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"Making Peace"
Matthew 5:23-25
Matthew 18:15-22
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
May 5, 2002
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
Today is Peace Sunday in American Baptist Churches across this country. In a time when peace seems far off, it behooves us to look at the causes of turmoil and the way that we might go about making peace in the world. Jesus said, "blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God."
Peacemaking is not something done only on the national and international level. It must also be done on the interpersonal level. It needs to be done between people of faith. It needs to be done here, of all places. In many ways this is the real difficult work of peacemaking.
For all intents and purposes, it may be the only peacemaking we can do.
Look at the bread and cups before us. We break bread together because we recognize the brokenness in our world and in our relationships. We eat it together in a church family so that we can witness to a healing ministry we might have with the world, with each other.
It’s taken me a long time to realize that conflict is not a bad word. In fact, it shows people care. It shows people are willing to deal with real issues. I've been in my share of churches in which conflict is the rule of the day. It has not always been addresses in a healthy way. It's really nice to be in a church that is relatively conflict-free. Since conflict is inevitable in a church or a community or a work situation or even a family, it behooves us to establish some healthy guidelines before a conflict arises. There’s no better place to start than the words of Jesus. I'm glad the Bible has a method of conflict-resolution that might even head off a crisis at its source. If we know how to act, if we internalize the language and practice of peacemaking, then we will be able to more quickly let go of conflict and go about the business of doing the work of Christ.
Jesus' method of conflict resolution could apply to most situations in and out of the church. But since he sets it in a church, let's look at the church.
Some people, it is said, come to church because they are looking for something--because there is something missing in their lives. Others come to church because they are filled with the Spirit if God and want to worship God in a community of like-minded believers. Still others jump from church to church looking for that special something they often cannot define, so far is it below consciousness. And many people come to church wanting to avoid conflict. They're looking to be unconditionally accepted by God and hopefully by the other people at the church. God knows there is enough conflict in other parts of our lives, we certainly don't want it in church. So we do whatever we can in order to avoid conflict.
When a hurt does happen in life or inside the walls of church we do what most people tend to do. If you are like me, some of you grew up wanting to avoid conflict at all costs.
I grew up in an alcoholic family where we learned that survival meant avoiding conflicts at all costs. We learned to smooth over anything and not make waves. We kept our conversations on the surface, so that we could ignore the elephant in the middle of the room. We knew that the elephant was volatile and unpredictable. As long as we ignored it and didn’t make it upset, everything would be fine, or so we thought. It was a taboo to start or even address a conflict. My understanding of peacemaking meant the absence of conflict, not necessarily the presence of justice or even love.
So if you are like me and you have a propensity to avoid conflict, what do we do with our anger? We tend to hang on to it. We stuff it. And it gets added to another part of anger that we have in other parts of our lives or another point of pain that we carry. And of course, we stuff that too. Since we are hanging on to all of this stuff, we become tense and impatient. Before long our temperature rises and it is all we can do to sit still, because now we are not only angry at one person, but we are angry at our boss because of what he or she said a month ago. We’re angry at some decision made by some politician somewhere. We’re angry at our kids for breaking a rule or not calling, and so on. We become living pressure cookers and God help the one who is nearby when the cooker blows.
Jesus saw this kind of thing happening even in the early church. He saw conflicts between people get folks so riled up that nothing could get done and most importantly, they would lose their sense of calling and the sense that they in the church were somehow different from the rest of the world.
Jesus had just told the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:10-14. In that parable, Jesus tells the people not to despise the little ones. If one sheep out of 100 goes astray, then the shepherd leaves the 99, searches high and low for the one lost one and when it is found there is great rejoicing. That is how important each of us is to God, and how important we ought to be to each other. Jesus, the peacemaker, tells the people how to make peace with one another.
Jesus does not want us to hang on to our anger, our bitterness, our pain. Jesus encourages us to deal with it in an upfront manner and then to let go of it. For when you let go, you leave room for God to fill you more and more. Twelve-step groups have a real simple slogan that applies here: "Let go and let God".
Jesus outlines a three-step procedure for confronting people who have sinned against us or against a community as a whole. He sets this in the church, but simply substitute whatever institution you may need and the method is interchangeable.
Jesus begins by saying, "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, then you have regained that one." Jesus doesn't want anyone to get away with anything. After someone has done something we are to confront that person. This is scary, I know. But it is very important.
Jesus says that we are to first talk to the person who has offended us in private. This is a place where it is just you and him or her. No one else is there to speak for you, so you must speak your own mind. You and the offender are the only ones who hear this, therefore you maintain respect for one another. No one loses face in the community. And more often than not, the conflict is resolved, or at least the truth is heard from both perspectives.
Often, the offender was not aware that what she or he did was offensive to you. And my experience is that both parties tend to respect each other and care for each other more having gone through that situation.
At the Baptist Peace Conference a number of summers ago, someone came up to me and asked to speak to me after lunch. Over coffee he asked if he had done anything to offend me. He said that I had shunned him and ignored him throughout the week and he wanted to repair the relationship. I was shocked. I had not intentionally done anything of the sort. I had no animosity toward him. In retrospect, I admitted that I had not been able to have a meaningful conversation with him or anyone for that matter, largely because of the fact that I was allowing myself to be pulled in many directions trying to help run the conference (It was the conference held in San Francisco). We then spent the next hour or so sharing and developing a much closer friendship. The friendship took a new turn when he cared about it enough to risk being honest with me. Through confronting me, he made peace with himself and with me.
