When two or three are gathered together
There is something wonderfully inconvenient about Christianity.
It is not enough simply to believe in God. It is not enough to say the right prayers, come to church, know our Scripture, or even consider ourselves reasonably good people. Jesus insists on something considerably more difficult:
We have to learn how to love one another.
And that sounds lovely until we actually have to do it.
It is very easy to love humanity. Humanity is wonderful. Humanity doesn’t interrupt you while you’re praying. Humanity doesn’t leave the coffee pot empty. Humanity doesn’t misunderstand your tone of voice. Humanity doesn’t say something that makes you think, “Did they really just say that?”
People do.
Christianity isn’t lived in the abstract. It is lived with actual people. Which is precisely why today’s readings matter so much.
In Exodus, God is creating a people.
In Romans, Paul tells that people what holds them together.
In Matthew, Jesus tells us what to do when that community inevitably has problems. Because the Church is not a community of perfect people — it is a community of people who are learning to follow a perfect Savior. And there is a very big difference.
God creates a people
In Exodus, Israel stands at the edge of freedom, preparing to leave the place of slavery. And God gives them the Passover. Notice what God does not say. God does not say, “Every individual Hebrew must save themselves.” Instead, households gather. Neighbors gather. People share what they have. The meal becomes communal. The liberation becomes communal. God isn’t simply rescuing individuals — God is creating a people.
That matters because we live in a culture that tells us almost everything is about the individual: my success, my happiness, my career, my comfort, my blessing, my relationship with God. And sometimes Christianity gets pulled into that same way of thinking. We start to imagine that faith exists primarily to make my life better — to make me successful, prosperous, healthy, comfortable. And if things aren’t going my way, maybe I just haven’t believed hard enough. Maybe I didn’t give enough. Maybe God is punishing me.
That, by the way, is the logic of what’s known as the prosperity gospel. And it can sound very religious. But it is a very different message from the one we hear today.
Two different gospels
Jesus never promised us a comfortable life. He never said, “Follow me and you’ll never suffer,” or “Follow me and your bank account will improve.” Quite the opposite — Jesus talks about crosses, sacrifice, service, forgiveness, generosity, love of enemies, putting others before ourselves. That isn’t the gospel of personal prosperity. That is the gospel of self-giving love.
Paul says it plainly: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” He doesn’t tell us our greatest obligation is to become successful or to accumulate. He says we owe one another love — a debt we never quite finish paying, because love isn’t simply something we feel. Love is something we do. We feed people. We listen. We forgive. We show up. We sit beside people when they’re hurting. We help carry what they cannot carry alone. And sometimes, love means telling someone the truth.
The prosperity gospel asks, “What will God do for me?” The Gospel of Jesus asks, “What is God calling me to do for others?” One measures blessing by what we possess; the other measures it by what we’re willing to give. One says, “Claim your blessing.” Jesus says, “Take up your cross.” One asks how faith can improve my life. The Gospel asks how my life can become an instrument of God’s love. These are two very different ways of understanding Christianity — one makes God a means of getting the life we want; the other teaches us to surrender the life we have to the God who loves us.
When we hurt each other
Which brings us to Matthew. Jesus says: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.”
Let’s pause there, because Jesus has just given us one of the most difficult instructions in the entire New Testament. Go talk to the person. Not their best friend. Not your best friend. Not everybody in the parish. Not the internet. The person — because apparently Jesus had already discovered that gossip doesn’t solve much.
Jesus gives us a process: first speak privately; if that doesn’t work, bring one or two others; if that doesn’t work, bring it to the Church. The purpose isn’t humiliation, or revenge, or proving you were right. Jesus says the purpose is to regain the person. That’s an important word. The goal is restoration. The goal is to find a way back to one another.
Reconciliation doesn’t mean pretending nothing happened. Christian forgiveness doesn’t mean ignoring abuse, abandoning boundaries, or allowing ourselves to be harmed repeatedly. Sometimes love requires saying, “That was wrong.” Sometimes it requires consequences, or distance. But even then, we don’t have permission to stop seeing the other person as human. We can hold someone accountable without hating them. We can tell the truth without destroying someone’s dignity. Because the person who hurt us is still a child of God. And so are we.
Entering the suffering
There is something particularly dangerous about a theology that tells people their suffering is their own fault. What happens when the cancer comes? When the marriage ends? When the child dies, or the job disappears, or grief arrives and refuses to leave? Do we look at that person and say, “Well, you simply didn’t have enough faith”?
No. We sit down beside them. We listen. We pray. We bring food. We make the phone call. We show up. Because the Gospel doesn’t tell us to explain away someone’s suffering — it tells us to enter it with them. That is what Jesus does. God does not remain safely above human suffering; in Jesus Christ, God enters it. God knows grief, rejection, betrayal, injustice, what it means to be wounded. God knows the cross.
So when we suffer, we are not suffering in the presence of a God who says, “You must not have believed hard enough.” We are suffering in the presence of the God who says, “I am here.”
Holy ground
Which brings us to those beautiful words: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
We sometimes use that verse when attendance is low — “well, there are two or three of us, so I suppose we’re covered.” But Jesus means something much deeper. God is present in relationship. Present when we gather, when we worship, when we share a meal, and when we struggle to reconcile. The difficult conversation can become holy ground. The moment when we finally say, “You hurt me,” can become holy ground. So can the moment someone says, “I’m sorry” — or the moment we say, “I forgive you.” Because Christ is there.
This is why the Church cannot simply be a place where we come to receive religious goods and services. It is not a spiritual vending machine — put in a prayer, push the button, receive blessing. The Church is a community where we learn how to love, and learning to love is hard work. It means patience. It means forgiveness. It means sometimes admitting we’re wrong, and sometimes listening to somebody explain something we were absolutely certain we already understood — perhaps one of God’s favorite ways of teaching us humility.
The Church is not holy because everyone inside it is easy. The Church is holy because Christ is present among us — present precisely as we are: messy, imperfect, occasionally irritating, sometimes wounded, sometimes wrong, and always beloved. That is grace. Your suffering does not make you a failure. Your poverty does not make you unloved. Your grief does not mean God has abandoned you. Because God’s love is not a reward for successful people — it is given, freely, completely, without our earning it.
Putting on Christ
And if we understand that grace, we begin to understand what Paul means when he says we owe one another love. We have received grace; now we become people who give it. We have been forgiven; now we learn to forgive. We have been welcomed; now we welcome. We have been loved when we were difficult to love; now we learn to love people who are difficult to love. Every congregation has at least one of those people. Some weeks, we may discover it’s us.
This is what Paul means when he tells us to wake up, to put away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light — to put on Christ. It isn’t abstract. It looks like the hard conversation in Matthew 18, pursued for the sake of restoration rather than victory. It looks like showing up beside someone in their suffering rather than explaining it away. It looks like the kind of community God started building back in Exodus, when God took a scattered people fleeing slavery and made them one household, sharing one table. The God who gathered Israel out of Egypt is the same God gathering us now — not as isolated individuals working out our own private salvation, but as a people learning, together, how to love.
So perhaps the question for us today is not, “Am I blessed?” but “Am I becoming a blessing?” Not “What has God given me?” but “What am I willing to give?” Not “Who is wrong?” but “What does love require of me now?” And perhaps, most importantly: “Where is Christ asking me to show up?”
Because wherever two or three are gathered in Christ’s name — whether we are celebrating or grieving, struggling or forgiving, whether we have much or very little — Christ is there. And perhaps that is the greatest blessing of all. Not wealth. Not comfort. Not status. But Christ, and the grace to become, together, the people Christ has called us to be.
Amen.