Speak to us Lord for your servants listen. Amen.
Jesus said: “where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.”
It’s the season of clean pages in new books, new friends and new teachers. The beginning of a new academic year is full of fresh starts for students. The start of the autumn term seems to affect lots of us, giving us all a renewed sense of the hope and creative energy that might come from a fresh start.

And into this Matthew’s Gospel has advice for us today about how to cope when things go wrong, as they inevitably do: Because we all make blots in our copy books or at least sometimes make a mess of the new chances we are given. We all struggle to maintain relationships long term and to deal with our own and other’s fragility. And Matthew, the ex-tax collector and friend of Jesus, speaks to this with words from Jesus about how to handle failure and conflict and how to resolve disputes.

Jesus taught that this is central to our calling as God’s children and this is what he meant in that often misquoted verse about two or three being gathered together. We sometimes use that verse to comfort ourselves when not many people turn up at church. We say that even if there are only two or three of us at least Jesus is there also to make up the numbers. But that is to ignore the context of these words and more dangerously to decommission the Gospel.  Jesus is saying that Christians are called to be engaged in the risky processes of reconciliation and peacemaking and that when we dare to do this we are participating in God’s work. He is with us when we dare to do this.

Reconciliation is our task and it is a Christ-like one. In the Gospel we heard we read that when we are hurt we are to go to the one who has hurt us, not out of our anger or pain, not to deal with our own sorrow but for the sake of the other, in order to welcome that person back. This is exactly how Christ came to us. Not out of God’s wrath or to execute God’s judgment, but because God loves us and longs for us to know that love and that welcome. Matthew is at pains to communicate to us the extraordinary power of God’s welcoming and forgiving love. He sets this passage between the story of the lost sheep and the words of Jesus about how many times we are to forgive others. It is a reminder of how everyone matters to God and about how the sheer force of God’s love can deal with anything that we might face.

And this is really important to remember not just at the beginning of a year because it addresses the conflicts and upsets which we face everyday and which over a period of time can be very destructive and difficult. It tells us that we should not get upset or fearful about conflict. It is part of the stuff of life and it something that we are equipped by our creator to deal with.

Jesus spells out how this operates in the passage from Matthew that we just heard read. It is like a practical guide for problem solving with a three stage process and it can be applied to any situation. In our translation on your sheets it reads as though Jesus is speaking specifically about conflicts in the church, but the Greek word  of the original text  used here simply means “gathering” or “assembly” gathering or assembly. But of course we can read all of this and apply it to church life as well as to elsewhere. It applies to the whole of life. Professor Keith Ward wrote about our human tendency towards conflict when he described the common place experience of someone starting a friendly society in a small town and said that you know that in a couple of years there will be a split in the friendly society and there will be two friendly societies that do not talk to each other. Division it seems is very natural to us.

But Jesus gives us three steps to overcome this: The first piece of advice given is the one I often find most difficult to grasp. If someone has sinned against you he tells us, go to them and talk about it. It sounds so simple, but it is not how we often choose to operate. I get angry at someone for some hurtful remark that they may not even have realized caused offence, or may not have been intentional. Instead of talking to them about it, everyone else in my circle of friends hears about that awful so and so for months on end. And the one who is the subject of all the talk doesn’t know why everyone is suddenly freezing them out. We all have experience of this kind of behaviour: Social scientists call it triangulation when A is upset by B but talks to C about it. In fact I often go better than this, I do “polygonation” when I’m upset with someone I often tell lots of people, but only rarely the one with whom I’m cross. If only I had had the grace and courage to speak first to the one who upset me, the whole thing might be cleared up with far less emotional upheaval and without involving and infecting a wider crowd. Jesus urges us to a better way, to try first to deal with our conflicts in private with the people who are directly involved.

He points out that listening will be key to successful resolution of a problem. Only when that fails one to one does he say that we should move on to stage two and to draw other people in. And those we ask to help us mend our problems are there as witnesses, to listen and confirm what is said not to get involved by taking sides. In the second stage towards resolution we are to involve others as witnesses to hear and confirm the truth of the situation.  Then, and only when these have failed are we to move on to the third stage towards reconciliation, the one that we often rush towards which is to tell the wider church and to treat the one who has caused offence as a “Gentile and a  tax collector”.  And this third stage may have a powerful sting in the tail. It has often been read as empowering the church to push people out and shun them, when disagreements have not been mended: - A last resort for the awkward squad. But there is a more radical reading of these words of Jesus. I think we need to remember that they are being told to us by Matthew, who had himself been a tax collector and who had been asked by Jesus to become a disciple. Jesus went out of his way to spend time with gentiles and tax collectors, he invited Matthew the tax collector to join his inner circle. And Matthew is repeating Jesus’ words to the church of his own time, which would have included large numbers of Gentiles. Perhaps, rather than permission to exclude sinners, in these words we hear the call of Jesus to stay close to those with whom we profoundly disagree and even to seek to build trust with them. Jesus goes on to say some words about binding and loosing which relate to the Jewish law, and which some Christians have taken as empowering the church set rules about who is in and who is out. The work of the Rabbis was to decide which laws applied when. So if I were to find a goat on my way home the rabbis would have rules that would determine if the goat were near enough to any property to belong to a landowner or for me to take it as my own. That is they said if a law was binding on me or if it loosed me to take the goat. And the tenses used in the words of Jesus here are clumsy in our translation. A better rendition would be a little like the words of the Lord’s prayer about God will being down on earth as it is already in heaven. Rather than Jesus telling us that God will follow the decisions of the church, as our version seems to suggest, a more accurate reading is that reconciliation is about participation, joining in with God’s plan.             

Jesus doesn’t guarantee that the work of reconciliation will be successful and that all conflicts will be resolved.  This Gospel story seems to note that the church isn’t going to be perfect and have all happy endings, but it does remind that we are not in this alone. Because whenever two or three engage in this work of daring to be reconcilers Christ is with us. Good news indeed. Amen.
Revd Canon Mary Stallard