So last week in my sermon I said some big, warm, fuzzy things about church, and the grace of being part of a faith community. But let’s get real. Churches are called by God, but made of people, and we don’t always get it right. Sometimes we hurt each other. Sometimes we piss each other off. Sometimes we disagree, about important things or dumb things.

Our Sunday lectionary seems eager to call our attention to all this. In both the Gospel and the Epistle, we’re smack in the middle of passages addressing conflict within faith communities. In the 18th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew’s Jesus is teaching the disciples how to deal with offenses within the church community, while the 14th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about how to handle differences of conviction among Christians.

As I read both of these passages, I found myself thinking of our church Community Covenant. About a year ago, the Vestry, our church board, began work on a document stating how we want to be with each other, when we disagree. The Vestry voted to adopt that Covenant, and then offered it to the whole church, to guide our life together. It includes guidelines like: Keep in mind the bigger picture and what we are trying to accomplish together. Remember that our differences of perspective are a blessing and an opportunity to learn. Stay faithful to practices that build our sense of community.

Both Matthew and Paul are undertaking similar work, offering some guiding principles and practices for situations of disagreement, misunderstanding, or hurt. Peter’s question about forgiveness, in this week’s Gospel passage, flows directly out of the preceding verses, last week’s reading, in which Matthew’s Jesus talks about church conflict. I’m saying “Matthew’s Jesus” very intentionally here. The bit about forgiving someone seven times, or even seventy times seven – that’s probably really Jesus; it sounds like him, and it shows up in several ancient texts.

But Matthew expands it into a recommended process for addressing grievances within the church community – here it is, we heard it in last week’s Gospel:  “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; 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.”

All of that is only in Matthew’s Gospel – which not always, but sometimes, is a clue that what we have here is the Gospel writer expanding and interpreting what they’ve received. And I can well understand how Matthew might be tempted to expand Jesus’ teachings in this way. He’s writing maybe fifty years after Jesus’ death, which means Christians have had fifty years to discover the ways that being church together can get difficult or awkward. He might well feel that he wishes Jesus had offered a little more concrete guidance.

And so Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness becomes this process: Matthew says, First raise the issue in private, then bring two witnesses to back you up; then if the offender still doesn’t apologize, tell the whole church what they did – and treat them as a Gentile and a tax collector, which given that Jesus ministered to both Gentiles and tax collectors, means – I think, I hope – that you just start the relationship fresh. Start over.

It sounds really sensible and practical. Like the kind of thing you might add to a community covenant. Until you think about it. To begin with, Matthew frames this as a process for what to do if another member of the church sins against you. Now, if I try, I can think of a few times in my nearly seven years at St. Dunstan’s’s when I could say somebody sinned against me – did or said something unfair or unkind towards me.  But the VAST majority of the times when something bubbles up that needs handling, among us, that’s NOT what’s going on. People have different visions or priorities; or there’s a misunderstanding, or people just irritate each other. Whatever’s going on, it is not helpfully addressed by the question,

“Who sinned?”  So for one thing, Matthew’s process here is limited in application.

For another thing, Matthew’s process is very open to abuse. I think something’s always made me a little uneasy about this – Biblical commentator Richard Swanson puts his finger right on it. Consider the move to involve witnesses. Swanson asks, Humans being humans, who are going to ask to come with you, to confront someone you’re upset with? He writes, “When we have been hurt, we generally talk to close friends who will commiserate with us, and then we talk to not-so-close friends who will agree with us.” So our witnesses are likely to be people who are in our corner.

And even if the witnesses are impartial, they may read the power dynamics of the situation, and choose sides on that basis, rather than on the basis of truth. Swanson writes, “Dominators of every sort exert their power (and do their damage) by creating a system in which subordinates believe that it is to their advantage to take the side of [the] abuser.”

