Getting Along

"Getting Along"
Matthew 18:15-20


Probably my all time favorite cartoon is Calvin and Hobbes.  One of Calvin’s main antagonists is the bully Moe.
Frame 1:  Calvin is swinging on the playground swing; Moe comes up to him and says, “Get off the swing, Twinky;”
Calvin replies, “Forget it, Moe.  Wait your turn.”
Frame 2:  Moe punches Calvin clear off the swing, and out of his shoes.
Frame 3:  Calvin is laying in a dazed heap, and says to himself, “It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightening.”

It is hard to get along with some people, isn’t it.  It seems conflict and fractured relationships are the norm.  Isn’t it interesting that Jesus assumes that people, including fellow believers, will hurt each other.  And Jesus assumes that the road back towards friendship between those who hurt each other may not be easy.  He assumes that even wave upon wave of attempts still may not bring healing to the broken relationship.

Jesus knows us so well.  He knows we are divisive, over-sensitive, bickering, petty, angry, contentious, broken people who act way below our God given humanity.  But by giving a way to reconcile and move toward friendship he also knows we have such a great potential to be healers, empathetic and sympathetic, forgiving, grace-full and understanding people who can act according to our God given humanity.  What makes us Christian is not whether or not we fight, disagree, or wound each other, but how we go about addressing and resolving that hurt.

The famous pop artist Andy Warhol decided to spend most of his time watching TV instead of developing relationships.  He equated relationships with pain, so he reasoned that if he had very few relationships, he’d have little pain.  “You can only be hurt if you care a lot,” he said.

So, in Jesus’ words, “If a fellow believer (brother, RSV) hurts you...” assumes that the reason you are hurting is because you care a lot about that person.  We don’t get hurt, as Andy Warhol discovered, as deeply by those we don’t care about.  If the used car salesman lies to you about the engine of the car you bought, you may get angry but you’re not likely to be personally hurt.  But if your wife comes home at 3 a.m. and lies to you about where she’s been and what she’s been up to, that’s another matter.

In Jesus’ statement the other person is a fellow follower of Christ.  Do we make the assumption in the church that other believers won’t hurt us?  Are we shocked more when another Christian does us harm?  Yet, by saying this, what does Jesus assume will happen in Christian communities?  Jesus doesn’t assume we’ll all magically (or in a Christ-like way) get along in the church.  We’re people, and whenever people get together, Christian or not, there is the possibility that feelings will get hurt.

The reason I included the verses about the lost sheep, is because I think they help create the context of what Jesus is telling us.  That context is about a broken community.  The middle eastern interpretation of the parable of the lost sheep, and why the shepherd goes after the one leaving the 99 is different from ours.  We concentrate on the worth and value of the individual.  The middle eastern people look at this parable and see the importance of keeping the 100 whole and together.  When one breaks away, for whatever reason, all suffer a lack of wholeness, until that lost one is restored to the whole.

So it is with the fellow believer who hurts you.  It’s not just about you and the other person.  The whole community of believers is affected.  To restore relationship and friendship of the hurt individuals is to restore the relationship of all.  Conflict between two people in a congregation not only affects the individuals involved but infects the entire community.  If we are the body of Christ, as Paul taught, any disunity between a few, in reality, is the disunity of all.

Often, it comes down to a matter of deciding what’s more important:  winning and being right; or, the health of the relationship.  And just as often, that may be a process not of looking out and pointing the finger at someone else, but looking inside yourself.

Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message Bible, has written a number of books.  One of those is Under The Unpredictable Plant.  In that book he writes about Jonah, and how the book of Jonah is descriptive of our times and our lives.  Do you remember the place at the end of the Jonah story where Jonah is sitting on the hillside waiting for God to incinerate Ninevah (just like Calvin waited for Moe to get incinerated).  But it doesn’t happen because God showed mercy.  This is what Peterson says about Jonah, who went ballistic at God:
What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside us or inside us.  We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us--our spouse, or our child, or our neighbor, or our God has done something wrong and we are angry...But when we track the anger carefully, we often find it leads to a wrong within us--wrong information, inadequate understanding, underdeveloped heart.  (page 157)

If Peterson is right, maybe our major, and most important work is not resolving the conflict and tension with someone else, but resolving all the conflict within ourselves.

For example, Henri Nouwen, another of my favorite Christian spiritual writers talks a lot about loneliness and how it is at the heart of a lot of our broken relationships.  His sense is that we all have this inner loneliness, and we carry with that loneliness an expectation that some other person is supposed to make us happy and take that loneliness away.  That expectation puts too much weight on the relationship, especially when the other doesn’t fully take our loneliness away.  Or worse, makes us feel more lonely than before.  We then spin off all kinds of anxiety, creating fractures in our relationships, and the problem isn’t other people.  It’s our own inner loneliness and the expectations it creates that is driving our anxiety and the divisions that anxiety creates.  Ironically, the very thing we desire--closeness and an end to loneliness--gets tragically broken and pushed away.


So, let’s look at Jesus’ way of handling those times when relationships get fractured and how he suggests we handle it.

First, he says go one on one.  I think it’s interesting that Jesus says that the one who is hurt, not the one who did the hurting, should make the first move.  We, if we are hurt, are more comfortable just sitting and sulking, letting our hurt simmer.  Letting it stew.  Maybe that’s the very reason Jesus said that the one hurt should make the first move.  So they don’t let their wounds grow bigger than they really are.

