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If there is a conflict

Posted by on Sunday, September 6th, 2026 in Minister, News

https://youtu.be/onGp5Viuio0

Hespeler, September 6, 2026 © Scott McAndless – Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ezekiel 33:7-11, Psalm 119:33-40, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20

Some people might be troubled with the passage that we read from the Gospel of Matthew this morning. It begins with one little word that strikes fear into the heart of church leaders everywhere. It starts with the word if: “If your brother or sister sins against you.”

Why does that one little word scare us so? Because it means that something could happen. And what might happen is an argument, a fight or a conflict. It is saying that, in the church, people could do things to harm, frighten, insult or disrespect one another.

We Are Family

I mean, that shouldn’t be possible, right? In the church, we are supposed to be a family. The words “brother or sister” are right there in the verse. And families are supposed to always love one another, not fight with one another.

Yeah, even as I say that, I realize how naïve that sounds. Families can actually be the very worst when it comes to arguing, fighting and disagreeing. They are particularly good at it because they know each other so well. They know exactly how to get under each other’s skins, the words and responses that hurt most.

Families fight precisely because they care about each other. You might not bother to respond at all if some stranger does something foolish because you don’t really care about them. But when it is someone in your family, you might not be able to stop yourself from fighting with them about their foolishness.

Yet even though we love to use that family language in the life of the church, we seem to expect that conflicts and disagreements should not arise in the life of the church. Leaders like me often seek to avoid it and prevent it as much as possible.

Conflict Is Part of Life

But, as the opening word in this passage should remind us, conflict is a part of the life of the church. In fact, if conflict is completely absent from the life of your church, it might be a sign that your church is not very healthy. It might mean that you don’t care enough about each other or that you don’t care much about the mission of the church to disagree.

And so, in our reading this morning, Jesus reminds us that conflict not only might arise in the life of the church, but is also likely an inevitable part of life in the church. Conflict, you see, is not in itself a bad thing. It will sometimes feel bad, but that does not mean that it is bad.

Handling Conflict Well

Now, when we manage conflict badly, there is no question that it can be very destructive. We have all heard horror stories of churches that tore themselves apart over some disagreement or other, maybe even over some issue that didn’t really matter. But that is precisely why this passage that we read this morning from the Gospel of Matthew is there.

If you want to learn how to make your way through conflict as well as possible, you will not easily find better advice than we have right here in this passage. And it is not just good advice for life in the church. The principles you find right here can apply to any area in your life where conflict might arise – in your family, among your friends or in your workplace. Jesus gives us useful advice on working through conflict wherever it might arise.

One to One

For example, the first piece of advice that Jesus gives is crucial. “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” The damage that comes from ignoring this simple piece of advice can be enormous, and yet we are constantly tempted to do so.

I mean, put yourself in that situation. Someone has hurt you. They have acted in a way that you feel is insulting or disrespectful. Or maybe you just know from experience that their actions will lead to real problems down the road.

And so, you feel as if something needs to be said or done about the situation. But most of us don’t relish the idea of being the one to do something. Most of us don’t like dealing with conflict. And so what we often try to do is get somebody else to deal with it.

Dragging in Someone Else

In the church, that often means that you go to the minister or to some other leader and you tell them that they need to straighten this other person out.

But Jesus here says that, if the matter is between you and somebody else, you are the one who needs to try to deal with it first. When you drag somebody else into the matter, it might feel like you are doing the right thing, but it often leads to greater problems.

First of all, when you go to someone else first, you can easily make the whole situation worse. You have just aired somebody else’s dirty laundry in front of a third party. And, even if you are completely righteous in the concerns that you raise, that can cause embarrassment and shame.

And sure, you might say that it is fine for them to feel like that, after all, they really did do something wrong. But embarrassment and shame are not emotions that generally help people to become better. In fact, they often provoke worse behaviour in some people. So, if you really want to help people to be better, you will find ways to engage them first in a more private way.

Exceptions

Now, there is an exception. In cases of abuse, harassment or even sexual abuse, going directly and privately to confront the offender is not the right course. If you do that, you are only putting yourself in a position where they can hurt you again and worse. In such cases, you need to go to the community first and the community needs to be courageous in dealing with the problem.

But in a healthy conflict where people are not at risk, conflict is a natural part of human relationship; you need to think carefully before you try to bring in a third party. You need to ask yourself if you are doing it as a power move, trying to leverage somebody’s authority or position to hurt the other person. Turning immediately to power or authority may get you a short-term fix, but I have found that it often creates long-term tensions and problems.