Think about Matthew’s process again; think about how easily it could become a tool of power, a process to silence someone raising a legitimate concern. Person A raises a concern about Person B: He has done something that upset her or caused her harm. Person B sees this complaint as a sin against him. He didn’t mean anything by it. She’s too sensitive. It was just a joke. And anyway, it didn’t happen; she’s lying.He follows Matthew’s first step: He goes to her alone, and says, You know, you should drop this. She refuses. She knows what happened, and she’s going to speak. So Person B comes back with a couple of friends. Step two.  They meet with her together, and tell her, If you don’t let this go, We’re just going to have to tell everyone all about you. All… about… you. Your family background. Your relationships. Your history of mental illness or addiction. That’s the next step: Go public. Tell everybody all about it.

By the time Step 3 is over, Person A is gone. Driven out of the community. Her life torn apart. The sin of naming Person B’s misbehavior has been duly punished. Swanson says, “When peace is broken, even the protocol that is set for making peace can be a tool used by oppressors.”

I don’t blame Matthew for outlining a process so ripe for abuse. He was naive. I envy him his blissful ignorance. And his process could certainly be helpful, in the best of circumstances, assuming good motives and a level field of play. At base, I think he just wants people to address issues directly, instead of gossiping about them. And quite right. But he just doesn’t seem to realize that disagreements and grievances within a community are rarely as simple as, A sinned against B. Most of the time, it’s just that we see things differently.

Which brings us to Romans 14, and to the apostle Paul. Paul has been traveling around visiting churches, founding churches, encouraging churches, dealing with difficulties and disputes in churches, for a while, by the time he writes his great letter to the church in Rome. He’s seen some stuff. He knows that churches can get messy. He knows that, as Swanson puts it, “People disagree and people hurt each other, even when all the people involved are good-hearted and aiming to do right.”

I actually really love Romans 14. I wrote a paper on it in seminary – I think it caught my attention at first because I’m a vegetarian. “The weak [of conscience] eat only vegetables” – ouch! But spending time with this passage – with the whole chapter – gave me a lot of respect for the ethic of community that Paul is trying to develop here.

Paul is addressing a reality of the first century church: there was a lot of diversity of conviction and practice. Christianity was still firmly rooted in Judaism at that time, and the church was still working out where Jewish ritual practices – holy days, food laws, and much more – fit into this new way of faith. At the same time, many new Christians had converted from other religions or no religion. And people reached different conclusions about what it looked like to be an observant Christian. There were people who kept holy days and food restrictions, and there were people who thought all that was nonsense, because we have this wonderful freedom in Christ, in which none of that prescribed piety matters anymore. And those two parties could be prone to clashing and looking down on each other. The observant think the non-observant are lazy spiritual slackers. The non-observant think the observant are superficial and faithless.

Eating meat wasn’t by any means the only issue, but it seems to of been a recurring issue. Meat might come from animals were sacrificed to other gods, and/or the animal might not have been killed in accordance with the practices of kosher. So either way, for those keeping Jewish food rules, the meat would be tainted. People who were trying to follow those food-related piety practices, in a multi-religious urban setting, might simply choose to be vegetarian and avoid the issue.

Paul addresses these kinds of divisions within faith communities by naming two parties: the Strong and Weak of conscience. The Strong of conscience are the non-observant: those who are convinced that the holy days and kosher laws and all that were part of an old order that has come to an end. The Weak in conscience are those who feel, deep inside themselves, that these practices and habits are still part of the texture of their life of faith, still part of the way they honor God in daily life.

Paul identifies with the Strong. He believes, with them, that Christians are not bound to any particular set of ritual practices – certainly not those associated with Judaism. And in this text, Paul is addressing the Strong. What he says to them is, essentially: You’re right. But: Don’t be jerks about it.

Because being right isn’t enough. Being right can break community. Paul takes seriously both the unity of the body of Christ, and the consciences and convictions of the Weak. He understands, maybe because he was once an observant Jew, that when people have deep-seated habits of faith, you can’t just tell them that stuff doesn’t matter anymore, and expect them to get over it instantly. Those practices are deeply imprinted in their souls. For example, pressuring them to eat meat, or even just eating meat in front of them, could injure their faith – because it feels wrong; it feels to them like an affront to God, even if they’re trying to think about it differently. Food choices might seem unimportant to the Strong, but they’re very important to the Weak, and the Strong need to hear that, and take it seriously. In the verses following today’s lesson, Paul explains this: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself. But it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died. Do not let your good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit… Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat.”

