Scripture text: Matthew 18:15-20
By all rights, I should not be up here. I should not be a Christian, let alone a pastor.
It is said that “the leading cause of atheism in America is Christianity.” I know what they mean by that. Many people who have fallen away from the faith have done so because they have been witness to the people of the Church behaving in the least Christian ways possible. I have been witness to that as well.
Between the years 1975 and 2000, my home congregation had 5 called pastors and 4 interim pastors, none of whom served longer than 4 years. Among them were two closeted homosexuals who cheated on their wives with other men, a harsh legalist for whom morality was absolute, unyielding, and cruel, an insurrectionist determined to withdraw the congregation from the larger church, and a sexual predator who had an enthusiastic fondness for the young ladies of the congregation. Flawed people, everyone of them.
And that’s just the clergy. Let me tell you about the lay people, the folks in the pews. Among them were families and individuals who believed their money, their name, or their position in the informal hierarchy of the congregation gave them privilege to bully and abuse the other members of the church. There were often constant battles between these individuals and the pastors, and quite frequently between these individuals and my own family. I have seen the mechanism of church discipline outlined in our Gospel lesson today used more often than any person in the Church ever should.
It’s very easy to become cynical and bitter when that’s your experience. Despite their flaws, I loved, respected, and admired many of those people about whom I just spoke, clergy and laity. It hurt to see them attacked. It was disappointing to see them fight back with the same ugliness as their opponents. It’s hard to blame someone for becoming discouraged by witnessing all that hostility and hypocrisy.
But despite the unpleasantness of all this, the truth is none of this should be any surprise to any of us. It’s been going on forever, since day one. But most of us don’t realize that.
One of my all time favorite songs is “Here’s Where the Story Ends” by The Sundays, a song whose chorus includes the words “It's that little souvenir of a terrible year which makes me wonder why. And it's the memories that we shared that make me turn red. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” There’s a lovely paradox in the words that describe both a “terrible year” and yet an affection for those times. It’s not an unusual impulse. We all have a tendency to look back upon the past with a nostalgic fondness and even longing, often forgetting that they were “terrible years.”
The history of the Church is no different, hence our blindness to just how divisive and often disagreeable things were in the first generations of Christianity. The Scriptures bear this out. Paul and Peter argue over the place of Gentiles in the Church. Paul and Barnabas have a falling out that causes their partnership to end.
I learned the origins of the insult “moron” from reading the Scriptures in Greek. Paul calls the congregation at Galatia moros which is often politely translated as “foolish” but really means “idiot.” Hardly the kindest way to describe a fellow Christian.
There were a lot of terrible years in the first decades of the church and little has changed since.
None of this was any surprise to Jesus himself. That’s why we have this Gospel text. He knew we were going to disagree. He knew our nature as humans, that disagreement can easily become hostility anytime you have human ego and pride involved. I spoke last week of the dangers of the words “You’re wrong” and it seems that reality is at play here as well. There needed to be a system, a mechanism, to handle this sort of thing if the Church was going to survive its own membership.
But even in the midst of this bit of law, grace abounds. When all other efforts fail, Jesus counsels that we treat those who have wronged us and remain unrepentant to be “as a Gentile and a tax collector.” What does he mean by that?
Well, let’s consider a bit of context here. This is a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. And what did Matthew do for a living? Oh, yeah. How did Jesus treat tax collectors? “Follow me.”
As for Gentiles, Matthew quotes Isaiah 42 in his own 12th chapter. “he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles...and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”
Jesus’ counsel for discipline in the church is not a passage of rejection or of banishment. This is a call to start over, to go back to the beginning. Because if a believer is still unrepentant after going through all the steps of this process, it is then clear that something just has not taken hold. They don’t get it. They don’t understand what it means to be a Christian. They have not embraced the values and principles upon which the Christian community is built. Therefore, we start over. Treat them as a new convert and begin the process again.
But you never give up on them, no matter how hard it may be. And it is hard. It is hard to deal with people who are hurtful or hurting (often times, they are the same thing.) But it’s worth it and no one ever said that being a Christian was an easy thing.
It’s about going back to the basics. That’s how you deal with conflict. Gospel, good news, joy, freedom, and mercy. Go back to these fundamental things. To treat another as a Gentile or tax collector is to preach the Gospel to them, to tell them good news, in the hope that it will be heard and believed.
It is no less than what God does for all of us. After all, we are the Church and we are still human. Each of us has our flaws, our weaknesses, our vices, and our egos. Even within our little community, as tight knit as we are, there are quarrels. Nothing ugly, I am thankful to say, but we don’t always agree with one another. We are far from perfect. We sin.
And sometimes we sin a lot. And sometimes we’re not all that sorry we’ve sinned. But God continues to shower his blessings upon us, to grant us good news in the hopes that we will listen. That we will understand. That we will believe and turn our lives around. Each week, both here and elsewhere, we come to receive God’s graceful bounty: wine, bread, and word. He treats us as Gentiles and tax collectors, calling to each of us again and again “follow me.” Amen.
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