SunSep72008
Scripture: MATTHEW 18:15-20
What a great day this is—this place is so full of spirit as we gather and commit ourselves again to this place we call “church”! “Church”: it’s an odd word. The Greek word for church, ekklesia, from which we get our word “ecclesiastical,” means literally, “those who are called.” We are those who have been called together. And the English word “church” comes from a Greek word meaning “Lord.” In other words, we are those who are called together by our Lord to be the people of God.
As important as the church is to Christian faith, it seems very odd to me that that word appears only five times in the gospels. In fact, the word never appears in Mark, Luke, or John. It only appears in Matthew. One of those appearances is in next week’s reading (18:21), another is the phrase in which Jesus says he will build the church on the rock who is Peter (16:18). And the other three uses of that word “church occur in this morning’s passage.
There is nothing else quite like this thing we call “church.” And we mark ourselves off as church—or better, we are marked as church—by certain distinctive habits and practices. What make a church are four key accents: churches worship God together; they learn about their faith; they serve other people; and they enjoy and care for each other. That’s really it, the heart of Christian faith: worship, learning, serving, and living together in community.
And underneath it all is joy—joy at the tenacious grace of God, the joy written about with such exuberance in the 149th Psalm that we read as our call to worship this morning. If we’re really taking the presence of Christ seriously, then suffusing everything we do there will be a relentless and ever-present joy, the sort of joy that’s so palpable today. That joy can bubble up because, no matter what’s going on in our lives, grace abounds. If things at work are terrible, there is always hope for a new chapter. If we’re sick, the power of God for healing wells up within us. If we’re dying, God’s resurrection power transcends even death. And if things are going beautifully, it’s because God is the giver. No matter what things are like, God is the constant, the baseline. And because of that, there’s always room for unbridled joy—joy because of the gifts, but mostly because of the giver.
That joy undergirds all those facets of church life—it’s there as we worship and as we learn and as we serve. And it is there as we build community, including even, and perhaps surprisingly, that part of community-building that involves our disagreeing and our fighting. In this morning’s gospel reading, Jesus explains how to go about resolving the differences that inevitably crop up when any people live together in community. In any church, people hurt each other. In any church, people disagree with each other about whether to serve Fair Trade coffee, or what sort of music to sing, or whether the preacher is just a tad off base. So Jesus says, ‘When these issues crop up, go to the one who has hurt you and try to resolve it. If that doesn’t work, take a couple of others with you as witnesses. If that still doesn’t work, take it to the church.’
And where, we might ask, is the joy in all this? It’s buried in a little word that crops up some four times in those verses. If Jesus is giving advice on resolving issues, wouldn’t you just assume that what you’re looking for is for the other person to say “I’m sorry”? Wouldn’t you assume that it’s an apology that you’re after? But no, Jesus says simply that everything will be alright if the other person “listens” to you. Just listens. That’s it. That’s the simple word that recurs in this passage: listen.
And come to think of it: that’s pretty fine. In any context, just to be listened to is one of the greatest gifts imaginable. There is immense joy in receiving that kind of care. Just to be attended to, just to have someone home in on you is like a little bit of heaven. You know what this is like if you’ve ever come home bursting with news, knowing that you had to share it to be complete; or if you’ve been trapped in a pit, and seen the shadows lift only once you were able to articulate the problem; or if you’ve gotten through a difficult time by working it through with a counselor; or if, in the kind of situation Jesus talks about here, you’ve gotten ticked off at someone and, rather than strike back, they listen to you when you unload your frustration. Have you ever had that happen? You’re raging at something, and, rather than fighting back, they say, “Tell me more”? When someone really listens to us, it’s pretty fabulous. This is joy. This is gospel.
At the end of this morning’s reading, Jesus says, “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (18:20). It’s not a dramatic, buzzing joy that wows us with spectacle. It is, instead, a small, everyday joy that’s available to us always. The joy we know as we resolve our issues; as we are reassured in the midst of anxiety; as we face death with a kind of equanimity: all this is the joy of Christ’s presence in the midst of every moment of our lives. This is what we celebrate as we rally here today.
And there is no better example of that everyday joy than when we really, really listen to each other. I want to tell you a story about that kind of attention:
It was midsummer now [writes Presbyterian minister, Stephen Doughty]. As I recall, he not only put down the hammer he was using, he unbuckled the belt that held all manner of other tools tight about his waist. He laid the belt on his workbench and took seven or eight steps directly towards me.
Half an hour before I had been in the office at the church. A knock came on the door. It was one of the summer residents, a jolly woman [whose] face now was drawn.
“Steve,” she said in direct and measured tones, “we just had a call from your parents. Your grandmother has had a stroke. It’s not good. Your mother and father are driving on from Chicago. They said you would want to know. They thought maybe you would want to be there too.”
My grandmother lived in western Massachusetts. We had eaten dinner together every Sunday all four years I was in college. The whole family had gathered for her ninetieth birthday just six weeks before. When the cake, with ninety candles on it, caught fire she had laughed harder than any of us.
Yes. In my parents’ phrase, I “wanted to be there too.”
I thanked my new friend for telling me. I went outside, got in my car, and drove off to ask the chair of the congregation if I might have some time away. He was a carpenter, year-round resident, and right now was building an addition on the home of a summer family.
“Ed.” I spoke his name through the open walls of the addition. The sun was bright and shown on his white hair. Normally he would have turned, smiled, given a few more licks with the hammer or finished sawing a board.
“Ed.” I am sure I only said his name once and not very loud. He looked directly at me. Then, without hesitation, he put down the hammer, laid aside his tool belt, and walked directly towards me.
After my explanation of why I was there, words followed from him. Kind words. I certainly could have time away, as much as I needed. Don’t worry about Sunday. “Don’t even think about it!” He would take care of the worship. Please, though, just let them know how matters were coming.
His words freed me to go. Some days later, when I returned from the memorial service for my grandmother, the warmth of the welcome I received lifted me. What I remember most, though, is a solitary image: on hearing the tone of my voice, and after a single look at my face, he laid down his tools so he could be completely there . . . for me (Weavings, Sept./Oct., 1997, pp. 16-17).
Listening, connecting, supporting: this is the deep joy of sensing the presence of Christ in our midst. This is what it is to be church. This is who we are. May it always be so.