Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
“Ask Andrew” is an annual opportunity for Knox members to ask question that might make for good sermons. Here’s the third one for 2024.
Ask Andrew 3: Believers Behaving Badly
Scriptures: 2 Samuel 12:1-7aMatthew 18:15-22
How do you keep your faith when you are not seeing Jesus in the eyes and actions of others?
This question came with a story from another congregation featuring an elderly man, a big contributor, threatening a young female church staff member with his cane in the church parking lot.
A clear power imbalance there: the old guy was rich, which gave him influence as it had for many years in that church, but I bet he was very aware of his age and his frailty and so threatening physical violence with a cane somehow felt justified as he tried to get what he wanted.
It doesn’t help that we have that cartoon meme of the old man waving his cane at someone, a symbol of impotence and decline that we have turned into a joke. But it’s no joke when you are the one about to be struck. Obviously inappropriate behaviour for a follower of Jesus and the question poses this as a faith challenge: How do you keep your faith when someone who should be a good example behaves so badly?
While someone’s bad behaviour may be upsetting, disappointing, I hope it doesn’t become a stumbling block. I believe that our faith is something we work out with God; that’s a theology the Reformed church has held for over 500 years now, and one reason we don’t venerate saints.
It’s great when you find someone you can admire because they are such a good example of the teachings of Jesus being lived out, but if we make the behaviour of others the foundation of what we believe, we will find ourselves disappointed over and over again.
We need to ground our faith in Jesus himself and the principles he taught, not in how well the people who follow Jesus succeed in living up to those principles.
That’s not to let everyone off the hook. How we behave is a major part of our faith: loving our neighbours as ourselves; doing unto others as we would have others do unto us; treating each other with respect and dignity; this is all at the core of what Jesus taught and this is what breaks down when we behave badly.
We can generally justify our own bad behaviour easily: “That person deserved it because of what they did”, reminiscent of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, something Jesus explicitly rejected and puts us into the role of judge, jury and executioner; or “I was afraid of what they were going to do next” which often speaks to something inside of us: we are trying to protect, or to defend someone (perhaps a person we love) which can trigger the most extreme behaviour; or perhaps ourselves when we feel we are losing something; or when things are moving in a new direction we don’t like and we want someone to be held responsible; or when we feel we’ve been embarrassed; or when we feel our influence is waning.
Nathan had the prophetic job of calling the king to account for his bad behaviour. This job was often very dangerous, prophets often died, and on those rare occasions when we see Jesus using harsh words, he is being a prophet. He is always challenging people in positions of authority to stop abusing vulnerable people.
Nathan was brilliant, very indirect: he told a story that got past David’s self-justification that allowed David, the powerful king, to experience the other side of his bad behaviour; to feel what the other family felt when he stole a man’s wife and then ordered that he be left to die in battle to cover up David’s adultery. I’m most impressed that Nathan was able to get David to experience true empathy, to really learn to love his neighbour as himself, to put himself in their shoes and recognize the consequences of his behaviour with no way for his self-justification to kick in.
In the church, we have ways of dealing with conflicts. The lesson from Matthew gives us an early example which starts with personal, one-on-one conversation, moves to expanding the circle with a couple of witnesses and then expands it to the whole church only when necessary.
We see elements of confidentiality, showing enough respect for the other person that you deal with them face to face (which makes it a lot harder to treat them badly, but not impossible of course).
It’s all about relationships and that’s why the final, most extreme outcome is removing the person from the church, what we traditionally call “excommunication” because it speaks to a fully broken relationship. And yet, the very next lesson is about forgiveness, the seventy-seven times or seventy times seven in some versions. It’s a symbolic number telling us not to give up on someone. We have to leave the door open to reconciliation, no matter how difficult it seems.
I have mentioned before that this passage has been used to persuade abused people to stay in abusive relationships. That is not the message. Reconciliation does not mean you go back to the same-old-same-old. Reconciliation only works if there is change, and people have to be safe.
We have also learned about the benefit to the person doing the forgiving. They don’t have to carry the burden of their hurt; they can leave it at the feet of the person who abused them without giving that person the power to hurt them again.
Jesus is calling us to a high ideal of forgiveness, but Jesus was very practical. He had strong and angry words for leaders who led people astray but he also accepted into his group leaders who were trying to change, who were prepared to embrace his principles and learn to be better.
And those instructions on how to resolve a conflict within the community of faith are evidence that bad behaviour has been with us from the beginning and that we are called to deal with it, not sweep it under the carpet. We are called to honestly, lovingly deal with the people who make us most angry and to be open to discover that maybe their eye has a speck, while our eye has a log.
In United Church congregations we have something called a Ministry and Personnel (M&P) committee whose specific job is to deal with conflicts between church members and staff and also between volunteers as well. Committee members are the ones you go to when you have a concern about someone behaving badly in the church. It will be dealt with in confidence, but you have to do it in writing and identify yourself because, as we have seen, this is about relationships and you can’t reconcile a relationship anonymously.
We need to be respectful of each other, and loving. We need to recognize power dynamics, just like going to the king with his sins, or confronting the rich old guy with his cane. One of our biggest duties is to protect the vulnerable and throughout it all we need to deal honestly and with a sincere desire to make things right rather than seeking retribution or simply lashing out in pain or anger.
We also need to expect change as part of reconciliation: things can’t go back to the way they were, but they can be better than they are now if we can all learn from our bad choices.
Holding onto that vision is what helps me keep my faith secure when believers behave badly. I hope it helps you too.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 