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Grace, Mercy and Peace to you …
Good morning again. As you may have heard … Our School’s theme for this year is called “J-Walking” … or more precisely … Jesus-Walking, J-Walking for short. And that’s what we’re going to be about for the next six Sundays…
We are going to go on a walk… with our Lord. A very specific walk on a very specific path. The neat thing about this walk with our Lord is that it’s going to be very much like our walk we took with Him when we did Experiencing God together not so long ago.
We’re going to start out together… where we are right now … and when we get to the end of our walk 6 weeks from now … we all will be in a different place … spiritually. That’s what taking a walk with Jesus is all about…
Not just mimicking Him, trying to be like Him, using Him just as a good example. No. But walking with Him in the sense of having Him move our hearts to be more attuned to His. So that when people see us … they just don’t see people trying to be like Jesus … they actually see Jesus really and truly in us. They see our lives… giving glory to God.
And I hope you, each of you, want to go all the way on this journey with us. And that means… really letting Jesus speak to your heart. You see? We only have a few minutes here in worship … just time enough to look over the path a bit … from here in the pulpit.
But what this journey is challenging us to do … is to really talk about what we’re seeing on the way … and to share our experiences with one another so we each can more fully appreciate the path the Lord is leading us on.
And so, to that end … for the next six weeks our adult Bible class time will be devoted to the study of the path we’re going to be looking at during our message time here during worship.
So, what we’re going to be doing is helping each other walk closer with Jesus in a part of our lives that will give glory to God as our lives give evidence of His life in us.
Are you ready?
Here we go! The subject we are going to be dealing with over the next six weeks is the subject of conflict. Conflicts … individual to individual. Where does conflict come from? We’re going to talk about that in our Bible class this morning. James told us a little bit about it in our Epistle reading for today. As much as we want to, we cannot tame our tongues. And out of that, comes hurt feelings, and even more.
But not all personal conflicts are the result sin. People can and have had conflicts over the color of the carpeting, over their taste in worship music, over the agendas adopted by different political parties, over a lot of things … that just reflect that people are different and we all have different tastes.
Many conflicts, however, do have their roots in the fact that our human natures tend to be somewhat self-centered.
We see ourselves having different needs and desires and these come into conflict with those of others.
We’ll pursue this more with the Holy Scriptures in Bible Study today. But for today what we want to look at is the various ways people, all people… Jesus people, as well as non-Jesus people… handle the conflicts that come up in their lives.
A handy device to help us talk about this is this diagram called “The Slippery Slope.” The idea is to try to use the strength God gives us in Jesus Christ to stay at the top of the slope … at what’s called on the graphic the “Peacemaking Responses” in the way we handle conflict in our lives.
Those responses are the walking-with-Jesus responses we want to choose no matter whom our conflict may be with … or what it may be about.
The reason we want to stay on the top of the “slippery slope” is that the other responses to conflict … the ones in blue on the graphic … namely peace-faking responses … and the ones in red, the peace-breaking responses … are ones we as God’s children want to avoid.
So. Imagine. Someone hurts you. Says some words that hurt your feelings, for instance … okay? Maybe some words that did some actual damage to your reputation… they could have been spoken words of slander… or if written down, libelous….
What does our human nature want to do with that?
Let’s look at the peace-faking responses first The highest one is denial. We try to pretend that it never happened. We smile, we shake the other person’s hand … but meanwhile we’re bearing a grudge. There is anger in our heart against that person.
We pretend there is peace, we fake peace, when there really isn’t any peace. Whatever relationship we might have had with that person has been destroyed. That friendship we’re pretending to have is really a sham. And nothing gets resolved and so the situation will only get worse.
Sliding down the slope further is “flight.” That’s when we decide not to address the conflict and just remove ourselves from it. People think that getting a divorce will put an end to the conflict. Nope. The conflict remains unresolved … flight just makes resolving the conflict that much harder.
The next step is one that some do take. It’s called suicide. That’s when we think the only way out of a bad conflict with someone is to resolve the conflict by putting an end to ourselves … either physically … or say in a career, committing corporate suicide, leaving the company … or changing jobs.
Then the conflict wins. And who is the loser? The one who would rather deny, flee, or opt-out of the situation before addressing the conflict in a positive, God-pleasing way.
Notice where the spotlight is in all those choices … it’s on me. I’ve internalized it. And in despair, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t fix it. So I’ll deny it exists … and if that doesn’t work … I’ll run away from it, or opt-out of the situation entirely …
I’ll change my identity … I’ll do anything to escape … to get out of that unresolved conflict.
