Michael L. Lindvall wrote about this once in a short story in which he affirmed:
Life together is hard. The are no perfect husbands, no perfect wives, [no perfect partners,] no perfect children. No perfect mothers-in-law. Life in family, life in any community, is both our sorest test and our sweetest joy ... the only thing harder than getting along with other people is getting along without them...” “Serves them Right.” Sermon preached at the Brick Presbyterian Church of New York City. September 7, 2008.So what to do? I’m going to back into this by introducing a concept from communication and family systems theory called “triangulation.” You have all been involved in this at one time or another in your lives. The wise avoid it, the foolish thrive on it. You can tell it is happening when you hear yourself complaining about one person to another. When you hear yourself gossiping. When you give into the temptation to get on the phone and complain to one friend about how another friend has treated you. Or worse yet, when you hear someone say something to you in the hopes that you will repeat it to the person who has offended them. It’s called “triangulation” because it makes you the third party in a potentially difficult conversation and this is a position that is to be avoided at all costs for it is not a safe place to be.
Jesus offers a far better way to handle our difficulties with another person. It would have been much easier if Jesus had said, “Go around and tell everybody you can what that stupid jerk did to you.” What he says is instead, “No, you go talk to that stupid jerk and tell them what they have done.” That is hard, even for the most mature Christian.
When the Chicago Bible Church started renting our facility there was some territorial issues with the Good News Church and Pastor Ang, perhaps one of the finest Christian men I have ever met, came to me to talk about it. What he was asking for was triangulation. That I should tell the Chicago Bible Church about the problems the Good News Church were having with them. As you all know, I never get myself into a triangle, so I read Matthew 18 to him and reminded him how Christ would want the potential conflict handled. Frankly, because of the language barrier, I wasn’t even sure what the problem was but I could tell by the look on good Pastor Ang’s face that while he believed the Bible and was deeply committed to following Jesus he still would rather have had me do his talking for him. Instead, I patted him on his back on the way out of my office and wished him luck. By the way, everything must have worked itself out because I never heard another word. Either that, or they just learned to live with whatever the conflict was.
That is another way people handle things – they ignore them. We take the attitude, says Dr. Thomas G. Long in his commentary on Matthew, of “If somebody hassles you, forget them. It’s their problem not yours.” But that just harbors bitterness, resentment, people not speaking to each other for days, months, or even years on end.
Jesus is ruining all of the good options. He keeps insisting that there be a meeting – one on one. But this meeting is to have as the number one spot on its agenda not confrontation but restoration. Believe me, because I have made this mistake, if you go in with your finger pointing and a three point verbal tongue lashing all prepared, you are setting off the first strike in what may become a verbal thermo-nuclear war. That is a worse idea than becoming part of “triangulation strangulation” because it just might kill the friendship, strangle it to death.
Jesus says our goal is to be restoration not retaliation. And this restoration was as important to the churches of the first century as they were in ours because there were no mega-churches back then. The average faith community consisted of no more than 50 people.
So, observes Brain Stoffregen, on www.crossmarks.com Their gatherings were much more like small family reunions ... we can easily imagine how the actions or attitude of one family member could spoil the festive gathering for the rest of the family.
We’ve seen it happen – in church, anywhere – one person in a small group gets out of hand and it spoils it not only for them and the subject of their wrath but for everyone. So you go to them in the hopes that what they desire most is restoration to the community from which they have become estranged. In going to restore, you speak not out of anger but out of a loving care that they might feel missed and you give them the opportunity for a graceful re-entry.
What if they don’t want to take it? That is why you bring two witnesses along. It is not to “gang up” on them but only that the other’s can say that you tried your best at reconciliation.
What we usually do first is the last thing that Jesus suggests we do. “Tell it to the church.” Again this is not so much to be understood as shooting for a giant congregational “harumph” but rather in context of Jesus day. It was all about “restoration to the community” and in his world it was not so much listening to an inner voice but a worry about what the neighbors might think if you got booted out of the church.
And, even if you are, says Jesus, “let the one who is lost or alienated be treated ‘as a gentile or a tax-collector.’” We think that means you put them outside of the triangle or circle and let them stay there forever. And that would be a very tempting response were it not for the irony. The whole of the Gospel of Matthew is about reaching out to and including those very Gentiles in the Christian embrace. They are to be included in the family of faith. And tax-collectors? Well, the author of this Gospel, Saint Matthew, was found by Jesus working in the tax collectors office. It seems that even tax collectors are a part of Jesus family.
All of what I have said can be avoided if we don’t give into a “triangulation strangulation” that chokes the life out of friendships, communities and even individuals. We may want to wash our hands of the difficult relative. We may want to dodge the difficult people at coffee hour. We may think we have every right not to talk to somebody for a very long time but Jesus doesn’t.
In the family of God Jesus wants to build – not the Gentiles, not the tax-collectors, not the difficult relatives or the impossible friends, not even cantankerous church members are ever beyond the long reach of God. For when God is brought into the triangle there is always the promise of restoration, emotional health, and wholeness.
In the name of the triangle we call Trinity who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
4 September 2011
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