TRINITY XVI, Year A: September 7 2008

Preacher: Fr Jeremy Morris

Readings: Ezekiel 33.7–11; Romans 13.8–end; Matthew 18.15–20

'It is time for you to awake from sleep' — I take these words from our second reading, from Paul's letter to the Romans, as my text for today — not as a rebuke to those of you who might feel tempted to nod off, but as Paul I think intends them, a clarion call to renewed hope and vitality in the faith that Jesus Christ is the way of life for us. The tone of Paul's encouragement, however, is a far cry from the Gospel we have just heard — or so it seems. For there, we heard Jesus describe what sounds pretty much like a judicial process, telling the disciples how to deal with conflicts between them, by summoning witnesses, and perhaps ultimately shunning the wrongdoer.

Some years ago, I think it was 10 or so years, the marketing men at the British Council of Churches thought they had come up with a brilliant ploy for advertising Lent and Easter — they took Alberto Korba's famous portrait of the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara and transposed onto it Jesus with a crown of thorns, and underneath placed the caption "Meek. Mild. As if." I don't know if it was effective advertising – perhaps. But it was certainly a tad controversial. Many people were offended. There were outraged true believers who thought this was an affront to a sacred image — and that was just the Marxists.

But — reluctant though I am to admit it — the caption touched a nerve. It had a ring of truth about it. We might like to think of all that Jesus said and did as warm, kindly, nice, gentle, inclusive, and affirming, and yet the Gospels actually tell us of a much more demanding, uncompromising figure than that. Here, in today's Gospel, Jesus does appear to be laying down limits to the ability of the Christian community to absorb dissension and wrongdoing within its ranks. You must tell your brother his sin against you to his face; if he doesn't listen, gather witnesses; if he still doesn't listen, tell the whole church; and if he still doesn't face up to it, throw him out — "let him be to you as a Gentile and tax collector", as the Gospel vividly puts it. This is hardly what we expect from the "gentle child of gentle mother". And if we took it at face value, it would look like an invitation to the church to frequent internal purges.

Now this text appears in this form only in the gospel of Matthew. Biblical scholars would rightly point out that, whether or not these words actually do go back to sayings of Jesus Himself, doubtless there was a very good reason why the gospel writer took the trouble to include them here in his account of the life of Jesus. Surely there were — we know there were — conflicts and crises in the very earliest of the Christian communities after Jesus's ascension. In that sense, churches then were no different from churches now. Perhaps these words, put here at this point in the text, had a very clear target. Perhaps the church or churches for whom Matthew's Gospel was written down had serious problems of discipline, and this teaching was intended to bolster the arguments of those who wanted to root out wrongdoers.

All that might be true, but it remains a perplexing question for us, today, what sense do we make of this saying? Our Gospel reading of course is set according to the lectionary. Up and down the land, in thousands of churches, not just Anglican, Christians are listening to this Gospel reading this morning, along with us; they share with us the deep responsibility as a Christian community of hearing the words of the Gospel in faith and trust, and then of interpreting them, making them live and bear fruit in our lives as Christians, so that we may, with Paul, awake from sleep.

It is vital, as always, when you have a short and puzzling extract from the gospels, to cast your eye over the text again, looking closely at what comes before this passage, and then after it. In this case, it's particularly illuminating. Before comes a sequence of sayings that begins with the disciples asking Jesus which of them will be greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus answers by putting a child before them and telling them that they must be like that child, they must be converted or transformed — in other words they must cease to be people who worry about status and order before God. And then — as Matthew describes it anyway — He goes on to hammer home the message that any deviation from this childlike openness, this humility, anything that gets in the way of your openness to God is a curse to you and is to be rejected — "Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks!" So when we come to this morning's Gospel, dealing with wrongdoing and division between Christians, we are already invited to read this apparent judicial process of summoning witnesses as in fact part of a way of life that emphasizes humility and openness to God.

