The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost - September 6, 2026

St. Paul’s - Proper 18 - September 6, 2026

We need to talk.  How do you feel when someone says these four words to you?  What happens in your body when you hear them?

Most of the time, if another person approaches us with those words, they’re not saying they want to chat about the weather, or relive highlights from yesterday’s football game, or share the latest celebrity gossip.  They’re saying, Something is broken between us, and we need to sort it out.

There are many Christian communities that are spectacularly bad at handling We need to talk moments.  If a conflict arose between members of the church, the community might do its best to shove it under the rug.  Many times, it becomes the source of gossip..  Or passive-aggressive games are played  manage the discomfort.  Or taking sides in ways that intensify the problem.  Or weaponized silences to intimidate each other.  Or the pulpit is used to shame the people involved.  

Sometimes, if all other tactics failed, people will abandon the community altogether, and join another.

In this week’s Gospel, Jesus offers us a radically different path which says the depth, health, and quality of our relationships within the church really matter.  They matter eternally. 

Look at how it opens.

“If another member of the church sins against you…”

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say in the unlikely event that another member of the church sins against you. He does not say if you find yourself in a rare situation where a member of the church has hurt you. He assumes it. He takes for granted that this will happen. He is teaching his disciples what to do about a thing he already knows will happen.

In a sense, what Jesus lays out in this Gospel are rules of engagement, and the principles of love and respect that should undergird them. 

The first step is private. Alone. One-on-one. Just the two of you. If someone has hurt you, Jesus says, go and speak with them privately. Not a group text. Not a whispered campaign in the parking lot. Not a passive-aggressive post on social media. Not gathering the sympathetic parties on your side. Face to face, alone, tell them what happened.

Do you hear what that is doing? It is protecting the person who hurt you.

Jesus is asking the person who has been wounded to give the person who wounded them a chance to hear it — first, before anyone else knows. To acknowledge the wound. To repent, if repentance is what is needed. To restore the relationship without a wider audience. To keep the whole conversation, if possible, in the smallest circle that can contain it.

I want you to notice what a countercultural instruction this is in our time. Our instinct, when someone hurts us, is to broadcast. To share it. To collect allies. To find the people who will agree with us that we have been wronged. To make it public before we have made it private. And there are times when that is necessary — I am not saying otherwise. But Jesus’s default is the opposite. Start alone. Start small. Give the person a chance to hear you before you tell anyone else.

My temptation as I read this Gospel passage is to place myself always in the position of the would-be reconciler.  What should I do if someone sins against me?  But what if the situation is reversed?  Am I willing to hear hard truths from the people I offend?  Do I value honesty and authenticity enough to surrender my privilege and power, and listen without defensiveness when a brother or sister in the church confronts my sinfulness?  Can I stop shielding myself behind my good intentions, and sit with the actual impact my actions have on others?  In the end, do I care about reconciliation, justice, repentance, and restoration as much as Jesus does?  Or have I settled for a spiritual life in the shallows?

Preserve dignity: If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.  Even as Jesus stresses the importance of honest engagement, he calls for discretion, kindness, and care.  

Needless to say, we live in a social media culture in which voyeurism reigns.  Too often, we take a perverse delight in watching others fall from grace.  When we’ve been hurt, we forget that we, too, are frail, foolish, and prone to error.  When we hurt others, we lash out at our victims, publicly dehumanizing them for the sake of protecting our own reputations.  All of this, Jesus says, falls miserably short of God’s desires for the beloved community.

Guard the truth: If you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.   Again, Jesus harbors no illusions about how challenging conflict-management can be.  Sometimes, a one-on-one conversation won’t suffice.  When that’s the case, the Gospel tells us to bring in a few more people — not to spread gossip, not to gang up on the wrongdoer, not to escalate the conflict — but to make sure that the truth is guarded, honored, articulated, and remembered as we work towards reconciliation.

When we feel injured, it’s easy to resort to exaggeration to press our own advantage.  When we wound someone else, it’s easy to deflect, minimize, and pivot away from what really happened in order to defend ourselves.  But as Christians, we have an obligation to guard the truth, and sometimes, we need others to come alongside us in our efforts to do so.  

This is especially the case in our current moment, when the very concept of truth is being attacked and desecrated on every side.  As if it doesn’t matter.  As if it’s up for grabs.  But in fact, truth does matter, and it is not up for grabs.  Jesus, who is himself the Truth, insists that we guard against falsehoods in our dealings with each other.

