I’m happy to be back with you at St. James this morning. I have just finished a stretch serving as priest in charge at All Saints, Beverly Hills. Hey, somebody had to be there! Actually, I enjoyed my time at All Saints very much, though regular commuting from Santa Clarita to West Los Angeles almost did me in.
My wife Kathy will tell you that I harbor some bizarre pet peeves, the strangest of which is a kind of righteous anger provoked every time the Postal Service raises the cost of a stamp by just one cent. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a streak of one cent stamp raises, and (in those days before we all paid bills electronically) year after year I would have to stand in line at the post office merely to buy a sheet of one cent stamps. Why didn’t they just raise postage a nickel at a time and leave us alone for a few years? This whole thing really rotted my socks. I would come home from my 90 minutes at the post office muttering expletives questioning the parentage and legitimacy of the US government in general and the postal service staff in particular.
As luck would have it, my first public appearance at Washington National Cathedral in 2012 was for the unveiling of that year’s Christmas stamp. They set up a press event downstairs in Bethlehem Chapel, and the two speakers were the US Postmaster General (the Honorable Patrick R. Donahoe, you can look him up) and me. As the Postmaster General and I waited in the cathedral’s vesting room for the event to begin, I realized that I had been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to press my case. It was time to speak truth to power! So after a bit of chitchat, I turned to Mr. Donahoe and said, “I’d like to speak to you, sir, about these one cent postage raises. They’re really inconvenient. Every year I have to go to the post office and wait in line for over an hour. Can’t you raise them less frequently, a few more cents at a time?”
I wish I had a video of the way the Postmaster General’s face changed. The light suddenly went out in his eyes. You could see from the look on his face that I had gone in his estimation from ecclesiastical dignitary to dangerous weirdo. The conversation suddenly ended when he remembered there was a phone call he needed to make. It was probably to security or his therapist.
I came to realize that trying to tell the Postmaster General how to run his agency was a bit like what the British call “teaching the Queen to suck eggs”. He’s the expert; you’re the novice. In the same way, I feel a little sheepish today talking to this parish about reconciliation and forgiveness. St. James’s experience of congregational exile and return has taught you lessons that no sermon can impart. I know: I walked with Cindy through a good bit of it. Nevertheless, today’s Gospel asks us to consider how we handle the wounds we inflict on each other, especially in the church. So I approach this Gospel understanding that you are the experts and I the novice.
It’s clear from the context that, in today’s reading, Jesus is talking about conflict within the church, but the process he outlines will serve for other relationships as well. If someone offends you, take it to them in person. If that works, great. If not, bring a couple of others along and try it again. If that doesn’t work, set the conflict before the whole church. So the steps are: one-on-one, small group, whole church. It’s important to remember that the church Jesus was describing was probably the size of a house church, a couple of dozen people. Nevertheless, his point is clear: try to resolve things personally before you take it to Facebook.
I haven’t been involved in a lot of church conflict in my working life, but a few years ago I ran afoul of a particularly toxic group of young clergy who call themselves “Weird Anglican Twitter”. They’re essentially Gen Z Anglo-Catholic Socialists who blame people like me for the decline of the Episcopal Church. We Baby Boomers, they say, ruined Christianity by making it more inclusive and less rigid. They want a church that is socially progressive and theologically conservative, kind of like Bernie Sanders meets Franklin Graham. People like me really seem to annoy them.
So because I had been vocal about social issues during my time in Washington, my friend the author Diana Butler Bass and I suddenly found ourselves the joint objects of their scorn, enduring endless daily personal attacks on Twitter. Diana and I solved the problem by figuring out who their bishops were and contacting them directly. To their credit, the several bishops admonished these weird Anglicans by reminding of them of Jesus’s advice in today’s Gospel. Before you go public, try to work things out in private. In any event, cool it with social media.
When we read today’s Gospel, we often forget the larger point that Jesus is making here, and this has relevance for our lives at home, at work, and in society at large. Justice is not necessarily everybody getting what they consider fair. Justice is about restoring the community for the good of the whole. Restorative justice is just that: it restores relationships. We live in a litigious age, and we tend to think of conflicts being resolved by lawsuits with compensatory damages. But the church, the family, and the neighborhood are not boxing rings. They are covenanted communities, and the highest good is not winning but the healing and restoration of the living organism of the church, the household, the city or state.
Because we live in a time of escalating use of social media, it is tempting to bring our beefs to the internet before we talk to the person who we believe has wronged us. It is now customary not actually to resolve conflicts but to heap shame on those who offend us or, perhaps worse, to paper over unresolved issues with polite fictions. A seminary ethics professor I know used to assign Emily Post’s book of etiquette as one of her required texts. When I asked her why, she said, “In the Episcopal Church, what people call ethics is usually just etiquette.” We revert to polite Episcopalian behavior and thus often protect those who can inflict serious harm. It is not polite to call out bad behavior, so often we look the other way.
As in my encounter with the Postmaster General, so in today’s sermon I don’t want to presume to tell a group of people who have had to call out bad behavior and go to the church for restorative justice how to resolve your personal and community conflicts. But I do want to express my gratitude that in Jesus, we follow one who values us enough not only to tell us the truth but who calls us to find a gracious way to tell the truth to others. In our Baptismal vows we all promise to “respect the dignity of every human being”. One way we respect each other’s dignity is to tell hard and sometimes difficult truths. The good news this morning is that we live in a universe in which families and churches and even societies can be torn asunder and still find a way to come together in a just reconciliation and thrive. Being right is at best a momentary high. Being reconciled is a sign of the blessed and abundant life into which Jesus calls us. And abundant life is what our being together with Jesus is all about. Amen
