September 7—Discipline and the Disciple

"If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; 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. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” –Matthew 13:15-20

When I was in college, several friends of mine went to a large and very popular church near campus. I remember hearing a story once about how their church had used this passage to handle an incidence of adultery within the congregation. The church leaders attempted to talk with the man in private, and when he refused to give up his affair, they brought him before the entire church one Sunday and publicly cast him out of the congregation. There’s no doubt that they took this passage seriously.

I remember feeling rather ambivalent about the whole thing at the time. Certainly I’ve never been okay with adultery, and kicking people out of the community for sin is found in scripture—in addition to this passage, there is the common refrain found in Deuteronomy, “ So you shall purge the evil from your midst” (Deut. 13:5, 17:7, 19:19, etc.), and Paul’s rhetoric on the contaminating effects of sin in 1 Corinthians 5. At the same time there seemed something rather harsh to me in simply throwing the man out of the church. Granted, I didn’t know this situation from the inside, and perhaps pastorally, such strong consequences were necessary for the person to acknowledge his own behavior. But I wondered how likely it was that this man would ever begin to address the broken relationship and hurt that his actions had caused if he were summarily cut off from his faith community. If the lines of dialogue were closed, how would the offender ever grow? How would the offended ever heal?

When I looked again at today’s lectionary passage in Matthew, a passage upon which many such protocols are based, I realized that Jesus’ rules for church discipline aren’t about punishment or rejection. Nor are they meant to preserve unity in the church at the cost of disagreement or diversity. Rather, they are all about relationships within the community. Notice how, in verse 15, the question is posed as “If another member of the church sins against you…” (italics mine). Now, those two little words set the tone for the entire passage. If they are not there, then the passage can be taken to address generic activities that contradict the church’s moral or ethical code. In some ancient sources, these words are indeed missing from the passage, suggesting such a general interpretation.

But if the two words are part of verse 15, as other ancient sources attest, then the entire passage becomes all about holding my Christian sibling accountable when her actions have broken our relationship. For in this the Apostle Paul is right—“a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough” (1 Cor. 5:6), and the bitterness and anger that results from an open wound between two people eventually poisons the whole community. So in this interpretation, Jesus’ plan sets up a way for the community to address broken relationships so that justice and reconciliation can take place. For when the community comes alongside one who has been wronged, confronts the breach, and calls for justice, it is not about enforcing uniformity of doctrine or belief. It is about being a disciple of Jesus—for just as Jesus came to heal humanity’s relationship with the Creator, members of his church are called to heal relationships with one another. And that healing cannot take place if we don’t address our brokenness with honesty and authenticity.

Yet what if someone refuses to acknowledge his wrong and try to mend fences? Is that the point at which we cast him out? In the past, when I’ve read the words, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (v. 17), I assumed that this was meant as a rejection of the offender. But as New Testament professor Mark Allan Powell points out in his commentary on Matthew, Jesus is saying quite the opposite—Gentiles and tax collectors were the outsiders of the Jewish community, to be sure, but they were also some of the people Jesus most persistently reached out to during his ministry. Treating someone as a Gentile and tax collector is not a call to cut off the wrong-doer, but a call to deeper and more persistent engagement with that person. For ultimately, the goal is unity—a reconciling unity, in which Christ himself is present among us (v. 20). And that requires not uniformity of opinion, but uniformity of loving, grace-filled care toward one another.

Our business as a church, then, is not about casting out and cutting off. But at the same time, it isn’t about discreetly overlooking the broken relationships within our community—from the petty fights and painful betrayals buzzing within local congregations to our failure as a Christian faith community to love and serve all humanity. Reconciliation cannot happen without justice, just as justice is empty without healing and reconciliation. And in Jesus’ discipline for the church, he gives us a practical, everyday starting point for practicing both.

Kelsey

PS-- The image above is of the Zaccheus story, one of the most famous stories of Jesus reaching out to a tax collector to bring him to discipleship.

