Whenever I was a sophomore in college, my roommate and I drew the short straw in the housing lottery. That’s how we did it every year. We gathered in the, they made it digital by the end of my time there, which was much less fun. But we all gathered in the union, all the whole class together. And we drew, as I said, the short straw. You know, my roommate and I, quiet, civilized young men, model students of the community, and accordingly, our hope was to be assigned a room in one of the converted fraternity houses on campus. The fraternities had been, you know, removed from their houses because they rioted a couple times in the 80s, so now those were dorms. I lived in one of those my first year. It was great. This beautiful, like, Harry Potter castle-looking house, maybe two or three dozen residents. You had deck that overlooked the soccer field, a shared kitchen, these beautiful old common rooms full of dark wood and books and portraits of long dead people. That’s not what we got. What we got, unfortunately, was exactly the opposite of what we had hoped for, and that was a room on the fourth floor of Shorney Hall, which was the biggest dorm on campus, an enormous 1960s building that if I squint and look across the river at the Allegheny County Jail, it’s kind of what it looks like. And our particular hallway was the absolute worst because it housed the football team and their underground fraternity who were absolutely awful to live with. They would yell and run up and down the hall all night. They’d fill the place with all kinds of varieties of smoke, grind food into the carpet, into the walls, vandalize every available surface, the abuse the bathrooms went through. Unimaginable.
On one occasion, my roommate and I walked out to go to class one morning and found a whole salad encrusted to our door. And my RA, who to my surprise is apparently a doctor now, was completely unable to handle any of this. my hall’s residents were eventually summoned by university administration to participate in what the university called a restorative justice circle. And what that entailed, as fun as it sounds, it entailed spending four Wednesday evenings sitting in a circle, sharing our feelings about how we felt harmed on one hand or persecuted on the other hand, and how we might move forward in peace. And I remember the last meeting when one of the most unpleasant football players, who now leads my class’s alumni association, by the way, raised his hand for the last word. And he said, you know, well, I think we just have to remember that we’re all 20-year-old guys and it’s just going to be this way. A month of this. And it was immediately clear that nothing would ever change if we had ever had that hope to begin with, which I really didn’t. There were no consequences. The whole process was a joke. There was no justice to be had. The university never had any intention of fixing the problem if it would actually take any work. Those guys kept on peeing in the radiators. And those were four miserable nights that I’m never going to get back.
We generally imagine that there are two main ways of pursuing justice. And the first is something like I just described. It’s a silly example, but it’s impunity, you might call it. There’s no justice there at all. You know, you have a process that pretends to be something looking like justice. And we see this day in and day out. You know, you have a disruptive co-worker that everyone just kind of tiptoes around or they don’t do anything and we just kind of work around them. You have a family member whose bad behavior is excused because, oh, that’s how they are, right? A bully in a church or other organization who gets away with it because no one wants to confront them. We prefer polite impunity over the friction of telling the truth. And the other reflex besides impunity is retribution. This is the other option. You hurt me, so I’m going to hurt you. You cut me off, I’m going to cut you off. You talk about me, I’m going to tear you down. You break a rule, you get punished. And the goal is pain for pain there. But neither of these is really redemption. It doesn’t fix anything. Impunity ignores the wound and just lets us keep working around it until things get worse and worse. Retribution might make us feel better, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
In today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 18, we encounter a third model. And this is a somewhat unique text, not completely, but somewhat unique text in the midst of the Gospels, because it’s incredibly practical. Jesus gives us this straightforward set of instructions, which is a breath of fresh air, maybe, from how he normally talks. This isn’t a parable. This isn’t some theological up-in-the-air concept. He gives you a step-by-step list of what to do. And he lays out this explicit path for handling sin and conflict, specifically within the church. You know, you kind of work on it here, and you learn how to do it in the rest of your life. And notice what the goal is here. It’s not punishment, and it’s not impunity pretending like it’s grace where bad behavior is just kind of coddled and accepted. Instead, what is sought here is reconciliation but with accountability.