New Possibilities

When you go yourself first to attempt to resolve the issues, it opens up worlds of possibilities. You may leave that conversation with a better understanding and appreciation for each other. If you put in the work to understand why they behaved the way they did, you might help them find ways to express their worries, fears or concerns more constructively. If you skip the step of going to them one-to-one, that opportunity may be lost forever.

So, I believe that it is very important for us to learn from this teaching of Jesus and, as hard as it may be, to go and confront the person ourselves. I know that I myself have sometimes failed to do this. I know we all will fail sometimes. And I have always regretted it in the long term.

But we may face another danger as we deal with conflict. Jesus said that we need to start by dealing with a person directly whenever possible, but he also acknowledged that such intervention will not always be sufficient. And so, he reminded us that we are part of a community.

Neglecting the Community Role

There are people who tend to go too quickly to some third party and can make the situation worse. But there are also people on the other end of the spectrum. They think that it is up to them to fix everybody else’s behaviour.

I think that we have a great example of that sort of person in our reading from Ezekiel this morning. In that passage we discover that Ezekiel has taken an enormous burden upon himself.

Ezekiel reports that God said this to him: “You, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, “O wicked ones, you shall surely die,” and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand.”

So, Ezekiel believed that God had appointed him to tell everybody else what they were doing wrong. And, if he failed to tell anybody, he would be held responsible for what they did. Now, I do not doubt that Ezekiel was receiving messages from God and that God was quite upset by what people were doing in his community.

Unhealthy Approach

But Ezekiel’s approach of taking all of that on himself was not very healthy. If you read the book of Ezekiel, you will see that everybody hated Ezekiel and his constant criticisms did nothing to reform people’s behaviour. Even worse, the constant burden that Ezekiel carried caused mental health problems for him. He suffered from constant depression and acted in compulsive and obsessive ways, like, for example, the time when he laid silently on his side in public for over a year!

I know Ezekiel was trying to do his best with the message he had received from God, and perhaps God had reasons for allowing him to carry that burden, but the point is that there are better ways and Jesus teaches us those better ways in the Gospel.

Sharing the Burden

So, while it is indeed best to start dealing with conflict directly by dealing with the offender yourself, that is not where it ends. When that fails – and it will sometimes fail because Jesus once again uses that ominous word if: “if you are not listened to.” – you do not need to carry the burden of your sibling in Christ’s failure as Ezekiel did.

Jesus goes on to talk about how to involve the community in careful steps, first calling on “one or two others” and then, as a final recourse, the whole church.

This releases you from the burden of dealing with someone else’s fault. But it also does more than that.

Not About Punishment

The point of it is not what we often assume. It is not about leveraging the community’s punitive power. That is how it has often been practiced through the centuries. Churches have punished people by shunning them, excommunicating them or making their lives miserable in some other way.

Excluding somebody might sometimes be necessary to protect the community, but punishment is never the goal. Punishment itself is one of the least effective ways of helping someone to reform their behaviour.

Healing Power

No, the most helpful way for the community to operate in times of conflict is in its extraordinary healing power. This is the secret power of any community, and it is especially the secret power of the church. Somehow, when the community comes together, it discovers powers of love, forgiveness and reconciliation that transcend the abilities of any individual member.

That is the truth that Jesus was pointing to when he said, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” The context of that verse makes it clear that the presence of Jesus is primarily a healing and reconciling presence in the church.

Part of Healthy Life

Conflict is a part of life. If you in your personal life or we in our congregational life never experience conflict, it may not be because there is no conflict. We may just be avoiding necessary conflict. That is not a good strategy either.

I understand why we may want to avoid it, of course, but we do ourselves no good when we do. Learning to deal with conflict constructively is going to lead us to better outcomes both as individuals and as a congregation.

So, do your best in your dealings with the people in your life who sometimes cause you trouble. Talk with them directly when you can and come into that conversation with an open and listening heart. At the same time, never forget the power in your community to heal and bring reconciliation. Let us leverage the incredible power that Jesus has given us to build a stronger, better community to face the challenges before us.

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Like a Woman Who Took Some Yeast

Posted by on Sunday, July 26th, 2026 in Minister, News

Watch sermon video here:

https://youtu.be/sZvyOJ9JVRw

Crieff, 26 July, 2026 © Scott McAndless – Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 18:1-8, Psalm 128, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

This morning we read six of Jesus’ parables. Six short little stories that seem to be about the most ordinary things – planting a seed, baking some bread, going jewelry shopping. Obviously, Jesus liked telling parables a lot. But why did he like them so much?

