How To Fight

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.07.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Romans 13:8-14 ; Matthew 18:15-20

I really enjoy the company of my wife, and have ever since I first worked up the courage to cold-call her and ask her out. She’s one of my best friends in the whole world. She’s fun to talk to, fun to go out with, and a great mom. She keeps me honest, and she laughs at at least a reasonable percentage of my jokes. It’s been 19 years this summer since we started going out...and it’s still great.

But to be honest, one of the best things about being in our relationship is that I’ve had to learn how to fight. Now, you might think that’s not a good thing. Fighting comes easy to human beings. We fight just fine with our enemies and people we dislike. Why should we have any desire to learn how to fight with people we love?

The reason is simple. When you hate someone, you don’t care about what happens to them, so long as whatever happens involves emergency dental surgery while they’re on vacation in some far off corner of Baja Mexico. But when you love them, what happens after the conflict matters. If you do the fight wrong, you can shatter or poison something very important to you. So...you have to learn how to fight.

I’m personally very conflict-averse, so I had a bunch of learning to do. I had a very particular fighting style as a young man, which I like to describe as Armadillo Style. At the first whiff of trouble, you drop to the floor and curl into a non-responsive fetal ball. You lie there for as long as it takes. Is it over yet? Can I come out now? The problem with this technique, beyond the fact that it looks very silly, is that when there’s an actual disagreement that needs to be resolved, it doesn’t resolve it. It just festers, or spreads.

There are other fighting styles. There’s the opposite of the Armadillo Style, which in honor of yesterday we’ll the Tropical Storm Style, in which you just bluster and rage without stopping for hours and hours and hours. You are right, and your opponent might as well not exist. Your goal is to wear them down by simply never for a moment actually listening. Though it seems exactly the opposite from Armadillo Style, the two are basically mirror images of each other...and neither is a loving way to fight.

There’s the Poison the Water Hole Style. There, you don’t go after the person directly. When you’re in their presence, you smile and nod. When you’re outside of that person’s presence, you go around whispering to all of your mutual friends about how wrong they are and how important it is that everyone show them how right you are. If you have incriminating pictures, even ones that are heavily Photoshopped, this is when you show them. All this approach does is spread the conflict.

There’s the Call Them A Nazi Style, which is very popular in political circles. That’s when your opponent is the Epitome of All Evil, a Villain, a genocidal monster, the destroyer of all that’s good and right in the world. In a relationship, this approach becomes “Everything Wrong In My Life Is Because of You and Your Failure to Put the Toilet Seat in the Correct Position.” In the church, this approach usually involves naming your opponent the “Servant of Satan” or “Enemy of God.” This style is very common, but it also means that the relationship has been destroyed.

None of these approaches brings the healing that comes when you approach conflict in way governed by Christian faith. Today, from the Gospel of Matthew, we hear Matthew’s remembrance of Christ’s teaching about how Christians should handle conflict. Of all of the Gospels, it is only Matthew who brings us this teaching. Why?

Of all of the early churches that received these first written records of Christ’s teaching, the one that received the Gospel of Matthew appears to have been in the midst of a struggle. That struggle was the wrenching withdrawal of the early church from the synagogue, as the Jesus Movement went from being a part of Judaism to an entirely new faith.

This was a church that knew about the nature of struggle, and about the deeply personal ways in which that struggle could manifest itself even within the life of the church. So they reached back into the teachings they had of Jesus, and remembered this one. What does Jesus tell us when it comes to conflict? What are the ways we should handle it when the relationship is one that matters? There are three general principles of Christian conflict here. The first is directness. The second is witness. The third and most important is healing. Directness and Witness and Healing.

Directness is what Christ counsels as an essential part of conflict. You don’t fight or argue with another Christian unless you’re willing to be up front and direct about it. That means you don’t ignore the problem or try to hide from it. You bring it up. And when you bring it up, you bring it up to them directly. It’s one on one, openly and honestly. This isn’t easy. It’s easier to hide away in passive aggression or in bluster and bravado. But what Christ calls for is for us to focus on the relationship itself, and to be direct.

Witness builds upon directness. If healing and restoration don’t come out of a direct conversation with the person you’re fighting with, then we are to trust that Christ’s spirit will speak more strongly in the witness of others. Those in conflict are to seek out others, and to bring them into the conversation as witnesses.

Notice what this is not. This is nothing like the Poison the Water Hole Style. You’re not going around behind the back of an enemy, seeking to subvert and undercut them at every turn by turning everyone against them. This also ain’t a posse. Jesus isn’t telling us to bring along some extra muscle to hold ‘em while you pound ‘em to a pulp. The purpose of their presence is to reinforce that message through common bonds of friendship and faith. You’re bringing folks with you to bear witness to the brokenness between you and another person. If that doesn’t work....bring more folks.

Why all this work? Because you want reconciliation. You’re seeking to fight in a way that upholds that central principle of Christian faith...that we are to love one another and care for one another and that this doesn’t change in the slightest just because we’re in conflict.

Which leads us to...healing. Now, it’s easy to read the ending of this little passage as giving us permission to cast aside our opponents. Look at Christ’s statement that we’re to treat those who don’t respond to our directness and our witnesses as Gentiles and tax collectors. You can easily take that to mean that we’re to hate ‘em and never have anything to do with them ever ever again. They become the “other.”

Problem is, when Matthew says that, we have to remember how Jesus treated tax collectors. He was, Matthew tells us in Matthew 11:19, often criticized for being a friend to tax collectors and sinners. How did Matthew know this? Well, according to Matthew 9:9, it’s because Matthew himself was a tax collector.

So when Jesus says to treat them that way, he’s not saying to give up on them, or give up on the love that we have for them. He’s saying that we have to treat them with the same earnest care we are to show to any child of God.

We are to be direct. We are to seek witnesses. But we are also to remember that the whole purpose of conflict...if it’s done as Christ taught us...is reconciliation and healing.

That is how to fight.