of nourishment and care.
A middle-aged woman, bright and cheerful, caring and compassionate servant, humble, everyday member of the Church! An ordinary churchgoer trying to live a life of Christian service some might say, a disciple of the community some of other traditions might say.
Then one day this woman takes a young seminarian into her confidence! Quickly revealed that behind the curtain of this model “church member” is struggle, torment, heartbreak, and longing for some sort of reconciliation with herself, one of her children, and the community of faith to which she belongs!
It seems one night her baby boy, whom she had raised in the Church, brought to Sunday school, served lemonade at church picnics and coffee hours, led from Children’s Chapel singing hymns of praise, brought to vacation bible school, her baby boy who she fed and clothed, loved and nurtured, protected and cared for, one night found himself high as a kite on drugs and in the wrong crowd at the wrong time. Her baby boy, in a drug deal gone badly, became the aggressor in a conflict and in a drug-clouded event committed violent crime that would land him in prison for the rest of his life!
We tried so hard when we knew he was going down this path! I begged and pleaded with him to straighten out his life, I couldn’t reconcile who he was becoming with the boy I thought I had raised him to be! He would not listen to me! I was desperate! I brought with me friends from the Church, his Sunday school teachers and confirmation mentors, we begged him to go to rehab, we shared with him how grieved and broken our hearts were that he was so tortured by his addiction to drugs and how his behaviors were destroying his own life and his relationships with those of us who love him! But he would not listen – he could not listen!
I prayed and prayed with my friends in Church, bringing it to prayer! We prayed and prayed at Church, and some of us still do! But we couldn’t save him!
A middle-aged mother now visits her son in prison, but struggles to find a way within her to find reconciliation with a son now alienated from those who loved, raised, and nurtured him, the alienation being a physical barrier, walls, a cell! Isolation from what he once knew! A middle-aged mother, a prayer group of church members, now pray to make sense, to reconcile who he once was with who he had become, how he became “lost” from the womb of the good Christian community that surrounded him!
And in the mother’s honest wrangle and lament is the ever-present force-filled struggle to continue to find a place of forgiveness and reconciliation! We pray together now! Once in a while I can take a friend from church and we pray together with him! In some ways he is my baby boy again, frightened, vulnerable, he needs me! But still my heart is broken, but my love cannot be broken, he is my son!
The struggle of human brokenness is one many of us know and are familiar with! The struggle of lives of faith, hope, nurture, and care, formation of lives of faith are what we in the Church hang our very being upon! An ethic of community creates for us the expectation of accountability and responsibility for one another! As Christian folk, part of that ethic hangs on our belief that to be witnesses to Jesus we must hold one another accountable to faithful lives and to an ethic of forgiveness. Jesus, when he invited his disciples to “pick up their cross and follow him,” knew that such a life was not an easy one, and to live it would mean a primal ordering of community! The disciples would need one another, just as we today in the Church NEED one another!
The Gospel lesson today speaks squarely to the degree of difficulty of following Jesus as a community of Kingdom Ideal followers! The listeners of Matthew’s Gospel, early followers of the way, were learning how to live together, how they needed one another, and in this section of Jesus’ discourse, they are learning how their need for one another would also demand of one another accountability and responsibility!
So what happens when one member of this community of faith (the church) offends another by not living by the ideal! First they are to be confronted, one on one! How absolutely uncomfortable for the 21st century reader who is a member of a community of faith! Confront one another! This is difficult at best! It is sometimes much easier first to gain another’s perspective by sharing with another the frustration and offense that we have endured. The hope is, of course, that the other will see things our way, show the appropriate display of hurt and maybe anger in a moment of sympathy, and if all things are equal perhaps even share that with someone else. But not for Jesus. His formula for accountability to one who has offended seems to ask us to consider first, the difficult (albeit uncomfortable) task of going straight on to try to reconcile our differences.
Second, Jesus suggests, that for the early community of faith living into an ideal of Kingdom discipleship, if this does not bring about reconciliation, indeed, take two or three folks from the community of faith with you! They, serving as witnesses, not to take sides mind you, but to be listeners, to help discern a dispute, to help make sense of it. And if you think ideally, perhaps having non-participant judgment, perhaps even as mediators. Risky! Somehow I don’t believe Jesus imagined a system like the people’s court, where we hand our differences over to an unemployed judge who makes millions by processing people’s disputes on syndicated cable television, but probably in the ideal, Jesus assumes those participating are participating in an agreed-upon value system of non-judgmental listening!
Third, if still it appears that a breach occurred and cannot be resolved, bring it to the Church, the community as a whole! Now the 21st century experience listens with great discomfort! Imagine airing our “dirty laundry” publicly! If one imagines a court of common pleas set up in Sayre Hall, this, I predict, would not be the case, at least not formally! However, for the early church believers, to have the strong ethic of the community being united in purpose and reconciliation is clearly of primary importance!
What will we do! How hard will we try! To what extent will we go to demonstrate the primary teaching of Jesus to be one in community and in purposes of living out the Kingdom Principles!
Now if that doesn’t work, treat them as tax collectors and Gentiles!
Again! How far will the early community of believers be asked to go to reconcile and be in agreement for purpose of living out Kingdom principles!
For the 21st century mind, we read quickly that Jesus teaches the believers to treat the unreconciled as tax collectors and Gentiles! Remember, this section of scripture is bracketed by the teaching of Jesus of the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the unforgiving debtor! The followers of Jesus have watched and listened to him spend a lifetime and a sacrificial death for the purpose of embracing the lost!
The punch line comes in Jesus’ response to Peter………how many times do we forgive one who has offended? Seventy times seven.
Like that middle-aged woman so devoted to the church and the church so devoted to her and her son, she seems to understand that, though broken-hearted and clearly aggrieved, her love poured out, inviting the community of faith she knows into that shedding of love, she and they fiercely seek reconciliation!
So it seems to be for the early followers of Jesus and so it seems to be for her and her fellow church members, and so it seems to be for us! An ethic of forgiveness and reconciliation is a worldview of forgiveness and reconciliation!
Jesus knew at all costs to hold one another accountable to the ethic is to have our hearts driven by it and by doing so, we fiercely and tirelessly pursue those who have become lost to us!
Jesus knew this as the antidote to alienation and isolation! We can know this too!
Amen.
