Coffee with Mother Nicole: What Kind of Community Are We Becoming?
Learning beloved community, one table at a time
There is a question I have been carrying with me lately: What kind of community are we becoming?
It is a question that came up for me again this week as I prepared Sunday’s sermon on Matthew 18. Jesus says some familiar things in this passage: about conflict, forgiveness, accountability, binding and loosing, and the presence of Christ whenever two or three are gathered in his name. But underneath all of it, I hear Jesus asking something much bigger: What does it mean to become a people?
A people is not simply a collection of individuals who happen to worship in the same building. The church is not merely people who agree about enough things to get along, but a community that is actually learning how to live together in the way of Jesus.
Christian community doesn’t mean that we all become the same. It means that we learn how to remain in relationship when we aren’t. That is harder work than it sounds.
So, pull up a seat at the table. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s chat more about this sermon and the idea of learning to live together and why it matters.
Sermon
September 6, 2026 | Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost Matthew 18:15–20
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Our Gospel this morning gives us one of Jesus’ most familiar promises: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
But there is another line in this passage that may be even more important: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
Father Winston pointed this out as our staff studied this gospel passage this week. It stands out because we just heard these same words a few weeks ago in Matthew 16, when Jesus told Peter he was giving him the keys of the kingdom. Twice in three weeks, Jesus is talking about what happens when his followers live together on earth, so we might want to pay attention. What is Jesus saying about what he is building among us?
That led us to discuss the idea of Beloved Community: the church as a people learning to live out the radical, unconditional love of God—a community that gives the world a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven.
And I think that is a helpful lens for hearing this passage, because all of chapter 18 is about our life together. Jesus isn’t simply teaching us how to become better individuals. He’s teaching us how to become a people—and he knows that becoming a people isn’t easy.
So as we move through this passage, I want us to keep asking: What kind of community are we becoming? Because Jesus isn’t simply building something in us. He is building something throughus—a community that gives us a glimpse of what the Kingdom of God looks like on earth.
Matthew 18 begins with Jesus placing a child among the disciples and warning them not to become stumbling blocks to the vulnerable. He tells them about the shepherd who goes looking for the one who has wandered away. And then he turns to what happens when members of the community hurt one another.
Jesus knows something we all know: whenever human beings live together, there will be conflict.
And we certainly know this is true about Episcopalians. We had such a beautiful time together at our town hall dinner and meeting on Sunday. There was good conversation and good food, and someone reminded us that evening of a joke that plays on this Gospel passage: “Wherever two or three Episcopalians are gathered, there is always a fifth”—a little nod to our reputation for enjoying a good drink together, too.
But there is another version of that joke: “Wherever two or more Episcopalians gather together, there will be at least five opinions on any topic.”
And honestly, I think that one might be even more accurate.
Christian community doesn’t mean that we will never hurt one another or disagree with one another. It means that Jesus gives us a different way to live when we do.
And that was part of what was so beautiful about our town hall on Sunday. We sat around tables together and talked honestly about where we are as a congregation and where God may be calling us. We listened, asked questions, named what is going well and what is difficult, and became more transparent about where we are and where we are headed together.
That kind of conversation matters. Becoming a community doesn’t mean pretending we all see things the same way. It means being willing to sit at the same table, listen to one another, and discern together.
Are we becoming the kind of community that can do that?
That is exactly the kind of work Jesus is talking about. When one person sins against another, Jesus doesn’t tell us to walk away. One person goes to another. If that doesn’t work, two or three become involved. If necessary, the whole church.
The circle gets larger, and at every stage there is the possibility of listening. The goal isn’tpunishment. The goal is restoration. Jesus says, “If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.” You have regained them.
God is concerned not only with whether someone is right or wrong, but with whether they can be restored to right relationship—with God and with the community.
After all of the efforts to listen, to bring in others, and finally to involve the whole church, Jesus says: “And if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
At first, that sounds like Jesus is saying, “If they won’t listen, they’re out. They’re no longer one of us.” These verses have been misused throughout the centuries to excommunicate and shut people out of communities. And there is certainly a boundary being drawn here. There comes a point when a community has to say, “This behavior cannot continue because we are hurting each other.”
But then we remember: this is Matthew’s Jesus—the Jesus who repeatedly crosses boundaries to reach Gentiles and tax collectors. Matthew himself was a tax collector.
So while the boundary may be necessary, the love does not disappear. We can tell the truth about harm, protect the vulnerable, and hold one another accountable while still leaving room for repentance, transformation, and return.
Are we becoming the kind of community that can hold truth and love together like this? That is the kind of community Jesus is building on earth.
And here is where those strange words about binding and loosing come in.
