Sermon: Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

It’s Rally Day. Fall is arriving in short order, we’re kicking off ministries, we are throwing open the doors, we are parading around the neighborhood and getting excited about what this church is all about. I can’t get enough of Rally Day. This is the Sunday when hopefully, as Paul writes to the Romans, you are ready to wake up. Get up, shake off the lazy days of summer, and wake up.
Rally Day is exciting, and we’ve tried to make it even more exciting. But, then Jesus has to give us the words for this morning, and if I were you, and if I was really awake and listening carefully, then I would high-tail it out of here before we have to start acting like Jesus is telling us to. If another member of the church sins against you, if you have been involved in the church in any way, you know as well as I do that it isn’t if another member sins against you, but when that member chooses to do it. Because this place, for as exciting and amazing as it is, is chock full of sinners and we’re in the business of adding more. Even as we seek to be the kind of people who center our lives around the teachings of Jesus, we know that the church is also often a place as full of relationship with God as it is with broken relationships between its members.
What Matthew writes about in our reading for this morning is not a checklist for success. It isn’t going to help to solve all kinds of congregational conflict. But, as we hear these words of Jesus we are reminded that we don’t give up, we keep on loving despite the circumstances even as we continue to add sinner after sinner to our community.
So here’s how it works. Step one, when someone sins against you, confront the person who has sinned against you. That’s all well and good, but we know that in the church or any other place, it always seems a lot easier to talk about that nasty old sinner to your neighbor, the person you share a pew with, your friends, because confronting the people who have hurt us never feels quite as good as making them look like the sinners they are to the people they know. This first step is meant to save the relationship, to stop the cycles of pain and rumors to name the places where a relationship has been broken and to heal the wound, rather than to let it fester. Step two, if that relationship is broken, if that first conversation doesn’t work, then you go and get a couple witnesses, and you try again. And if that doesn’t work, then you tell the church. And, if still, after all this work, the relationship is still broken, if there is still that painful wound festering between the two of you, then you bring it to the church. And, finally, if they still won’t even listen to the church, if you have faithfully and with an open heart gone to the individual, brought in the witnesses, and then opened it up to the church. Then, and only then, do you get to treat them like a gentile and tax-collector. Whew.
You get to treat them like a gentile or a tax-collector. You get to let them be to you and outsider, thrown out of the church and ignored. You let them be out this community. You don’t give them an invitation to come back, because with a three strikes and you are out rule, they’ve already had their three chances.
At least, at first glance. At first glance we hear treat them like a gentile or a tax-collector, and if you are anything like me you want to whiz through steps one through three and move right into banishment. Except that this is Jesus speaking, and if we know anything, we know that he is always eating with, drinking with, hanging out with gentiles and tax-collectors. In fact, he is with gentiles and tax-collector so often that it makes some of the other characters in our story uncomfortable. So maybe Jesus isn’t giving us a three steps and you can give up method here. Perhaps Jesus is asking us to confront that person that has talked about us, that person that is sarcastic and rude, that person that hurts us for no reason we can understand, that person who is just plain difficult to be around, perhaps Jesus is asking us to confront that person three times, to open the wound to the air, to try and find some healing, and when that doesn’t work, when that person just won’t meet us halfway, instead of giving up, Jesus is asking us to keep on loving, to keep on inviting, to keep on letting that person back into the fold because something has to change eventually.
Something has to change eventually, because God promises that when two or three gather that God is there. Now, that isn’t just any old random two or three people, Jesus tells us that when the offended, and the offender, and a witness or two get together, that God is going to be there. That is the promise. That God is going to cover up that wound that festers between God’s two children with God’s very being. And God is going to keep on coming down, getting in the mix of it all, and God is going to keep healing, because that is God’s business.
God never gives up on us, no matter how broken our relationship gets. God doesn’t give up on creation no matter how broken it gets. God doesn’t give up, and we ought not either. Love is what unites us, love is what sustains us, love is what binds us. And if we really are going to get ourselves mixed up in God’s business, than the first thing we have to have going for us is the desire, the passion, the goal of proclaiming forgiveness.
Today on Rally Day we do more than just get excited about the upcoming year, this year we dedicate a new baptismal font. We dedicated this font and we read the words of Jesus for this morning, because it is in the waters of baptism that we are forgiven, that we die to sin and rise again as children of God. It is in the waters of baptism that we remember that God never gives up, that God keeps meeting us, that whenever we gather with some water, a little bit of bread and some wine, God is there. Peace among members is not a precondition, because God promises to be with us regardless.
No matter how good or bad we are at it, our job is to proclaim forgiveness. Our job is not to bandage the wounds and pretend we don’t see them. Our job is to wash our wounds in the power of God’s love, to be vulnerable enough to tell each other when we are hurt, to keep on coming back, to keep on trying to heal what is broken because God is with us. Our job is to proclaim forgiveness in the waters of baptism, because God promises to be in them, to wash us, to wash our shame and our pain and the cleanse those wounds that we carry. This font is the symbol of the kind of love that goes beyond the grave, the kind of love that will hang on a cross and still proclaim forgiveness, the kind of love that does not give up on us. So let them be to you as a gentile or a tax-collector. Let them be to you those people that are never too far gone, never too far away to be a part of this community again. Let them be to you those people that we don’t give up on. Let them be to you as baptized children of God, daughters and sons of the author of creation, part of the family of the church. We’re still going to get hurt, relationships are still going to get broken. Pain is still going to be a reality in this very sanctuary, but God is still going to be with us. God is not in the business of giving up, God will not lose you, brothers and sisters, because forgiveness, reconciliation, and love proclaimed in the waters of baptism are God very promise.