A Sermon for Harvest Festival: What to do with an abundant harvest

I'm taking another break from the lectionary this week, to celebrate Harvest Festival. Even in those congregations whose connection with rural life is very remote this seems to remain one of the more important occasions which we celebrate. I once attempted to lead a Harvest Festival in which I failed to include the "We plough the fields and scatters." The congregation complained bitterly. I (quite reasonably, I thought) pointed out; "We don't, we don't plough or scatter." This was not an acceptable argument. Something inside even the most urbanised worshipper knows that our relationship with God is deeply tied to the earth and its fruitfulness, and this is something which we must celebrate.

What to do with an abundant harvest

Luke 12:16-30

(Genesis 8:15-22)

Jesus’ story starts with a harvest.

The land of a rich man produced plentifully.

As the story goes on, actually, it becomes clear that this was more than a regular harvest. When Jesus says “plentifully” he actually means “abundantly” or “excessively”. This is a harvest that has produced more than enough,with lots to spare. This is what put the rich man to thinking, what will he do with all this extra harvest?

For over more than a decade now we have lived in a social/political/economic climate that talks so much about “austerity”. And the crisis of the last six months has increased the likelihood that this kind of talk will continue for the foreseeable future. “Austerity” is literally the opposite of “abundant” or “plentiful”. In a climate like this, it is easy to overlook how plentiful our circumstances are. While there is real need in our society, while there are genuinely those who go without very near to us, we still live in a very rich place. For all the economic troubles that confront us, which are being made worse by what we are going through, depending on how you measure it the UK still has the 5th or the 10th largest economy in the world.  (And remember that league table has about 200 member in it, so either way Britain is pretty close to the top.) Of course unlike the world of Jesus and the rich man in his story, our economy is not tied to the seasons of sowing and harvest. Productivity is pretty much continuous around us. As if we lived with a constant harvest. We are in a time and place where someone could step back at any time and admire just how much was being produced, and acknowledge that what is produced by our economy is, like the rich man’s harvest, “plentiful”. We as a society, and probably most of the individuals in it, have more than enough to meet our most immediate needs. Which in global terms makes us more like the rich man in Jesus story than the majority of the people living in the world right now.

The plentiful harvest poses a question. The rich man wonders what he will do with all his crops. As a society, and perhaps as individuals we should perhaps wonder, what should we do with our wealth?  How do we use what we don’t need right now to meet our basic needs? The rich man’s answer is that he will keep it all for himself. And it is now that it becomes clear just how abundant his harvest has been:

What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?

This is a harvest that is beyond normal expectation. It is a harvest that outstrips the rich man’s ability to store it up:

I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones

You could almost hear Jesus’ listeners gasp. This harvest isn’t just big. It is miraculous! Only harvest of such gigantic proportions would make it worthwhile to take such extreme measures. The rich man won’t just extend the barns he has. He won’t just build a few new ones. He’ll tear down what he has and start again bigger and better. And then, in his ongoing conversation with himself, he reveals his objective, where he is going with all this:

I will store all my grain and all my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”

The rich man achieves his life’s aim. And he offers his definition of the good life. He defines a good life, his aim, as a life that is freed from the need to be productive, one in which he no longer has to work. He is looking for a life in which he can indulge himself, by eating and drinking, for a life which is filled with merriment. The rich man’s aim and his definition of the good life is not so different from that of most people around us, which is to have enough resources to live without work. It is that kind of offer which the lottery makes. The rich man in the story in a sense has won the lottery. The miraculous harvest gives him the means not to work any more and instead live a life of pleasure. People buy lottery tickets with that aspiration in mind. And even if we don’t buy a lottery ticket, many people work hard towards the same objective. The ideal for work is to work hard enough and successfully enough, to have saved up enough, to not have to work any more. Early retirement and comfortable retirement are significant aspirations . The ideal life in our society is the one in which we are no longer tied to a job and the need to be productive, and instead are free to enjoy ourselves in whatever way we choose.

In the story God declares the rich man a fool. And judgement is passed against him:

This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?

The rich man is about to die. His plan for himself comes to nothing. He is a fool not because he dies and doesn’t get to enjoy what he planned. His death merely draws attention to the shortsightedness of his thinking. But he would still have been a fool had he lived to enjoy the spoils of the miraculous harvest. He is a fool, in the Bible’s terms, because he ignores where that harvest came from. And he ignores why it was given. The rich man ignores God. One of the reasons the harvest in the story, as Jesus tell it, is so large, miraculously large, is to make it plain where it came from. The harvest was not something the rich man achieved or made himself. This harvest was given  by God! Which is meant to point us to the reality that all productivity, every harvest, ultimately finds its source in God. God is the source of all our well-being. By ignoring God’s role in the abundance he had received the rich man was also able to ignore why that abundance existed. God does not provide a surplus now for any to store up for later in a way that liberates them from responsibility to others. The surplus, the abundance, exists to be shared now to meet the needs of others. There will be another harvest next year. There will be more productivity to come, which will meet the needs of the future. This goes to the heart of God’s ongoing care for us. In the story from Genesis, when Noah and his family emerge from the Ark, God promises:

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

God has created a world that is capable of meeting our needs, that will continue to be capable of meeting our needs. That is why we celebrate a harvest festival each and every year. God keeps caring for us and will keep on caring for us. To try to escape from that cycle of productivity is to deny the providential care of God, and to have become, in practice, an atheist. This is why we pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” For God to meet our needs now. Trusting that tomorrow God will provide another opportunity for the same prayer and its answer.

Which leaves us with the same question as confronted the rich man with his miraculous harvest. What do you do, when you have more than you need for right now? How do we avoid being foolish? How do we avoid acting as if God isn’t there meeting our needs? How do we become wise? Jesus warns:

So it is for those that store up treasure for themselves but are not rich towards God

“Store up treasure for themselves” For themselves! “Storing up” denies God’s ongoing care for us and pretends that we are able and better qualified to meet our own needs. The rich man thought the good life was idle pleasure, if we think carefully we realise he was mistaken. He denied his connection with and his responsibility toward those who were around him, his family and his community. Was the rich man selfish because he was an atheist? Or did he become an atheist because he was selfish? Perhaps there is no answer to that question. What is clear is that selfishness and belief in God are not compatible. Where an abundance exists, where individuals, or societies as a whole, have more than they need for their immediate needs, where God has given an excess, (and everything that is produced or harvested ultimately comes from God) where there is a plentiful harvest; It is provided to be shared. Wisdom as opposed to foolishness, wealth towards God consists in the recognition that any surplus we might have is there for the benefit of others!

Amen.

What to do with an Abundant Harvest by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (20/09/20): The Kingdom of Heaven is not Fair

The Kingdom of Heaven is not Fair!
Matthew 20:1-16

The kingdom of heaven is not fair!

“These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” 

The complaint of the labourers who have worked all day is that it is not fair! How is it fair that those who have worked for 12 long hours receive the same wages as those who have worked for just an hour?This seems to breech one of the principles that they and we have hard baked into our ideas about the way the world should be: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”

It stands to reason: If one hours work is worth one denarius. Then 12 hours work must be worth 12 denarii. In Jesus’ telling of his parable of the workers in the vineyard, he has set up the final scene precisely to raise this objection. The landowner instructs his manager to pay the workers in reverse order of the time that they had worked. He was to start with those who had worked for an hour and work back to those who had worked longest. But he was to pay each of them one denarius, the usual daily wage. His decision to have things done this way looks like an act of provocation. Those who had worked longest seeing those who had worked an hour get a full days pay, would have an expectation raised. An expectation that was dashed when they too received one denarius for their work. No wonder they grumbled.Their sense of fairness had been offended

The landowner could have spared himself the aggravation if he had paid the workers in the opposite order. If he had started with those who had worked all day they would have left satisfied that they had received what they had bargained for, the amount that they had agreed was fair for the days worked. This would have been followed by growing delight, and gratitude toward the landowner, as each group of workers who had spent less and less time in the vineyard received the same amount, the one denarius which they and their family need to survive until tomorrow. Not only is the kingdom of heaven not fair, it also seems like a deliberate provocation.

Our ideas about work are completely dominated by wage labour. When we think or talk about work we almost always mean working to earn a wage. Work is for most is not the point, or certainly not the only point. Work is not an end in itself. It is a means to another end, earning a living. Almost everyone, like the workers in the vineyard, has to work in order to survive. It is difficult for most people to imagine why you would work if you weren’t going to be paid. And coupled to this is our sense of fairness. That the rewards of work should be proportionate to the effort made. The harder or longer you work, the more you get paid. And also the acceptance that some work is deemed more valuable than others. Our thoughts about work are dominated by merit and reward, about earning and deserving the wages which are received. So, “A fair day's work for a fair day's pay.”

Of course Jesus’ story isn't about work, or at least it’s not just about work. It is a metaphor. A metaphor for the kingdom of heaven, the relationship between God and his people. The vineyard and the work done in it are a metaphor for the world and our lives in it. It is about how we live in relation to God’s intention for us. Here too our thinking is dominated by the same pattern of merit and reward, about earning and deserving our good standing with God and our place in God’s kingdom. Are we the right kind of people? Have we done what is right? Do we deserve to be considered good people, worthy to be in relationship with God? A good life lived, for heaven’s reward.

Jesus’ parable is about what happens when his offer of grace collides with our notions of fairness. The offer which Jesus makes is that a relationship with God is freely available to everyone. And remains fully available to anyone, at whatever point they choose to receive it. At first sight we might wonder who could object to such a generous offer. Except! Those who have spent a life of virtue, loving their neighbours and glorifying God, are accepted on the same terms and with the same reward as the death bed conversions of notorious sinners! How is that fair! It’s the same visceral reaction one might have to the idea that everyone should receive what they need to live. The objection that finds voice in complaints about benefits scroungers.

The problem is our captivity to the idea of wage labour. We can’t see that there might be another reason to work. For almost all of us, living in the world as it now is, the connection between what we do and who we are is arbitrary. The point of our working, even if we enjoy what we do, is largely to earn the wages we need in order to survive. Why would anyone work if they weren’t being paid? Why would anyone work harder if they weren’t being paid more? And why would anyone work if they were going to be paid anyway?

The same sort of thinking infects our moral lives. Why would anyone be good if they weren’t going to be rewarded Or more to the point, why would anyone refrain from being bad if they weren’t going to be punished. Our sense of self-worth is profoundly linked to this sense of merit and reward, or earning and deserving. Jesus’ offer of free grace undermines our sense of purpose and our self-righteousness! And this in part is what gets him killed.

But Jesus’ offer is an offer to transform our minds and our self understanding. The kingdom of heaven is offer of a different way of being. The purpose of work in God’s intention is not to earn a living. Work is not simply a means to an end. Work is a way in which we share God’s image. Like God we are creative and productive. In the kingdom of heaven - the world restored to God’s intention - work becomes an expression of our likeness to God. And likewise virtue is not a way to avoid punishment, or even to feel good about ourselves. It too is the way in which we express our likeness with God and reflect his glory. The kingdom of heaven is not fair because it is gracious and just. It restores the world and us in it to God’s original intention for our lives.

Amen.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not Fair! by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (13/09/20): Forgive Without Limit As You Have Been Forgiven

 Forgive without limit as you have been forgiven

Matthew 18:21-35

Then Peter came to him and said, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? . . .”

Peter is actually asking for some clarification. He wants to more clearly understand the boundaries of the practical instructions which Jesus has Just given. Jesus has just explained what to do when another member of the church “sins” against you. His instructions are plain enough. First confront the person who has offended you on your own, to win them back. If that fails, go with witnesses. If that fails get the whole congregation involved. And if that fails to win the offender back they will find themselves outside of the church. "Let such a one be to you as a Gentile or a tax-collector" says Jesus. But that negative consequence is only a last resort - after everything else has been tried. What Jesus really wants is the restoration and maintenance of positive and loving relationships within the family of the Church. His hope and expectation is that a better outcome is reached first. He presents us with a process to deal with the hurts that we inevitably inflict on one another when we’re gathered together as a community of believers. It’s a process where the offence is named and the offender called out, not to punish or humiliate, but as an invitation to repent. Where forgiveness will be offered, and relationships will be restored. These are some of Jesus’ most clear and practical instruction for how life should be within the family of the church.

Peter though wants to know if there is any outer limit to this. What’s the boundary for this process of calling-out/repentance/forgiveness/reconciliation. How often must this process repeated with a repeat-offender before it’s acceptable to toss them out right away without the rigmarole of speaking to them by yourself, or with witnesses or with the whole church, to have them back down and be forgiven, only then to go back on their word and offend all over again. How often must we forgive someone before the sincerity of their repentance is called into question by their repeated re-offending?