In the first-century Jewish context, binding and loosing were legal terms of religious and communal authority. To bind was to forbid or prohibit an act; to loose was to permit or allow it. Jesus was giving the budding church authority to make decisions about discipline and moral behavior. In other words, Jesus is giving his community the responsibility to discern together what is faithful, what is harmful, and what makes restoration possible.
This means we need to ask: What must we hold fast to? What must we refuse to tolerate? What protects the vulnerable? What makes repentance possible?
These are not merely questions about rules. They are questions about what kind of people we are becoming together.
A couple of things I want us to notice about this passage: notice that Jesus doesn’t give this responsibility to an individual acting alone: not a leader or clergy member. He gives it to the community. Because the community itself matters.
I want us to look at one more important part in this phrase: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
Jesus is connecting what happens on earth with what happens in heaven. Our life together matters for eternity. The way we treat one another is part of our participation in the Kingdom of God and what we are building that will last.
We pray every Sunday: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The Beloved Community is not simply something we hope to experience someday. It is something we are invited to practice now, and what we do now ripples out into eternity.
This isn’t just about church politics. This is about seeing people restored to God and us being part of the communion of saints that stretches through all time.
The German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The Christian cannot simply take for granted the privilege of living among other Christians.” He wrote those words in his book Life Together while reflecting on Christian community during the rise of Nazi Germany and a church under enormous pressure.
Bonhoeffer understood that Christian community is both a gift and a responsibility. Christ gives us one another and asks us to learn how to live together.
And it is not a community that exists only for itself. Bonhoeffer also wrote that “the church is only the church when it exists for others.”
We learn to live together here so that we can carry God’s love beyond these walls.
How we live together here impacts how we represent Christ out there in the community. When people look at us, do they see a community living out the patience, persistence, and love that Christ calls us to?
Which brings us back to the words Jesus ends with: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
If we really believe that, perhaps the question isn’t simply whether Jesus is present when we gather.
The question becomes: What difference does his presence make in how we live together? Because Christ is here.
And this is the strange and beautiful thing about Beloved Community: It isn’t a community of people who have figured everything out. It is a community of people who keep learning how to love one another in the presence of Christ.
Which is why the table we are about to come to matters so much.
This is Christ’s table. We didn’t create it, and we don’t own it. It is not a table where we first have to prove that we agree with one another. It is a table where Christ gathers us.
We come with our differences, our wounds, our disagreements, our gifts, and our need for one another. We take in the Body of Christ, and in doing so, we become the Body of Christ.
And perhaps that is the most concrete way we practice Beloved Community: we come to one table—not because we are all the same, but because Christ has gathered us into one body.
This is the table where we practice becoming the kind of community Jesus is building on earth.
So the question about what makes a church isn’t simply, “Are two or three of you gathered?” It is: What kind of community will we become, knowing that Christ is here?
Amen.
Learning to live together
Matthew 18 is one of those chapters that makes me realize Jesus knows us pretty well. He begins by talking about the need to care for the vulnerable, and then he starts talking about what happens when we hurt one another. Because, of course, we do. Jesus doesn’t seem particularly surprised by conflict within the community. What matters is how we respond to it.
When someone sins against another person, Jesus gives the community a process: go to the person. Talk to them. If that doesn’t work, bring others into the conversation. If necessary, involve the whole community. The circle gets larger, and at every stage, there is an opportunity for listening.
The goal of Christian community is not to win arguments. It is not to protect our own comfort. It is not even simply to enforce rules. It is to become the kind of people who can tell the truth about harm while still making room for repentance, transformation, forgiveness, and return. That takes practice. It takes humility, and it takes people who are willing to stay at the table long enough to listen.
What Bonhoeffer has been teaching me
I have been spending time with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together as we prepare for our women’s retreat in a couple of weeks. Our retreat theme is Christian women in community, and the more I think about that phrase, the more I realize how much we have to learn from Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer begins Life Together with a deceptively simple idea: Christian community is a gift.
We do not manufacture it. We do not get to choose every person who becomes part of it. We do not get to decide that we will only live in community with people who understand us, agree with us, or make us comfortable. God gives us one another. Bonhoeffer writes, “The Christian cannot simply take for granted the privilege of living among other Christians.”
That sentence lands differently when you remember the circumstances in which he was writing. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian writing during the rise of Nazi Germany, at a time when the church itself was being tested by political power, fear, nationalism, and profound moral compromise.
For him, Christian community was not an abstract idea. It was a matter of life and death, and perhaps that is why he takes community so seriously. We can be tempted to think of church as the place where we go to receive something: worship, teaching, encouragement, friendship, spiritual nourishment. But Bonhoeffer reminds us that Christian community is also something we are called to practice.
