For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20).

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1 For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20). 23 rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A September 4 th, 2011

2 First Reading: Ezekiel 33:7-9 7 So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. 8 If I say to the wicked, O wicked ones, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. 9 But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life. Responsorial Psalm 95:1-7 Lector: 1 O come, let us sing to the Lord; All: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Lector: 2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; All: let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! Lector: 3 For the Lord is a great God, All: and a great King above all gods. Lector: 4 In his hand are the depths of the earth; All: the heights of the mountains are his also. Lector: 5 The sea is his, for he made it, All: and the dry land, which his hands have formed. Lector: 6 O come, let us worship and bow down, All: let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! Lector: 7 For he is our God, All: and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Second Reading: Romans 13: Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet ; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, Love your neighbor as yourself. 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

3 Gospel Reading: Matthew 18: If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. 16 But 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. 17 If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. 18 Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. Homily Well, I like how that Gospel Reading ended, where two are three are gathered, because that s the exact situation we re in when we gather at tiny little St. Junia s House! In today s readings, we are given a procedure for dealing with conflicts in our communities. Paul summarizes the commandments plus underlying motivation which should be guiding us in these situations where we must choose how to deal with human problems ethically and morally. He is drawing upon Judaic thought and especially how this way of thinking about the commandments was then shaped by the Greeks. Often the Greeks sought to find an underlying principle that would unify their understanding, and here we see that loving your neighbor as yourself will accomplish this goal. This teaching is universal and all of the Ten Commandments are summarized for us. Our Gospel reading about conflict resolution is connected with this teaching too, although it may not be immediately apparent. Last week s Gospel and this week s are the only two passages in all four Gospels using the term church [Greek: ekklesia]. This is the community of believers that eventually was called church. And in both passages, there was the promise about binding and loosing, in Matthew 16 directed to Peter and in Matthew 18 to all of the disciples generally. The premise is a there is a brotherly and sisterly pattern of correcting one another when needed. Matthew s source developed it into a church rule, and it became a pattern for how discipline is carried out in a Christian community. 1 In Ezekiel, the approach seems more harsh and frightening. As the poet Hopkins once quipped, the mode was to Frighten the poor sheep back. But this approach of fright or guilt-induction doesn t 1 Reginald H. Fuller & Daniel Westberg. Scripture in depth. St. Louis University website, 23 rd Sunday in Ordinary Time A.

4 settle the heart issues that are at stake. Jesus is presuming that there is first a basis of Christian love between us and other people in the community before his directive applies. Have you ever been in a church where you saw this approach genuinely applied? It seems to me that it is actually rare. We probably have all seen or participated in communities where some people would come and go, where they would become offended and their noses out of joint and then decide to leave the church. In some cases, entire congregations have been torn apart by people taking one side or another in a controversy that goes out of control. Of course, anyone who leaves takes the main source of the conflict with them: themselves. It doesn t work to leave and it surely does not follow the guidance we have in the Gospels. But it is very uncomfortable and hard to stay and work things out. One starts with an effort at private resolution and if this doesn t work, then bring a couple of others with you to try to iron out the problem. Sometimes it is absolutely clear who wronged whom, and we need to be ready to humbly own our responsibility when this happens. Perhaps we also need to be ready to take more than our fair share of the blame. Remember the adage when someone takes your cloak, offer him your shirt as well. But realistically, many times, there may have been contributions on both sides of a misunderstanding. We can only be responsible for addressing our own contributions, and we cannot seek to take the splinter out of the other person s eye as long as we overlook the log in our own. All of us are only too human and at times may unintentionally hurt each other. We don t always know what emotional and spiritual vulnerabilities that the other party carries that may lead to deeper wounding in some circumstances. Deciding who is most at fault or who broke the rules is an issue that we need to get past and is generally a waste of time. And in the idea that two or three coming together to pray, if two of us agree on earth about anything for which they pray, Jesus says it will be granted to them. So we can apply this to conflict situations as well as for other things for which we are led to pray. And he has promised us he will bring healing. So when we re afraid, intimidated, shamed, or angry but we come together to seek healing with one another, he has promised us that he is there for us! Perhaps the commitment to remain in one s church community and to learn to love -- no matter what -- is the starting place. As in a marriage or other close personal relationship, if leaving is always an option, then the chances of finding healing are going to go downhill rapidly. The Christian community should be our safest place to work out these quirks and vulnerabilities that we all have from our past experiences and injuries. No one is immune to them. Pope Paul VI, in his 1964 Ecclesiam Suam said that our common goal as an assembly is to gather to do the work of God. 2 This being the case, to fully serve the Church, we must seek healing for ourselves and those around us. How can we presume to reach others and to have anything to offer if we cannot model such healing among ourselves? Pope Paul VI said, Owe no debt to anyone except the debt that binds us to love one another. Through loving each other, we will overcome our flaws that interfere with doing the work of God in the world. Dorothy Day, an activist who worked to overcome injustice in the world commented that exploitation and injustice were just as likely in little communities as in political empires. None is spared. The injustice that is done at our own doorsteps is what must first be solved. 2 Page 49. Op. cit. in Gerald Darring. The Perspective of Justice. St. Louis University website. 23 rd Sunday in Ordinary Time A, September 4, 2011