Maybe we think Peter is being a bit cynical. He’s looking at the people he knows in the church. And he knows that a least some of them will go through motions. They will jump through whatever hoop is placed before them, in order remain within the fellowship of the church, to not be treated as a Gentile or a tax collector, all the while none of it making any real difference to their actions or their character. It does seem like a harsh way to be looking at people and seeing among the members of the church potential re-offenders.

But I wonder if Peter is actually being more cynical than any of us. Perhaps he like us would claim simply to be realistic, and therefore to be looking for a realistic limit to the demand that Jesus makes of us. Most of would probably agree with the proverb:

“Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me!”

Which would suggest the normal answer to the question: “How many times should I forgive someone who sins against me?” is “only once.” They can have second chance, but not a third. Forgiving once would allow for someone to make a mistake. Forgiving a second time would demonstrate weakness or foolishness on our part. Hiding under all of this is the basic assumption we make about people: that they won’t indeed can’t change. People who do bad things are bad and will remain bad. Sinning against us once could be a mistake, a simple lapse. But a second time is a demonstration of a fixed disposition. “A leopard can’t change it’s spots.” So we conclude there is no further point trying to bring this person to repentance and reform. There is no point sticking with them and helping them to change. We’re done with them. “Away you go, Gentile! Tax collector!”

In the light of that “conventional” wisdom Peter’s offer does sound remarkably generous:

As many as seven times?

Not just a third chance or a fourth - but all the way down to an eighth chance. At this point Peter is probably feeling rather pleased with himself. He definitely feels like he’s going the extra mile. He feels that he has grasped the way that Jesus goes beyond conventional wisdom, the way that Jesus goes on to risk taking generosity of spirit. Just now Peter thinks he’s finally got what Jesus is asking nailed down. Except, Jesus has an uncomfortable habit of puncturing our confident assumption that we have grasped what he is asking from us:

Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times

Seven times is already past the point where you’ve probably lost count. “Was that a seventh chance or was that the eighth?” Who could be bothered to keep score like that? But Jesus pushes well beyond even Peter’s generously extended limit. Seventy-seven is definitely past counting. Though what Jesus says could actually mean “seven times seventy” in other words 490 times. At this point they’re not really numbers any more, they’re just a way of saying there isn’t a limit. “How often should I forgive” Peter asks. “Past counting,” says Jesus, “keep forgiving, don’t stop, there is no limit!”

Jesus offers one of his stories as clarification. He pictures a scene in the court of a king. There is a settling of accounts. And there is an enormous debt:

One who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him

This is way beyond the scale of personal debt - this is debt on the scale that governments and nations create. There is no point in trying to work out what 10,000 talents is worth in today’s money. You can do it - it is a certain weight of silver, you can find out the value and do the arithmetic, but that is not what Jesus is getting at. Like forgiving someone 77 times it’s another number that isn’t a number any more. It is money past counting. It is he biggest denomination of money multiplied by the largest number you can think of. Like saying “a zillion pounds.” The debt is unpayable. It is essentially infinite. Selling the debtor along with his wife and his children and everything he owns will not make any kind of a dent in what he owes. Even after all that the debt would still be a zillion pounds!

The debt is unpayable. Any attempt to collect the debt by the king would mean an end to relationship between the king and this servant. The king chooses to maintain the relationship with his servant. The relationship is more important to the king than that debt which is owed. The debt is forgiven and the relationship is restored

The only number here that is remotely a real number is 100 denarii. The now debt free, forgiven servant goes out and:

He came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii

This is a real sum of money. It’s not trivial, one denarius is the average daily wage, so 100 looks like several months of wages. This very much the scale of personal debt. This is a manageable sum of money. Given time it could be repaid. This is not an inconsequential sum, it is not something that “doesn’t matter” or that could be dismissed as unimportant. But it is as nothing compared to the sum of money that was being talked about in the conversation which the unforgiving servant has just had. Though you could argue given what he owed his master, these 100 denarii were actually part of what he himself owed to his master. Therefore since that debt has been forgiven, he has nothing to pay, and therefore no need to recover the money. The need to get that money back disappeared when his own debt was cancelled.

The servant's demand is clearly self-interested and greedy! His unwillingness to forgive a debt which was payable brings an end to the relationship between the two servants. In contrast to the king the unforgiving servant chooses the money over the relationship he has with his fellow servant.

