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I don’t know whether I should own up to this, but I was pondering this sermon during the week and I found myself watching The Only Way is Essex. I didn’t mean to – HONEST – but Sergiu was channel hopping and I was curious: It was a bit like being a voyeur driving past an emotional accident, and being unable to resist the temptation to slow down and have a look as I went past the television. And I was drawn in, and in the end I just had to sit down and watch as these rather complex emotional dramas, and battles and intrigues unfolded through this episode. (Of course I told myself it was OK because it was either sermon preparation or research into how we might preach the gospel to some of the people of Essex who don’t usually come to church – except Josh!)
One strand of the drama was this couple who had been having a very off-on relationship – (Lydia and James Arg, and those of you who are aficionados will know who I mean) – and there was this whole saga about whether or not he was having an affair with someone else, and whether it was true, this other girl having denied it to his girlfriend, and so it went on, until his girlfriend confronted him and having twisted and turned and denied everything he found he was backed into a corner with no escape, and in real danger of losing this girl he really loved, he started admitting that he might have lied about this affair just to make her jealous.
‘Ah, now, this is the truth talking,’ said his girlfriend.
And it was in this moment that you could actually see this couple reaching a turning point, beginning to have a real relationship, dropping the deception, and finally being honest with one another.
And there was something in that moment that reminded me of our gospel reading this morning and of the exhortation from St Paul in his epistle to the Romans that we should love one another, for love is the fulfillment of the law.
What does it mean to love? It’s not the idealized, saccharine sweet, perfectly suntanned and manicured deception about love and relationships that it is sold to people in our contemporary culture. Nor is it either the pious romanticized vision of caring Christian communities, where everybody is nice to one another and nobody ever falls out. That is equally a deception.
We moan about one another, we can be rude, hurtful and make ungenerous comments about, or to, one another. We are all sinners. This is part of life in community. It isn’t perfect, because we are not perfect.
But we do have this wonderful gift of love. And it is not about loving just those nearest and dearest to us, as Jesus says elsewhere in the gospels; it’s about loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you.
Love is tough: love is about being honest; love is about being prepared to admit you are struggling with people, that we do not all get on; it’s about confronting and listening, it’s about admitting you are wrong, and apologising – on both sides – love is about accepting each other warts and all. To allow and be prepared to see each other for who we are, with all our faults and failings. That is love.
So what does this tell us about God’s demand of the church that we should love one another? What does it mean for our lives together as Christians?
In our gospel reading today Jesus is teaching his disciples about relationships. And of course the early church, rather like the Only Way is Essex, was not without its emotional dramas and arguments. Jesus says if your brother sins (the original version does not necessarily say a member of the church) you should go and talk to them about it alone, and if you are not listened to, you should take a party, and if that fails go to the church (bearing in mind that by church they mean the ekklesia – the community gathering) and if the person still refuses to listen then they should be ‘to you as a gentile and a tax collector’.
But what exactly does that mean? Does that mean they should be treated as outcasts as the Jews treated Gentiles and tax collectors? As people beyond the ritual life of the community, the lowest and despised? Is that what Jesus is asking us to do – to cast people out of our community?
Jesus didn’t treat gentiles and tax collectors as outcasts. He loved them, and ate with them, and drew them into the heart of his mission – he taught them and healed them and spent time with them, and worked harder on those people than any of the good and the pious and the wise. It was not the healthy that needed the doctor, he said, but the sick. Jesus did not rest until he brought them into a relationship with him, and with the Father, he talked them, wined and dined them round – he loved them into submission!
It was a process and not an easy one. Relationships are hard work and take courage and persistence and energy, and this is what Jesus gave to his relationships. God knows we are not perfect, God knows we are flawed and sinful, and that it is our habit, as individuals and communities to fall out.
Jane Williams, the wife of Archbishop Rowan, suggests that this phrase from our gospel today:
‘if two of you agree on earth about
anything you ask, it will be done for you,’ (Mtt 18:19)
is not some gentle affirmation about the power of
prayer, but actually an expression of complete astonishment – if two of
you can actually ever agree on anything… it will be done for you.