We are given one another, and then we have to learn how to love the people God has given us. Not the imaginary community where everyone agrees. The actual community.
The person who annoys us. The person who sees something differently. The person whose way of communicating gets under our skin. The person whose politics make us uncomfortable. The person whose theology isn’t quite ours. The person who hurt us. The person we may not have chosen, but whom God has placed at our table. That is where Christian formation happens.
And then we leave the table
But here is where I think this gets even more interesting. If we learn how to live in Christian community only so that we can have a nicer church, we have missed something. Bonhoeffer famously writes that “the church is only the church when it exists for others.”
In other words, what we practice here is supposed to change how we move through the world. The patience we learn here matters when we encounter someone outside these walls. The humility we practice here matters when we meet someone whose life experience is completely different from ours. The ability to disagree without dehumanizing someone matters when we find ourselves sitting across a table from someone with whom we disagree profoundly. The willingness to listen before we defend ourselves matters everywhere.
I learned something about this years ago when I found myself sitting around an iftar table during Ramadan at a Muslim community center. A small group from my home church had gone because we wanted to know our Muslim neighbors better. We were not there to debate theology or persuade anyone to become Christian. We were there to eat together, hear stories, ask questions, and make room for one another.
People brought food. People made room at the table. People told stories about their families and their faith and their lives. There were obvious differences among us. We did not share the same religious beliefs, the same traditions, or necessarily the same understanding of the world. But for a few hours, we were simply people sitting together at a table.
I remember realizing that I couldn’t create the community I imagined. I could only participate in the community God was already creating. That has stayed with me. Because perhaps beloved community is not about finding the perfect group of people who already agree with us. Perhaps it is about learning to recognize where God is already making room for relationship—and then having the courage to pull up another chair.
What kind of people are we becoming?
This is where I think the church’s internal life and its life in the world are deeply connected. If we cannot learn to listen to one another here, how will we listen to our neighbors? If we cannot disagree here without turning one another into enemies, how will we respond to a divided world? If we cannot tell the truth and practice forgiveness here, how will we become people who contribute to healing beyond these walls?
If Christian community is supposed to be a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, then the way we live together is itself a witness. That is part of what Jesus means when he talks about binding and loosing and connects what happens “on earth” with what happens “in heaven.” Our life together matters. What we practice here becomes part of who we are out there. And this is why I keep coming back to the question: What kind of community are we becoming? Not, Are we a good church? Not, Do we have everything figured out? Not even, Do we all agree?
But: Are we becoming people who know how to listen? Are we becoming people who can tell the truth without losing love? Are we becoming people who can hold boundaries without closing our hearts? Are we becoming people who can stay at the table when things get difficult?
Are we becoming people who recognize Christ in one another—and therefore learn to recognize the image of God in people beyond our own community, too?
The table gets bigger
I think this is also why the Eucharist matters so much. We don’t get to decide who is worthy of it or who belongs at it. Christ gathers us.
We come with our differences and wounds and disagreements and gifts and need for one another. And then we take in the Body of Christ. And somehow, in that mystery, we become the Body of Christ.
That is what Christian community is ultimately about. We gather around Christ’s table so that we can become people who make room at tables in the world.
We learn here how to listen, so that we can listen there. We learn here how to forgive, so that we can become people of reconciliation there. We learn here how to live with difference, so that we can cross boundaries there. We learn here that Christ is present among us, so that we can begin to look for Christ among people we might otherwise overlook.
The beloved community is not something we perfect. It is something we practice. And perhaps the practice begins simply by asking better questions.
Who is God giving us to love?
Whose story have we not listened to yet?
Where have we confused agreement with community?
Where might God be asking us to make the table a little bigger?
And perhaps most importantly: What kind of people are we becoming as we learn to live together in the presence of Christ?
I don’t have all the answers to those questions. But I think they are worth sitting with. Maybe that is part of what it means to be the church: not a people who have figured everything out, but a people willing to keep gathering, keep listening, keep practicing, keep making room, and trusting that Christ is already there among us.
Around the table. In the disagreement. In the reconciliation. In the stranger who becomes a neighbor. And perhaps even in the person we never expected to find sitting beside us.
A Question to Ponder
As you think about the communities you are part of such as your church, your family, your neighborhood, your workplace, or the wider community:
Where is God inviting you to make the table a little bigger, to listen to someone you might not otherwise listen to, make room for someone different from you, or practice a little more beloved community?
I’d love to hear from you in the comments: What does beloved community look like to you? Where have you experienced it, or where do you long to see it?
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