And so, while Jesus gives us clear-cut instructions here, they’re not easy because no one wants to do it. And I’m talking about myself. We are not used to being held accountable by other Christians for our actions. We don’t like it. We can’t stand the notion of being subject to one another. How dare someone tell us we are wrong? And on the other end of it, you know, if we’re the party that’s been sinned against, there’s nothing we’d less like to do than go confront the person who’s done it. And the ways our society has evolved in modern history make this even harder than it was then. Not so long ago, your congregation, by virtue of just where you lived, was your congregation. You know, you had a particular parish, right? And these were the people that you were gonna be stuck with. Take it or leave it. Today, it is very easy to shop around for a new community if the first one irritates us or hurts us or holds us accountable for our bad behavior. You know, we’re not stuck anymore in situations of discomfort. unlike my terrible dorm or a Christian in a country village 200 years ago where that’s all you had. We are consumers with a choice. And today you’re able to simply disappear if you’d like. Drive five minutes down 51 to a different church where no one knows you or your past or your sins or shortcomings. Now, this sounds like freedom, but I would suggest to you that it’s kind of tragic. It can be superficial. It can be lonely. Because imagine if your family or your spouse was only allowed to know the very surface of who you are, without any of your faults or uncertainties ever coming up. That’s not really being known. It’s not being in relationship with somebody if they don’t actually know you. We can’t be healed if we refuse to acknowledge what our wounds are, what our weaknesses are, and we cannot be truly loved if we don’t let anyone actually know us.
Jesus in Matthew 18 and throughout the New Testament calls us to something higher than that. Again, mutual accountability to one another. I address your sins against you. You, against me. You address my sins against you, not out of a desire that the other person is punished, but so that we might grow through it, that we become more holy through it, and also that the church might be strengthened. Jesus offers this step-by-step procedure. First, go alone and have a conversation with the person about it. And then if that doesn’t work, bring two or three others to go talk to them again. And note that the point of that, in part, is that those two or three others that you talk to, they might be like, hey, actually, you’re wrong. That’s a possibility, right? And then if all that fails, tell the church, the leadership of the church, and treat the offender like a Gentile or a tax collector. And that sounds really brutal, but it’s important to understand what that means, to treat someone like a Gentile or a tax collector. First, and maybe this is the most important thing to know about that, Matthew, the writer of this gospel, was a tax collector. So obviously this is a group of people that he doesn’t think of as beyond redemption. To treat someone as a Gentile or a tax collector doesn’t mean they’re to be hated, but to hopefully be reconciled, to be re-evangelized, to be given the good news of Jesus again and brought back. Whenever they’re a Gentile or a tax collector, they’re no longer part of the community because they’ve removed themselves by their own behavior, by harming other people. You could call that excommunication, I guess. but the point of a move like that is not retribution. It’s not supposed to hurt for the sake of hurting. The hope is that God is going to reveal to them the error of their ways and they’ll come back. The whole church’s goal is to win them over once more with the gospel just like the first time. Hear the good news again. Receive the grace of God again. Be a brother or sister again.
And this type of mutual accountability has been an enormous focus of Methodism since our roots, arguably the entire reason for the existence of Methodism. The Westleys, other early Methodists, refused to accept that you could have a church where you sit comfortably in the same pew for 50 years and never actually change. They knew that if our faith doesn’t ask anything difficult, It can’t heal anything broken in us. It can’t renew us in any way. And that’s why Wesley insisted on what he called social holiness. And that doesn’t just mean charity. It doesn’t just mean, you know, sort of like social justice. It does. But beyond that, it’s this work of what he called watching over one another in love. These people, the early Methodists, became vulnerable to each other. They entered into this discomfort of really being seen. Whenever they’d gather every week, it wasn’t just to do a Bible study or to learn something. It was to ask, how is your soul? How is that problem that you were dealing with last week? What has God done? What have you prayed about since then? How have you handled it? And they risked in all of that being called out for their sins, for their blind spots, for their bad habits, because that’s how they sought to grow. And this is what Matthew 18 is about. It’s not a system for just maintaining order. It’s not a system for deciding who wins an argument. Instead, Christian accountability is about our relationship with God and our sanctification as Christians. It’s about you being changed.
And so for the first Methodist, the Matthew 18 process was non-negotiable. There was one exception. It applies to mutual conflict among people in the church. If there’s a situation of abuse or danger, even Wesley said, no, we don’t do that. We do something different. It’s dangerous. But between people on the same playing field, Jesus gives us this blueprint for reconciliation. Not a toll for abusers or to impose power, but for reconciliation. And Wesley preached an entire sermon on this exact text from Matthew today called the cure of evil speaking. We don’t use that terminology anymore, evil speaking, but this is what he meant. Almost every church and relational breakdown happens, he said, because we do the process backwards. Instead of going to our brother or sister, we tell our friends, we vent in the parking lot. We tell everybody on earth what the problem is except for the person who caused the problem. And Wesley emphasizes that this passive aggression is unacceptable for one and also doesn’t work. And that confronting a brother or sister must happen and must be drenched in love. This is the quote that he has on it. Great care is to be taken, that this is done in a right spirit and in a right manner. You pray first, you check your anger, and you speak in love. Not with accusations, not with a manifesto, but in love.
But Wesley also warned, this part stuck out to me, that whenever we are hurt, whenever we are angry, we will invent a hundred clever, spiritual-sounding excuses why we can’t have that conversation. And he called that an attempt to shun the cross, to dodge the discomfort, the friction that love is going to sometimes require. And this observation hurts, but you and I both know that he’s right, that we’d love to find a reason why we can’t talk through whatever our problem is. It’s not going to work. I don’t know what I would say. They’re not going to listen to me. I get that. But there can be no opportunity throughout all of this process to hand the responsibility over to someone else to deal with. There is nobody else. We can’t take our ball and go home. We have to do that thing where we intervene with two or three others, where we go to the leaders of the church. All of these, even past that first step of us doing it ourselves, still require us to stay engaged. You can’t turn this over to anybody else. No matter how much we’d rather cut and run, this is a person-to-person thing. And the same thing applies to the third parties who are helping us. Strength and love is required from these two or three others who come to arbitrate. It’s hard to sit in the middle of two people who have a conflict. And courage is also required from church leaders if things rise to that third level. Asking somebody to step away until they can stop hurting other people is very uncomfortably painful. No one ever wants to do that. But through all of this, Jesus emphasizes from the first line in this passage, The whole point is to hopefully regain a brother or a sister. That’s how Jesus puts it. If they listen to you, you have regained a brother or a sister. It’s not just that we get an apology for what’s been done. We’re not sure that some abstract sense of justice is served. Though, of course, we’re going to want that. Like, you know you want someone to apologize to you. But the point is to regain a sibling. And the imagery Jesus is using here reminds me of the parable of the prodigal son. You know, the son who has gone away, who’s taken his inheritance, goes to live this life of sin, partying, whatever. Whenever he comes back, he’s celebrated because he has come back from the dead. That’s what his father says. This brother of yours was dead and now he is alive. Because reconciliation is to be understood as a miracle like resurrection. And in our world, it really is. And the passage ends with what sounds like a pretty cozy verse. We tend to use it in a cozy kind of way. Where two or three are gathered in my name, Jesus says. I am there with them. And we usually hear this as a reminder that even in small gatherings, small congregations, a little group praying, Jesus is there. That’s true. But look what it means in the context of this passage. That two or three line, where two or three are gathered, as Jesus is saying it, he’s referring to two or three people who are gathered to do this difficult process, this work of reconciliation, of working through their faults, because they have decided that the body of Christ is more important than winning. Jesus is saying where two or three people are gathered to do that, in that place, in that discomfort, in that tense moment, that will hopefully lead to a new life, I’m there, specifically. We can’t expect to meet Jesus in community, the place where he promises to be, if we flee the friction where he is at work. If our reflex is to hit the road, to cut people off, to hop to a different place the moment things get tense, we’re fleeing from the body of Christ. We’re running away from the only place where resurrection can really happen between people. And Jesus is with us when we dare to stay in the room and not to participate in some fake justice circle that just glosses over what happened, not to plot retribution against each other, but to take up the cross of truth telling, of grace. And that is the only way forward. That is a justice that actually restores. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
