When You're Here, You're Family? The Messy Truth About Church

Our reading this morning comes from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew,

the 18th chapter.

Jesus said to the disciples, if your brother

or sister sins against you, go and point out the faults when

the two of you are alone. If you are listened to,

you have regained that one. 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 2 or 3 witnesses. If that person

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.

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.

Again, truly I tell you, if 2 of you agree on earth

about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father

in heaven. For where 2 or 3 are

gathered in my name, I am

there among them. This is the word

of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I want to start out with a question for you, a little

who said this. Okay, who said this?

You've heard this before, trust me, alright.

When you're here, you're family.

Hold on, I'll let you think about that for a second. I'll give you a

hint though, when you're here, you're family, who said that? The answer is not Jesus,

it's not. Or if he did say it, the gospel writers

didn't write that one down, didn't write that one down. Alright, what do

we think? Who said that?

Yeah, it's what you think it is. What? What?

Your mom? They would want you to think that, that your mom said that.

This was the marketing tagline for the Italian-American casual dining

restaurant chain Olive Garden, right?

Come on, yeah, okay.

And it's been a while. This was introduced as the

restaurant slogan in 1998 as part

of a rebranding strategy after they added their unlimited

breadsticks and soups on their menu.

And I like that you said your mother because this marketing message

was— it was created to project that image,

right? A warm, hospitable, you know,

home-cooked meal reminiscent of a traditional

Italian family dinner, right? When you're here, you're family.

Right? Alright, today we are talking about church,

church. You know, I preach a lot about, you know, who God is and also

about who God calls us to be, but we don't often talk just about,

you know, the community gathered here, church. Who are we? What do we

do? And when talking about church,

I— and this is true for every church I've ever been in,

every church, I often hear people say, something along

those same lines as Olive Garden, right? You know, people will

say, our congregation is, you know, it's just like

a big family.

Every church, they've said that, right? And I like it.

That's a nice sentiment right there. I like what we're going for with that,

but I do worry. I do worry. I worry that

what we can often infer by church as

family is a truth in the Olive Garden

sense of the use of family.

Because what when you're here, you're family was meant to convey was, you know,

a warm, hospitable, home-cooked experience that would remind

you of a simpler time, right, of when you

were little and when you were a kid and you'd go to your nonna's house

for some pasta fagioli, right, and you're trying to evoke that. Everything is

simple and quaint. But really,

the phrase, when you're here, you're family, it was just

to get everyone to come and load up on breadsticks, right?

You know, eat a dozen breadsticks, some empty calories before your meal actually

arrived. And I do, I worry

that when we say offhanded things like, you know, our church is just

like a big family. What we're trying to convey is that it's,

you know, it's warm, it's hospitable,

you know, we all get along, it's family, you know, where it's like sitting around

a comforting home-cooked meal,

reminds you of a simpler time of, you know, going to church when you were

a kid. But really,

it's something we say to just get more people here, right, you know, to grow

our membership, run more programs, you know, fill us up with breadsticks.

I think what both of these ideas of church and family fail to wrestle

with is that, you know, life together is actually— can

be pretty hard. You know, families,

they're not perfect. We're not perfect. Our life together

is full of complication. You know, people ask me,

they'll say, how's it having a 3rd kid, you know,

now that Peter's joined our family this year? I give them the

warm breadstick answer, right? What do I tell you guys? I'm like, oh, it's great,

you know? It's more fun.

It's more excitement, more love.

That's true. That's true. But what I don't tell you is that

there's also more crying at our house these days,

Peter and everyone, you know? More stuff. Babies, there's too

much stuff. More crumbs, more tiredness,

more of a high-wire act to keep everyone sane and getting along.

But we do, we pull out the breadsticks every once in a while. You say

you're coming over to my house, you better believe it, I'm going to clean it

up before you come. I'll put all the toys away. I'll shove

all the art supplies underneath the easel that are everywhere in the sunroom. Crumbs in

the kitchen, I'm going to sweep them up. The folded clothes on

the couch, they're going to be in a drawer in a closet.

If you're lucky, we'll even cut some fresh flowers

from the garden and put them in a vase and place them on the table

when you arrive. We'll hide all the dirt and

the grime because when you're here,

you know, you're family. We want it to be warm

and hospitable.

But that's not always life, and that's not always

the church. The reality is that if

you are family, then you're actually

in the midst of the chaos. And if you're going

to be a part of the church, you also sign up for the

life lived together in real meaningful

ways. And that means life together

can be hard. This is referencing the

book that Pastor James talked about last week in his sermon, The Cost of Discipleship,

written by the great pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He says our

lives together, our lives of discipleship, they come with

a cost. And the cost is that

when we enter into relationship with each other,

When we choose to

go from our self-isolation and enter into community,

when we come from our own separate spaces and we come together

here in this church, things are bound to get complicated.

