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Foundry United Rev. |
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“When Two Agree” Sunday, September 7,
2008 |
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Matthew 18: 15-20 Rev. Dean Snyder
For a graphic presentation
of Thomas and Kilmann’s theory, click here. |
In
chapter 18 of his Gospel, Matthew has put together a collection of parables
and sayings of Jesus concerning community. It is a loose collection of
parables and sayings that sort of fit with each other. Right in the middle of
this collection is a saying of Jesus that when I finally heard it took my
breath away – Matthew 18: 19. “Truly
I tell you,” Jesus says, (which is his way of saying I’m about to say something important that you may have to think about
for a while to understand)…“Truly I tell you if two of you agree on earth
about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father [or my Parent]
in heaven.” Try to
absorb that – Truly I tell you if two
of you agree on earth about anything you ask, God will do it. Or as
Eugene Peterson puts it in the Message, God “in heaven goes into action.” When I
thought about it, it occurred to me that this saying is characteristically
Jesus. Jesus was always saying things that if we hear him make us say: Whoa!
It is an outrageous unbelievable saying, like so many of Jesus’ sayings. The
meek shall inherit the earth. The kingdom of heaven is in your midst here and
now. Love your enemies. The last shall be first. Inasmuch as you did it unto
one of the least of these, you did it unto me. The camel getting through the
eye of a needle. Truly I
tell you if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, God will do it.
This is
characteristically Jesus – bold, frame-bending, unbelievable. Notice
Jesus doesn’t qualify it. He doesn’t say if two of you agree on earth about
anything and it is a good thing to ask for or something God approves of, then
it will be done for you by my Parent in heaven. No. It is just “anything.” Jesus
is saying that God is phenomenally responsive to that which persons have
reached agreement on. One of my Hindu friends says the universe ultimately
gives us what we really truly want. The key
to understanding Jesus’ saying, I think, is the word “agree.” The Greek word
used in the Greek manuscripts is the work sumfwnevw.
The Greek word that we get our word sympathy from is the word sumpath If two
people really will one thing with one heart and one mind and one desire, God
responds, Jesus says. If two people are really united by one will, the
universe will respond, my Hindu friend would say. We had
a staff offsite this week and we were talking together about this verse and
one of our staff suggested that there is a sort of edge to what Jesus says
here. It is almost as if he is saying that if two of us ever managed to
finally agree on any one thing, God would be so surprised and relieved that
God would do it. It is as if Jesus is saying that agreement among his
followers is so rare that God would jump at the chance to do anything we
agree upon if we ever could manage to agree on anything. True
agreement is a rare thing. The kind of agreement Jesus was talking about is a
very rare thing even in the most intimate relationships of our lives. It is
certainly rare in the place we work. It is rare in church. It is rare in our
communities and very, very rare in our national lives. There
is a tool we use in our Pre-Cana weekends – our weekends for couples
preparing for their committed relationships and marriages. It is the
Thomas-Kilmann theory of conflict – which is really about how we manage our
disagreements and differences. It is a theory developed by Kenneth Thomas and
Ralph Kilmann. I think Thomas and Kilmann’s work is very relevant to Jesus’
saying so I’d like to review it with you. Thomas and
Kilmann have identified five ways of dealing with disagreement or
differences. Each of them may be appropriate in certain situations but most
of us tend to overuse one or another of the. Here
are the five ways of handling disagreement. The
first is avoiding. You avoid talking about or dealing with things that you
know or even suspect you might disagree about. So it may appear that you are
in agreement but it only appears that way because you avoid issues or topics
that you might disagree about. Many of us have things in even our most intimate
relationships that we just avoid talking about because it just feels too
painful. I once heard a pastor say that his church never had any
disagreements because they avoided talking about controversial topics like
politics or religion. (Think about that for a minute.) So we
can have relationships that appear peaceful and loving on the surface but in
which there is no real agreement – not the kind of agreement Jesus was
talking about – because we avoid the hard the conversations. There
is an animal image we use for avoiding and for those of us who prefer to deal
with disagreements by avoiding them – the turtle. The
second characteristic way of dealing with disagreement is accommodating. When
there is disagreement, one person accommodates the other. One person lets the
other have their way either because they don’t really care that much or they
don’t want to disagree. Remember there are times when each of these,
including accommodating, makes sense, but accommodating is not agreeing. It
is not the kind of agreement Jesus was talking about. The
