Week 50: Got Beef?
Today's entry into our Fifty Things list comes from Matthew 5:23-26. This is part of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. He is addressing the crowd and He says -
So if you're presenting a sacrifice on the altar in the temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God. When you are on the way to court with your adversary, settle your differences quickly. Otherwise your accuser may hand you over to the judge who will hand you over to an officer, and you will be thrown in prison. And if that happens, you surely won't be free again until you have paid the last penny.Matthew 5:23-26
So in this passage, it's kind of broken up into two separate, but related directions and pieces of advice. This passage has both spiritual and practical applications and benefits in our lives. And ultimately, we can boil down the idea behind this passage down to one word.
So #41 on our list is
#41 - RECONCILE
Now depending on what you're dealing with, who you're thinking about, what situation comes to mind when you hear 'Reconcile' or 'Be Reconciled' - it could sound lovely, it could sound irritating or it could sound difficult or even impossible. And this is one of those situations where we tend to weigh what happened to us and what we did to others completely differently in our mind. I don't even think that's necessarily an indicator of sin or evil intentions, I just think that's the way our brains work sometimes as a matter of psychological self-preservation or just because we tend to focus on OUR feelings first, OUR wounds first, OUR needs first - and maybe we don't have the same strong feelings about what we've done to other people.
When somebody hurts us, we expect them or at least we want the other party to fix it. Come to me and fix it. Make with the apology. Make it up to me. Grovel if necessary. But when it comes to when we've hurt other people… we often sing a different tune. We often have a different dialogue that plays in our head - sometimes it's something like - "it's not that big a deal, they can get over it. Let it go already." Or maybe it's "hey, if they've truly got a problem, they know where to find me. They've got my number. They know where I live. I'm not hiding." "They know where I sit at church each week - if it's that big a deal, come and talk to me."
Now, I mean, this seems like a clear case of 'Do Unto Others' as you would have them do unto you - but we rarely see ourselves as the villain in our own stories. And we rarely put what we did to other people on the same emotional level as what others have done to us. Because we feel it differently. We're on a different end of the equation of pain in these situations. You know, maybe, we know we hurt someone, but we didn't even mean to - or we didn't mean to hurt them as bad as we did. Or maybe we realize way later… like the example that Jesus gives in this passage. You're coming to worship - you're bringing a sacrifice, or in modern day equivalency - maybe a gift or a tithe to hopefully do good in the name of God… and suddenly, I don't know, maybe the pastor says something… maybe there's a line in one of the worship songs that triggers a thought in your head and a realization… or maybe the Holy Spirit just catches you at a tender, open moment and puts on your heart the realization that you hurt somebody… or somebody has "beef" with you. And what makes this particular instruction from Jesus more difficult or challenging for some of us is that Jesus says when we remember that somebody's got beef with us - he puts the responsibility for reconciliation on US. Being a follower of Jesus means not waiting for the wounded party that you hurt to do the emotional labor and come to us. We go to them.
If you're presenting a sacrifice on the altar at the temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person.Matthew 5:23-24
And that's our first takeaway today -
THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR RECONCILIATION IS ON US
When we've hurt someone… we need to go to them. Jesus does not allow us the excuse, the convenience, the escape route of 'I'll wait for the other person to make the first move.' The verse doesn't say - 'If you're presenting a sacrifice and someone CONFRONTS YOU.' The verse says - "if we remember that somebody has something against us." I think it would be safe to add-in "If we realize that somebody has something against us." I mean think about this scenario - nobody has confronted you recently. Nobody comes looking for you. Nobody called you out. Nobody sent you a nasty-gram or tagged you on social media. You just 'remembered.' The thought popped into your head. And I think another takeaway from this - is that Jesus wants His followers to develop what I'll call "Moral Self-Awareness."
JESUS WANTS US TO BE MORALLY SELF-AWARE
Enough to the point that we think about our actions and our words and even our timing - enough to ask ourselves - "Did I hurt somebody? Intentionally or accidentally?" "Was I unfair? Was I dismissive? Did I make a joke that landed differently than I wanted it to?" "Was I just not a good example on a particular day - even to my kids who may have missed it?" I believe that Jesus wants us to be more aware of our actions and words than we sometimes are. I think He might want us to reflect and consider even our demeanor or attitude towards people sometimes. To think about if we messed up and need to reconcile with someone - even over something small.
