Love Does No Harm

This Sunday's readings put two things side by side that I think belong together, and that a great deal of American Christianity right now has managed to pull apart: love and honesty about what love actually requires.

Jesus tells his disciples what to do when someone has genuinely wronged them: go and correct him, between the two of you alone. If that fails, bring one or two more. If that fails, bring it to the church. And then this promise: where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am, in their midst.

Paul, in the same set of readings, gives the summary underneath everything: love is the plenitude of the law. Not one virtue among several. The whole of it, filled up, completed, made entire.

I want to say something about that promise, because I think it gets sentimentalized into something smaller than it actually is. Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am, in their midst is not primarily a comfort verse for small congregations. It comes directly after Jesus describes the hard, unglamorous work of confronting harm honestly and trying to restore what has been broken.

Christ's presence is promised in the middle of that work. Not instead of it. Not as an escape from it. In the actual, difficult process of naming a wrong, seeking correction, and trying to restore relationship. That is where two or three gathered in his name are promised his presence: in the hard conversation, not just the easy comfort.

I want to talk honestly about forgiveness, because I think it gets misunderstood in two opposite directions, and both of them are wrong.

Some people hear the command to forgive and think it means never confronting wrong, never setting a boundary, never saying that something someone did actually hurt you. That is not forgiveness. That is avoidance, and it usually costs the person avoiding conflict far more than it costs the person who caused the harm. Matthew 18 does not describe a doormat. It describes someone who goes directly to the person who wronged them and names it plainly. That is not weakness. That takes real courage.

But other people hear the same text and use it to justify permanent estrangement, refusing ever to forgive, holding a wrong over someone's head indefinitely as leverage. That is not what this text asks either. Forgiveness, in the shape Jesus describes here, is neither passive endurance of harm nor permanent refusal to release it. It is honest confrontation followed by a real, costly willingness to be reconciled when reconciliation is actually possible.

Forgiveness is not the same thing as pretending you were not hurt. And it is not the same thing as refusing forgiveness forever. It is telling the truth about the wound, and then choosing, when it is genuinely offered, not to let that wound have the final word over the relationship.

I want to sit with Paul's sentence for a moment, because I think it is the most important test available to us right now for telling real love from something wearing its name: love does no harm.

That is not a vague sentiment. It is a specific, testable claim. If an action, a policy, a sermon, a political movement causes real, documented harm to a real person, it does not matter how loudly it claims to be love. By Paul's own definition, in this Sunday's second reading, it is not love. It cannot be. Love does no harm. That is the whole test.

I want to apply that test directly to something I have watched grow more powerful and more dangerous in this country, because I do not think faithfulness allows me to describe it in generalities.

Christian Nationalism, as it currently operates in the United States, claims the name of Christ constantly. It invokes scripture, waves crosses, and insists it is defending Christian values. And by the measure Paul gives us this Sunday, it fails its own test almost completely.

You cannot deport immigrants back into danger, back into the violence and instability they fled in the first place, and call that love of neighbor. Love does no harm. Sending a person back to a place where their life is at risk is harm, full stop, and no amount of biblical language draped over the policy changes that fact.

You cannot target LGBTQIA+ people, especially transgender people and especially children, with legislation and rhetoric designed to erase their existence from public life, and call that love. I have heard it described as love more times than I can count this year: love that tells a queer teenager they are broken, love that tells a trans person their own understanding of their body is a lie, love that strips away healthcare and safety in the name of protecting children who are, disproportionately, the very ones being harmed. That is not love with hard edges. It is harm wearing love's name, and Romans 13 gives us the exact language to say so plainly: love does no harm. If it harms, it was never love.

I am not interested in relitigating whether Christian Nationalism has good intentions. Paul does not ask about intentions. He gives a result-based test. Love does no harm. Judge the fruit, not the claimed motive.

This parish tries, imperfectly but genuinely, to hold both halves of this Sunday's readings together. We believe in honest confrontation: naming harm plainly, the way Matthew 18 describes, rather than pretending it is not happening. And we believe in the test Paul gives us: love does no harm, which means our welcome to immigrants and to LGBTQIA+ people is not a political position layered on top of our faith. It is what faithfulness to this specific text requires.

Where two or three of us are gathered in his name, seeking the hard, honest work of naming wrong and choosing reconciliation over cheap comfort, Christ has promised to be present in the middle of it. That is the work in front of us. Not because it is easy. Because it is what love, tested by its actual fruit rather than its claimed intentions, actually looks like.

Come Sunday. Let us do that hard, honest work together.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer