by the Rev. Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” St. Matthew 18:17

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is very little direct teaching in the Gospels about the church and its life. What there is, though, is found in Jesus’ discussion with his disciples in the central chapters of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, from which this evening’s lesson is taking. These chapters have come to take on a kind of special importance, especially among Christians who try to base everything the church does on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

For example, this three step process that Jesus describes for dealing with a member of the church who sins against another has been treated by some as judicial proceeding. First, confront the person with the sin. Then bring some witnesses. Then present the person for judgment before the entire congregation. One commentator[1] compared it to reading someone his Miranda rights—did you “Matthew 18 him?” one Christian might ask another in talking about how an inter-church controversy unfolded.

I read a story recently[2] , and the teller swore it was true, about a Pentecostal Holiness church in Southside Virginia where this was not just the occasional, but the annual judicial process. This was a part of the country where nearly everyone made his living as a tobacco farmer. And the official book of discipline of the Pentecostal Holiness church banned not only smoking, but any involvement in the tobacco trade. Now the Methodists and the Baptists, officially, were supposed to look down on this as well, but in that kind of community, their ministers were content to look the other way. But not the Pentecostal Holiness pastor. He was a man of his word, and he expected his people to live by that code of holiness that they had sworn to follow when they became members of his church.

So on a Sunday in May, when the time came to plant the tobacco crop, he would stand in the pulpit on Sunday and read out those words about the sinfulness of the tobacco trade. And the next Sunday, he would stand up in front again, and read those words with one of his elders on either side of him. And then, the third Sunday, he would formally excommunicate every man and boy in that congregation—shun them like “Gentiles and tax collectors.” And for three and a half months, while that tobacco crop was growing, there wasn’t a man or a boy to be found in the Pentecostal Holiness church

But then, the day would come for harvesting the crop, taking it to the warehouse and getting that annual windfall—the tobacco harvest check. The next Sunday, those women and girls would vote every man and boy back into full membership in the church. After all, they needed them to keep that other article of the discipline, which insisted on a full tithe.

Now, yes, I’ll admit there’s something slightly ridiculous in going about the life of a church in this way. Magnifying things into grave sins that aren’t really anything of the sort is to start off on the wrong foot from the beginning. But I wonder if, in its backward, hypocritical sort of way, that pastor wasn’t on to something important about how Jesus means for us to understand the way discipline should work in the life of the church.

It’s important to say, on the one hand, that Jesus meant that there should be discipline in the church. His three part process isn’t really original to him, but is adapted from the standards set out in the law of Moses, the way God told the Israelites to deal with destructive sin in their community. The Church is a community set apart for God’s purposes, called to holiness of life that will reveal his purposes to the world. It can’t be a place where “anything goes.”

We are called, as our First lesson reminds us, to a life of integrity and steadfastness, without “a desire for evil,” not “putting Christ to the test.” God doesn’t merely expect conformity to a minimal code of ethics. Instead, he calls to a divinely empowered, holy life, a consecrated life, as I was discussing this morning. Because God’s standards are high, we will all fail. And sometimes we will fail very badly, and the ways that we fail will become not just a disappointment, but a scandal to others.

Jesus knew this. He did not invite his followers to entertain any illusions about man’s noble nature or instant purification by the Spirit. We will fail each other, and sometimes we can’t all just look the other when this happens. The evil needs to be confronted. We need to speak the truth to each other, to have that difficult conversation about why this thing you are doing is threatening all of us in a very real way.

Not all sin is this serious, of course. I don’t think that Jesus meant for this kind of procedure to apply to every kind of sin, nor do I think that He meant it to apply to any one particular sin in every community. But there will be some kinds of wrongdoing that we cannot tolerate and at the same time remain faithful to the way of life God has called us to share.

I kamagrawiki.com think particularly in our time of the abuse of children by the clergy, and the way that this sin as been such a tremendous cause of scandal in the way the church is viewed by the world. We can’t just overlook this. It must be confronted. The integrity of our common life demands that we confront it.

And so for this kind of sin, and for other kinds of grave scandalous sins, we have disciplinary procedures in the church. In the Episcopal Church there is an established procedure for dealing with serious sins, especially among the clergy. It is based at the diocesan level, and it has these three steps given to us by Jesus, among other safeguards to make sure that the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty. In my last diocese, I served as an alternate judge on the Ecclesiastical Trial Court, which administered the process. Thankfully, over the years I served on the court, a case was never brought to us. It’s important that we have these rules and procedures, that we take them seriously and that we try to administer them fairly. But they never have the last word.

You see, I think Jesus is intending a kind of irony in these directions about church discipline, an irony that that Pentecostal preacher might have understood as well as anyone else. This teaching comes just after a parable of Jesus, you see, a parable you all know very well. It’s the one about the lost sheep who runs away, and the master leaves the rest of them behind, so much does he love the one that is lost. He leaves them, and goes out to search for that sheep and then he brings him back and rejoices.

And then there’s that way Jesus describes what you should do to this obstinate sinner who refuses to repent even when the whole church has tried to show him he’s wrong. “Let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector,” He says. And how was Jesus with Gentiles and tax collectors? Well, He sought them out, of course, He shared His suppers with them, he lured them into the kingdom of God.

Where two or three are gathered, He concludes this teaching, two or three gathered for a session of the Ecclesiastical Trial Court, to condemn another, to tell him that this sin simply cannot be tolerated—where they are gathered, I am there in the midst of them. And maybe Jesus means “I am with them to second their condemnation,” but to be honest, I’m not so sure.

Because this is Christ’s justice we administer in Christ’s Church. It’s not the blindfolded woman with her infallible scales that stands in the midst of us, but Jesus Christ, with his nail-scarred hands extended. How is it in that old Gospel hymn? “The vilest offender, who only believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives .”

We must take serious things seriously. We must speak the truth and call one another to holiness. But with Christ we must also be ready to forgive, to extend mercy, to “overcome evil with good.” There is something more precious than justice, something truer than law. Let us use discipline faithfully, but remember always that Jesus holds the scales.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

[1] Hoeeze, Scott. “Matthew 18:15-25: Comments and Observations” Center for Excellence in Preaching. http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/viewArticle.php?aID=534

[2] Chilton, Delmer. “Sermon.” The Lectionary Lab: Pentecost 12. http://lectionarylab.blogspot.com/2011/08/twelfth-sunday-after-pentecost-proper.html

The Rev. Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” St. Mark 9:37

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“We’re taking a bit of a chance on him,” the headmaster told me, “It will probably be a tough adjustment. Make sure you keep an eye on him.” Joey, let us call him, was one of the students assigned to my advisory group at Saint James School. We classed him as a tenth grader, but he had been in and out of so many schools over the past few years that it was hard to tell where he actually belonged. My first impression was that Joey was a nice enough kid, but he couldn’t really understand social cues. He laughed at things that weren’t funny, and he had trouble following a conversation. He seemed extremely nervous, shell-shocked almost, always fretting about whether he would be able to remember when this class met, or what he was supposed to wear for football practice.

Saint James is definitely a college preparatory boarding school. We didn’t really have what are termed, in the trade “second chance students.” The schedule was tight and there were lots of things to remember, and we left students to supervise themselves a fair amount of the time.

I did watch out for Joey, though, and I could soon tell that he needed it. Nothing seemed to go right for him. He soon fell far behind in his classes. He was danger in hurting himself and everyone else on the football field. His backpack was like the Bermuda Triangle—things went in there, and never seemed to come out again in one piece. And for much of the time, he was an emotional wreck, breaking down in tears or blurting out inappropriate things in class almost every other day. I met with the assistant head of school and looked at his file, quite a few pages of assorted psychological disorders, lots of meds, a broken home. The kid pretty much had everything stacked against him, and the results we were seeing seemed to fit well into what could be expected.

And then, about three weeks into the term, things began to change for Joey. He was still failing most of his classes, and he was still disorganized and all the rest of it, but he seemed to always be smiling. One day, he confided his secret to me, “I have a friend—not just one, but a couple of friends.” This was the best school he’d ever seen, he said. Because at Saint James, people didn’t call him names or beat him up behind the locker room when the adults weren’t looking. They talked to him about ordinary stuff, played video games with him. One kid had actually invited him to go home for the weekend for a sleepover. Joey was 16 years old, but he’d never been on a sleepover.

Later that day, I talked to Grant, the boy who had asked him over to his house. Grant was a good athlete, one of the most popular kids in the ninth grade. The girls all loved his curly black hair. He could have made Joey’s life a living hell—he had that kind of social power. But instead, he decided to fill Joey’s life with joy. I thanked Grant for taking an interest in him and asked him about the sleepover. “Yea, he said, I’ll think it’ll be fun. I mean, he’s a little goofy in the head and all, but once you get to know him, he’s not a bad kid. And anyway, it’s the sort of thing you are supposed to do, isn’t it.”

I was proud of my students when they won the football title and when they got into Ivy League colleges, when they put on those wonderful musicals in the spring. But I don’t know if I was ever so proud of one of them for anything as much as I was proud of Grant for taking Joey home for the weekend. “It’s the sort of thing you are supposed to do”—yes he was right, but how seldom do people really do that sort of thing? How seldom do they really treat the weak and the vulnerable with dignity?  How seldom do they look past the faults that everyone else can see to the person that lies behind? How seldom to they welcome the little child in the Name of Christ.