Some of us - we are really good at this. Almost too good. Some of you were raised Catholic - you carry that catholic guilt around with you about everything and everyone… I'm kidding.. kind of… some of you are thinking about going to confession just because you had a fraction of a second where you admitted that some of that guilt was unhealthy. Here's a news flash - that guilt doesn't have to be systemic to just one denomination or belief system. I'll see your Catholic guilt and raise you a pile of Baptist shame. Some of us are already worrying' about this kind of stuff. Maybe unhealthily so. And this example that Jesus gives to us - I think it can set us free a little if we're dealing with that. We can reconcile and be reconciled to the fact that things are okay even if they're not resolved. We'll talk more about that in a bit.
My wife and I have ADHD. And that can come with a special kind of anxiety sometimes called RSD- Rejection Sensitivity Disorder. That means that we are often hyper-aware when "the vibes are off" even just a little. And that can cause us to spiral or catastrophic in our own minds a little, making us ask ourselves questions like 'what is something I said?' 'Was it something I did?' 'Are they mad at me?' - I just want to clarify that that is not what Jesus wants from us or requires from us. I don't think He wants us being big balls of anxiety or stress or guilt or shame. We can be morally self-aware without picking up on every micro-expression on somebody's face on a random Tuesday afternoon and allowing our anxious brains to write a story about how it's somehow our fault.' We can have reassurance and confidence in Jesus when we are walking with Him. We're called to be morally self-aware not anxiously hyper-vigilant. Some of you don't even have ADHD or RSD but you can relate because maybe you grew up in a household or worked in an environment where you had to walk on eggshells all the time and your safety or emotional well-being depended on the mood of someone else. Again - that's a fear response that's driving your hyper-vigilance. That's not being morally self-aware. That's a trauma response. Okay. I just want to make that clear. To be morally self-aware does not mean to go around worrying that everybody else's stern-face or weird energy is your fault. It's probably not. I recommend prayer and therapy. And I'm deadly serious about both of those things. Look at the wording here in the passage - "You suddenly remember that someone has something against you." That seems pretty specific. You REMEMBER… there is a clear situation that you REMEMBER that HAS DEFINITELY HAPPENED… where SOMEONE -a SPECIFIC SOMEONE… has SOMETHING - a SPECIFIC SOMETHING… AGAINST YOU… not against the world or a bad day 0 but YOU IN PARTICULAR. Dealing with constant low-level anxiety and the need to people please and 'fix' a situation that is not your fault and that doesn't require your 'fixing' to begin with is not the same as being 'morally self-aware.' Capeesh?
Now- all of that said - I hope this doesn't come off like I'm giving mixed messages here - because I still think it's okay to examine our own SPECIFIC actions and words and attitudes and review them and come to the conclusion - "Hey. You know - that person didn't say anything to me - but I'm pretty sure I said something hurtful. It might not be a big deal. - but I'm gonna go and apologize to them and make it right and own my poor choice.' That is being morally self-aware. And being morally self-aware helps us to reconcile.
So let's talk about how we reconcile. The first step is to
REMEMBER
Sometimes you remember because God put it on your heart. Sometimes you remember because It's a natural extension of being morally self-aware. Sometimes you're going to remember you hurt someone through personal
REFLECTION
And I'm gonna give you a third possibility here. There are certain situations where somebody else gives you a
REMINDER
You may have forgotten what you did completely. But somebody else hasn't. And it may be brought up as a reminder. More on that later.
When that happens - you need to feel genuine
REPENTANCE
You're probably not going to have a successful reconciliation if you're not genuinely sorry about what you did. If you still think what you did was funny or deserved or you're justifying it to yourself someway - your reconciliation isn't gonna get very far. Because the next step is to
RENDEZVOUS
With the person you hurt
In Matthew 5:24, Jesus said
GO and be reconciled to that person.Matthew 5:24
And if you go to meetup with them without having repentance in your heart - humility in your heart - a genuine desire to patch things up - this is not gonna go well.
Can you imagine? You're sitting in church - suddenly you're reminded that someone has something against you. So you set down your offering envelope, and you go seek that person out and your attitude, your open is - (New York accent) "Hey! You got beef with me?" I said, "Do you have a problem with me?" "There's nobody else here - do you have a problem with me?" No "I don't have a problem with you, check my pockets, I don't have a problem with you - do you have a problem with me?"
That's not gonna go well. Because you don't have true repentance in your heart. You're4 just going because scripture tells you to go. You've still gotta go with the right attitude and the right motivation. If you're coming in hanging onto resentment - or trying to make the hurt that you've caused someone else - intentionally or unintentionally the other person's problem and not yours - you are not reconciling. You're just role-playing as a follower of Christ and following the letter of scripture but not the spirit behind it.
