This sermon was preached on Sunday 10th September 2023 at St Peter and St Paul Church, Langham.

Reading – Matthew 18:15-20

In the 1930s, Britain and her allies were following a process of appeasement. It was a time of great political tension as Hitler and the Nazis had come to power and were beginning to expand across Europe. The rest of Europe was at a loss on how to stop Hitler. The solution that the Allies decided upon was to pursue a series of appeasement offers to Hitler in the hope that he would stop after gaining Anschluss or the Sudetenland. But as we all know that did nothing to deal with the root of the problem. It was a bandage to the deeper problem of Hilter’s desire for imperial expansion over others in the name of the Third Reich. Appeasement was no way to deal with Hitler. In the end, the lack of action led to the conflict with Hitler escalating to the biggest war in human history. Britain’s failure to deal with Hitler and address his wrongdoings had terrible consequences.

Or closer to home you might know of tension brewing in your family. Who is it that keeps leaving dirty mugs right next to the dishwasher instead of putting them in? If you do not deal with these tensions or when things are wrong, then the problems will only build and build, continually increasing in its ability to blow up in our faces. These sorts of things are part of family life and need to be dealt with properly. Think of how you tell kids to say sorry when they do wrong and to go and make things right with the other person. This is important to family life.

 

It is also important for our church family life. In our gospel reading today, Jesus talks about how to deal with people who wrong you or sin against you. Jesus says:

 

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector.[1]

 

If someone wrongs you, Jesus says that you should go and speak to the person and call them out on their wrongdoing. I know that many of us probably closed up a bit inside when I just said that. Really, do I have to go to talk to them? That is literally the worst thing ever. It is so awkward and difficult. You think, ‘Jesus, can’t you just do some of your miracle stuff and just change that person and make everything all better? Why do you need me involved?’ Sadly for us, that is not how Jesus deals with us. We see that God our Father wants his children to go and talk things through when some sins against another. To talk it through and to make up with each other. And we say that to our own children as well. Not to be mean, but in our love for them, we want them to learn from their mistakes and move on to doing what is good. (Yet somehow as adults we go back to behaving like children in these matters.)

 

But this is so counter-cultural to who we are as Brits. As Brits, we tend not to get involved in other people’s lives. We keep a stiff upper lip and say that sounds like too many emotions. We say that’s private and none of our business, (though we may gossip about it instead). And to some extent that is true. What goes on between two people whether two friends or a husband and wife, and mother and daughter is their own personal thing, stuff that we rightly have nothing to do with. However, we all have something to do with the care and wellbeing of the people in our church family and to encourage and uphold them as they follow Jesus as his disciples.

 

So with that, there are times when it is right for us to take someone aside and call them out on something that is wrong in their lives and which they are not doing anything to make amends. However, a lot of us would worry about doing this because we don’t want to come across as judgmental. But this isn’t about being judgmental or all high and mighty up on our high horse, or ‘look at me, I’m better than you.’ That is not what Jesus is on about.

 

I get that we don’t want to come across as judgmental, and I don’t think calling someone out necessarily needs to be a judgmental thing. But so often we feel we can’t say anything without it coming across as ‘judgy.’ Maybe we worry about this because that is what we most fear in our society, being judged. In this world of social media and the internet where so much of our lives are exposed, is it any wonder that we fear being judged? Is that why you say ‘no judgement’ when talking to people?

 

The problem with this approach is that it makes it seem like what we do and how we behave doesn’t matter. We say ‘You do you,’ but that’s misleading because it treats people as individuals. You are probably thinking, hold on a sec, Shakeel, we are individuals with our own unique personality and character etc. I am not disagreeing with that. But I think upon the words of the famous priest and poet John Donne, who said, ‘No man is an island.’[2]

This mantra ‘You do you’ is the product of a Western society that is built around the individual. But we exist in families, in a community, in a society. We cannot escape being interconnected with others. The majority of the world outside the Western world are societies where the focus is on the group and the community rather than the individual. Where the group is king, not the individual. Jesus was talking to a group and a community-centred Jewish community. The individual in the group matters because each individual makes up a part of the group. Think of how Paul says the church is a body, and how each of us has a role to play. If you are the eyes, and you are not looking on behalf of the body, then the body is going to suffer as a result as it stumbles around blindly. If we are sinning, our sin and the consequences of our sin will impact our wider body of the church. We call people out because we care about the people in our body, in our family, the church. I know I want to do my best for my family, and if I am getting something wrong, I want to know what I can do differently to better love, care and serve my family. 

 

So what does Jesus say to do? He says to take aside the person who has sinned against you and have a conversation with them about it. No one beyond the two of you needs to be involved or know what it is. You talk it out and sort it. This is a gentle, loving and kind way to deal with wrongdoing as it doesn’t make a song and dance about it and drag someone’s name in the mud. The hope is that the conversation leads to change for the person sinning against you and you can both move on.

If that doesn’t work, you do an intervention with a small group of you. Maybe as a group of friends, you say, ‘Hey, the way you have been gossiping, or speaking angrily to your spouse is not okay, and it’s not Jesus’ best for us. We want you to be able to change so that things are better for you and for all the other people in your life, including us.’

 

If that still doesn’t work, Jesus says take them before the whole church and call them out as a church. This feels extreme and could almost feel like you are trying to shame the person. But the aim here isn’t to shame the person, rather it is to show how the whole church loves and cares for this person and doesn’t want them to suffer by being caught in this sin that is creating problems in their life. It is a church responding to the truth that Jesus has a better way for us. If this still doesn’t work, then Jesus says treat them like you would a tax collector or a gentile.

 

But what does this mean to treat them like a tax collector or a gentile? Well, I see this as two fold. First, In Jesus’ day, tax collectors were considered to be betrayers to the Jewish people as they stole from their own people for the sake of their Roman rulers. These were people shunned by the community because of their harm to them. And there is a place for that kind of separation. In church history, this kind of separation has been called excommunication. And the reason behind it is that the person is so unwilling to change their ways, that keeping them in the church will cause harm to the body. They will lead the rest of the body astray like eyes wandering off to the side. Or think of when you have someone in your life who is bad for you and as much as you want to be reconciled to them, you know that you need space and separation from them for your own good. These are the times when we cut off people who are harmful to us like a surgeon cutting out a tumour or a cancer. It hurts, but if they stay, they could be our own downfall.   

 

Second, however, we look at how Jesus treated Gentiles and tax collectors and we see that he treated them with love. This passage comes from the gospel of Matthew. We remember how the apostle Matthew was a tax collector. He was hated by his community, but Jesus did not hate him. Instead Jesus loved him and called him to follow him and to be his disciple and friend. And Jesus came not only for the Jews but to save the Gentiles as well. We must not forget that Jesus always loved the Gentiles and tax collectors and wanted to bring them back to him. In Jesus those who were distant find a place of transformation.

 

You might have wandered far away from God or felt distant from God through your sin. You think God is done with you but God is never done with you. Even when we walk away, God is still calling us back to him and waits for us to return. He is the Father constantly looking out for the Prodigal Son’s return, racing to us when we come back to him, to cloth and restore us to be his child. This is Jesus’ heart for those who sin against him, and this is the heart Jesus wants us to have for those who sin against us. Lord Jesus, would you give us your heart to love those who trespass against us.

 

Amen.

---

[1] Matthew 18:15-17 [NRSV].

[2] John Donne, ‘Meditation XVII’, in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1623.