We are of course meant to see ourselves as the first servant. In the context of Peter’s attempt to find a limit to our need to forgive. Jesus reminds us that we have already been forgiven by God to an almost infinite degree. God forgives us our sins in the interests of maintaining a relationship with us. In view of that great act of forgiveness we are called to be forgiving ourselves, in the interests of maintaining the relationships that build the Church

But before it finishes Jesus’ story takes a disturbing turn:

When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and went and reported to their lord all that had taken place.

The other slaves see a terrible injustice. And they speak out on behalf of the victim. Implicit in their speaking out is the typical human expectation that bad things should happen to bad people. The unforgiving slave should be made to suffer for his bad behaviour. In the same way that wrongdoers should always be punished. And trouble makers should be excluded from every community. And people who annoy and upset us should be thrown out of the church.

This part of the parable is very worrying. The king delivers on the slaves’ expectation. The unforgiving servant is:

Handed. .over to be tortured until he would pay his debt. 

As a portrayal of God this is disturbing. It pictures God as cruel, capricious despot. Who is forgiving in one moment. And who moment later goes back on his word, and inflicts torture on one in his power.It implies that forgiveness could be undone. Or that it is not real, that it only provisional or conditional. Yet for all that, we probably feel that justice was done. The first, unforgiving slave showed bad character. The act of kindness and forgiveness had no effect on his behaviour. Which suggests he did not deserve forgiveness in the first place. His appeal for mercy was self interested, dishonest and cowardly. He was merely trying to avoid the consequences of his actions. And he remains self-interested in his dealings with his fellow slave.

The king delivers on our expectation that bad things should happen to bad people. The slave got what was coming to him. But torture? How does torture repay the debt? It merely appeals to the cruel side of our nature that thinks wrongdoing deserves to be repaid with suffering. Jesus just pushes the buttons of our unforgiving nature. And we happily respond, revealing ourselves to be cruel and unforgiving. We happily expect God to be unforgiving, and bring bad things on bad people, on the very risky assumption that we aren’t the bad people! Forgiveness and forgivingness are entwined with one another. Unforgivingness could come back round and bite us!

Peter asked the wrong question from the outset. He was looking for the wrong thing when he asked at what point would it be acceptable for him to stop being forgiving. The question which Jesus confronts us with is: What kind of people must we be to be part of his community of faith? Which is parallel to the question: what kind of people must we be to be capable of receiving forgiveness?

The issue is that failure to forgive leads to a breakdown in relationships. The relationships that make the community of the Church. The relationships that enable us to become part of the kingdom of God. What do you do when faced with an unforgivable debt? The answer is, if you want a relationship to continue, you must forgive the unforgivable. That is what God does. Jesus invites us to pray (in the Scottish wording of the prayer): "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." Our forgiveness is dependent on our forgivingness. But it is also true the other way around: Our debts are forgiven which poses a duty of forgiveness on us. Forgivingness must grow out of forgiveness. The kind of person who can be part of the community of faith is the one who recognises the debt they have been forgiven and forgives the debts that other owe them. Not once or seven times or seventy seven time but past all counting.

Amen.

Forgive Without Limit As You Have Been Forgiven by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (06/09/20): Where Two or Three are Gathered

After five months of being unable to meet in church, this is the first sermon which I have published on this blog that will actually be preached live with a congregation.

Where Two or Three are Gathered

Matthew 18:15-20

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am among them.

Powerfully over the last five months we have experienced what might be called a lack, or even a loss of church. During these last months we have not been able to gather. So our usual sense of church has been missing. We have not be able to do what Jesus here hints is characteristic of his church; gahtering. We haven’t been able to come together, in the place which we call church, and do what we want to do there, which we also call church. Of course even now, whilst some of us are back together, gathered in the one place, church may still seem to be lacking, since we still can’t “do” church. For the time being at least we still can’t sing any hymns. We still can’t receive Holy Communion. But we still can’t have a cup of tea together afterwards. Nor can we hug our friends. We might be left to wonder whether without these things there is much “church” at all. We could question why we should gather at all in these circumstances.

