February 22 - “Covenant of Grace”
A Covenant of Grace
Psalm 32
Matthew 18:15-21
22 February 2026
Rev. Mary W. Nelson
Traditionally, the scripture reading for the first Sunday in Lent is a different reading from Matthew, when Jesus is tempted three times by Satan and withstands the challenge. Lent is a time when we consider the temptations and challenges that we face, and we engage in acts of discipline in order to try, like Jesus, to resist. It’s a time for mindfulness, for intentionality, to develop habits that (we hope) will bring us closer to God. In Lent, we may try the classic approach of giving-up-something like chocolate or alcohol or social media; or we may take on a new practice we hope will become a habit, like daily journaling or walking.
As a church community, we have just adopted a new Behavioral Covenant at our Annual Meeting a few weeks ago… And the best way to ensure that it becomes a meaningful covenant in our common life, a set of shared practices we want to be habitual (rather than another list of good ideas that we stick in a drawer), is to talk about it. So for these six weeks of Lent, we’re going to focus on the six behaviors in the Covenant that we want to adopt with one another.
This week, we begin with the scripture reading that undergirds most covenants and conversations about how we want to be a church community together: Matthew 18. Jesus, talking with the disciples, draws out a clear process for handling conflict in the church.
Now I know, I know: we are all nice polite New Englanders, and we would never admit to ourselves that there might sometimes be conflict in the church. But we also know that wherever two or three are gathered, there are at least four opinions! We are going to encounter conflict sometimes. For all our desire to think of ourselves as above all that, striving for some noble ideal of community—we are the Body of Christ, we are all children of God, we are called together by the Holy Spirit—the truth is that we are a group of humans. A little bit inconsistent, a little bit contradictory, a little bit proud, a little bit stubborn… any relationship between two people necessarily involves energy, and that energy sometimes includes tension, or friction, or difference. Conflict is a natural part of all relationships, and if there’s sometimes natural conflict just between two people, of course there will naturally be conflict among groups of people. Conflict isn’t bad, conflict is healthy—when you handle it in healthy ways. Which is what a Behavioral Covenant is supposed to help us to do.
Because, really, church is hard. Getting along with other people is hard. The divisions we encounter in our daily lives, in the wider community, have grown so much that we have less and less ability to be in community with those who think differently or hold different perspectives than we do. And for a long, long time, church has been the main place in our society where we can be in relationship with people who don’t agree with us. We commit to joining, belonging to a church community and staying in relationship with people who may have different opinions or experiences. We stay at the table together. Church is a place where we are challenged to live together with people who may fundamentally disagree with us about the way the world should work. Church is a place where we sometimes have to be vulnerable and share with others the things we’d rather not speak out loud to anyone. Church is a place where we encounter our own emptiness and maybe work on filling it a little bit. Church is a place where we behave badly sometimes, and where we trust one another enough to let them call us on our bad behavior when it happens.
That’s what Jesus was talking about in our passage from Matthew. Matthew’s church knew something about bad behavior, and outright conflict, and even schism. Matthew’s congregation was in the process of figuring out who they were in the midst of an identity crisis in Judaism—some scholars think Matthew’s community may have been kicked out of the synagogues. Disagreement and distress in this new community was right there on the surface for all to see. So it’s no wonder that Matthew includes this guide for how to deal with people who are causing conflict in the church. The unity of the community was critically important to Matthew. This plan for how to handle conflict is geared toward a slow, deliberate process that promotes peace long-term. It’s about skill-building and resilience to get through difficult times. If someone sins against you, go talk to him. If he doesn’t want to talk, bring another one or two people to witness the conversation. If that still doesn’t change the situation, talk with your church community about it and enlist their help. If he still won’t listen, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
Now, some hear this tax collector part and think it means that the person in question should be ostracized. That’s not what it means. Gentiles and tax collectors were shunned from mainstream Jewish society, but we have to remember that so was Matthew’s community. Jesus was the one who ate with tax collectors, and reached out to the Gentiles. Jesus was the one who broke the rules when it came to who was in and who was out. In this new Christian movement, Gentiles and tax collectors and prostitutes and widows and all kinds of down-and-out folks were encouraged to participate fully. Some people were new: the Gentiles and the tax collectors had a lot to learn, and the Jewish-born Christians took seriously their responsibility to teach newcomers about the laws and stories by which they lived. “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” meant that the community should stick with the recalcitrant person and work to educate and enlighten him. This passage is about seeking peace and reconciliation and transformation, not about separating the sheep from the goats.
Your Behavioral Covenant includes “grace” as one of your shared values that will guide your behavior together: “I have an obligation to offer grace to everyone in this congregation. It entails sensitivity to the situation at hand. I will listen with understanding and acceptance because we do not always make clear our perspective as we intended. I will honor silence as another expression of perspective.” “Offering grace” includes assuming that everyone has positive intentions for our behavior toward one another, and remembering that we are all here because we love our church. And when, for whatever reason, our words or our actions don’t have the impact that we intended, we strive together to seek understanding and clarity, to heal the harm, and close the gap between intention and impact. When you hurt me, I have to give you the grace to believe that you did not intend to hurt me; when I hurt you, I hope you will do the same—and in order to heal that hurt, we have to talk about it with one another. Hopefully we can do that in a way that doesn’t escalate the situation and perpetuate the harm, and that’s part of why we bring in our church community to help us have those healing conversations in good faith.
The thing that Matthew doesn’t make explicit here, but that we need to remember, is that this passage is about disagreement between two rational people. It’s a program for healthy interaction between two healthy people. It’s an ideal program for an ideal situation – and not all situations reflect this ideal. Jesus is not setting forth a program to deal with abuse, or mental illness, or destructive behavior. Jesus urged patience with those who needed correction, but didn’t allow violence or unhealthy behavior to destroy his community. He tells Peter to forgive seventy-seven times, but forgiveness doesn’t excuse or ignore or tolerate harm. If only one party can behave with grace but the other party can’t, then we’ve got to find a different way forward—that’s a different part of the Behavioral Covenant, for a different day.
But when we are engaging with our community in healthy ways, we still can make mistakes, we still can disagree or misunderstand one another. That’s where grace comes in. We are all given the promise of renewal through God’s grace, and we can and must extend that grace to one another in Christian community. It’s something we have to practice with ourselves and with one another. If we can practice grace among ourselves, then we will be able to take it out into the world, too.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
