Sometimes You Must Choose Peace: Psa.119: 33-40; Matt. 18: 15-20
A friend of mine worked for many years in a rather toxic work environment. She stayed for hopes of promotion, things would get better, the allure of improvement that would never come. But, alas, she finally learned that the only thing she would get from her place of employment was toxic foolishness and a second blood pressure medication. One day she called me fussing about something they had done—ranting, raving, losing her mind about how irritating her supervisor had been—and she said, “You know what, I’m going to give that ‘insert choice words here’ a piece of my mind.” My response was this: my friend, it is better to be employed than to be right. Being right will not pay your bills. Besides, why not leave them once you’ve found somewhere else better to go?
Sometimes in life, we have to simply choose our peace over the chaos and misery that other people and situations want to bring into our lives, and that can be a hard thing to do. In Matthew’s gospel, we read a somewhat difficult passage. This portion of Matthew’s writing deals with living together as community. Any time you gather a group of people together for long enough there are bound to be squabbles and disagreements. But there also may be an element that is toxic, bent on destruction, cruel, and working to damage the community and livelihood of the faithful in community.
Matthew offers the following: confront someone (peaceably) about something which has caused you offense and allow them the opportunity to confess and be restored. If they refuse, go again with witnesses in the hopes that they will understand and budge. If that doesn’t work, take the case to the church, and let the church decide. If they refuse to accept the decision of the church, put them out. Now, obviously, for a faith that practices such an expansive welcome and love, this is tough. It is difficult for this to come from Jesus who welcomed the tax collector, the sinner, the unclean, and so on.
And we have to take a moment and acknowledge that this process has absolutely been abused and over-used by churches. When I was in college, a friend told me of a church that used this process on her. She was in a depression because she has just divorced her abusive husband, and she had not been going out of the house much at all, let alone to church. The elders visited once or twice, not to pastorally care for her, but to chide her for her lack of attendance. It took only a short time for the church to hold a meeting and vote her out of fellowship. They sent the harshly worded letter calling her a wicked, backslidden, sinner home with her 13-year-old daughter who was also told not to come back. I guess the daughter was collateral damage. Churches, sadly, have abused this scripture for a long time.
So, what does Matthew mean here…why would this even be included? It’s actually used to address a person who is cruel and toxic, using their participation in the church to harm others and the community of faith. For starters, Matthew only intends this to be used for serious, harmful, sins which are unrepentant and disruptive in the church. Think of something like slander, gossip meant to destroy a person, or constantly trying to create chaos in the midst of the work for hope and peace in God’s faithful.
What Matthew is saying is that by living in community with one another, we are not required to sacrifice our sensitivities to the feelings of others, but instead we are to become more sensitive to how our choices and words affect the peace and walk of faith in other people with us. The only real way to live in a faithful community gathered together in Christ Jesus is to be gentle and sensitive with one another, patient and seeking peace.
The end goal here is not to put someone out. Matthew is not seeking to push people away or thin the community, but to create a path of powerful restoration and reconciliation. The hope is that when a person hears that their words or actions hurt a fellow believer, they will work hard to be forgiven and change their ways. That way the two who have an issue will find a way to be reconciled as members of the body of Christ. Being a Christian means being a part of community together. Faith is not a solo activity. It’s meant to be lived in community. If you need an example, think of the words of the Lord’s Prayer—Our Father. It’s not, “My Father.” It is “Our Father.”
This context also gives new meaning to the part that says, “For where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them.” That was never meant to mean that if you have just enough show up you can still carry on with church. What Jesus meant was even in a group as small as two or three faithful people together, God is in the midst, and the expectation is that love, peace, and gentleness with God’s people are preserved and lived. Where God is, God’s love and grace should be shown. As a friend of mine posted on Facebook, “It doesn’t matter how many verses of scripture you can quote from memory, if you don’t live by it, all of memorization is worthless.” And that is true. Faith is mean to be lived not memorized and recited.
But what do we do when there are toxic people in our lives? I’m sure you’ve encountered them. It’s people, maybe even at church, who cross your boundaries, who disrespect you as a person and a person of faith, who find ways to make you feel inferior or inadequate, or who simply take advantage of your attempts to be kind. Either you confront them, and they find the love of Jesus in their hearts, or you put them out of your life. It sounds harsh, but sometimes you must choose your peace, and that means walking away from abuse and toxicity until God can work on that person’s heart.
Sometimes, though the problem is the collective church. I saw a friend’s online post the other day that said, “This generation is way too comfortable with hell.” And my first thought is this: what has the church as a whole offered that seems better? Consider for millennials and younger from the 40 and down crowd, the church has been petty, politically minded, worldly, self-absorbed, cruel, and sometimes downright hate-filled. I look at news reports of bad actions church have taken around this country and world, and I think it’s no wonder that the church is being abandoned. To many who have sought hope and comfort within a church and faithful community, that church didn’t fight against the gates of hell, it was hell itself. Perhaps that’s because the ones who needed to come in were put out, and the ones who needed to go were kept in.
If you need statistical proof, the number of pastors who seriously considered resigning rose from 29% in January 2021 to 42% in March of 2022. That’s a 13% jump in a year. Jesus said, where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there with you. We, as followers of Christ, need to remember this in every thought, word, and deed we do to one another in life—Jesus is there.
Sometimes in life, we must choose peace. There is too much angst in the world with news, politics, surveys, and personal bad news for us to let bad behavior be tolerated in God’s faithful. One of the strongest and most clear points of the epistles is in I John where it tells us that if we do not know love, then we do not know God, for God is love. And it is up to us to practice that love in this world.
My friend had hoped for a place of wisdom and community to grow as a worker; instead, she found a place of pettiness and toxicity. After a few years, she found a much better job and left. She chose peace. We follow Christ, the Prince of Peace, and Matthew gives us a clear instruction—seek to reconcile, confess, forgive, and restore, but if someone chooses to harm over showing Christ’s love, we must choose our peace in our own walk with God, for God is love.
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