Grant, you see, wasn’t just popular and handsome and strong. He was also one of my best acolytes. He was in the chapel for services 6-8 times a week. He had grown up going to Sunday School every Sunday. He knew he was a Christian, and he knew what a Christian was supposed to do. Along the way Grant had internalized the message that Jesus explained to the apostles so vividly when he drew a little child into their midst: the test of your fidelity to me is the way you treat the most vulnerable. “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

Jesus called us to the lowly in response to a dispute among his disciples about who was the greatest. He had told them twice now that he, their king, would be rejected and crucified. But the disciples just can’t get the idea of a worldly kingdom based on violence and ambition and envy out of their mind. For them, a kingdom meant grades and ranks and classes to fill. The apostles wanted to be at the top of the heap, catapulted from obscurity to hobnobbing with the rich and famous.

You don’t get it, Jesus says. Whoever wants to be first in my kingdom must be last of all, the servant of all. The first must be one like me, who pours His life out for you, who gives up all the glory of heaven to take the form of a servant. You shouldn’t be worrying about how well you will fit in with the high and mighty, but how you can www.kamagrawiki.com nurture the weak and lowly.

To demonstrate his point, Jesus pulls a child into their little conclave. It’s the way you treat one of these little children that will show how truly you want to follow me. Ancient Palestine was not a world that swooned over the cuteness of children. There were no clever kids’ sayings email forwards. In Jesus’ time only about half of children lived to adulthood, and infanticide was a widespread practice in Roman society. To be sure, many parents must have been tender and affectionate toward their own children, but children had no social standing and little protection. They were often treated as nuisances, unable to pull their weight.

You need to take the people whom no one else wants, Jesus is saying. You must receive them “in my Name:” for my sake, seeing me in them. Jesus, the one rejected by His friends, the one ridiculed by the crowds, the one who suffered unjustly, without anyone to come to his defense—that’s who you should be looking for when you gaze into the eyes of those forgotten and rejected by the world.

In the rigid societies of the ancient world, this teaching of Jesus was among the most noticed, the most condemned and the most liberating. The Greek philosopher Celsus sneered in the second century, “Wherever one finds a crowd of adolescent boys, or a bunch of slaves, or a company of fools, there will the Christian teachers be also.”[1] That great modern religious philosopher, Jesse the Body Ventura, was, you see, in good company when he claimed a few years ago that Christianity was a religion for weaklings. The Church has long been a place open to all comers, like Robert Frost’s home, “that place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”[2]

Almost every church I know has folks who are deeply involved in its life who don’t really fit in anywhere else. They are just a bit too awkward, or to eccentric, or they have a few too many needs.  But in the Church, at least when we’re doing what we’re supposed to do, we welcome them in, we befriend them, claim them as one of our own.  We hope of course, that they will grow in the life of grace, and sometimes we’ll need to intervene and keep them from harming themselves and others. But it’s crucial that we swing the door as wide open as it goes, so that we are ready to seek for Jesus just where he promised we would find him, among the people no one else wants.

Here at Saint Timothy’s, I’m finding that you really get this. The sign out along road says “The Episcopal Church welcomes you,” and you’re putting that into practice in all kinds of ways. Children are welcomed here, and no one scowls when a baby cries or a toddler wiggles under the pew. Many of you have told me that you came here and stayed here because the people were so kind to you. They remembered your name and helped you find a way to use your gifts.

You had an outstanding model for this in your former rector. In the few weeks that I worked with him, I was so impressed by the ways that Father Brad went out of his way to provide pastoral care to some very vulnerable and broken people.  As those of you who staff the food table will know, this is a place where the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill are received with respect and compassion. There are people all over this town whose life has been one rejection after another, who have been kicked around by the system, who are truly the little ones of our place and time. And this church is their sanctuary. Here they have found something unique, an outpouring of love in the Name of Jesus Christ.

This is a rare and precious thing in a world like ours.  So many seem anxious to build higher walls these days, so we don’t have to think about those who are suffering. We hear such crude and unsympathetic rhetoric used to speak of the vulnerable. These are times when the Hungarian prime minister claims to be defending his country’s Christian heritage by spending millions on razor wire to keep out refugees fleeing for their lives. Presidential candidates who claim to revere the Bible announce their plans to deport millions of our hardworking undocumented neighbors and friends, our brothers and sisters in Christ. There is such fear and anger all around us, and Christ sends us out to counter it with love, by seeking out and welcoming those people whom the world is so quick to reject.

This will not, of course, be easy. Jesus isn’t looking for armchair activists, and you don’t really welcome the vulnerable by merely spouting slogans about tolerance and inclusion. You have to go to people like Joey, that former student of mine, the awkward, demanding, needy people that God has put right in the middle of your life. You will know who they are unless you’ve already decided to ignore them. Welcome that person into your life. Remember that he or she is Jesus for you, in this time and place. He has promised to hide Himself in them. Share with them the love they’ve been looking for and never finding for so very long. And then, you see if the Gospel of Jesus Christ doesn’t change people’s lives.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] qtd. in Origen, Against Celsus, 3.55.

[2] Frost, Robert. “The Death of the Hired Man.”