Speaking Truth to Harm
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
I am the parent of a high school girl. Naturally, I spend more time with high school girls than I did a few years ago. Usually when I’m driving them around - and they are always in the back seat - I hear all their gossips and annoyances. Be it good or bad parenting, I often interject with some kind of brilliant comment about how they are expending too much energy on these annoyances or how gossiping harms people and relationships.
Highschool drama. Family drama. Neighbor drama. Church cabinet drama. Political drama.
We get it. Jesus got it. In fact, Matthew 18:15-20 shows not only that Jesus got it, but also that Jesus expected it. There is going to be drama. There is going to be hurt. We are human. We get tired. We get angry. We get hurt. We are afraid.
And we harm.
I wish I could say only that we get hurt. Certainly, but we also hurt. Neither being harmed nor harming are easy to handle. Our nervous systems rev up or slow down, our shame and pride kick in, our anger rises, we strike out, or we might just bury our heads in the sand like the infamous ostrich.
A few years back the congregation I serve dealt with a major upset that was the culmination of years of hurts and which was compounded by a global pandemic on its heels. I am thankful that one of the interim pastors who came prior to my installation did some work on healing. I do not doubt that this helped heal some of the trauma. But, like personal trauma, the scar tissue is still there. This wasn’t the first hurt in its 123 years of life, and undoubtedly this congregation will live through more hurt - although I am actively resourcing myself in the hope that it is not at my hand.
But hurts will come.
This is where a little bit of Jesus might come in real handy. But, before Jesus, there was Psalm 119, the Bohemian Rhapsody of its day - ringing in at 176 verses. Fortunately the lectionary reading only assigns 8 verses. Fortunately, those verses remind us well that a love for God’s Word can bring us delight in living out God’s ethic. These 8 verses are a tiny and mighty reminder that each week we get to encounter God’s word together with God’s people - singing it, reading it, savoring it, and ultimately letting our hearts be shaped by these practices into conduits of grace and kindness and courage.
So, how might Christ’s words “give us life”?
First, these words in Matthew 18 might help us change how we think about hurts from “hurts won’t come if we are perfect” to “we can navigate hurts because we know in our most intimate selves that we are loved.” This might help us stay the course when the hurts come. Second, by taking note of some key aspects of this particular teaching and its relation to its immediate surroundings, we can build ourselves a practical playbook for when we are annoyed, hurt, shamed, or angry with our Christian siblings.
Perhaps like me you grew up thinking of this passage as the “three steps to confronting and disfellowshipping sinners.” You wouldn’t be alone in this, even Stanley Hauerwas interpreted step 3, “let one such be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector,” as a call for the excommunication of unrepentant offenders. “Jesus clearly implies,” he writes, “that his new people must excommunicate.” The thing is, Jesus’ interactions with “tax collectors and sinners” is aimed at restoration and grace, much more so than at excommunication. To read this as a call for excommunication perhaps reflects a bit more of our anti-semitic ways of reading and our anxiety around “tax collectors and sinners,” than it reflects Jesus. It is helpful to read these 6 verses in their textual location: between the parable of the lost sheep (Matthew 18:12-14) and Jesus’ impossible teaching that we must forgive our offenders seventy-seven times (Matthew 18:21-35).
In fact, in those surrounding parables, Jesus instructs his listeners in: 1) God’s ever-loving will for sinners (“it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost”); and, 2) God’s expectation that we forgive and forgive and forgive (“so my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart”).
We don’t want those burning coals from last week’s text heaped on our heads (Romans 12:20), but we might like to heap them up higher and hotter on our enemy’s heads! The thing is that Paul was very clear that heaping burning coals meant something other than burning and punishing someone. In fact, he was really clear that whatever the coals alluded to (and I am partial to the ancient Egyptian repentance ritual), the believer was called to bless their enemy.
The thing is this.
It is easier to avoid our enemies or to harm them than it is to bless them.
I personally wish this week’s Gospel reading was easier - then it wouldn’t call me to truth-telling and it would let me avoid what feels like a futile expectation of mutuality with other believers. That expectation gets me in trouble because it hurts when love isn’t mutual, especially when I’m the one on the unloved side of the equation. But, Jesus calls us to these very things: 1) to truth-telling; 2) to non-shaming; and, 3) to treating others with love and honor. This doesn’t make their harm “ok.” If it did Jesus presumably wouldn’t offer up steps for confronting it.
The painfully beautiful truth is that for all of this we have the community of faith to help us love one another well. Approaching the offender to speak truth about harm doesn’t feel like a kindness, and yet that is how this passage frames it. It could say, “take them up in front of your friends so they can back you up” or “post about it all over social media.” But, instead, it calls the offended to approach the offender with care rather than with intent to harm. Does this make the offended a doormat? No, it calls for bravery and a stepping into the light of truth being spoken where sin and harm would rather hide in the darkness of shame.
Of this we can assure our communities - Jesus assures us that “where two or three are gathered in [his] name, [he] is here among [us].” The hard times will come, but Jesus has promised to be present in those times - and to be present in the very community that will create its own hard times because we are a church made up of broken, hurting, growing, learning people.