No, you're gonna have to come with a spirit of repentance. And when you do meet that person and say something like - "Hey. I think I hurt you by doing x, y or z. I want to apologize sincerely, and I want to make things right. I want to give you the opportunity to tell me how I made you feel and how I can make it up to you and just give you the chance to say anything that needs to be said and I will LISTEN.
If we're going to reconcile, we need to take
RESPONSIBILITY
Owning our actions is taking responsibility. Being open to listening is taking responsibility. And by the way - our natural reactions sometimes when people being detailing how we hurt them and how it made them feel - is to minimize or diminish the other person's feelings. To downplay our intentions or the impact of what we said or did. Because most people don't like hurting other people. And to be confronted with the pain we caused someone - it's not a good feeling. Sometimes we want to push back, or even say - well you see, the reason I did this was because you did 'that' and try and justify our own behavior. That's not taking responsibility, That's not taking ownership for what we did. That's deflection and minimizing and even a form of emotional invalidation. That's not reconciling. That's making excuses. Before you go about defending your intention, listen to their experience. Intent matters - for sure. But so does impact.
No. If we want to reconcile, we need to take responsibility but our job does not end there. Once we take responsibility and own our stuff and apologize, we need to
REPAIR
The relationship. And that doesn't happen overnight. It happens little by little. And it happens by
REBUILDING TRUST
Listen, you can do all the right things. Truly. You can knock yourself out and even go overboard trying to be different than you were before. And it may take a while for that person to warm back up to you and trust you again. Things may still be awkward. For a while. Depending on the severity of the trust that was broken to begin with or the pain that was caused to begin with - it can take a long while for that person to see - "hey, they're serious about repairing this relationship. They're genuinely repentant and sorry for what they've done. They're committed to making things right moving forward." Now - some things - they may be small - you may remember some small little thing, you still bring it before the other person to reconcile because it's the right thing to do and it's what Jesus asks us to do - and the other person may say, 'no big deal.' Thanks for saying 'sorry.' Lose no sleep over this. But some wounds take more time to heal. Some relationships take longer to repair. Cause at the end of the day - that's what we're after.
RECONCILING IS HEALING
That's the objective. To bring healing to the other person. To heal our relationships. To stop the bleeding. To prevent things like this from happening again. And it is possible to fully reconcile in some cases and be better than you ever were before.
I'll share a story of my own reconciliation with someone. When I was a much younger youth pastor, there was an individual in our youth group who I loved very much - cared about very much - wanted the best for - and they fell in with another individual who was a bad influence. Who had a reputation for taking advantage of women. Who was an excellent and charismatic liar. Who knew how to fly under the radar and get what he wanted while remaining in the good graces of leadership. And we didn't even know all of this at first, we found a lot of this stuff out through his interaction with this young lady. Well, I felt like I had invested a lot of effort and emotion and love into this person, my wife too - lot of time, we had a relationship over multiple years… and this young lady got involved with this troublesome guy and left. We became the enemies kind of, the youth group became the problem and a symbol for all that was wrong with the world to both of them - and it hurt. It hurt really bad. I was angry. I was sad. I was frustrated. And I have a mouth. And sometimes the way I deal with pain is through humor. And I was around a small group of other people… two or three at most and somebody brought up this relationship and the young lady's absence from our youth group. And I made a really inappropriate comment about their toxic relationship at her expense. Not cool. But I am human and a sinner just like everyone else. I made a mistake. But I didn't think much of it. Said it, got the laughs, got my pain out, moved on…
And then one day I got a
REMINDER
Of what I had said. Not because I remembered, or because I had spent time in reflection and had become more morally self-aware of things I did in the past. I got a reminder because this person showed up YEARS later on a night we were hosting the Young Adults Group. They weren't there for that, they were actually looking for something else entirely - but she was spotted by people who used to know her, and then I came up - and I'm not gonna lie. It was awkward. I was happy to see her. Truly. But I also was suspicious because of the way we left things. I didn't know if the other guy was still in the picture. But it wasn't just awkward from my end - you could tell there was some genuine hesitation and suspicion and side eye being thrown my way as well. But we talked, the night went on a little longer, she came into Young Adults Group, and it went really well. There was genuine love being shown there, we were starting to relax and let our guards down. So after Young Adults, I'm locking up and she sticks around with a couple more people from the group and we're all talking out back again. And, again, it's going well - and out of nowhere she hit me with, "Hey. Did you say… and again, it was beyond the pale, I'm not going to repeat it" to this person that knew me?"
I had not thought about saying that in years. I did not think about it after I said it. But people talked. And it got back to her. So now I had a
REMINDER
That I hurt someone. Now I know. There's other group members there too. This doesn't make me look particularly good as a youth and young adults pastor or a human being. I can tell you that the second I was reminded about that, I felt really bad about it. I wished that I could go back in time and take it back - never say it. I didn't say it with the intention of hurting her, but it didn't matter - it had definitely hurt her. And I was truly sorry about it. I was genuinely repentant about it.