But most of us don't do that, do we? No, it is much easier to hang on to something and say to a friend, "Hey, do you know what he or she said to me?" We are real quick to fall into the trap of hanging on instead of letting go. And too often the offender who could have been a friend becomes demonized in our eyes. The relationship gets poisoned because of supposition and our propensity to project our thoughts onto someone else. "He must be thinking this. She must be thinking that." Bob Klutz once said, "you either deal with it today, or you deal with it tomorrow, plus interest."
My uncle came to our wedding at our home church in Cleveland. It was the first time he was in church in 15 years. There was a time when he and all six of his children were very active in that church. Off and on, the children, my cousins, would attend the youth group events and meetings. One time, notices went out that a very special youth group quarter was beginning, but it was required that each of the youth make a commitment to be at every session. It had something to do with the group needing cohesiveness and because missing one session would severely hamper the rest of the group.
Well, for some reason, my cousins missed the first two meetings. When my uncle came by to drop them off at the third meeting, he was told by the youth pastor that since they missed
the first two sessions, they could not be in the group, but they could rejoin the group next quarter. My uncle was so angry about this one incident that he pulled his children out of the church and didn't step foot in the church again for 15 years. When asked about it now, even though it happened 24 years ago, he is still angry, still hanging on to a hurt from long ago. And the sad part of it is that I don't think he ever spoke with the person whom he felt had offended him. He never worked to resolve the conflict, and he never forgave the youth pastor or the church.
I think Jesus wants us to be better than that. I hope that we are willing to say that if anyone comes to us with a conflict that we do our best to hear them, and if we have done wrong, will try to promptly admit it and work to repair the problem, the breach, before it escalates into a broken relationship.
But what if that doesn't work? Jesus then institutes plan B. If you are not listened to, Jesus says, then take one or two others along as witnesses. Sometimes in the heat of anger or in the frustration over our own inability to express ourselves, we cease to make sense. The emotions are way too charged. Neither party hears the other and we just end up more frustrated.
I know I can get tongue-tied when I'm trying to tiptoe around a delicate subject. Sometimes in my tiptoeing, I will let the wrong word slip and the other person will get set right off and I'll go scurrying away with my tail between my legs. What a wimp I can be from time to time. In this case, a mediator is real helpful.
Objective ears can often restate things and ask pertinent questions which will help draw us out. And more often than not, the problem is either resolved or at least there is recognition that each person has had a fair hearing with the other. Since you have already spoken with the person individually, this should not seem like something new or out of the blue. The key and the challenge is that this conflict resolution model must be done out of respect for the person with whom we have the conflict. If you cannot have respect for the person, if you don’t see each other as lost sheep who have a right to be in the herd, then you will not be satisfied when the confrontation is over. The goal is not winning, the goal is making peace and restoring community: a win/win situation.
Finally, if none of that works, there is plan C. We go to the entire church, and in the wonder of the Spirit, which is active in the community of faith, the conflict is somehow resolved. But when it gets to this level, the resolution happens either by the offender capitulating, or leaving. Remember, this is only a last resort. This is done only after everything else has been tried and it has failed.
Too often, however, we get the order mixed up from Jesus' order. And when we do, there is little trust or desire for relationship, little hope for peace, really: only winners and losers. How do we do this? Well, we gossip about one another. We project what we assume the other person is thinking and feeling. We assume we know the motive of the person. When it gets bad, we send anonymous notes. All the while we think we are protecting the institution, or ourselves but what we are really doing is letting something unhealthy continue to happen. This does not lead to peace and trust. It fosters mistrust, accusation and often-false assumptions.
When we get it backward and if the two people actually sit down and talk after the whole church has dealt with the problem and everything is blown out of proportion, it’s hard to rebuild trust. If we hang onto our problems and our fear and our anger and our hurt, which we are prone to do, we restrict the Spirit's access to our guts. We have so much pain inside of us that we cannot let the Spirit in. It is not until we let go of that anger that we let hope enter.
I want you to know that there is no hidden agenda in this sermon. There’s no conflict on the horizon that I see brewing. If there is one, I hope to be able to hear it and address it in a healthy way. And if this has gotten you thinking, I hope we can make this monologue into a dialogue at the sermon talkback at the forum.
Many of you have been up-front with me when I have stepped out of line and I am grateful. My concern is that we keep things healthy as our community grows in spirit. We need a healthy and healing church family to support us, a church that makes peace, especially when we live in a world which is prone to ignore the advice of Jesus.
Maybe as we approach this table, we can remember the hurt that we still hold onto. We can recommit ourselves to using Jesus' method of problem solving. It may not make wars cease. It may not make bombs stop from dropping. It may not keep people from flying planes into buildings. But it can mend out relationships. It can give us peace in our souls, and when our souls are at peace, we can better do the work that God would have us do. We can soar like peace cranes to a new tomorrow. We can be open to the fire that can enliven our hearts. And through it all we just might find a new way of being in this world. Blessed are the peacemakers, those who live peace, those who make peace, for we shall be called the children of God.
AMEN.