Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20Our Gospel today seems particularly relevant,
since it gives something like a plan of action
for dealing with conflict and controversy,
and I think it is pretty non-controversial
to say we live in conflict-ridden times.
Jesus says that if you perceive
that someone has wronged you,
rather than seek to publicly shame them,
you should go to them one-on-one
to confront them with the truth
of the harm they have done.
If that doesn’t work,
bring a couple of other people along
so that, “every fact may be established.”
Finally, if the other person will not face up
to the truth of the harm they have brought about
then you, as it were, go public,
bring the matter before the Church community.
If your opponent does not repent and reconcile,
then they can no longer be part of the community,
and must be treated as “a Gentile or a tax collector.”
Note that this is not merely a mechanism
for resolving disagreements;
the scenario imagined is not simply one
in which two members of the community are at odds
and are seeking to reach a compromise.
Rather, it is one in which one party has wronged the other
and must be made to see the wrongness of their ways.
The issue is not simply reconciliation,
but repentance and truth-telling.
For there can be no reconciliation without truth-telling,
without a truthful account of past harms inflicted.
But telling the truth is a tricky thing.
On the one hand, it can be difficult
to speak a hard truth;
we would often prefer
to let the unreconciled elephant-in-the-room
go unremarked
rather than to deal with the messy fallout
of, if I may add another metaphor,
opening up a can of worms
we may not be able to close.
On the other hand,
I suspect we all know people
who wield truth like a weapon,
not as a means to reconciliation
but as a means
of bludgeoning others into submission,
exacerbating conflict and alienation,
perhaps even destroying the wrong-doer.
So how do we walk that line
between elephant-ignoring
and truth-weaponizing?
Paul tells us, “Owe nothing to anyone,
except to love one another,
for the one who loves another
has fulfilled the law.”
We owe one another the truth
and so we must sometimes risk the possibility
of opening a can of worms we cannot close,
but only if it is a truth spoken in love,
only if even a hard truth is spoken
out of a genuine desire
to find on the other side of the painful process
of reckoning with harms, past and present
healing and wholeness for all parties involved.
“Love does no evil to the neighbor.”
Note that the process Jesus outlines in the Gospel
is one that is very careful to save and not destroy
the person who has committed the offense.
Which is not to say
that the truth spoken in love never hurts.
Anyone who has ever undergone physical or psychological therapy
knows that pain can be a necessary part of the healing process.
Painful truth spoken in love is the spiritual therapy
that can lead to that healing that we call reconciliation.
We can see the connection of truth and reconciliation
in our on-going national struggle to deal with race
and the legacy of slavery.
We can see the temptations of elephant-ignoring
and of truth-weaponizing,
of pretending that we have put the past behind us
and of wielding truth as a cudgel
simply to balance the scales pain.
But between these twin temptations lies the narrow way
of reckoning with the truth as an instrument of love
and a means of reconciliation,
a pursuit of reconciliation that is not simply
an attempt to declare victory and go home
but involves concrete works of repair
to overcome the effects of the legacy of racism.
Over the years I have found myself
forced to rethink many things I was taught
in my upbringing in the American South,
things about the past and about the present,
things about the nobility of causes and heroes,
things about the fairness of current structures,
beliefs that, in the name of truth,
I have had to abandon.
And, though this was sometimes painful,
I owe a debt of gratitude to those who over the years
have loved me enough to inflict that pain,
who continue to confront me with the truth—
the truth that must be faced as the first step
toward true reconciliation and repair.
Of course, we Christians recognize
that the work of reconciliation and repair
is no mere human work;
indeed we recognize that our human efforts
are simply not adequate to the task
of bringing about true reconciliation,
of repairing a history of damaged relations,
whether between races or classes or nations,
and even less so the broken bond
between humanity and God
that lies at the root of all our brokenness.
Reconciliation on all levels is the work of grace,
which comes to us through Christ.
As Paul writes to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:19),
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them,
and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
The truth that we must proclaim is not simply
the truth of past and present harms,
but the truth of God’s on-going work of reconciliation,
a work that is rooted in and grows from
the painful moment of truth-telling that is the cross,
in which we see displayed the reality of divine love
against the backdrop of human evil.
Let us pray that God would give us
the grace to know the truth
and to bear that truth in love
to a world in search of reconciliation and repair.
And may God have mercy on us all.
