September 6, 2026
Pentecost 15 / Proper 18, Year A
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Exodus 12:1-14 ~ Psalm 149 ~ Romans 13:8-14 ~ Matthew 18:15-20
On mornings like this with the readings we have just heard, it is really hard to square the circle, to see some kind of connection between the stories we tell. This beautiful path of reconciliation found in Matthew and the commands to love found in Romans are enough Good News to last a lifetime, but then we have the God of Israel striking down the firstborn of Egypt which must have been a tremendous slaughter of innocent people, and we find ourselves recoiling at the idea that we have the same God or that the God of the Old Testament is not the same or is a God of judgment whereas our God is a God of love. And we need to tread very carefully here because to say that the God of the Israelites, the God of the people who would become the Jews, is petty and vengeful is antisemitic. It’s also anti-Christian. Jesus, our Lord and Savior, did not get his words about loving enemies and praying for persecutors out of thin air. His tradition was a Jewish one. His bible was the collection of books we call the Old Testament. In Matthew of all the gospels, he was not creating a new thing, he was emphasizing the tradition about love and care and forgiveness.
So, what do we do with this last plague poured out on Egypt? I think the best we can do is to say it’s the story they told about how God delivered them from bondage and led them into the land flowing with milk and honey. There are many such stories in the Hebrew bible that reflect the worst human tendencies back onto God, genocide being one of them. But before we get too judgy about all of that, we all know there are people even today who blame God for the worst of disasters, saying that God is punishing us for our sexuality or our loosening morals or whatever it is they don’t like, and I am telling you that none of that is of God. As a recent book title asserts, “God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us.”[1] And if we affirm Jesus as the incarnate God, and this Jesus talks so much about love, then that’s all we really need, to paraphrase the Beatles.
I often say in bible study and in preaching that we need to be aware of what comes before a passage we are focusing on, and this bit I just read from Matthew is a good example. Taken in isolation, it sounds like Matthew is being the guy who sets the rules and insists we follow them – he’s good at that – but this isn’t just about a conflict resolution technique. If we back up to the beginning of the chapter, we have the question about who’s the greatest, and Jesus sets a child in the midst of them and says, “here ya go.” And then we have Matthew’s version of the lost sheep parable, where the shepherd leaves the flock to go after that one sheep who strayed. That part ends with, “So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost” (18:14).
What we heard this morning is about making sure not one person is lost. Matthew’s community is small and persecuted, and they can’t afford to lose anybody, so when there is a dispute, we are going to figure it out together. Did Jesus reject tax collectors and Gentiles? No, he did not. He sat with them and ate with them and talked to them about love, that’s what he did. The binding and loosing in heaven isn’t God affirming our rejection of anybody. It’s God affirming our staying in community with one another, assuring that the most vulnerable among us – the little ones – are protected. Not one of them is to be lost, and God will be in our midst.
It is bizarre to me how the prosperity gospel folks took the line “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven” (18:19) and made it about getting rich. Just ask for it and “boom,” there’s your mansion. There’s your Rolex. There’s your Caribbean island. You have to read this in the context of reconciliation. If even a couple of us can come together in love and charity with our neighbor, just imagine what God can do with that.
Over the years, I have read and studied a lot about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, that violent period between roughly 1968 and 1998 when paramilitaries and others wreaked havoc among communities, some promoting a Republican Ireland that included all of Ireland and the other side fighting to keep Northern Ireland in union with the United Kingdom. It was an ugly, vicious time, and while it was not directly about Catholics and Protestants as religious groups, each side used the language and imagery of their faith to support their loyalties and their ethnic identity. Perhaps no one better exemplified this than Ian Paisley, later seen as elder statesman in Northern Irish politics but who was an extreme right-wing Calvinist-Presbyterian who believed the Pope to be the anti-Christ and the Catholic Church to be the work of the devil. His language fueled the sectarian nature of the violence and bled into the Democratic Unionist Party which he founded in 1971.
The religious aspect that propelled the violence was much more the responsibility of the Protestants than the Catholics largely because of Paisley and his followers, and if any kind of reconciliation was ever to take place, someone would need to speak into that arena. Enter a dear friend of mine, David Porter, who in 1988 co-founded the Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland, known by its acronym ECONI. David and his partners in faith-based community organizing believed that the only way to counterbalance the fire breathing, hate-filled dogma of an Ian Paisley was to challenge it directly. This isn’t what we believe. Jesus called us to love our neighbor. We are given a ministry of reconciliation. Over the ten years between ECONI’s founding and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, their work centered on critiquing their own evangelical tradition and using that tradition to create change. Drawing on the work of the Anabaptists like Stanley Hauerwas and the anabaptist commitment to pacifism, they began to change the narrative about this “religious” conflict, that it was contrary to the teachings of Jesus.
David and his co-workers did not try to out-shout, or shun, or cancel, or exclude the voices of hate and violence. They changed the conversation by changing hearts; they repented of their own sins rather than demanding repentance from the other side. More than one-third of all Protestant congregations in Northern Ireland participated in the work of ECONI. This work was instrumental in bringing all sides to the table in the Good Friday Agreement.
God does not will that even one of the flock will be lost, and we are to speak in love with one another, refuse to turn our back on any among us, seek peace and reconciliation, willing always the good of other people. If we can do this here, in our rather small community, where we know God is in our midst, imagine what God can do with that.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland seemed insurmountable. Sometimes I look around and wonder if we’ll ever get beyond the political and social and ethnic and racial divisions in this country. And then I remember the work of David Porter and all those involved in the Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland, and I know that if we can look at ourselves, repent of the ways we have lost our way, and make sure that the Christ we proclaim always, always leads with love, the promise in today’s gospel is that God will do this. God will bless this.
Listen again to the words of St. Paul:
“…you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light…” (Romans 13: 11-12).
Lead with love and that love will bear fruit that lasts. That’s the promise.
[1] By the Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail.