Park United Methodist Church

Mark 18:15-20

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I often remind us that we are a Matthew 18 church. What does that mean, though? How do we live into that?

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Let's start with this: who here genuinely enjoys conflict? And who has ghosted a situation, or a person, just to avoid it? If you don't know the term — ghosting means you simply stop communicating. You stop showing up, and you never explain why.

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Most of us don't like conflict. It's uncomfortable. But conflict is normal — it's part of healthy development, healthy systems, healthy community. Communities don't grow together without it. People don't learn to trust one another without it. It's part of how different people live together, hear different ideas, and find creative solutions — while also learning from each other.

 

This chapter opens with the disciples asking who is the greatest among them. Jesus — resisting, I imagine, the urge to face-palm — pulls a small child onto his lap and says the one who is least, like this child, is the greatest. Then he warns them: if anyone causes another to stumble, it will go badly for them. Next comes the parable of the lost sheep, and then the passage in front of us. All of it is about how we exist together as the church. We are not to jockey for who is more important, and we are never to do anything that separates someone from God or causes them to stumble. God seeks out the lost and rejoices when they're found. 

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Then we arrive at how to handle it when we miss the mark with one another — when we aren't getting along.

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Notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say talk to everyone around you and build a team. It doesn't say discuss it with your ten closest friends. It says: talk to the person. This is so hard. We don't like telling someone, "you offended me," or "you hurt my feelings," or "I don't agree with you because—." But that's the thing: we're Christians. We're being called to do the hard, right thing — the thing that makes community stronger — as our own kind of cross, the thing that holds us together as one body. We're asked to put our ego in the backyard and go talk to the person who thinks differently than us, or who hurt us, and look for a way forward together.

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The text says "if they sin against you" — and that can mean a Ten Commandments kind of sin, but it can just as easily mean simply missing the mark in how we treat one another: respect, moral character, love. If the one-on-one conversation doesn't work, you take another person from the church with you. Notice again what it doesn't say — not your bestie, not your biggest ally, not someone who already agrees with you. This person is a mediator. Someone who helps facilitate the conversation. We aren't there to pick sides. We're there to help find a way forward. If that doesn't work, you bring it to the church. And if even that doesn't work, you treat them "like a tax collector or a Gentile."

Here's where it gets interesting, and where I want us to pause for a moment. People hear "tax collector or Gentile" and assume that means cut them out completely. But think about who Jesus actually was to tax collectors and Gentiles. He was constantly eating with tax collectors. He was healing Gentiles. He kept inviting them in.

Inviting them in required repentance — and then it required making room for them in the fellowship. It was never an automatic, one-sided welcome. It required someone turning away from what was doing harm, and someone else choosing to keep the door open. That's hard, slow work — but it's the work Jesus keeps modeling, over and over. We are also not alone in that work.  

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Notice how this whole passage ends: "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." That's not a throwaway line tacked on at the end. Jesus is telling us he shows up specifically in this hard work — in the direct conversation, in the mediated meeting, in the whole messy process of a community trying to stay together. Not just when it's resolved. Not just at the happy ending. He's present in the awkward, uncomfortable middle of it, when we're doing the very human work of trying to make things right, in the slow and painful steps. 

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Living in Christ's community isn't for the petty, and it isn't for people looking for drama or a self-serving life. It asks for love, humility, and doing hard things: admitting when we're wrong, talking to people we'd rather avoid, and refusing to run from what makes us uncomfortable. We live in a culture that tells us it's fine to avoid anything uncomfortable. Jesus tells us that in community, we are all — every one of us — needed.

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So, my friends: what conflict has been nagging at you lately? Who do you need to have a real, direct conversation with? And can you trust that Jesus is present with you — not just after it's resolved, but in the hard conversation itself?