“Don't give up on each other” - Fr. Pete's Sermon for September 6th, 2026, the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 18:15-20

​A few weeks ago I was talking with another Episcopal priest who had just gone through one of the toughest experiences of their ministry. A church member had become a little bit out of control and my priest friend finally had to remove them from positions of leadership in the church. The priest didn’t tell this person they couldn’t come to worship, and I understand they’ve continued to attend. They were welcome to worship, but for the health of the community they could no longer serve in a position of responsibility.

My priest friend wasn’t happy about this sad situation. But I thought, you know, that’s exactly the kind of painful state of affairs that Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 18.

Now, in case you haven’t noticed, churches are made up of human beings, and yes, even their clergy are human beings. We disappoint one another. We misunderstand one another. We hurt one another. Sometimes we wound one another deeply. As I heard someone say when they were exhausted by various tensions with others, “Well, people gonna be people!”  The question isn’t whether conflict will come. The question is: What do followers of Jesus do when it does?

It’s like Jesus is giving us a set of instructions in this gospel story. I hope you don’t have to ever do this! But: “If another member of the church sins against you,” Jesus says, what? Don’t gossip about them. Don’t recruit allies to your side. Don’t discuss the problem with everyone except the person involved. Go and speak to that person privately.

“If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.” Notice Jesus’ goal. It isn’t to win an argument. It isn’t to prove who’s right. It isn’t punishment. It’s relationship. “If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”

Some of you may remember the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, which outlined rules for a priest to refuse communion. One reason was “unreconciled malice.” David reminded me at our Bible study last Wednesday that such a person could not take communion until they made open repentance, and reconciled with the person they had wronged! For some reason that’s not in our current prayer book!

I do remember years ago at the church where I became an Episcopalian, one Sunday we read this gospel text. And rather than preach a sermon, the priest encouraged those of us sitting in the nave, if we had a problem with someone else in the congregation, or needed to forgive or be forgiven, to go and make things right, right now! And after an awkward silence, people actually did.

It was powerful, very moving, and frankly very scary! There were lots of tears and hugs. Rather than storing up resentment and anger, the priest said, we can ask for forgiveness. We can offer forgiveness. We can try to regain the relationship.

But Jesus says, if that doesn’t work, take one or two others with you—not to gang up on the person, but because perhaps a few trusted voices can help bring understanding and healing. Then, if that doesn’t work, involve the wider church community. Only after every effort at reconciliation has failed does Jesus acknowledge that the relationship may at least for now be broken. This is just how my priest friend handled it.

Frankly, I find all of this a little uncomfortable. But then Jesus says something even stranger: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Now, two weeks ago, in Matthew 16, Jesus spoke those words to Peter. Here, he speaks them to the whole community of disciples. And it’s an enormous responsibility. But I think the key to understanding it comes from the verses surrounding today’s Gospel.

Just before this passage comes the parable of the lost sheep. The shepherd leaves 99 sheep to search for the one who has wandered away. Jesus concludes, “It is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.”

Then comes today’s passage with Jesus’ instructions. And then immediately after it, Peter asks, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus replies, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
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Do you see what the writer of Matthew’s gospel is doing? He has surrounded this difficult teaching with two great themes: seeking the lost and forgiving without limit.

That tells us how we’re meant to understand today’s Gospel. God’s heart is all about binding people together. God’s desire is that no one be lost. God’s first instinct is reconciliation. Even those difficult words at the end take on a different meaning when we remember who Jesus is. “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church,” Jesus says, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

That sounds bad, doesn’t it. Gentiles and tax collectors were despised by good Jewish people. But let’s ask ourselves: how did Jesus treat Gentiles? How did he treat tax collectors? Oh! He ate with them. He welcomed them and hung out with them. He healed them and their children and beloved servants. He loved them.

So even when trust has been broken, even when someone can no longer serve in leadership, even when a relationship cannot be restored right now, that person never ceases to be someone Jesus loves. And neither should they cease to be someone we love.

Jesus closes with one of the most beloved promises in all of Scripture: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” We often quote those words when only a few people show up for Bible study. I quoted them a couple of weeks ago when Lala was in town and we only had 12 souls in church! But notice the context: Jesus is talking about a community doing the hard work of reconciliation.

He is saying that when we gather prayerfully, humbly, and honestly, seeking not our own victory but God’s will, Jesus himself is present among us.

Here in Hawaiʻi, we have a powerful example of what this difficult work can look like. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Queen Liliʻuokalani was imprisoned in an upstairs room of ʻIolani Palace. She had been stripped of her throne. Her people had been denied their sovereignty. Some who supported her had taken part in an unsuccessful effort to restore the monarchy, and the new government threatened them with severe punishment. The Queen faced an agonizing choice.

She believed the lives of some of those supporters were in danger. So, while she was still a prisoner, she voluntarily surrendered her claim to the throne, hoping to secure pardons and protect the lives of those who had risen in her cause.

Think of the cost of that to her. She didn’t say the overthrow was right. She didn’t bless the injustice done to her or to the Hawaiian people. She continued for the rest of her life to tell the truth, to protest, and to advocate for her people. But neither did she allow bitterness to rule her.

During those months of imprisonment, among many other hymns and songs, she wrote the Queen’s Prayer, and we sing verse 1 at the end of every service, but another verse says: Behold not with malevolence/ the sins of man,/ but forgive and cleanse... and let peace be our portion/ now and forevermore.

So beautiful! And this isn’t cheap forgiveness. This isn’t pretending nothing happened. It’s forgiveness born in suffering—the kind of forgiveness that tells the truth about what has been broken while refusing to surrender the soul to hatred or bitterness.

Maybe that’s part of what Jesus means by binding and loosing. There are things we must bind ourselves to: truth, justice, mercy, the dignity of every human being, and the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation.

And there are things we must ask God to loose from us: resentment, vengeance, the need to belittle another person, and the desire to answer wound with wound.

That is also the wisdom behind the Hawaiian concept of hoʻo ponopono: not sweeping conflict under the rug, but bringing what is broken into the light so that, through honesty, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation, things might be made right again.

In just a few minutes, we’ll come together to this table. None of us comes because we’ve never hurt anyone. None of us comes because we’ve gotten every relationship right.

We come because Jesus is still reconciling us—to God and to one another. Week after week. Person after person.

And if Jesus hasn’t given up on us, there’s no reason we should ever give up on one another.

Amen.