And at the beginning of today’s text, Paul even says to the Strong, Don’t argue with the Weak about all this. Even if you change their minds, you can’t change their hearts. Don’t be a stumbling block for their faith. Instead, create breadth within the faith community for a variety of practices, because people experience and live out their faith in many ways. And don’t judge each other: Those who eat meat must not look down on those who don’t, and vice versa, for God has welcomed ALL of you.

Now if I thought that Paul was advocating that we should let people cling to an overly rigid sense of rulebound faith indefinitely, then I might find this more troubling. But I don’t believe that. I’m reading out from Paul a little here but I think I’m solid ground: Paul sees this as a temporary and evolving state of affairs. His endgame is to hold the community together, across their differences, so that over time they learn from each other and shape each other.

After I graduated from seminary, I spent a couple of years in New Hampshire, serving as the assistant to the rector in a church there. This was 2008 – 2010, but even then, five-plus years after the fact, people there were still processing their experiences of electing Gene Robinson as their bishop, and the worldwide response to that election. Back in 2003, the tiny Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire was suddenly thrust into the worldwide limelight, because their newly-elected bishop was an openly gay man, who had a partner.

People from New Hampshire are not attention seekers; they did not set out to make a splash, to make history or to make their new bishop a target. New Hampshire is a small diocese; everybody knows Gene, and lots of people had been part of the bishop search and election. What people told me, again and again, is, We elected Gene because we knew Gene. We knew his family. He’d been serving in the diocese for years. The unfolding understanding of whom God calls to ordained ministry, in the Diocese of New Hampshire, didn’t happen because of cogent theological or biblical argumentation on the part of the Strong of Conscience. It happened through people being church together, and recognizing the witness of a good life, and bearing with the discomfort of coming to a new understanding together.

I think that’s exactly what Paul was counting on, with the Strong/Weak division back in his day. Paul believed the Strong would, eventually, win – not because of arguments or pressuring the Weak, but by staying in community and showing, by their words and actions, that they’re faithful servants of God even though they eat meat of dubious origin. Paul believed that time was on the side of the Strong, and he was right.

Matthew wants there to be situations in which there’s a right, and a wrong, and a resolution. His prescription for those situations, built on Jesus’ call to forgiveness, is fine.  But those situations aren’t actually that common. Paul offers a much more generalizable and durable approach to the many times when people within a community just aren’t all on the same page about something. That’s ultimately why I’m so drawn to this chapter of Romans: because even though meat-eating and holy days may not be the issues, life in the Church is full of situations when something matters to me, but not to you, or vice versa.

And having Paul talk about this, so clearly and so kindly, feels like having a wise elder church leader, who’s walked closely with God and who’s lived through so many church conflicts, tell me what what happens in my church, in all our churches, is normal – and even holy.

Sometimes there will be a group that feels very clear about what God wants and where we should be going, and they’ll feel impatient that everybody else hasn’t caught the vision yet. I’ve been in that group. Sometimes there will be a group that feels very clear about the integrity and beauty of what we have already, and the risks and costs of change, and they’ll feel anxious and stretched by new possibilities. I have been in that group too. Sometimes I feel like I’m in both at once. Paul says, here, Yeah. That’s just how churches are. Don’t expect unanimity or uniformity. The diversity among you leaves space for the Spirit to play. Get comfortable with the discomfort of being impatient, or stretched, or both at once. And work on loving each other, and trusting God, enough to follow that discomfort where it leads you, together.

Happy Lammastide! Lammastide is a harvest festival celebrating the first wheat harvest of late summer – hence the focus on bread. We borrowed this feast from the Church of England a few years ago because we needed a way to mark and celebrate the beginning of a new program year.

