“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.Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:15-20, NRSV)
Here is the clincher…
Are you sitting down?
Are you ready?
I’m not perfect!
And you aren’t either!
We are all saints and sinners.
We all do good and bad!
And for these verses to be in Matthew means that Jesus knew we weren’t going to be perfect, or that the community Matthew was writing to already had problems and needed help figuring them out.
But you see these verses should give us hope! Because even from the beginning things were messed up in the community of believers. You see we don’t have to have it all together. We don’t have to pretend to be perfect. We can be who God created us to be.
But in doing that we have the hard work of talking to others in the community. We need to call people on the hurts they cause, and restore the relationships.
And these verses I believe are talking about horizontal relationships, not vertical! The vertical is our relationship to God and that was sealed on Calvary by Jesus.
These verses are talking about how we are in relationship with each other, and the community. When some one wrongs us. Sins against you!
Restoration is the key here! We are restored to the relationships that God intended.
We need to talk to the person that has sinned against us, let us down, missed the mark. That is what the word for sinned means in the original Greek. Missed the mark! How many times have we missed the mark,
by not being where we said we would be when we said we would be there
by not being prepared for a meeting we were leading
by not showing up for a job we volunteered for
by ________________________________________!
We have all missed the mark, and here we are told how to fix it. This is what it means to live in community.
So lift the fallen
restore the broken
bring healing to the hurting
restore the relationships in the community.
Jesus has taken care of the vertical, we all can work on the horizontal!
aSacredRebel 