Dealing With Conflict — And here's why

A sermon for Sunday, July 12, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God whose Word is with us always, thank you for gathering us together. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

As I’m sure you’ve seen from the pictures of our garden out back at Whittier UMC and all the other flower beds and gardens around, it is a growing season, with some early fruits of that growth already showing. For the church, too, this is a growing season. We continue to be in what we call Ordinary Time, the long summer of the church, which lasts from Pentecost until Advent. Though the rhythms of our Christian story, starting in Advent, then Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, all the way to Pentecost, are important for us to live and relive each year, this Ordinary Time is the dedicated time for us to focus on our growth as followers of Jesus Christ. And I think the Christians who’ve gone before us show a lot of wisdom in making this growing season the longest season in our Christian calendar. We all need that time to unfold and stretch, to dig deeper roots and to blossom.

In this growing season, we’ll continue to focus on listening to Jesus’ teachings in the gospel of Matthew. My hope is that each of us will be able to find again the Jesus who first called us to follow him and allow these teachings of Jesus to work on us as we grow in discipleship. I think I speak for all of us when I say that the world we live in sorely needs disciples of Jesus right now.

Now, Jesus is a great teacher. Sometimes, he offers us words of comfort, sayings that build us up and remind us of the beloved place God has for each of us in God’s heart. Sometimes, he nudges us, giving us just a little bit of wisdom that we can chew on throughout the week and learn how to apply to our own lives. And sometimes, he gives us words that cut right into us and challenge us, teachings that aren’t comfortable but will help us grow to be more like him.

Our scripture this week is, I think, the last of those. I know that I feel convicted as I read these words from the Sermon on the Mount and from later on in Matthew. He is teaching us how we are to resolve conflict between one another and how to handle disagreements. It’s such practical teaching, yet it is rooted in the enduring word of God, and so, of course, it challenges us. And in case we’re tempted to dismiss what Jesus has to say, remember that Matthew is the only gospel to use the word “church.” These teachings, as preserved in Matthew, are meant to speak directly to those first Christian gatherings that we would recognize as churches. They’re aimed specifically at how we are to interact with one another.

And remember, too, that the words from Matthew 5 are a part of the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus drew out his disciples from the crowds that followed him from all around Galilee, Judea, and even beyond the Jordan, and offered them the more difficult teachings that the crowd wasn’t ready for yet. In these teachings we’re focused on today, Jesus is calling us to rise above the worldly way of doing things. So he begins by affirming that what he’s teaching is rooted in the word of God, and that the word of God is fulfilled in him. Just Isaiah 55 and Psalm 65 remind us that the word of God goes out into the world and does not return empty, Jesus affirms that the law and the prophets aren’t abolished, but made complete in what he’s teaching. Jesus understands the spirit behind the commandments and calls us to understand them more fully.

He comes out strong with his first teaching of the fullness of the law. You have heard it said, “You shall not murder,” but Jesus tells us that not murdering is the low bar to jump over. If you are angry with a sibling in Christ or if you insult a sibling in Christ, you’ll have to answer to judgement just the same as if you murder. Jesus takes conflict seriously. So seriously, in fact, that before you can give your offering to God, you are to resolve any dispute you have with your siblings in Christ. That has stuck with me ever since I first read it. Before I can connect fully to God, I must restore my connections with my family in Christ. How many of us would need to take a week or two off of church if we followed this teaching of Jesus? Or how quickly would we come to the table and talk to one another if we truly believed Jesus’ teaching that before we can come to God, we must make things right with one another?

Now, I don’t mean to offer this as a stumbling block to any of us. As Paul says in Romans 8, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. This doesn’t mean that we won’t ever give into the temptation unresolved anger with one another, but it means that the Spirit is constantly working in us, calling us toward repentance and reconciliation. Being angry or having a fight with a sibling in Christ doesn’t mean that we’re kicked out of the church and separated from God. It means that the Spirit will always be with us, guiding us toward what we need to do in order to restore our relationships with one another.

In our second teaching today, from Matthew 18, Jesus gives us the blueprint for how we are to handle conflict with one another. First, we are to go directly to the person who has wronged us, who has sinned against us, to use Jesus’ language, and explain to them how they have wronged us, remembering always that this person is just as beloved in the eyes of God as we ourselves are. If that person is able to hear you and begin that rhythm of repentance we talked about a few weeks ago, the matter is resolved. You’re good. If they don’t hear you, though, it’s time to bring in a few others from the church and try again. It might be that having witnesses will encourage the person who has wronged you to listen to you and take your words more seriously.

Again, the goal isn’t to gang up on someone or to bully them into doing what you want. The goal is correction, knowing the belovedness of the other, repentance, and the restoration of relationship between siblings in Christ. If they don’t hear you then, bring the matter to the whole church. If the whole church isn’t able to convince them of the harm they’ve done, you’ve done all you can. It’s up to the Holy Spirit to work on that person’s heart until they’re able to realize what they’ve done and to turn away from the harm they’ve caused.

Now, here’s the piece that we miss in this conversation. It’s something that was so clear to Jesus and his disciples at the time that it went without saying, but we’ve forgotten it over time. In Jewish practice, forgiveness is always tied to repentance and restitution. When Peter says to Jesus, “How often do I have to forgive?” and Jesus says, “Seventy times seven,” meaning, “As many times as it takes,” Peter is referring to forgiving someone who’s repented and made the right steps toward making things better. For Jesus and Peter, it goes without saying that someone asking for forgiveness would have done the work needed to make things right. It’s in that case, when someone has repented and done all they can to make up for the harm they caused, when Jesus calls us to forgive.

What difficult words Jesus has for us in these teachings! When we have wronged somebody, we are called to the hard, hard work of understanding what we’ve done wrong, truly apologizing for it, doing the best we can to make it right, and committing to not doing that again. If someone has wronged us, we are called to do hard work of seeing that person as beloved and calling them to repentance. We cannot ignore the cracks in our fellowship that come with disputes. We must resolve them.

And we are to practice this in our churches because it’s even harder to this out in the rest of the world. As Christians, we’re called to always be thoughtful about what we’re doing and what we’ve done, always ready to repent when we learn that we’ve done something harmful and always ready to learn a better way. In theory, this way of resolving conflict should come naturally to us, though in many churches, we’re out of practice. But this kind of reflection and humility isn’t taught in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, the strongest argument or loudest voice or most powerful person wins in any conflict, without any care for who is hurt in the process.

But my friends, if we follow Jesus, we can’t be like the rest of the world.

And so, this week, I invite you to practice what Jesus teaches us, even if you’re uncomfortable doing it at first. If you come into conflict with someone, remember that they are a beloved child of God, just as you are, and try to resolve the conflict as soon as you can, one-on-one. We don’t often take that first step, but it usually does the trick. And if it doesn’t, reach out for help. We’re never alone when we’re trying to make things right. If we take this step, we can be peacemakers. And if we’re peacemakers, Jesus tells us, we’re blessed.

Go and be blessed this week, my friends. Amen.