Was it because he was such a great storyteller and loved to spin a good tale? Oh, I am sure that he enjoyed the storytelling process, but he had a deeper purpose in telling them. You see, each little story was packed with all the wisdom his disciples needed to live out the reality of the kingdom of God successfully. Each and every one of them.

19-Word Story

Now I can see that some of you are looking at me very doubtfully. Some of these stories are really short, and they all seem to be focused on quite ordinary and everyday things. Take the parable about an ordinary person making ordinary bread. That “story” is only 25 words long in English. It is even shorter, only 19 words, in the original Greek. War and Peace it is not!

And here this preacher is trying to tell us that, in those 19 words, Jesus lays out an entire program for us to follow in this world to establish God’s kingdom. Well, he is going to have to show me some proof before I accept that.

Well, if that is how you feel, then challenge accepted. Let’s look at some of those 19 words and see just how much Jesus is saying to us in the careful choice of them.

Woman

Let’s take the word “γυνὴ” for example. That was the common Greek word for a woman (the word that we get words like “gynocologist” and “misogyny” from). And let us pause at that word for a moment to notice that Jesus made the main character of this story a woman. To tell a story from the point of view of a woman is hardly a shocking thing today, but it was in Jesus’ time. So, let’s assume he didn’t do that lightly.

When people interpret the parables of Jesus, they often make the assumption that the main character represents God. Now, I am not entirely sure that people are always right to do that, but it is a tendency we have.

Imagining God as a Woman

But here’s something I have noticed: I’ve never heard anybody do it with this parable. But why not? Why wouldn’t Jesus have been inviting his listeners to imagine God as a bread-baking woman? And why might we have problems accepting that he might have done so?

In this one word, we have a very important teaching about Jesus’ understanding of how the kingdom of God spreads. Whether the woman in the parable was meant to represent God or not, she certainly represented someone who was not normally given agency or power in that world.

Jesus is teaching us that the kingdom does not require the influence of powerful people to spread. In fact, he’s letting us know that God loves to use the forgotten, the powerless and the outsiders to spread that message in powerful ways. So, whenever we complain that we don’t have the power or influence to have an impact on the world, remember who the main character of this parable of Jesus was.

Yeast

The next word I want to look at is the word yeast or ζύμῃ in Greek. Yeast is an incredible organism. It can take a flat, hard pile of dough and turn it into a light and fluffy loaf. It is the secret ingredient that turns grape juice into fine wine and mash into beer. Together with bacteria, it can also turn milk into yogurt and cheese. Life without yeast would be a miserable existence indeed!

And the people of Jesus’ world appreciated all of that about yeast. But they also had some mixed feelings about it. For yeast was forbidden in Jewish households during the season of Passover according to the law. And so, Jews like Jesus knew very well how pervasive it was.

During Passover, they would have to clean their houses from top to bottom, going deep into every crack and crevice. They knew all too well that yeast had a way of getting everywhere and into everything. They knew exactly how hard it was to get rid of it.

What Jesus Was Saying

So, what do you suppose that Jesus might have been saying about us and about how we can represent the kingdom of God on earth by saying that it is like yeast? I think that, a lot of the time, we fall into the assumption that, for the church to accomplish anything, it has to be big, and it has to be able to use a lot of influence and have connections to people in power.

But if the kingdom is like yeast, that gives us a very different perspective on what we can do. Yeast is added only in small amounts, yet its transformative power is massive. It can pervade and transform a huge amount of dough. How much dough? Well, actually the amount is literally unlimited, as we will see in a moment.

The church doesn’t have to be big to have an impact. It just has to be like yeast. Rather than size, we should be concentrating on infiltrating, bringing life and hope to every bit of dough we encounter. And when we do that, we will discover that, just like yeast in a Jewish household at Passover, the church will be very hard to eliminate from society.

Mixed

But then we come to our next word. It has to do with what the woman does with the yeast. In our English translation, it says she “mixed” the yeast with the dough, but I am here to tell you today that this is not what it says in the original Greek.

The word that is translated as mixed is ἐνέκρυψεν, and that doesn’t mean mixed. It is actually the Greek word that we get words like encryption and cryptocurrency from. It means to hide something. So the woman didn’t mix in the yeast; Jesus said that she hid it in the dough.

That word choice is clearly not an accident. Jesus often described the kingdom of God as something hidden or secret, like, for example, when he said it was like a treasure hidden in a field.

