Being Together

 I expect you know that the Gospels were only written down about 50 or 60 years after Jesus’ death. A lot of things happened during those years, of course, and although we know how accurate oral transmission can be, there are a few places where it looks as though an extraneous passage got inserted. I don’t quite mean extraneous, I don’t think – but a passage attributed to Jesus that perhaps wasn’t what he actually said, but what the early Church thought he ought to have said. And part of the passage we heard just now is, I think, one of those passages, mostly because it talks about the Church, a gathering of Christians – and such a thing didn’t exist in Jesus’ day. But whatever, it got into our Bibles, so we need to read it and learn from it.

It does seem, at first reading, extraordinary, though. We know from elsewhere that Jesus tells us never to put limits on our forgiveness. We know we must forgive, or it’s impossible for us to receive God’s forgiveness, we block ourselves off from it.

And we are told never to judge. We’re told to sort out what’s wrong with ourselves first – you remember how Jesus graphically told us to remove the very large log from our own eyes before we could possibly deal with the tiny speck that bothered us in someone else’s.

But we are human. No matter how much we want to love our neighbours as ourselves, it’s difficult. It’s easy enough to love suffering humanity en masse, to send a text to a certain number to give three pounds towards relieving some kind of community suffering somewhere else. It’s easy enough to throw an extra box of tea-bags into the food bank box at Tesco’s, or to donate to the Brixton soup kitchen. It’s even relatively easy to do small things to lower your carbon footprint – to take reusable produce bags to the supermarket, to be scrupulous about recycling, and so on.

Now, don’t get me wrong, all these are good and right and proper things to be doing, and we should probably all do them more than we actually do. But they are all relatively easy – the difficult bit comes when we have to start interacting with other people, and loving them.  “To love the world to me’s no chore. My problem is that lot next door!” That’s when we’re apt to forget to be loving, when we are apt to go our own way, when we’re apt to hurt people, most probably totally unintentionally. The careless word, the accidental insult – or even, sadly, the intentional one.

Now, obviously, if we realise we’ve hurt someone, the thing to do is to apologise at once. Sometimes there are times when we don’t really want to apologise – they started it, it was their fault. Well, even if it is, we are the ones who need to apologise, if only because it makes us bigger than them…. Well, perhaps not for that reason, but you know what I mean.

But what if it is they who hurt you? The human thing to do is to hit out and hurt them back, but we’re not supposed to do that, and with God’s help we won’t. This passage tells us what to do – first, go and explain what has gone wrong, and if they agree and apologise, all is well and no harm done. Then you take a couple of friends along to witness that you had a problem and to try and help you be reconciled, and then, finally, take it to the church. The church, note – not the world! And then, the passage says, if they still won’t listen, let them be to you as a tax gatherer or a gentile. Which, on first reading, sounds as if you should shun them completely, which was how Jewish people of the time behaved towards them.

But Jesus didn’t, did he? Remember the story of Levi, who was a tax collector, and Jesus called him to become one of the disciples. Remember Zaccheus, who resolved to pay back anybody he had cheated after Jesus loved and forgave him and went to eat with him. Remember how many times he talked with, and healed, Gentiles, non-Jews, people who observant Jews would have nothing to do with.

So what is the church to do with those who won’t see that they’ve hurt someone, or if they do see it, don’t care? From Jesus’ example, it looks as though we have to go on loving them, trusting them, and caring for them. Heaven, as one paraphrase puts it, will back us up. Obviously, there are very rare occasions when steps have to be taken, if a child or a vulnerable adult is at risk, for example, but mostly things can be put right without that. And even when steps do have to be taken – and the Methodist church has systems in place to organise such steps, so our safeguarding people know what to do – we still have a duty to love and care for the perpetrator.

Now, the next part of the passage is really not easy to understand. If, says Jesus, or the Church speaking in Jesus’ name, two or three agree on anything in prayer, it will be granted. But we know that, with the best will in the world, this doesn’t always happen. We have all seen times when our prayers, far from being answered, appear to have gone no further than the ceiling. But then again, were we only looking for one answer to our prayer? Were we telling God what to do, as, I don’t know about you, but I find I’m rather apt to. Were we just talking at God, and not trying to listen, trying to be part of what God is doing in the world? All too easily done, I’m afraid.

But the final sentence – ah, now that brings hope. “For where two or three come together in my name, I am there with them.”

You see, in the Jewish faith, you need what’s called a minyan, a minimum of ten people – in many traditions, ten men, not people. If there are only nine of you, you can’t go ahead with the service. But not for we Christians. We know that even if there are only a couple of us, Jesus will be there with us and enabling our worship.

And that, in these strange times, is very comforting. We haven’t been able to meet together for worship for so long – I was supposed to be coming to you on March the 29^th of this year, but of course I couldn’t. Couldn’t have, anyway, as I was ill with this wretched virus and couldn’t even get out of bed at that stage! And now it is September, five months later, and at last I can be with you. But we are still restricted, and if the pandemic gets worse again, we may well be stopped from meeting again for a time. But even if we have to restrict ourselves to our so-called “bubbles”, we know that Jesus will be there with us.

I noticed, didn’t you, how much God was there during the worst of the pandemic. The ministers of the various denominations, and often the congregation, too, worked so very hard to stream services so that we could join in from home. We sometimes watched three services in one day – the one David and his cohorts put on from the Southwark and Deptford circuit, then I very often watched the service my mother’s church put out – especially if my mother or sister were reading the lesson – and a couple of times watched the service from my daughter’s church, as she was terribly clever about mixing the choir’s solo singing so it sounded like the choir, and once one of my grandsons was leading the Lord’s Prayer. And I know there were many, many other services we could have watched – and an awful lot of people did, people who perhaps wouldn’t have dreamt of going to church under normal circumstances.

And there were – and still are – Zoom fellowship meetings, and on other platforms, people have met for worship from many different countries around the world. It is amazing how God has kept his people together in these difficult times. I do wonder, don’t you, what this is saying about being Church, not just in the middle of a pandemic, but going forward. Many churches, I think, will continue to stream their services as a matter of course. Many more will consider having their various committee meetings on Zoom, which, quite apart from anything else, means you don’t have to rush through your supper and have indigestion, and the meetings finish much earlier!

But, and of course there’s a but, because there’s always a but, this is reserved for those who have the technology to join in – not everybody has broadband at home, or unlimited data on their phones. In some countries, even having a phone would be a privilege. We say “This is where God was in the pandemic”, and I think that’s true – but we also have to remember those places where they really did have to rely on just their immediate families for fellowship, as there was no other option. And we know that, even if it was just a husband and wife together, Jesus was there with them. As he is with us now, and will be whenever two or three of us meet in worship. Amen.