Now that’s bad enough … but let’s go to the other side of the slope, the Attack Responses… this is where the conflict is not about me, it’s all about the other person. I’m the totally innocent party … and the conflict is all your fault.
So, in that case, what do I do, the injured party? Well first, the natural inclination is that I hit back in kind… If with fists, with fists … with words … with words… Assault is easy to understand. And it leads directly in our society to that step called… litigation.
Why is litigation an attack response? Because by the nature of court procedure, each party portrays and admits no guilt in the conflict which has brought the parties to court…
In litigation, only one party is found guilty and bound legally to offer restitution. But no matter how the litigation goes … what happens to the relationship between the two parties? It is never mended, it only get’s worse.
And then, like suicide, a permanent solution to a temporary problem, at the bottom of the slope on the attack side is murder. Kill your enemy. It may sound strange … but many engage in this. Except instead of another person … their enemy is God. Kill God … and then the conflict they have with Him will go away.
That’s called losing your faith.
People can become apathetic about their faith and lose it that way … but those who have an unresolved conflict in their lives and hold God responsible are those more likely to end their relationship with Him voluntarily in this way.
Attack responses to conflict… It’s all someone else’s fault. And the way to fix the conflict … is to fix them. The problem again is … the relationship that once existed is never again restored.
Relationships are what we are truly about … whether we call it “peacemaking” or we call it “conflict resolution” or calling it “adopting a culture of reconciliation” … we are about is stewardship of relationships. That’s the path we are on!
You notice on the graphic the picture of the handshake in the cross-bar of the Cross. What we are doing is walking with Jesus and receiving His strength from our relationship with Him … the vertical direction … to help us give glory to God by being good stewards of the relationships we have with others … symbolized by the handshake in the horizontal direction.
It’s those faithful stewards of their vertical relationship with God giving them the power to be good stewards of their horizontal relationships with others that we hear God Commending on the Last Day: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”
Now. We looked at 3 ways of faking peace and 3 ways of breaking peace. We want to speak briefly today, about the 6 ways we can make peace even in the face of conflict.
Starting on the left side, the first peace-making solution is overlooking an offense. Denial means the offense is there, we just won’t publically acknowledge it. But overlooking an offense means it’s gone as if it never happened.
By the power of the Holy Spirit we just put it aside, we don’t think about it, we don’t talk about it, we never bring it up, again. Period.
Overlooking is great. But sometimes there are material issues involved that cannot be ignored. Then reconciliation is in order. There we approach the one who has offended us and show him or her the wrong. In Christ, we pray, that as they admit their fault, and we admit ours, and we forgive one another … that true peace will follow.
Why? Because as the relationship is restored, which is the spiritual part of the conflict … then whatever material issues there are … can then be worked out as between friends.
Negotiation is the next step as we move to the center of the arch. In Negotiation the material issue moves to center stage … and mutual confession and forgiveness is usually in order, as in the reconciliation step, to achieve a mutually agreeable solution to meeting each others needs.
Now these three, Overlooking, reconciliation and Negotiation all can be done just between the two parties that find themselves in conflict. The next three are assisted by a third party…
Mediation takes Negotiation a step further by having a third party help each side work through the spiritual and material issues to come to peaceful settlement.
Arbitration, the next step, calls for both parties to agree to the decision of the third party as final and binding on them both. The arbitrator will set the conditions for a peaceful settlement and both parties agree to live by that agreement … up front … before they meet together.
And finally, there’s accountability… This is the application of what we Lutherans call the Office of the Keys. When a Christian refuses to be reconciled … the final step the one offended has is to “tell it to the church.” The Church’s job from Scripture is to hold the one who refuses to be reconciled accountable to the Word of Christ.
Now … we covered a dozen different responses to conflict in the past 10 or so minutes. Don’t worry, there isn’t going to be a test to see how many you can remember. At a point in the weeks ahead, you’ll be receiving a card which has this graphic on it as well some summaries things we’ll be discussing in the weeks ahead.
But the whole Idea today is to get us thinking about our interpersonal relationships being under the cross of Jesus Christ.
It is only because Jesus lived and died for us that we can be having this conversation. That there would be any hope for salvaging relationships that have been ravaged by the world and our own weaknesses.
That we can see God using even these sad occurrences in our lives to Give Glory to Him … and witness to our faith in Him who first loved us loves us, the God whom we serve.
Make it a point, then, to join us all of these next Sundays … and make the extra effort if you’re not already doing so … of joining us during the Bible class hour so we can have some dialog on these concepts, as we open God’s Word and hear Him enable us through His Gospel to live at peace with one another as His children. To walk with Jesus!
In Him…Amen.
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