A Hidden Kingdom

So, what does that word, “hid,” teach us about being faithful citizens of the kingdom of heaven today? Well, we live in a world that is largely oriented around attention. If you want to be considered a success these days, you must get a lot of people to pay a lot of attention to you. That seems to be the entire basis of our celebrity culture, our politics and 90% of our social media.

And it is easy for the church to get sucked into that attention culture. We judge our success by how many people are noticing what we are doing. But Jesus understood that attention is not just an end in itself. We are called to bring about transformation, not to get attention. It is through acts of mercy, love and kindness, which are carried out without seeking attention, that we will have the greatest impact on the spread of the kingdom of God.

Measure

The next word I want to look at in this short parable is the word translated as measure. Now, when you read that a woman “mixed” some yeast with three “measures” of flour, how big do you imagine that “measure” to be? I always assumed that we were talking about something about the size of a cup. I mean, with three cups of flour you could probably make a decent loaf of bread.

But the word that is used in this parable does not mean a cup. Nor is it the common everyday Greek word for measure, which would be μέτρον (the word we get meter from). No, the word that is used in this passage is not even a Greek word, but it refers to a specific quantity of flour.

A Hebrew Measurement

Jesus says that the woman took three σάτα of flour. And σάτα is a common Hebrew measure that is used in the Old Testament.

The fact that a Hebrew word appears here is significant because Jesus didn’t speak Greek; he spoke Aramaic, a language closely related to Ancient Hebrew. So, it seems the Gospel writer has translated this entire parable into Greek except for this one word. And I wanted to know why. I hope the reason blows your mind as much as it did mine.

Σάτα is the plural for a Hebrew word for a specific quantity equivalent to 7.3 liters. Think about that for a moment. This woman didn’t take three cups of flour; she took three times 7.3 liters of flour. That is… almost 22 liters of flour. Since we normally buy flour by weight, we are talking about maybe 14 kg of unsifted flour. That is about as heavy as two 10-pin bowling balls.

That’s A Lot of Dough

I have a few questions. How much bread is this woman baking? With 14 kg of flour, I could easily make about 25 loaves of bread. How many peanut butter sandwiches could you make with 25 loaves of bread?

So, what does this tell us about being part of the kingdom of God in this world? It tells us that we might be very small – like a small little bit of live yeast – but we can have a huge impact. But that impact does not come in the form of influence or power. I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where Jesus tells us to pursue those things. It comes in the form of service.

Same Amount as Sarah

But there is one more thing I want you to note about the amount of flour the woman takes. It is exactly the same amount of flour that Abraham tells his wife Sarah to take in our reading from Genesis this morning. And that, I assure you, is not a coincidence.

When three strangers turn up in front of Abraham’s tent, he makes them a seemingly limited offer of hospitality. “My lord,” he says, “if I find favour with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves.”

But then Abraham goes and immediately tells his wife to take three measures – three σάτα – of flour. He tells her to make cakes with what we have established are 14 kg of flour. He also slaughters and cooks an entire calf and makes soft cheese for his guests.

Not Very Practical

Now, such an extravagant meal doesn’t seem very practical. I mean, there is no way that three strangers would eat 25 loaves worth of cheese sandwiches and an entire calf. And how long would they have had to wait for all that food to be prepared? But the practicality is not the point of the story. It is simply an illustration of hospitality that is so extreme that it borders on the ridiculous.

And I suggest to you that it is no mistake that Jesus refers to the same extreme amount of flour in this short parable. The promise in that story in Genesis is that when we practice extreme hospitality, we will encounter God. Because, of course, in case you didn’t know, those three strangers that Abraham offered hospitality to turned out to be God.

Practicing Hospitality

So, what is Jesus promising us with this parable? He is promising that if we practice hospitality as a church, if we welcome people just as they are and no matter where they are coming from with kindness and generosity, something amazing will happen. We will know the presence of God among us. And that, more than anything else, is how the kingdom of God will be made real among us.

So, we have this one parable, and in only 19 words it teaches us so much that we need to learn about the spread of the kingdom of God. What have we learned?

Lessons of the Kingdom

We have learned that the kingdom of God is led by the very people that the world has discounted, that it may be small like yeast, but it also spreads and infiltrates like yeast and is even harder to get rid of. We have learned that it is hidden – that it does not seek attention – but that it has the greater impact on society for that reason.

And we have learned that it is like 14 kg of flour – that it is never cheap or restricted when it comes to reaching out. And, most of all, we have learned that our practice of hospitality towards all is what is going to drive the growth of the kingdom of God into the future.

Not bad. Not bad at all for one little, short story!

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