The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev Melanie Lemburg

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18A

September 10, 2023

 

        A few years ago, my husband David and I were stuck in a not-particularly-healthy spot in our marriage.  The bishop recommended a book for us to read that’s by Dr. John Gottman and is titled The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.  Gottman and his wife Dr. Julie Gottman have spent years researching the typical patterns of relationships in their “love lab,” and this book is a result of those years of work and research.  I appreciate Gottman’s premise around conflict in his book and it’s one that I take when doing pre-marital work with couples who I’m going to marry.  It isn’t a question of when you’re going to have conflict in your most significant relationships; instead, the important question is how.  Conflict is an opportunity to grow and to learn more about each other and ourselves. 

Gottman also weaves a thread throughout the whole book that is a reminder that in our significant relationships, we need to spend time and effort building those up so that in the difficult times, we can approach conflict in ways that will work to continue to build us up rather than drawing us apart.

        In the book, Gottman lists several “keys to managing conflict” in significant relationships that are worth mentioning here before we dive into a closer look at the gospel.  1. Negative emotions are important.  Gottman writes about how in our most significant relationships, we need to know that “when you are in pain, the world stops, and I listen.”  It’s important to try to listen for what is under the negative emotions and to have conversations in ways that encourage healing rather than creating more hurt. 2. Noone is right.  What?  That can’t be right.  Gottman quotes his friend Dan Siegel who says, “There is no immaculate perception.”  All reality is subjective, and so in all conflicts, the reality usually falls somewhere in the middle of the two sides.  3. Acceptance is crucial.  In our significant relationships, we have to start from a place of acceptance of who the other is before we try to navigate any kinds of requests for change.  4. Focus on fondness and admiration.  There are systems that we can cultivate in our closest relationships that help us nurture fondness and admiration for the other.  They can help us mellow about each other’s faults and they help us tackle issues from the foundation of knowing that each of us is loved and accepted, “warts and all.” [i]

        In our gospel reading for today, Jesus is responding to his disciples’ question earlier in the chapter about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  Jesus brings forth a little child to show them and then goes on about not putting stumbling blocks in front of these little ones.  (Matthew likes to talk a lot about these little ones.)  Jesus then goes on to tell the parable of a shepherd who has 100 sheep and when one is lost, he leaves the 99 to go off and find the one lost sheep, and he tells them that it is God’s will that not a single “one of these little ones” should be lost. 

Then our reading for today picks up—about what to do if you are wronged by someone.  First, you must recognize your own negative emotions and how those have been impacted by another person, and you own those.  Then you go directly to that other person to try to be reconciled.  How many of you have ever done this before?  It’s really, really hard, and it requires you to be so very brave.  Most of the time, we don’t do this very first step, right?  We either try to avoid whomever or whatever has hurt us, or we talk to other people about whatever has happened to us, and it’s usually the people who we know will agree with us.  We gang up on each other, and we become entrenched in thinking that we are right and the other person is wrong (as opposed to the Gottman perspective that no one is fully right).  But when we go directly to the person who we have a problem with, it shows that we value that relationship, that we trust them to try to work things out with us, and when it works, then ultimately addressing that conflict makes that relationship stronger.[ii]  And I think two keys to those difficult, one on one conversations has to be that first, we go into them with the main goal being trying to repair a relationship that is important to us, and that second, we are willing to walk into those conversations with the understanding that no one is really right in this situation.  Just think about how that might change how we have these conversations when we are attempting to repair relationships!  Because that is what is at the heart of what Jesus is trying to teach us and his disciples this week.  He’s trying to teach us about the lengths that we should go to try to repair relationships.

        But what happens when it doesn’t work?  Because, let’s face it, we all have experienced times when we haven’t been able to reconcile our problems with someone.  Jesus makes it very clear that estrangement is not a good option saying, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  And what did Jesus do with Gentiles and tax collectors?  He ate with them and continued to try to teach them the way of life of his good news.  But we all know that sometimes, that just doesn’t happen.  And those times when we are not able to be reconciled leave scars on our hearts and our souls.  (In fact, when I asked the Wednesday group about a time when they had experienced accountability and reconciliation in a significant relationship or a church, only one person was able to speak about a reconciled relationship, and many more of us reflected on the failed reconciliation attempts and how painful that was for us.) 

        Our gospel reading for next week will see Peter asking Jesus how many times he must forgive someone who has wronged him, so I’ll give you a bit of a spoiler for next week by saying that Jesus draws Peter’s attention through a parable to the importance of both unwavering forgiveness and mercy. 

        In those times when we feel that reconciliation is failed, it’s important to recognize that in the Kingdom of God, nothing is ever lost.  These moments of hurt can become for us opportunities to ask for God’s healing, to ask God to help us learn things about ourselves that can continue to benefit us and other significant relationships, and also to ask God to help us open our hearts to examining what reconciliation really means and looks like?  What if reconciliation was less like the absence of conflict or peace and was more like growth in ourselves and our relationships?  Then that can change how we look at what might seem to be old failures and see them in new light. 

        Many of you know that I was forced out of my last church.  It was an incredible painful example in my life of when conflict goes completely awry, and I felt for a long time that my relationship with that church could never be redeemed.  But I don’t believe that’s true anymore.  I’ve talked about how my relationship with you has healed some of the woundedness in me from that last experience.  I also believe that God gave me the courage that I would not have been able to summon on my own to show up here willing to love you and let myself be loved by you.  It’s miraculous when I look back on it now and was certainly an infusion of the Holy Spirit in and among us all. And while I won’t ever be a part of that former community again, I’ve come to realize that isn’t what reconciliation looks like for me in that relationship.  Instead, reconciliation has meant the Holy Spirit revealing to me important truths about myself—about how no one was right in that conflict, about how there are things about myself that need to shift to support and strengthen relationships that are important to me such as the importance of compromising more and less intractability on my part and the importance of showing up with gratitude to help strengthen relationships so that the foundation of trust and appreciation is already laid when misunderstandings and conflicts do arise.  

        Your big question for this week is to think about a time when you were not able to be reconciled in a significant relationship.  What might God still be offering to teach you about yourself through that?  Where might God be inviting you to grow?  How might reconciliation look differently in that situation than what you hoped for or expected? 

         


[i] Gottman. John M.  The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work:  A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert.  Harmony: New York, 1999, 2015, pp156-159

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