REPENTANCE
Well, the rendezvous was already happening.
RENDEZVOUS
Here we were. I was being confronted with this thing that I said that this person had against me and rightfully so. And ironically, since I had said what I said in front of a couple of people, I was being reminded of what I said in front of a couple of people. Now I had a choice. I could say, "let's not talk about that here. Let's schedule time to talk it over over coffee." I could've said, "I'm not sure that's exactly the way it went down. Are you sure that's what I said? It's been a while." I mean, I could've out and out denied it in an attempt to protect my own reputation and act like I was more of a saint than I was. But I took responsibility.
RESPONSIBILITY
Right there. Right then. I'm not gonna lie. When she confronted me with it - it was like I got slapped. I literally paused for what felt like an eternity - probably less than ten seconds - I just so wasn't expecting it. But I said- disgusted with myself. "Yeah. I did. And I'm sorry. It was wrong. It was wrong then, it is wrong now. I was hurt and that's why I did it, but it doesn't make it right. I should've been better. Please forgive me.
I caused harm. And now I was seeking to
RECONCILE
Now here's the good news. We did. This person is one of my closest friends to this day. She is family. She is an auntie to my daughter. We're Ride or Dies. But I'll be real honest with you - it took a little bit. Not as long as I thought it would, thank God - but it still took several more meetings of kind of feeling each other out, and repairing the relationship
REPAIR
And rebuilding trust
REBUILDING TRUST
And that took literally seeing how I would respond in certain situations. She was well within her rights not to just automatically go - "We're fine. Erase. Erase. Erase." It's a good reminder - that the attempt to reconcile - it's not transactional. You don't get to dictate the terms if you're the one who hurt the other person. You don't get to go - "I apologized. Now you give me forgiveness and we're good again." "I attempted to reconcile. Now you must trust me immediately and welcome me back into your life." Doesn't work that way.
Reconciliation is not a vending machine. But you know what even the attempt to reconcile can be?
RESOLUTION
When you're seeking to reconcile, you're not just seeking forgiveness, but you're seeking resolution. I hope you get it. But the sad truth is, we don't always. Reconciliation doesn't mean you both pretend like nothing happened. Reconciliation doesn't always mean that every relationship returns to exactly what it was before. Because apologies don't always erase consequences. And reconciliation requires two willing participants.
And that's where this can be a little painful. Because you can genuinely desire reconciliation, but the other person might not. Sometimes people change. Hearts harden. They become influenced by unhealthy voices in their lives. Pain changes them. Fear changes them. Power changes them. Anger changes them. Time… changes them. And you can remember old conversations, remember times where you laughed together. Remember doing ministry together. Remember hanging out and spending good times together. Sometimes you can get those things back. Sometimes your relationship matures and grows into something completely different but still good. Sometimes, as is the case for my story, with two willing participants both seeking reconciliation - it becomes better than ever. But there may be some cases in which our desire to reconcile cannot magically manufacture the other party's desire to reconcile. Which can be sad. And painful. And disappointing. Especially sometimes after you put yourself out there and own things and try to make it right.
There's a verse from Romans 12 that keeps coming back into these discussions. The apostle Paul writes -
If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all peopleRomans 12:18 (NASB)
In some cases - you've done everything you can. You've done what's asked of us by Jesus, you've done what's required. You've done the right thing. As much as it depends on you, you've attempted to reconcile. But reconciliation doesn't just depend on you. It takes two to reconcile. And sometimes the other person doesn't want to. In that case - go in peace… you have done everything you can to live in peace with the other party, gather your gift and bring it back to the altar with a clean conscience. And at that point, you can have peace in your heart and it's time to release the outcome and breathe and move on with your life and move on in your walk with Jesus.
So if you're presenting a sacrifice on the altar in the temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God.Matthew 5:23-24
You went to be reconciled. The other person didn't want to reconcile. But you still did what Jesus asked you to do and even though you didn't achieve reconciliation, you achieved a peaceful resolution.
RESOLUTION
Thank you for letting me share with you today. Next week we'll talk about conflict resolution versus conflict escalation, and we'll talk about what it means to reconcile not just as individuals but as an institution. I hope you'll join us for "Got Beef part II." Until next time, may you have the courage to make peace where you can, the grace to own what's ours, and the wisdom to realize that reconciliation takes two, but it works best when the Holy Spriit is in the mix too. God bless you, have a great week!