Of course “church” is an overworked word. As we have already seen we use it to mean the building. And we also use it for what we do in that building. Sometimes though we do remember and do remind ourselves that what the word “church” does and should mean is the people. We are the church. Of course not just any people. Not an undifferentiated, random selection, from among all human beings. When we say church is the people, we do mean a specific group of people, who are formed together in a church. Jesus doesn’t often use the word “church” when talking about his people. This passage in Matthew’s gospel is one of the few places where he speaks explicitly about what his followers will become. The word which is used to carry his meaning church is: εκκλησια (ekklesia). Which means literally “the called out.” When we say the “church” is people we mean a particular group of people who have been “called out” by God. We are a group of people who have been called out and called to be together. This too has been something that we have been missing over these last months. One of the critical, decisive things which coming to church week by week does is that it makes the church visible. We can see who the church is. Our gathering together, even if it is just part of our number, enables us, and everyone else to see that we are a distinctive group of people. And Jesus reminds us that when we do come together he is present to us.

Most often when we read the final verse of Jesus’ instructions on how to deal with conflict in the church, we read it as a reassurance:

When two or three are gathered in my name. . .

This phrase has become rather important to us. In an age when the church is declining, when fewer and fewer of us gather, it is reassuring to hear Jesus tell us that the church doesn’t have to be very big to be the church. When we say the church is people, we are reassured to know that two or three are enough. And certainly, this is true. The church can be as small as two or three, though we have to also note that does have to be more than one. Christianity is not a solitary activity. Which is why this period of isolation has been so very difficult for many among us.

But true as that sentiment is, taking a single verse of Jesus’ speech out of context is liable to distort its meaning. Jesus’ promise to be present when two or three of his followers come together also has a quite specific meaning. The two or three he has in mind are the two or three he was thinking of at the beginning of this passage:

If a member of the church sins against you go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.

The situation he has in mind and the people Jesus is thinking of are the people involved in this process of reconciliation, with or without the third party as witness. Jesus promises to be present when members of his people are working to reconcile with each other. Jesus is explaining what we should do when there have been difficulties or falling out or offence given among his people. Jesus is realistic about what happens when people are gathered together. We all rub against each other, and sometimes the friction produces sparks. We all know that there is no row like a row you can have in church. We all know the hurt and upset that people’s actions can sometimes cause. We all know of people still within the church who no longer speak to each other. And we all know of people who have been so upset that they have never darkened the doors of our gathering ever again. Jesus knows this is inevitable. Jesus knows that we are human. But Jesus provides a mechanism to deal with this. He expects us, even in the face of our differences and disagreements to be reconciled to one another.

But Jesus’ words here are more than just a practical solution to the real experience of being a church. By pointing us to what to do when things go wrong, Jesus points us to what the church is really for and what it is like. He has a very specific way for dealing with conflict in the church:

First the offended party should approach the one who has sinned against them. The purpose of this meeting is to seek repentance and reconciliation. But the meeting is kept private so as not to spread the offence. If that encounter succeeds well and good, the community of the church is restored. If not there is a further step. This time a third part is involved, to provide a witness, and perhaps even to act as mediator. Again if reconciliation is affected good, the church is once more a unity. If not there is still another step. Only at this point is the whole church is involved, all those who are “called out” to be God’s people in a particular place.  Once again if reconciliation is affected and the unity of the church restored, all is well. But if not the offender is cut off from the church. This sounds harsh. But this “excommunication” is not intended as a punishment. It is merely the recognition of the reality that the offender’s refusal to repent and be reconciled has already placed them outside of the gathering of the church. What shouldn’t be forgotten of course is that much of the mission of the church is intended to gather those who are not part of the community into its gathering. The thread which has run through this whole process has been telling the truth. At every step of that process it is the truth which is brought to light. Which is how Jesus points us to what the church is really about.

The church is the place where, and the people amongst whom, we will hear the truth. We will hear the truth about God. But more particularly we should be hearing the truth about ourselves, and be changed by it. What has been missing these last few months has not really been the hymn singing, or the Holy Communion or the cups of tea and hugs. Important as those things feel to us. In a way all of those things are surface detail. Or they are the means to a greater end. What we have been missing is hearing the truth about God and about ourselves from the people who have been gathered in Jesus’ name. What we have been missing has been the ongoing opportunity to be transformed by that truth. We say that church is not the building but the people. The reality is a little deeper even than that. The church is the relationships between those people, relationships of truth telling and reconciliation. As we come back together the mission of the church can become clear to us again: We are called out, gathered together two or three or more of us, to make God’s kingdom visible by the practice of truth telling towards reconciliation.

Amen.

Where Two or Three are Gathered by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.