The church’s calendar, in terms of our formation programs and many of our ministries, follows the secular school year, because that’s convenient. That’s the rhythm of our weekday lives, so we roll with it. We need a break sometime to rest and plan, and summer is when it’s easiest to take that break.

But the church’s New Year is the first Sunday in Advent – not until December. In terms of the church calendar we are in the most undistinguished possible part of the year – late in the Season After Pentecost. There are NO major feasts between late May and early November.

Some churches call this Welcome Back Sunday. But that’s a little insulting, frankly – it implies you’ve all been gone. And you haven’t.

The English church, our mother church, has a number of agricultural festivals as part of its calendar and culture, like Rogation Day and Lammastide.

So in the interests of having a way to mark a new beginning, and to remind us to attend to the cycles of the natural world, we have borrowed this harvest festival, Lammastide, and are making it part of our calendar and practice here.

Bread is a really powerful symbol. It stands for “food”, and even more broadly, for that which sustains us – in the Lord’s Prayer, for example, and in the name of the organization “Bread for the World,” to which our church belongs.

Bread has ritual and sacramental and symbolic meaning and use in many faiths and cultures. Today’s Exodus lesson is about the Passover meal, the great holy meal of Judaism. That meal has two key parts: the lamb and the unleavened bread.  This passage is a lot like our Eucharistic prayers, which in turn are based on passages from the Gospels. It tells a story that explains why we are eating this bread, what it means to us and how it makes us a people. And it tells us, Keep doing this.

That’s not an incidental connection. It’s easy for us to forget, but the Gospel writers cast the Last Supper as either a Passover meal or Passover-adjacent. The holy, people-making bread of Exodus is part of the foundation for the holy, people-making bread of the Eucharist.

Bread, then, is not just food, not just sustenance, but also unity and identity.  As we will say at the Eucharist this morning: We who are many are one body, for we all share in the one bread. In the Didache, the oldest know Christian liturgy, the Eucharistic prayer includes these words: “Just as this broken bread was scattered as grain on top of the hills and was gathered together and became one, in the same way let your people be gathered together from the remotest parts of the land into your kingdom.”

Scattered and gathered, many made one. In sharing the Eucharist, in sharing all the other ways we eat together, we become companions – a beautiful word that literally means, People who share bread. Com, with. Pan, bread. Companion. The word has a sense too of a fellow-traveler, of pausing on a long journey to share what you have in your bags.

Look around you: You all just shared a little bread. And in a little while we’ll share bread again, in the Eucharist.  We are all companions. Fellow-travelers, sharing bread.

This new beginning, this moment of looking back with gratitude and forward with purpose, this feast of bread seems to me like a good time to talk a little about why church.

Being part of a church isn’t the cultural norm anymore. That means you’re all doing this on purpose. You’re choosing this, when there are so many other ways we could be spending our time, energy, and resources.

To begin with, let’s be clear that, even though we often talk about it that way, church isn’t a place we go;  it’s a thing we make, a thing we become. I read a piece earlier this summer that argued that people participating in their churches’ ministries shouldn’t be called “volunteers,”  any more than a father caring for his children is “babysitting.”  The article argued that you “volunteer” for an organization at which you’re an outsider, a guest.  Whereas this church is YOURS. Your baby. Church happens because you come, and do, and give.

There are plenty of reasons NOT to choose church. A writer and scholar named Marylin McEntyre outlined some of them in an essay published this week.

Here are some of the reasons she names:

First, “Churches can be clubby and exclusionary.” Sometimes you just feel that there’s no room for you – either you don’t fit the demographics, you’re not wearing the uniform; or the church simply isn’t really interested in new people. I don’t believe this is true at St. Dunstan’s, but I am mindful that as we grow, we need to step up our culture and practices of welcome to make sure people coming here the first and fifth and tenth time feel welcomed and connected.

That was easier when we had five new households a year instead of fifteen. But we’re so excited to be challenged by growth; we are going to figure this out and keep improving our welcome.

