Ministry of Reconciliation
Updated: Sep 5
Rev. Bobby Musengwa
Transitional General Presbyter
A Weekly Reflection for Mission Presbytery | Matthew 18:15-20
Memorable Coffee Hour in Harper
This summer I worshiped with the good people of Harper Presbyterian Church. I have also worshiped with other congregations, such as First Presbyterian Church in Junction, Pipecreek, Lampasas, as well as several others. I have had great experiences in all the congregations I have worshiped at.
Harper is a small town. The church building is small and beautiful, the kind you might drive past and not know is there unless you were looking for it. In fact, I passed it and did not immediately see it, because it is tucked towards the back, away from the street.
That Sunday, several families were missing. It was the last weekend before school started, so I understood.
After worship, I joined the congregation for coffee hour in the fellowship hall, which felt more like a small, beautiful house than a hall. I sat with the folks there and I was amazed by their hospitality.
But what struck me the most was the reminder of how closely related most of the people were. Many people are family, and you’d better treat them right just as you’d treat your close family well.
You cannot have a hidden grudge in a town like that. You cannot avoid the person you are mad at.
You will see them at the gas station, at the school pickup line, at the next funeral.
That is the world Jesus was actually talking to in Matthew 18.
The Text Matthew Wrote For
"If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone."
Most of us read this in a city mindset. We picture a big church where you could avoid a person for years if you wanted to. Skip a service. Change small groups. Never run into them at the grocery store.
But Jesus was not talking to city church. He was talking to villages. Small, tight, related communities where NOT reconciling was not really an option. Where your neighbor was your cousin. Where the "two or three witnesses" he mentions were probably your uncles.
Musa W. Dube, a New Testament scholar from Botswana, who now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, writes about scripture through the eyes of African communal life, where the self is never separate from the community.
Read that way, Matthew 18 is not a legal process for an institution. It is what you naturally do in a village where walking away from your neighbor is not really possible, because you will see them again tomorrow.
ASK YOURSELF: DOES MY CONGREGATION STILL LIVE LIKE HARPER, OR HAVE WE STARTED ACTING LIKE STRANGERS?
What I Learned in the Village
I have my own village too.
When I went back to my ancestral village in South Africa, I got to see family, including my aunties, who were very old by then. I have taken my two daughters there separately, in different years. Each of them also spent time in Pretoria, a big, busy city.
When I asked my daughters which one they preferred, city or village, both of them said the village. I was surprised at first. But they explained it. The slower pace. The deep connection people had with one another. That is what pulled them in.
Most of the Bible was written by and for people who lived exactly like Harper, and exactly like my village in Venda. Small. Related. Bound to each other whether they liked it or not.
THIS IS THE LENS I WANT US TO USE ON THIS TEXT. NOT A COURTROOM LENS. A VILLAGE LENS.
Why "Gentile and Tax Collector" Is Not the Exit Door
Jesus says if the person will not listen even to the church, "let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector."
That sounds like banishment, until you remember who Jesus was.
Earlier, in Matthew 9, we had been reminded that Jesus ate with tax collectors. Jesus reached toward Gentiles.
And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. (Matthew 9:10-12)
So calling someone a "Gentile and a tax collector" was never Jesus' way of saying "you are dead to me." It was Jesus saying, "here is someone I still go looking for."
In a village, this makes even more sense. You cannot un-know your cousin. You cannot pretend a person does not exist when you will pass their porch on the way to church next Sunday. The village will not let the conflict be the last word. It keeps pulling people back into relationship, on purpose or not.
WHOEVER YOU HAVE QUIETLY WRITTEN OFF, THEY ARE STILL YOUR NEIGHBOR. GO FIND THEM.
Ubuntu and the Village Down the Road from Apartheid
I think of my own village and I think of what South Africa had to face after apartheid ended.
Desmond Tutu led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on a value central to village life across Africa, UBUNTU, "I am because we are."
