Did you know that, here in the church, we practice ‘tough love?’ It’s true! Of course, tough love looks different from different perspectives.
I have a friend who left a church that practiced ‘tough love’ – if you did something that the pastor and church leadership thought was wrong, you got a visit from them. At that visit, you were told that you had to repent, but that you were going to be shunned from the community for at least some suitable amount of time before you could come back to church some Sunday and in front of the entire congregation confess the sin that had been pointed out to you and symbolically ask the forgiveness of Jesus. The pastor and elders of the church would confer, and after some uncomfortable silence would usually let you back in, noting at the same time that they were being lenient – lenient -- out of Christian love.
That was their tough love. But is that really the love that Paul talks about? “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” As Paul writes – and he echoes the words of Jesus and other, even more well-respected Jewish rabbis – that the commandments are summed up in the words “love your neighbour as yourself.”
And that seems really, really, easy. In fact, some aspect of that is usually cited by people who describe themselves as ‘I’m-not-religious-I’m-spiritual’. If we’re not religious, but we’re spiritual, we can tell ourselves that ‘I love my neighbour as myself, so I must be good, then.” And honestly, that seems a lot easier of a way to live. It’s easier simply because then I can choose who my neighbour is.
But the difference between being spiritual and being religious is that when your are religious, you don’t get to pick and chose things based on how uncomfortable they make you.
You may find your neighbour in the homeless woman who sits outside of Safeway and asks for change,
You may find your neighbour in the person of little education but strong opinion who comes to talk with you because you’re “good church-going folk.”
You may find your neighbour in the young unmarried couple next door when they come over to ask if they can borrow some milk. They need to borrow the milk because he got laid off because of a DUI (which was SO not his fault), and they can’t get to the store to buy food for their kids. They become your neighbour when you load them down with food from your pantry, and grit your teeth instead of pointing out the huge party they had last week.
When you’re Christian, your neighbours choose you. And then you find what ‘tough love’ is really about.
It’s about loving when you really don’t want to. And finding that love and forgiveness are really, really, hard pills to swallow.
Today Jesus talks about what to do when your brother or sister ‘sins’ against you. It’s interesting that Jesus uses that word; in Greek, the word means “to miss the mark.” So, when someone else ‘misses the mark’ with you, Jesus provides a means of recourse. At first reading, it seems to be the kind of ‘tough love’ that we understand.
But think very carefully about what Jesus is actually saying in this text when he says’ “let such a one be to you as a tax collector and a Gentile”.
In classes at Seminary, I was always up for a good argument – I mean, class discussion. If a professor wanted someone to throw something out for the class to chew on, I was often the first to open my mouth.
One day, we were talking about this text, and how we are provided with this model in Matthew 18. I tossed out the example of the church that my friend attended, and then said that, apparently, it was after all ‘biblically sound.”
And my professor looked at me and said, “really? That’s biblically sound? Then answer me this: who wrote this gospel?”
And I said, “Matthew.”
And she said back to me, “and what did he do?”
I said: “he was a disciple.” “And what was his profession?” “He was…a tax collector.”
And she reminded me of the gospel story of a few weeks ago, of the woman who came to beg Jesus that her daughter would be healed. “Where was she from?” my teacher asked. And the light slowly dawned as I said, “she was a gentile.”
That was the beginning of my realization that ‘bible study’ meant more than just memorizing dogmatic answers to tradition texts. ‘Bible study’ means letting the text speak to its own understanding, not the meaning we want.
Jesus says, ‘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.”
Bring them into your community and love them. Bind them to the love of God in Christ, and they will be bound in heaven. Loose them, and you will lose them.
Now that’s ‘tough love’.
I’ve said before that I think there was unity in the church for maybe fifteen minutes at the foot of the cross. Conflict is natural in any situation where culture, values, and mixed experiences are present, and Jesus knew that. There are a couple of stories in the gospels that begin “now the disciples argued among themselves…”
If you live by the law, your entire life will be lost, because the Law is hungry: it’s easy, really easy, to point out the flaws and sins of everyone around you. You can, in fact, make a church around that kind of idea. But Paul reminds us to live by love: love that poured out for us in the cross of Jesus Christ.
Being Christian means acknowledging that Christ died for your sins: but honestly being Lutheran means admitting you drove the nails in, while at the same time Christ says to you: Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.
Tough love is not destroying someone utterly so that we can feel righteous in ourselves.
Tough love means loving the unlovable – and maybe even admitting that that includes ourselves. Paul reminds us, “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers,” possibly because when we come to understand and know the love that Christ has for us we can come to understand a bit better what it means to both be saved from and saved for.
Saved from death, and sin.
Freed for love, for community – because Jesus never, ever, uses an example of just one person. Where two or three are gathered, there will always be conflict. Yet it’s funny that it’s in this place that Jesus also promises us, “I am with you.”
Maybe that’s because Jesus knows that we will always sin – we will always ‘miss the mark’. We will always fall short as a community because, well, we’re not Jesus – but we bear his name to the world, despite our failing, despite our sins. And then, together, we move forward as a community of two, or three, or thirty, or three hundred, knowing that as we are gathered in the name of Jesus Christ here is here among us, that we owe each other nothing, other than to love one another, as Christ first loved us.
And there is nothing that can ever separate us from that love.
Let the people of God say ‘amen.’
No comments:
Post a Comment