Another reason not to go to church that McEntyre points out that some churches are boring. Now, this one can be a touchy topic for liturgical churches, where doing and saying the same thing week after week is just part of what we do. But repetition isn’t intrinsically boring. Before I was ordained, and the question of boringness or non-boringness became ultimately my responsibility, I worshiped at Episcopal churches where their liturgy was repetitive, yes, but alive, intentional, gracious. And I worshiped at Episcopal churches where the liturgy was just boring. Of course, churches can be boring beyond their worship, too. McEntyre points out that sermons, websites, and church ministries can also all lean towards the safe, the predictable, the lukewarm. I gotta tell you, even when I talk with people who don’t love what we’re doing at St. Dunstan’s, I rarely hear that we’re boring…!

And finally, some churches elevate something above the Gospel. What McEntyre actually says is, Some churches are partisan – they hold some political leader or ideology above the witness and teaching of Jesus Christ. They’re not reflecting on society and current events in light of the Gospel, but simply holding up a party line borrowed from the surrounding culture.

But churches can also risk making an idol not just out of a particular political ideology, but out of peace – not the kind of peace that comes from God, the peace that passes all understanding, but the shallow peace of avoiding the difficult subjects, and never talking about what really matters to us.  In fact, there’s recently been a significant movement calling people to leave churches, primarily evangelical churches, where the leaders don’t shine the Gospel’s light on today’s challenges.

It can feel risky to talk about the big stuff; that’s why we hold tight to the Gospel when we do it. But the point is that both political partisanship, and political silence, can be ways to hold Jesus at arm’s length, and keep church as a social club instead of a community of grace and transformation.

I want to add a reason that’s not on McEntyre’s list, but that I’ve been thinking about lately. Sometimes people quit church because so much wrong is done in the name of Christianity. Evil things – things that the opposite of what Jesus Christ taught and lived – are proclaimed in the name of Jesus, by people who see themselves as Christians. The deep divisions in Christianity – and in American public life – are beyond the scope of this sermon. But I know there are people who just can’t take it anymore. They know that not all Christians are like that. They know that what they’re hearing is a distortion of the Gospel. But it’s just become too poisonous. The very name of Jesus feels tarnished to them, because of how some Christians have used it. I find that terribly sad, but I understand it. I can’t blame them.

Nobody’s left yet, so I guess I haven’t convinced you to quit church yet. So let’s turn to the reasons FOR church that McEntyre names.

Some of the reasons have to do with the way a healthy church meets us where we are, and addresses our deep needs. For example:

A healthy church will allow you to acknowledge guilt and experience forgiveness. McEntyre writes, “It may not seem that acknowledging guilt would be a particularly attractive reason to attend church, but you find, if you do it, that it’s amazingly restorative. Most of us carry around guilt like a stone in a pocket. Sometimes you get so used to its weight you stop even noticing it. So it can take a long time, if you’re leading what seems to be a decent and innocuous life, to get to a place where guilt becomes pain and you long for forgiveness. When you do get there, a healthy church is a good place to go.”

Of course there are other ways to address guilt or pain or anger that we carry from the past. But there is something distinctive and gracious about the church’s language and practice of confession and forgiveness – whether the weekly words of confession we share, or the Rite of Reconciliation for an individual. McEntyre says, “[In church,] we can afford to confess because confession doesn’t mire us in shame, but lifts us into sure and certain hope and a life of gratitude.”

Another reason to choose church is that being part of a church gives you access – immerses you – in a rich heritage of words, music, symbols and holy stories. It connects us with a centuries-long conversation about how to live as followers of Jesus. It enlarges and enriches our imagination, imprints words of prayer and Scripture and song in our hearts as resources for moments of need.

And in healthy churches, the riches of Scripture and tradition aren’t seen as something fragile that we have to protect behind glass like a museum exhibit, but as robust and living gifts. As McEntyre says about the Bible, “Healthy churches wrestle, working out their salvation over coffee and concordances, knowing there is nothing pat or simple about the living Word, but that it invites us into subtle, supple, resilient relationship with the Word made flesh who dwells, still, among us.”