God blesses this process of coming together, and working things out. Of having the courage to challenge and question, and listen and respond. Where two or three are gathered together, not praying and being nice to each other, but struggling to work out their relationships through difficulty, through failures, through crises, Jesus is there helping, supporting, guiding.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was the German theologian and leader of the church in opposition to the Nazis during the Second World War, and he wrote that we should confess our faults to one another, because he who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. The breakthrough to true fellowship is not through corporate worship, or praying or serving together, but through admitting our sins.
‘The pious
fellowship permits no one to be a sinner,’ he wrote, ‘so everybody must
conceal their sins from themselves and from each other. We dare not be
sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner
is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone in our
sin, living in lies and hypocrisy.’
Offering this opportunity of confession – whether
that is through the sacramental rite of confession, or through a more
informal process that Jesus talks about of just having a quiet word
with one another – is the turning point. ‘In confession,’
says Bonhoeffer, ‘the breakthrough to community takes place… In
confession the light of the gospel breaks through into the darkness and
seclusion of the heart.’
The process is not as one sided as our gospel might make out, with one person in the hot seat under pressure from others: it makes demands on all of us, on our whole community. It’s a process, a negotiation in which we have to have the respect for one another to speak and listen, to hear uncomfortable things and to challenge.
Through this process we learn about one another and ourselves. But through this process of confession, we are actually able to be who we are, to be honest, to drop the mask we wear, which God sees behind anyway. In that moment of surrender we find fellowship. But what, also, is crucial is the response of others to this confession.
It is no accident that this gospel passage follows on from the parable of the lost sheep, about the shepherd who leaves his ninety nine sheep to go looking for a single individual, and greatly rejoices when he finds it, which is likened to the Father’s joy when a sinner returns to a relationship with him. And it’s also no accident that immediately following this passage is the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant where the master forgives his servant enormous debts, while the servant then goes out and refuses to forgive the far smaller debts of his fellow servant, and is duly punished. Here, clearly we have an indication of how we should respond – we must go out and seek those with whom we are struggling to build a relationship; we must talk, and try to be honest and open; and we must respond with compassion and forgiveness, for we have also sinned and been forgiven in turn.
During the Catholic Liberation movement in Latin America in the 1970s, Gustavo Gutierrez, said that sin was a breakdown in human relationships – when our relationships break down, we cut ourselves off from one another, and in cutting ourselves off from one another we are able to demonise each other and justify all sorts of bad behaviour and abuse of one another.
Which brings us back to our reading from Romans about loving one another: we know that we should not commit adultery, murder, steal, etc. but all this stems from healthy relationships. If we love each other; if we can be as open-hearted, generous and honest with one another as we would like others to be with us, then we cannot demonise and abuse one another. If we love one another then we fulfil the law because we have relationships which can withstand and work through the problems that lead us to cut ourselves off from one another, which lead us at the extreme to commit adultery, murder, steal etc.
I think this is at the heart of St Paul’s exhortation in Romans to: ‘lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.’
‘Let us live
honourably as in the day,’ he says. ‘Not in revelling and drunkenness,
not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and
jealously,’
which is rather appropriate advice for The Only
Way is Essex:
James and Lydia’s relationship broke down, she confronted him, he
confessed, there was truth, and a more honest acceptance of who each
other was. Whether or not James and Lydia’s relationship survives we
shall have to wait and see next week. That is ‘The Only Way is Essex’. But for us, the only way is Jesus, and our way is to keep working it out together, challenging each other, confessing, forgiving, living in the light of truth and acceptance and not imprisoning one another in the darkness of misunderstandings, assumptions and false expectations. When two or three are gathered together there will always be a difference of perspective, but the love of Jesus is the love of light, of truth, of relationship and that is what binds us together and offers us a way through to the light.
Let us try, at least this week, to try and live this way.