“If he listens...” Jesus says.  What is he listening to?  Your hurt.  Your pain.  How you are feeling.  Your sense of what happened.  The main objective is not blaming, but listening.  It’s not about forming your next rebuttal while the other is talking.  The offending one is the one who is supposed to listen.  It is the offended one who is the one who gets to talk.  The main goal, in Jesus’ words, of this listening is “making a friend” (“gained your brother,” RSV).

For Jesus, mending brokenness, becoming friends, is a deep part of the Christian spiritual life.  Remember when he said, in the “Sermon on the Mount,” if you are at the altar, ready to offer your gift, and you realize that someone has something against you, what are you supposed to do?  You’re supposed to leave your gift there, go make things right with that person, then come back and offer your gift.  For Jesus, mending broken relationships is just as important (maybe more important) than worship.  Or that mending broken relationships is part of your act of worship.  Because how can you worship fully with anxiety and hurt in your heart?  How can you approach worship with a heart loaded down with bitterness?

So, a primary step in creating depth and health in one’s soul, and life in worship, is measured by our willingness and ability to approach someone we are at odds with, one-on-one, and create friendship.

This is not an easy thing to do.  I was reading an article on the Psychology Today website recently.  The name of the article was, “Words That Wound.”  The article outlined some of the ingredients necessary when you are talking to someone else about your sense of being hurt, and coming to understanding and friendship.

The first ingredient in working towards understanding is how accurately you interpret what the other person is saying.  Emphasis is on the word interpret.  It’s not about what you say, but about how closely you interpret what the other means when they are talking.  Often it isn’t what the other person is saying that gets our knickers in a twist, but our interpretation of what they are saying.  What we think they are meaning.  In order for there to be understanding, we need to check out our interpretations with the other person.  “Is this what you mean when you say that?”

Secondly, understanding grows when each person has the ability to be able to predict the impact of your own words.  Again, it’s not about what you say, but knowing as accurately as possible how what YOU say will impact the listener.  How well are you tracking with THEIR feelings, and how much do you care about their feelings?

The final ingredient in communicating with someone after being hurt is called “interpersonal cognitive complexity.”  That’s a mouthful.  What that is about is your ability to be able to express your feelings while at the same time having the ability to be able to process social cues (body language, tone, etc.) accurately.  If I’m talking to (someone in the congregation) and while talking to her, I touch her shoulder, she has to interpret my touch accurately.  She has to decide, “Is Steve being caring or is he coming on to me?”  Some people don’t interpret those kinds of social cues well, and it causes fractures in their relationships.

But when you look at those three ingredients, they are very complex pieces of how healing can happen and relationships restored to a level of friendship.  That’s why the one-on-one piece of Jesus’ advice is so difficult and probably why he suggested the next strategy:  “If he won’t listen, take one or two others...keep things honest and try again.”

Jesus understands if you just put two people in a room and think they can reconcile their hurt, may be unrealistic for every case.  Too often we are either unwilling or unable to heal our situations.  Thus all the “judge” shows on TV these days.  Isn’t it weird that we have turned our broken friendship pain into entertainment?

At this point, things have either hit an impasse, or they have escalated.  There is no detail given by Jesus about what these others, who are dragged into the conflict are supposed to do.  Maybe there were some traditionally Jewish rules of being a go-between amongst people in conflict.  But nothing like that is detailed here by Jesus.

There’s a certain wisdom about NOT putting yourself in the middle of other people’s conflicts.  You have to watch out not to get triangled with you at one point, and the other parties at the other points of the triangle.  The one in the middle always gets squashed by the other two sides.  If you find yourself in the middle, trying to be a go-between, it’s best to promote straight line communication.  No bank shot communication off of someone but directed towards someone else.  That only creates more layers of misinterpretations and misguided meanings.

Get the two conflicting sides together, rather than relay ping pong messages back and forth.    It’s important that they be together and talk to each other.  The go-between doesn’t take sides, but instead uses the tools I mentioned in the one-on-one strategy to help create understanding that can lead to friendship.  As Jesus said, keep things honest and keep trying rather than throwing your hands up and giving up.

Lastly, Jesus says, if listening still doesn’t happen, “tell the church.”  Bring the whole community in on it.  By “the church” Jesus means the congregation.  It’s interesting, and telling to me, that in speaking about moving two people from hostility to friendship, Jesus didn’t go any further than the local congregation.  It tells me that Jesus trusted the more immediate people involved, rather than taking the conflict to a group or a committee, or a level outside (above) the local congregation.

So, the question is, how would you feel about listening to and helping resolve a squabble between people as a congregation, if it came to that?


Jesus closes out his comments with an oft quoted statement:  “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”  That comment of Jesus is usually quoted when talking about praying or worshipping.  But do you see what he was really getting at in the context of his teaching about reconciling friends?  “When two or three come together (that is come together out of hostility and back into friendship) I am there.”  When people get together and resolve their issues, that’s an indication of the presence of the Lord.

Conflict resolution isn’t about a contest of wills or posturing.  It should be about taking responsibility, making sure we are listening as well as we can, elevating the value of the relationship to a place of higher importance than winning or even pushing what we think is the truth.  It isn’t about judging and disciplining.  It’s about reconciliation.  It’s about coming together, healing our broken relationships with ourselves and others, and then celebrating the presence of Christ when that happens.