Which brings us to a third reason to choose church: You might find God here. In McEntyre’s words: “[A healthy church is a place] of divine encounter… It provides a place, a way, an invitation, and a sacred space in which, if you come with an open heart, you may find yourself, in spite of yourself, practicing the presence of God.”

We use many practices: silence; music and song; art and story; hearing sacred texts read aloud, and reflecting on them, in community or alone, but always with the Holy Spirit’s breath at our ear. And then there are our sacraments – all of them, but especially the Eucharist, our weekly practice of assent, of saying Yes, again, to being part of this body, part of Christ’s body, part of what God is doing in the world.

McEntyre is realistic about this: We don’t have big experiences of God’s presence every week, or every year. We often come to church distracted, reluctant, confused, or weary. And I’m keenly aware that church isn’t “perfect” every Sunday, or any Sunday. But, as she writes, “underneath the distractions and irritations runs a current so strong it carries me in spite of myself. I float in mighty waters.”

Naming our guilt and experiencing forgiveness; being blessed by our heritage of music, prayer, and Scripture; and feeling, now and then, that God is here, with us, with you.  These are all gifts that may be healing and inspiring for the individual.

But as I said before: church isn’t a place we go because we enjoy the services it provides. It’s a thing we make, a thing we become, together. It’s a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Forgiveness and grace, song and story and sacrament, are all doorways into something bigger that ourselves. And paradoxically, coming to see ourselves as part of something bigger can help make our individual lives more bearable and more meaningful.

McEntyre writes, “A healthy church will help you get over yourself. God loves you with infinite, unconditional love…, but to experience that love fully, you have to get over yourself—excessive concern with your own welfare, your own family, your own ambitions or failures.”

I think that’s probably true for some people – that we struggle with a spiritual myopia that keeps us overly focused on what’s right in front of us. But I know we have people in this congregation, too, who have more or less the opposite problem – call it spiritual vertigo: that sense that you’re standing in the middle of something huge and unstable and dizzying. Some of us are so aware of the big picture that it’s paralyzing. We feel stuck, helpless, overwhelmed.

Either way – whether what ails us is myopia or vertigo – I believe that a healthy church can help us back towards seeing ourselves in relation to the world in a way that’s both realistic and hopeful. What we do together here, our prayers and songs and Scriptures and sacraments, our holy conversations about how to live and act and serve, and just being together in the power of the Spirit – all of that, all of it helps us recalibrate our sense of self and of agency, of our capacity to act.

Doing church helps us look at the world in light of the Gospel. McEntyre writes, “A healthy church will look at [cultural] norms with a critical eye, holding them up to the light of Christ, which involves deep reading of Scripture and deep engagement with biblical ethics… A healthy church will have the conversation and invite you into it. It will [show you where the work is happening, and] teach you to pray as you go.”

And doing church helps us realize that we have something to offer, however weak or small or poor or busy we may feel. She writes, “In a healthy church you begin to recognize yourself as someone with gifts to give—time, money, energy, expertise—and you begin to want to give them, because the grace that comes with giving is suddenly so startlingly apparent.”

I hope, I believe, that St. Dunstan’s is a healthy church. I hope, I believe, that being part of a healthy church will be good for you. I want that, for you. But I also hope and believe that all of us being church together is good for our community, our world.

To borrow words from our baptismal covenant, we can resist the forces of evil the corrupt and destroy the creatures of God more effectively when we’re resisting them together, whether that’s acting as one body, or encouraging one another in our separate vocations of justice, kindness, and generosity.

And there are evils done by churches, in the name of Jesus, that are best undone by churches, in the name of Jesus.

So that’s what’s in my heart, and in my prayers, as we celebrate our companionship today. As we share bread, and become, always and again, the body of Christ, given to us and for us, to bless and heal and redeem each of us, all of us, and the whole world.

Article cited: 

“Choosing Church,” Marilyn McEntyre.  https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/5114/choosing-church/#.WaHKdBKVu-4.facebook