But take heart, this is the same now as it was

back in the time of Jesus. Even with Jesus

around, as we heard In the 18th chapter of Matthew's

Gospel, members of the church were still sinning against

one another. Even as Matthew writes this gospel,

right, in this time of the early church, this time that we tend to hold

up as the, you know, the gold standard, if only we could get our church

back to the early church when, you know, believing and

evangelizing and practicing our faith was real and great.

But this passage shows you that there was definitely disagreement,

letdown, sin,

brokenness. And to go back

even further, this method of reproving and

reconciliation that Jesus is laying out where

if one member of the church cannot work it out with another and then you

get 2 or 3 people involved. Jesus didn't come up with this; this

is from the Torah. This is from Deuteronomy 19.

Just goes to show you this is ancient stuff.

People, disagreements, sinning,

letting each other down.

Yes, family,

no vacuum can remove, no broom can sweep,

no amount of tidying before company comes over or,

you know, donning our Sunday best to come to church can clean

up and fix our hearts and our relationships.

Only God can do that. Only grace can do that.

Only love can heal the most important sins and brokenness in our

lives. Only can 2 people

with God's love in their hearts and grace on their

lips Listen to each other and seek

to mend what is broken for the betterment of each other,

the betterment of church, and yes, for the betterment of God's

The life of discipleship and of the church,

it comes with a cost but Jesus is here to

tell us that's a cost worth having.

And this is almost redundant, but I'm just going to say it, you know,

because I'm hoping to prove my point here, right?

Despite the chaos of my life

right now, would I still choose to have Eliza,

Joe, and Peter in my life? And that's ridiculous,

but, you know, even if I knew that someday my

office would be a nursery full of dirty diapers and I

have to schedule 30 minutes of each of my days just to put away toys.

You know, if I knew that that's what I was in for, among all the

other things, would I still choose it? Yeah, of course.

Of course I would.

And God makes that an easy choice, too.

After all, even God looked down on this chaotic

world and He thought, you know what?

I need to be a part of that. You know, Jesus came to earth,

dived right into it all, saw the best and the worst that humans have

to offer, but who in being in

relationship with us was also able to place the one

thing in our hearts that would

ultimately overcome all the shortcomings.

By coming down, Jesus placed His love, placed His very

being into our

hearts.

And we know this because today we heard a promise from Jesus,

and the promise He gave is, it's enough.

'Cause the promise he made calls us here together.

The promise he made calls us to gather together in fellowship over

a meal on Wednesday nights or to serve our neighbors in

need next week. The promise calls us to gather

in prayer or in study as we grow in knowledge of who

God is and who God calls us to be. This promise calls

us to worship as we receive God in word and

sacrament. The promise calls us to

be the church and the promise is this. Jesus promised long

ago, he said, where 2 or 3 are gathered in my name,

I'll be there among them.

I'll end with this.

Another of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's works, it's a wonderful little book,

it's called Life Together.

And he wrote this in 1938 while part of an underground

seminary, a secret seminary in Germany that was resisting Nazi rule

and its power over the church. And in this book,

he began with a quote from the Psalms,

Psalm 133:1.

Psalms 133:1

Behold how good and how pleasant it is for

brethren to dwell together in unity.

At a time when his country and his countrymen were uniting

under sin and division and hate, it was quite bold

for Bonhoeffer to write of believers coming together in unity and

goodness because it seems like the exact opposite was happening. Right? It was a radical

proclamation to write at that time with theological

clarity that true fellowship begins

only when romanticized ideal notions

of community, when they are shattered against

the reality of human sin, that the life together is not

about coming to a congregation of perfectly

sanctified people, but it means

coming to a community where God is known fully

in the Word proclaimed and the grace of the sacraments just as

Jesus promised.

And because it is God who

is found here, And it is

Christ who called each and every person

here.

We're not called here by our ideals and our warm sentiments,

but because we are called here by Christ himself, then what

holds us together, what makes us church,

is the fact that The only thing we actually

all have in common here at the end of the day is

Jesus.

You know, can life together be hard?

Yeah. Can life together be messy?

Yes. Will the church and your fellow Christians let you down?

It's pretty much guaranteed. Can this life

together cause us to sin?

It's human nature.

But this life together that we call church is the place

where we find Jesus.

And because Jesus promised that long ago,

Then what you find here is not unlimited

soup and breadsticks, although that does sound really good, you know.

You don't find a casual Italian dining experience

here. What you find is

Jesus,

so that when you're here,

you're part of God's family.

Amen. Would you pray with me?

Holy, gracious, and loving God, we cling to your word

of promise today, a promise that reminds

us that as we journey through this life together,

we don't go through it alone.

You are what stands at the center.

You give us strength.

You give us grace and love to bind

up the brokenhearted, to mend that which is broken,

to give us new life so that

hurts and shortcomings and sins can be laid at Your

feet. Holy One, we give

you thanks for our church this day,

for this community of imperfect people brought

together and made whole by your perfect

love. It is in

your holy and blessed name that we pray.