What comes after is equally telling. For Peter — nearly always the one nerved up to ask the really awkward question — clearly wonders about the limits of this openness and humility. He asks Jesus how often he should forgive his brother — up to seven times? — in other words, quite a lot, but still perhaps with some sense that forgiveness can go too far? And Jesus, as we all know, replies crushingly: you should forgive always — "up to seventy times seven". Yes, wrongdoing and division in the church is to be faced, it is not to be avoided feebly — it is to be confronted, now as much as it was then — but the followers of Jesus Christ are not to be concerned with restoring their own reputation, with their value in the eyes of others, with their own standing in the community, with settling scores and assuaging their own hurt feelings, but with the acceptance and unlimited forgiveness of their fellow Christians. This is not just the gentle Jesus — it is Jesus the realist, the Jesus who knows the constant tendency of religious aspirations to veer off into self-preoccupation and pride, the Jesus who foresees how His followers will need to face their own faults and divisions.

Yet even so, there's still something missing for us, I think. It's the note of love. Jesus is holding before us the pattern of a relationship with God that is one of honest, truth-speaking openness and forgiveness. It's not difficult to see what the implications of that are for the Church today. And you probably don't need me to labour the point, given the welter of publicity about divisions in the Church of England, and the Anglican Communion — and, I may say, in other Christian traditions — over many years. But the Gospel is a word of hope for us personally, individually, too. Paul urges the Roman Christians to wake from sleep. He means, clearly, for them, and for us, hearing these words, to be stirred up, to be woken from our lethargy. What is it, though, that makes us wake up? When we hear this Gospel of openness, of humility, of forgiveness, what is it that connects to us personally, that makes us stirred up, touched and inspired to go out from here and recommit ourselves to the Christian life?

Well, as any parent knows, wisdom, experience, tolerance, good sense, and firm boundaries are all very important, but they're nothing without love. In this little slice of the Gospel, Jesus is certainly outlining a way of behaviour for His followers. It is a new kind of practice, a way of relating to each other that stands in stark contrast to the cynical ways of the world. But underneath it, reinforcing it, motivating it, must be love, love that springs from the God of love, and works in us as His divine spirit when we open ourselves to Him in all humility. As Paul says, "love is the fulfilment of the law". Now this is not sentimentalism, or eroticism, or even just a basic warm feeling towards others, though divine love underpins and makes real human forms of love. It is descriptive, it is a way of placing the invisible connection that really does exist between the God who is above all and in all and through all, and our own busy and imperfect lives. We can't work up from our own faltering steps at trying to love to conceive of the love of God; we have to work down from the love of God to see glimpses of it in the world we inhabit. That's why Paul says, wake up! We are living in this love already, even if we don't always feel it or see it or believe it. Wake Up! Open your eyes — it is all around us. Paul's language is excited, almost mystical — "now salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed". Every day in faith, every step, believe it or not, takes us nearer to God's fulfilment of all things. "The night is almost gone", he says, "and the day is near". "Put on the armour of light".

Being a Christian is never easy. It is always a tense and difficult balance between a variety of competing demands. We've seen just some of those laid out even in today's Gospel — honesty and willingness to challenge, on the one hand, with limitless forgiveness on the other. Or acceptance and welcome, on the one hand, against the possibility of exclusion, on the other. No one has a ready-made solution to these things in everyday life. The way is not self-evident. That's why — I hope — we come to church, try to pray, try to open ourselves to the wisdom of the Scriptures, so that we might learn ever and again how to try to be better disciples than we have been. That's why we come to be fed spiritually here, to be part of a community of mutual support, and to be united with Christ as we offer ourselves in faith to God at the altar. Sometimes being a Christian feels like a case of one step forward, two steps back. It is a struggle. It's best to be honest about that.

But Paul, following Jesus, knew it was a struggle. It was a struggle for him. There's no reason why it should be any easier for us. Yet our own difficulties in living out the way of faith are beside the point. They do not keep us away from the love of God. If this Gospel of honesty and forgiveness is demanding, nevertheless God is always there before us, the infinite God whose forgiveness and love are infinite. It is often hard, but keep going. Be reassured — God is walking beside you. His love is the stirring of the universe. What matters is not how well you achieve some sort of spiritual goal, but simply that you are here, that you place yourself in that living stream of faith that flows from the first disciples through Paul and on through the Church of the ages. It's a great company we're part of, and as part of that company we have a chance, again and again, to live out Jesus's radical call to be a community of faith and forgiveness. The hour has come for us to wake up — the night is almost gone, and the day is near. We live, not as separate, lonely beings, caught up in our madness, but in the light and love of God, to whom be all praise and glory, now and for ever. Amen.