A person's harm was named out loud, in community, in front of those they hurt. Not buried. Not avoided. Named, and then, where possible, restored.
That is the same instinct behind Matthew 18. Go to the person. Bring witnesses if you must. Bring it to the whole community if it comes to that.
But at every step, the goal is restoration, because the community cannot function while the wound stays open.
It is the same instinct that made the man in Harper unable to imagine his own children dating a stranger from three towns over. Everyone belongs to everyone.
Our own Book of Confessions carries this same conviction, and it did not wait for a peaceful decade to say it.
The Confession of 1967 was written in the middle of the American civil rights movement, and it is built entirely around one verse, 2 Corinthians 5:19, "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself."
The confession names THREE DIRECTIONS of reconciliation: with God, with other people, and within society itself.
Section II calls the church "his reconciling community." This would be a community entrusted with the actual work of healing the enmities that separate people from God and from each other.
And it names the target directly: "God's reconciling love breaks down every form of discrimination based on racial or ethnic difference."
The confession does not treat that as a nice idea. It calls the church to abolish such discrimination in its own life, not just preach against it somewhere else.
That is Matthew 18 at the scale of a whole nation, and it is Matthew 18 at the scale of a fellowship hall in Harper. Same wound. Same call. Go toward the harm, name it, and do not stop until it is healed.
READ THE CONFESSION OF 1967 THIS WEEK. ASK WHERE YOUR CONGREGATION HAS SETTLED FOR DISTANCE INSTEAD OF DOING THE WORK OF RECONCILIATION.
When the City Forgets How to Be a Village
Here is the hard question for a lot of our congregations, especially the ones in San Antonio and Austin, and every growing suburb between here and there.
In big cities, people often do not know one another. They are not related. They do not share ancestors or porches or coffee hour gossip. That anonymity has a cost. It lets conflict sit unresolved for years, because nobody is forced to face it.
Father Damien understood the cost of that kind of distance. In 1873 he chose to live at the leprosy colony in Kalaupapa, Hawaii, a place people were sent to be forgotten.
He built homes there. He dug graves with dignity.
He refused to let the world's exile be the final word on those people.
He went toward them the way a village goes toward its own, even though the wider world had decided those people were no longer part of anybody's village.
The church hierarchy did not approve of his actions, but he knew Jesus approved. He died loving and serving his marginalized neighbors, far away from his own home.
In 1969, the state of Hawaii honored Father Damien, now known as Saint Damien of Molokai, with a bronze statue which stands as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol.
Our Book of Order reminds us that church discipline is never for its own sake. It exists "to honor God's own justice, mercy, and forbearance."
That only works if we choose to act like Harper even when we are scattered across a big city. If we choose to remember each other's names. If we choose to show up at the porch instead of letting the silence win.
THIS WEEK, TREAT ONE PERSON IN YOUR CONGREGATION LIKE THEY LIVE THREE HOUSES DOWN FROM YOU, EVEN IF THEY LIVE ACROSS TOWN.
Where Two or Three Are Gathered
The passage ends with a promise. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."
At a potluck, that line is comfort. In the middle of a hard conversation about conflict, it becomes something sturdier. It is a promise for the hardest room in the building, the room where two people who hurt each other finally sit down together. Christ shows up there too.
My daughters chose the village over the city, and they could not fully explain why until they tried to put it into words. It was the connection. It was knowing you belonged to people who were not going anywhere.
Our Matthew 25 invitation calls us toward building vital congregations and dismantling the things that separate us, I think of Harper. I think of Venda.
I think of what it means to be a people who cannot really walk away from each other, and who are better for it.
FIND YOUR TWO OR THREE THIS WEEK. GO SIT WITH THEM. INVITE THEM FOR COFFEE, OR TEA. GO ON, RECONNECT AND RECONCILE ONCE AGAIN. Jesus would love that!
Much love to you, the people of God,
Rev. Bobby Musengwa
Transitional General Presbyter
Mission Presbytery
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