PROPER 18, YEAR A
Sunday 6 September 2020
St. John’s, Newport
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20
From our Epistle reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “The night is far spent. The day is at hand …” What a wonderful affirmation! For many of us, the balance of the year 2020 has indeed seemed like a prolonged night. Yet even in the midst of the darkest night, we always have God’s promise of an approaching dawn. I could be wrong, but I think that we can legitimately entertain the hope that if not by the end of this year, then certainly in the coming year, our current situation in this country and the world—with respect to the coronavirus pandemic and all its attendant economic and political woes—will brighten considerably. “The night is far spent. The day is at hand …” Good news indeed.
Of course, St. Paul is writing not of any particular historical crisis, but rather of the dawning of God’s eschatological kingdom. For Christians, that is the ultimate hope that illuminates all our temporal hopes in this world. Whatever disappointments and frustrations we may experience in this life, God’s promise of eternal life in Christ remains valid and trustworthy.
St. Paul combines the promise with the exhortation to make ourselves ready for the dawning day. “The night is far spent. The day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness; and let us put on the armor of light.” In several places in his letters, Paul repeats the theme that under cover of darkness, when we think no-one can see us, we may be tempted to engage in activities that we’d be ashamed to have brought into the light of day.
In his classic autobiographical work The Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo tells of his conversion to full Christian faith and practice upon reading the following verses in today's Epistle. Unsure of what he believed or what he should do with his life, he was meditating in his garden one day, seeking guidance. From a nearby garden he heard a child’s voice playfully singing the Latin words, Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege! “Take and read! Take and read!” So he picked up a copy of the Scriptures, opened it at random, and the first words his eyes fell upon were those that follow in today’s Epistle: “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness; not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.” On reading those words, Augustine’s life was transformed; and the former profligate sinner started down the road to becoming one of the Western Church's foremost bishops and saints.
A key component of the attitudes and behaviors that St. Paul calls us to forsake in preparation for the dawn are “strife and envying,” translated in the Revised Standard Version as “quarreling and jealousy.” Here Paul is picking up on his earlier exhortation in the same passage to “love one another,” for “love is the fulfilling of the Law.”
Our Gospel reading from St. Matthew addresses this same theme of loving one another, and avoiding quarreling and jealousy, in the set of instructions beginning, “if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone …” Our Lord commends to his disciples a threefold procedure for conflict resolution in the Church’s life: First, try to resolve the problem one-to-one; if that doesn’t work, take along two or three witnesses who can perhaps assist as mediators; if that doesn’t work, bring the matter to the full Christian assembly; and if that doesn’t work, cast out the offending party as if a heathen or tax collector.
That specific procedure may have worked well in the first and second centuries but has since become impractical, and the Church has evolved other methods of dealing with such problems. The procedural details are far less important, however, than the underlying principle, which remains valid for all time: namely, when conflict threatens to divide a Christian community, the Gospel imperative is to do everything we conscientiously can to be reconciled. We’re not to acquiesce in the breaking of relationships in the Church until we’re clear that every reasonable effort at reconciliation has been tried.
Our Lord goes on to explain that disagreement, division, and disunity hold the Church back from being all that it can be and achieving all that it can achieve. By contrast, the costly work of reconciliation opens the way for God to do amazing things in a Christian community whose members are united in love and prayer: “if two of you agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
Having been a clergy friend of this parish of St. John’s, Newport, for almost twenty years now, I can testify that God is doing great things in your midst. The work of capital fund-raising, restoration, and rebuilding that you’ve undertaken bespeaks a wonderful vision of hope for the future. The results so far are marvelous. You’ve had your ups and downs, with times of conflict and division in the past, but at the moment you appear to be united in spirit and purpose. It’s a joy to watch, even from a distance. Although he'll probably be upset with me for saying so, a great deal of the credit goes to your rector, Fr. Humphrey, clearly a man of deep prayer, who models the way of Christian reconciliation and forgiveness.
My message to you today is that you can count on God to keep on doing great things in your midst so long as you remain united in faith, hope, and love—praying together for the same things, forgiving one another, and maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Easier said than done! In fact, what I’m describing is humanly impossible. The good news, however, is that we're not in this alone; God doesn’t leave us to our own devices. The Collect of the Day invites us to trust with all our hearts in the God who always resists the proud who confide in their own strength, but does not forsake those who make their boast of his mercy. With that reassurance, although the night is far spent, we joyfully await the approaching day.
