Text: Matthew 18:21-35; Romans 14:1-12; Date: Sept. 11, 2005

As we all have seen on our TV’s, New Orleans was drowned in several metres of polluted water when two levees broke in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This may well be the greatest natural disaster in American history—a tragedy of truly Biblical proportions.

I do not for one minute intend to compare the victims of New Orleans to the armies of Pharaoh. Nevertheless, today’s first lesson gives us the image of pent-up water breaking forth to cause death and destruction, as the waters of the sea return to drown the Egyptian army.

In a limited way, we humans are able to constrain and direct some of the forces of nature, to give protection and safety to our neighbours. In areas of the Gulf Coast that received Katrina’s full force, no such constraint was possible, and whole communities were leveled by the winds. New Orleans was partly protected by the levees, which were built over the years to keep the waters at bay—until the storm of the century hit.

For many years, the levees held back the waters, protecting the community they surrounded.

At least…the physical community, its buildings and infrastructure, remained intact. The true nature of the city, which many of us in this part of the world have mostly associated with Mardi Gras and jazz, has been revealed—and it is a community in significant trouble. It seems clear that New Orleans might have been better able to withstand or even prevent the flood, if it had been a healthier community.

I don’t intend to go any further in analyzing the news. You can buy The Globe and Mail for that. Rather, I want to suggest that this breakdown of community on a large scale stands as a lesson for all communities. The waters of chaos can easily overwhelm us if we do not pay attention to those things that restrain them. Whether we are talking about a large city, or a small town, or a church congregation, communities stumble for many reasons.

The Epistle and Gospel lessons for today are both concerned with the life of the Christian community. They point to two significant reasons why churches stumble, and give us some valuable tools with which to build and maintain community.

Building community is not something that we just do once, and then leave the community to run itself. Even a car needs periodic maintenance, to ensure that it continues to function as designed. Likewise, life in community—from family to nation—needs constant attention.

Paul’s concern is for a local church beset by divisions between people he calls the "strong" and the "weak." The division is essentially one of convictions about how the Christian faith is to be lived out. The behaviour and attitudes of some people offend others, and the two parties end up judging each other negatively.

Paul does not favour either group over the other, but condemns the judgments of both. He calls for mutual respect for each other’s faith stance, as long as all is done to the honour of the Lord.

Judgment does not belong to any person but to God. True Christian community is built when we welcome those who disagree with us, sometimes profoundly, respecting them and their positions out of love for the Saviour we all follow.

This is not to say that Christian community should be without boundaries or standards. Far from it! God does ask of us that "higher righteousness" of which Jesus spoke in the Sermon on the Mount. That’s just the point: God requires it of us. It is not we who are to require it of others, and not we who are to judge others who, by our standards, appear to fall short. If there is to be judgement (and there is!), it will be on God’s terms—not ours.

Let us welcome each other, then, as fellow disciples, and children of God. And let us live out that discipleship by striving to learn the hardest lesson of the Gospel—forgiveness.

The need for forgiveness is constant. Even with the best of intentions, people in community will do wrong to each other. That’s a basic part of being human. What should distinguish the Christian community from others is what we do with those wrongs.

In the first place, as we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel, we are called to deal with them in love, not avoiding them, or compounding them by gossip or complaint. But beyond that, we should not let the wrongs done in our midst destroy the community, but are instead called to show mercy, and to forgive.

Nothing destroys community faster than the holding of grudges and resentment. When someone sins against us, they place themselves in our debt, giving us power over them. To forgive is to give up that power, as we seek to restore the harmed relationship, to be reconciled one to another.

We can not change the past, but we can change how we view the past, and how the past governs our lives. The American psychologist Diane Cirincione has said:

Forgiveness is shedding our remembered hurts and bonds of resentment, and opening ourselves to the future God has prepared for us—on God’s terms, not ours.

Withholding judgment and forgiveness are two powerful and essential tools, given by God for the building up of the people of God, the community of Christ. Our liturgy gives us a powerful expression of community in the Exchange of the Peace. I would remind you of what the Peace is intended to be:

• Not just a time to greet friends, but a time to be reconciled with each other.
• Not a foretaste of coffee hour, but a foretaste of the Kingdom, where all are reconciled.
• Not just a "good morning," but a powerful prayer for the one we greet.

When we greet each other this morning, let us be mindful of the community we are continuing to build in the name of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to the Glory of God the Father. Let us therefore reach out to those we need to forgive, and be reconciled to each other.

And so we continue to pay the only debt we ought to owe to any person—the debt of love.