August 3-- Feeding the Crowds (Instead of Turning and Running)

Passages: Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7, 15; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21

Life in the Boston area, I have discovered, always involves crowds—you just never seem to be able to escape them. My husband and I drove all the way to Salem a few nights ago for a quiet, relaxing seaside dinner. We made it through road closures, traffic snarls, and blocks of parking spot-less curbs, only to finally dine in a restaurant so loud that we could hardly hear one another speak. When I recently went to experience the meditative, peaceful environs that inspired Walden, I was shocked to find Walden Pond swarmed by hundreds of people crammed onto its tiny beaches, their voices drifting up in a dull roar that echoed through Thoreau’s hallowed woods. In Massachusetts, especially during the summer tourist season, it seems that the only path to true solitude leads to somewhere in upstate Maine.

So we folks from Massachusetts can feel some of Jesus’ pain when, in today’s gospel lectionary passage, he gets in his boat and sails off for some R&R, only to find that he just can’t escape those pesky crowds. Jesus has good reason to seek solitude—he has just heard the news of John the Baptist’s death, and John’s killer thinks that Jesus is a resurrected John (14:1-2). It is smart for Jesus to lie low for a few days.

But someone in Jesus’ camp isn’t good about keeping his itinerary secret. For just like Walden Pond’s beaches on a sunny Saturday afternoon, upon coming ashore Jesus sees the beach jammed with people from the nearby towns. If Jesus had been like you or me, he probably would have cruised a little further up the coast for a more secluded beach. This being Jesus, though, “he had compassion for them and cured their sick” (v. 14).

Yet Jesus has something more in mind for this crowd than simply a few healings. To understand what’s going on, it helps to take a step back and think about the role this story plays in Matthew’s larger narrative. Many scholars have pointed out that for Matthew, Jesus is a latter-day Moses, the new lawgiver (Moses is threatened at birth but miraculously escapes; Matthew’s Jesus is threatened at birth but miraculously escapes. Moses gives the children of Israel the Law on Mount Sinai; Matthew’s Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7). So when Jesus feeds the crowds twice in Matthew’s gospel—here in 14:13-21 and again in 15:29-39—there are echoes of Moses providing manna and quail to the Israelites on God’s behalf in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11. Jesus is to these people as Moses was to their ancestors, God’s miraculous messenger sent to lead them to the Promised Land.

But is Jesus really Moses here? Or is Jesus actually playing out the divine role in this little Exodus/Numbers parody? For when the disciples come to Jesus and ask him to send the crowds away, he doesn’t respond by telling everyone how God has promised to feed them, as Moses did. Instead, he tells the disciples, “You give them something to eat” (v. 16). When they offer all that they have, Jesus himself does the miraculous, transformative work that before had been reserved only for God. Here Matthew clearly states that Jesus is not simply a new Moses, but greater than Moses. Jesus not only speaks for God, but is the Son of God.

What about those disciples, then? The disciples, like Moses, are God’s servants to the people. They participate in the miracle, not only bringing the five loaves and two fish, but also distributing the meal to the crowds. The whole passage has a ritualistic, liturgical undertone to it—with all this blessing and breaking, giving and receiving, it sounds a lot like our own Eucharist services today. Jesus is inaugurating a new community to follow his teachings, a community where God amplifies our limited human tools to effectively serve the world. Jesus’ disciples find that with his help, they can in fact meet the needs of the crowds. They may not be new lawgivers, as Moses was, but they find that what they have to give is enough to do the job.

In these dog days of summer, when the needs of those around us threaten to swallow us like voices swallowed up in a crowded restaurant, remember Jesus feeding the five thousand. It isn’t just about the abundant feast that Jesus has put before us to nourish and sustain us on our personal journeys. For we are not only the crowds, but we are the disciples—called to offer grace and mercy to others as Christ has offered us grace and mercy. Our tools can seem woefully inadequate to the task. But through Christ’s transformative power, our lack becomes God’s abundance in us. Through Christ’s grace, we find sustenance for ourselves and strength to serve the world.