If the member refuses to listen, tell it to the church.  Here in the West, this principle might be the hardest one for us to swallow.  In fact, it might even offend us.  Why?  Because we tend to think of the church as a voluntary association of autonomous individuals.  We think this way, not because the Bible offers us any sanction or justification for doing so, but because we don’t want to surrender the idols of individualism and personal independence.

The Scriptures describe the church as a body, each part wholly interdependent on every other.  When conflicts arise in our midst, what’s at stake is not my personal feelings or your personal liberty; what’s at stake is the health and well-being of the entire body.  

Lament the brokenness: Sometimes, Jesus says, all of our efforts at reconciliation will fail, and we will lose a member of the community.  It’s interesting to me that Jesus uses the language of losing and regaining to address this circumstance.  The fact is that it might happen that we fail to regain a brother or sister.  The implication here is that such losses should be met with grief.  With mourning.  With broken hearts.  Even when a conflict escalates to a point where we must break with an offender for the health of the church, our reaction to that break must never be self-righteous glee.  The fracturing of the body of Christ is not an occasion for gloating.  We have lost a limb, an organ, our own flesh and blood.  The appropriate response is lament.

And then we get to the line that has done so much damage.

If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.  At first glance, this instruction might sound like it gives us permission to shun or cancel people with whom we experience deep conflict.  

Let me remind you. Matthew is written by a tax collector. The whole Gospel bears his name. Matthew was sitting at his tax booth when Jesus walked past and said, Follow me — one of the tenderest moments in the whole book. Jesus eats with tax collectors so often that his enemies use it as a slur against him: look, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Jesus tells parables in which tax collectors are the heroes. Jesus tells the chief priests, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.

And the Gentiles. The Roman centurion — Jesus says his faith is greater than anyone’s in Israel. The Canaanite woman we heard about a few weeks ago — Jesus praises her faith and heals her daughter. The great commission at the end of Matthew’s Gospel sends the disciples to the ends of the earth, to all nations, to make disciples of every Gentile.

So when Jesus says, treat them as a Gentile and a tax collector, what he is actually saying is: treat them the way I treat Gentiles and tax collectors. Treat them as people who are still being pursued. Treat them as people who are still being invited in. Treat them as people whose refusal today does not have to be their last word tomorrow.

This is not a passage about excommunication. This is a passage about the church refusing to give up on anyone. Even when the private conversation has not worked. Even when the small circle has not worked. Even when the whole community has not been able to reach them. The final instruction Jesus gives is not shun them. It is treat them the way I treat the people the religious establishment has already given up on.

I hope you are hearing what this does to this passage.

And now the final verse, which almost every one of us has heard used out of context so many times we have forgotten what it actually says. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

We know this verse. We have seen it on posters. We have heard it as a reassurance when the small group is small, when the prayer meeting has three people, when the church committee meets in a mostly-empty room. And it is a beautiful promise for all of those things. I am not going to take that away from you.

But do you hear what verse it is? Do you hear the context?

Jesus is not saying wherever two or three of you happen to gather, I will be there. He is saying that in the specific context of the process he has just laid out. Where the community is doing its hardest work — where two or three are gathered to try to reach a member who has hurt someone, to try to preserve a relationship that is breaking, to keep the circle of love around someone who is refusing to hear — Jesus is there. Right in the middle of it. Doing the hardest work with us.

Even as we acknowledge and grieve brokenness, even as we make painful decisions to safeguard the church, even as we recognize that the insider is now outside, we practice hospitality.  We extend care.  We hold open the possibility of repentance, reconciliation, restoration, and renewal.  Even in the mess and muck of life together, we cling to the promise of resurrection, and honor the outsider as the beloved of God.

What a timely set of rules and principles!  How powerfully they speak to the historical moment we occupy.  Has there ever been a time when we’ve felt so divided, so partisan, so deeply entrenched in our own perspectives, cliques, and subcultures, as we do right now?  We can barely even hear each other anymore.  We can barely even condescend to listen. 

What would it be like to live into the high calling of the beloved community here, now, in this profoundly troubled moment of conflict and division?  What would it be like for all the world to know that we are Christians — not by our rightness, but by our love? 

Are we ready?  Are we willing?  We need to talk.