5 Some of us are more charitable to strangers and forgiving of outsiders than we are to those who are our well-known co-laborers in Christ. We shoot down our own walking wounded. It is similar to the family dynamic among sisters and brothers where there may be very strong emotions, perhaps derived from childhood jealousies and perceived inequities, which in some cases were never resolved. Have you ever known people whose relationships within their own family were cut off and they stopped communicating? Or perhaps some of you have known that particular hurt for yourselves. Some families will go years before addressing their grudges and others never do. Wouldn t it be better to sit down with the premise of love and commitment not to leave and to work it out? Perceived misdeeds often get discussed with everyone but the accused. It is tough when we feel we ve been unfairly slighted, hurt, or maligned falsely. Sometimes we too have misread others intentions, projecting on to them our own unresolved fears or other unfinished business. As I had previously commented in another recent homily, I again recall Fr. Richard Rohr s comment that he prays for one good humiliation a day, because it is only here that he can address the underlying core of egotism that is his own contribution to misunderstanding and conflicts with others. Since reading this several weeks ago, it has helped me to recognize much more precisely where I need spiritual work, and at the same time has helped me become less harsh toward myself in dealing with failures and setbacks. If we seriously love another fellow believer and treat them as other, e.g. not as a mere extension of ourselves or presuming that their views should be the same as our own, then we address some of the same issues that are needed in our relationship with God. Our human relationships are a mirror of that same process. We will see the face of Jesus mirrored in the faces of those in our communities if we are willing to love. If we are in touch with this reality, respect and honor of the other will follow, and we can see our conflicts as an opportunity to deal with the parts of ourselves that we otherwise may fail to recognize or may even avoid. When we encounter one another face-to-face, when we pray, when we seek to resolve conflicts and misunderstandings, even when there s only two or three of us, Jesus is present with us.

6 There is only one thing, one rule to live by, one debt we owe: Love one another. Lord, Jesus, be with us especially when love is hard; give us a hand when love makes demands. Amen. Prayer copied by permission Copyright 2011, The Center for Liturgy at Saint Louis University. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use. Study Notes: I want to tell you about a book I began to read a couple of weeks ago that has rocked my world, and perhaps it will rock yours too. I encourage you to go to Amazon books and read the two more substantial reviews than the brief note I am posting here. Thomas C. Oden (2011). The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing Early Church Tradition. IV Press. We ve probably mostly presumed that Mark who purportedly wrote the Gospel of Mark was out of the same world as Jesus and the other disciples. That is, if we did not assume -- as many modern historical-critical scholars would prefer to espouse -- that the book was named for Mark but that he probably didn t actually write the Gospel. In this book, the case is made very powerfully that John Mark, who was in the first generation and knew Jesus, was probably born in Africa in a devout Levite Jewish family, and at a young age he and his family returned to Jerusalem. But subsequently he returned to Africa where he was widely known as the Apostle of Africa. His travels are described as more far-reaching than Paul s, but there is a lot of evidence that he

7 ended up in Africa and was martyred. The story of his family going back and forth between Africa and Palestine is parallel to the fact that Jesus family also fled Palestine and went to Egypt, and then later returned when it was safe. This was apparently a common event among the Jews. His mother is thought to have been the person who provided the upper room for the Last Supper and for the event of Pentecost. There are family connections between Mark, Peter, and Barnabas which can be found both in the NT as well as other documentation. We don t get a lot of this kind of detail in the NT, but the story has been preserved in Africa in almost every language and every locale which seems to corroborate its reliability. By putting the sources together, there are certain stories in Mark where Oden thinks that the Gospel writer may be referring to himself in the Gospel, but does so by placing the people or events into an anonymous reference. Because there is very early documentation about Mark in every part of Africa in many languages from independent sources, Oden believes this is not something that was merely fantasized and added later on. But the data have been studiously ignored or discounted by many Western scholars. The study entails data and methods that have not been a part of modern premises of historical-critical biblical study methods that have so overwhelmed biblical studies in the past two hundred years; yet. there is its own kinds of verification and validation. They have relied on records of events that were carefully passed down via orthodox Christianity as well as physical, geographical, archeological, and liturgical origins. This book is available through Amazon in paperback or through Kindle. Did you know that you can get Kindle books without a Kindle? They can be downloaded to your computer, and actually, I ve tried the PC version which makes for a sharper contrast and easier reading. I am beginning to use my books this way, and to think of the Kindle itself as a back-up and a convenience when use of my computer is not convenient.