animal image for accommodating is the teddy bear. The
third way of dealing with disagreement – competing. Fighting it out until
someone wins and the other person loses. This is the way we tend to do sports
and politics. The animal is the shark. Competing is not the kind of agreement
Jesus was talking about. The
fourth way of dealing with disagreement according to Thomas and Kilmann is
compromising. In compromise you split the difference. No one gets everything
they want but no one loses altogether either. Everybody gets something and
nobody gets everything. The animal for compromise is the fox. There is lots
of compromise in life. Compromise
is not the kind of agreement Jesus was talking about. Compromise is a
settlement. It is settling. It is not agreeing. Thomas and
Kilmann’s fifth way of dealing with disagreement is collaborating. Collaboration,
they say is rare. It is rare because it is time consuming and usually
requires lots of work. Collaboration is when we work through disagreement to
a place of full agreement. Our hearts and wills are fully at the same place. Usually
for collaboration to happen, it takes two person’s minds and hearts being
changed. The
animal image for collaboration is the owl. But Thomas and Kilmann emphasize
that collaborating is time consuming, long term, and takes a major
commitment. Thomas
and Kilmann add these arrows to their chart. The arrow for assertiveness or
task or mission, getting something done, runs from the bottom of the page to
the top. The arrow for relationship or community runs along the bottom of the
page. Avoiding is weak in both task and relationship. Accommodating
emphasizes the relationship and sacrifices getting what you want to do done.
Competing emphasizes the task and devalues the relationship. Compromising splits
sacrifices some of both. Collaborating
maximizes both the task and the relationship – both mission and community.
This is why this kind of agreement has the power to move heaven and earth. In our
intimate personal relationships, we are always balancing our goals in life
with preserving and strengthening our relationship. Freud called it balancing
love and work. Really powerful relationships have one or two or three aspects
of defining agreement where there is profound collaboration – where your mission
in life and your relationship are totally shared. But, as Thomas and Kilmann
remind us, this does not happen except through profound sharing and
transformation in which both partners are changed by the process. In
organizations there is often a tension between the task or mission and
community. This may be true about the place where you work or worked. It is
certainly true about congregations. There is often a tension between the
mission we are called to and preserving and building community. There are
churches that don’t get much done because they so emphasize community that
they avoid anything that might feel like disagreement or so accommodate
everyone that they can’t get much done to make a difference in the world. And
then there are churches that are so focused on getting the mission done that community
is lost. There is lots of disagreement and competition for resources because
everybody wants to do their own thing. The
powerful congregations are those in which there is profound agreement about
one, two, three, four or five things. But in order to get there, there has to
be enough conversation and sharing and wrestling with differences and
disagreements that everybody is transformed in the process. One of
the most important ways this happens is when we study together. It happens
some when we listen to the same sermons, sing the same hymns and pray the
same prayers. But it happens most powerfully when we sit around a table or in
somebody’s living room and read a book together or watch a video and
encounter one another’s deepest thoughts and feelings. Study together changes
everyone engaged in the study and brings people together to a new place. That’s
collaboration. That’s agreeing. Part of
the reason we put such an emphasis on Christian Education for children and
youth is because this kind of agreeing may take more than one generation.
Annie Dilliard wrote her book entitled “Teaching a Stone to Speak” while she
was living on an island off the It is
sort of like that with the faith. To reach the depth of agreement we need to
move the heavens may take more than one generation, so we engage our children
in the conversation early on. And our
conversation and study benefits from being wide. Sometimes small groups
within a congregation develop a strong sense of agreement but the groups are
not talking to each other much. When we
engage in studying Scripture together – sitting together at a table wrestling
with the Bible – we are building a collaborative spirit. This is why
Christian education is critical in our life together. In fact, we
increasingly call it Christian formation – because we are being formed as
individuals and a community united by a shared vision and mission. The
symbol of this is the Lord’s table – the perfect union of mission and
community. It is where we are broken and re-formed as God’s people. As we
share Holy Communion this morning, may it be an expression of our willingness
to be one body in the service of God’s vision of love, inclusion, justice and
peace. www.foundryumc.org |
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