How to gain your brother
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus often speaks in riddles and cryptic language, but not today. In our reading from Matthew 18, offers some practical advice for resolving conflict and encourages us with His promise to be present, even with all our issues.
The Church is full of problems.
There are plenty of descriptions and pictures of what the Church is in the Bible and in well-known hymns. The first verse of The Church’s One Foundation pictures the Church as Christ’s holy bride:
The church's one foundation
is Jesus Christ her Lord;
she is his new creation
by water and the Word.
From heaven he came and sought her
to be his holy bride;
with his own blood he bought her,
and for her life he died.
The Church is Jesus’ treasured possession and the bride that He was willing to give His life for in an act of deep love and commitment.
Luther and his companions put together a definition of the Church that is beautifully simple:
It is the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel.
Augsburg Confession, Article VII. Concerning the Church
The Church is a new creation, which is being constantly renewed by the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins. It is Christ’s holy bride, who He was willing to give His life for and still remains deeply committed to. It is the assembly of believers who are unified in faith and love.
If I asked you to describe our little pocket of the Church here at St Martin’s, I wonder if you would use those words to describe it. Is St Martin’s a new, holy, and united community of faith? If we’re honest with ourselves, as all local churches should be, we might say quite the opposite.
This community is not all that new, it’s not all that holy at times, and we’re not all that unified either.
The most efficiently-run hospital is the one that has no patients—maybe the same could be said for the Church.
In theory, the Church is the assembly of believers where people can come to access the forgiveness of sins and receive the gospel. In reality, the Church is a community of human beings who try their best, but often disagree with each other and find themselves spending more time trying to be legally compliant and fill rosters.
God is rich in His grace.
Clearly, it is not the people that make the Church holy, as we read elsewhere in the Lutheran Confessions:
This holiness does not consist of surplices, tonsures, long albs, or other ceremonies of theirs that they have invented over and above the Holy Scriptures. Its holiness exists in the Word of God and true faith.
Smalcald Articles, III, 12: Concerning the Church
God makes the Christian Church holy, despite all the issues we seem to have ourselves. God makes the Christian Church His new creation by recreating us through baptism. God gives the Christian Church His Spirit to instil and strengthen the faith which unifies us in Christ.
Our ideas of a new, holy, and unified Church are not what God means when He describes the Church in these ways. We view them in a way that depends on our ability to keep things fresh and new, to be “good” Christians and be holy people, and to maintain unity in the Church by agreeing in theology and in practice.
Human beings do not establish or maintain the Church. This congregation, just one tiny part of the Christian Church on Earth, continues to exist because God wills it. He could have brought this congregation to an end at any point in its history if that was His plan, but we are still here. God, in His grace, establishes and sustains the Church through specific means:
…God is extravagantly rich in his grace: first, through the spoken word, in which the forgiveness of sins is preached to the whole world (which is the proper function of the gospel); second, through baptism; third, through the holy Sacrament of the Altar; fourth, through the power of the keys and also through the mutual conversation and consolation of brothers and sisters. Matthew 18[:20]: “Where two or three are gathered …”
Smalcald Articles, III, 4: Concerning the Gospel
We take that verse way out of context all the time. Nearly every Friday night, we quote it when there are only a few of us waiting before the service at 6:25 pm to reassure ourselves that God is present even when a gathering for a worship service is small. Of course, a few more always turn up at 6:35…
Although it is true that God is present wherever His believers gather, but Jesus is not talking about a worship service here.
Jesus provides the path to forgiveness.
He has just given us a very clear three-step process for resolving conflict in the church. It’s almost as if He knows that a community of human beings will eventually result in some kind of disagreement, mistreatment, or argument…
Jesus says that if someone sins against you, call it out and give them three chances to repent. The goal of this process is not to make them pay for what they’ve done or punish them, but to restore the relationship. If a sin is not admitted to, it can’t be dealt with. Maybe you know from experience what unresolved conflict and unforgiven sin feels and looks like.
To “regain your brother” and for healing to take place, the sinner must first acknowledge their sin and be truly sorry for what they have done. If you are the person who has been sinned against in this scenario, the first step towards reconciliation is to help that person to see what they’ve done. I would say this is the most difficult step and we often don’t even get this far.
When we’ve been wronged by someone, our natural tendency is usually to overlook and move on. We do this because the person is not very likely to appreciate what you’re doing. In fact, if you tell someone that they’ve sinned and they hadn’t realised, it’s highly likely that you’ll be met with a lot of anger, denial, and finger-pointing.
If they are receptive to what you’ve called them out on, you can very quickly move to a place of confession and absolution between the two of you and, hey presto, you’ve regained your brother or sister in Christ.
If you’re met with anger, denial, and finger-pointing, Jesus says, move to step two and introduce a couple of trustworthy and level-headed people.
The point here is not to outnumber or to manipulate the person and force them to surrender, but to bring a bit more order to the conversation. Jesus says these two or three witnesses are to provide evidence of the sin this person has committed. It’s important that this is a fair trial. Remember, the intention is to help this person to realise what they have done so that they can repent and ultimately be forgiven. We want to regain our brother or sister in Christ.
If that still doesn’t work and the person refuses to repent, we get to step three. I doubt many of us have ever seen this step take place. Jesus simply describes this as “telling it to the church”. It’s hard to know exactly how that might look, but the intention here is to give the whole church community an opportunity to regain this person.
If the person still won’t listen, Jesus says, let them go. The Lutheran Church of Australia does have a Rite of Excommunication for this purpose. That word sounds very full-on, but it merely means “outside of the community”. I’ve never seen it used myself, but I have heard of it happening. In that rite, our gospel text for today is quoted right at the beginning. After the person is declared excluded from the church, the prayer that follows says this:
Holy and merciful God and Father, since you want everyone to be saved, use this act of excommunication to lead N to confess his/her sin and to turn away from it. Help him/her to resist the devil, and bring him/her back to faith in Jesus Christ, so that he/she may not die and be condemned eternally. Forgive us our sins, and make us ready to forgive N. Give us grace to restore each other in the spirit of gentleness, and help us to bear each other’s burdens. Give us joy by bringing N back into communion with us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
I hope and pray that I’ll never have to lead this rite, but you can see the intent in this prayer. Remember the intent of Jesus’ three steps: to regain your brother, to forgive the sin, to restore the relationship. The goal is forgiveness, not rejection and isolation.
Jesus has given this authority to the Church: “Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
The sins that are forgiven in this building week to week are forgiven in heaven. The Church then passes that authority on to pastors who exercise it “by the authority of Jesus Christ”. When sin is forgiven, it is “loosed”, released, taken away forever. And what a weight off the shoulders that is.
And so, we come back to that verse that we misuse all the time: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” Yes, God is with us when we gather in His name as His people. But today, Jesus promises to be with us particularly in our broken relationships.
As He forgives us our sin, He gives us the grace to forgive others. As He has restored our relationship with Him, He gives us the courage to work towards restoration in our relationships with others.
His grace is abundant. His presence is real. His forgiveness is eternal. May His grace, presence, and forgiveness be yours again today. Amen.
