Matthew 18:15-20 "Come Home" Scott Hoezee

Recently the Templeton Foundation, which has campaigned for an increase in what it calls "forgiveness research," funded a major nationwide study on people's attitudes toward forgiveness. Co-sponsored by the University of Michigan and the National Institute for Mental Health, the study found that 75% of Americans are "very confident" that they have been forgiven by God for their past offenses. The lead researcher, Dr. Loren Toussaint, expressed great surprise at such high confidence, especially since many of these same people are not regular church attenders. Still, three-quarters of the people surveyed had few doubts about God's penchant to let bygones be bygones.

The picture was less bright, however, when it came to interpersonal relations. Only about half of the people surveyed claimed that they were certain that they had forgiven others. Most people admitted that whereas God may be a galaxy-class forgiver, ordinary folks struggle. It's difficult to forgive other people with whom you are angry. It's even difficult to forgive yourself sometimes. But where forgiveness does take place, the study found a link between forgiveness and better health. The more prone a person is to grant forgiveness, the less likely he or she will suffer from any stress-related illnesses.

Apparently, forgiveness is important, it's necessary, it's even healthy. What's more, we need it because sooner or later, we will encounter hurts inflicted by others. That seems to be no less true inside the church than it is beyond the church's fellowship. Indeed, as many commentators have pointed out, whatever else the Lord Jesus Christ may have envisioned for his church, one thing is certain: Jesus was not so naive as to think that the church would be such a bright, sunny, happy place that forgiveness of sins would never be needed. Quite the opposite: Jesus was no utopian visionary who imagined that if only a few simple ground rules were followed, his future disciples would experience unending bliss.

Jesus did not think that way, and the entire chapter of Matthew 18 is proof. This chapter includes warnings about not causing one another to sin. This chapter has two parables related to themes of sin and forgiveness: the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the unmerciful servant. Smack in the midst of all that is this morning's passage and its famous "method" for conducting what in history came to be called church discipline.

Sin does happen. In verse 15 Jesus says, "If your brother sins against you . . ." but we all know only too well that Jesus might just as well have said, "When your brother sins against you . . ." because there is a grim inevitability to our experiencing such hurts. That's probably why, right after this morning's passage, Jesus reminds us that forgiving other people is a little like taking out the trash: just once won't do it. "So, my Lord," Peter will say in verse 21, "would it be enough if I forgave somebody seven times? Could I quit if he went and did the same old thing an eighth time?" And we know that Jesus' reply was along the lines of, "You're never finished forgiving, Peter. It's not finally about keeping count for a short while but rather staying gracious over the long haul." Jesus made no bones about it: sin would remain an ecclesiastical reality.

But of all the times Jesus talked about the need to deal with our mutual sin, Matthew 18:15-20 has become the single most famous of all those passages. For centuries people have seen in these verses a kind of blueprint for discipline. It's almost a kind of holy "three strikes and you're out" scheme. First you confront Person X privately. If that fails, you still keep the matter largely quiet but bring in a couple of other folks who will assist you in your effort to get the attention of Person X. Finally, if that also fails, you allow the matter to get a more public airing after all by getting the whole leadership of the church involved. And if even that fails to yield a change in the behavior and attitude of Person X, then you kick him out of the church, and if you ever see him again, you shun X the way all good folks would shun any other greasy, pagan lowlife you might encounter out in society.

That's what Jesus said. And in one way or another, most church fellowships have found ways to codify these verses into a formal series of church discipline steps. Once you can convince a sufficient number of people that you've taken all three steps--and that you have been careful and earnest and prayerful throughout the whole process--then excommunication can happen. It's all right there in Matthew 18 in black-and-white. It's simple, straightforward, and apparently just the way things need to go.

But I've never thought it was really all that simple, and maybe some of you have harbored such thoughts yourselves. There are good questions to raise here--not questions that call into doubt that Jesus said this but rather questions that properly cause us to wonder what Jesus meant. First, let me raise a fairly obvious point: how could Jesus have told his disciples to bring someone's sin to the attention of "the church" when at the time Jesus said this, no one had ever heard of a "church"? This appears to be an anachronism. It looks as though Matthew has slipped the word "church" into these verses in order to help his readers apply Jesus' words to that later time when Matthew wrote his gospel (and by which time there was then such a thing as a church).

But that little anachronism aside, it remains clear that Jesus was aiming his words at the future community of faith of the church. But there are other things to take into account--matters that quite properly give us pause in terms of seeing in these verses a final solution to the obstinate in our midst.

For one thing, these words come inside a chapter (as well as within a gospel) that urges patience, that recommends an abiding and long-term grace, that highlights the need to seek, and seek, and seek the lost and wandering. A few weeks ago we looked at the parable of the weeds in Matthew 13 and saw there Jesus' teaching that when it comes to discovering sin in our midst, we are not to start yanking up such "weedy" people willy-nilly but indeed just leave such things alone until finally, and in the end, God himself would sort things out. Meanwhile, we are patient when we see sin around us.

All along in Matthew's gospel we've been taught to be inclusive, to accept the surprise presence of people like the Magi, of tax collectors, prostitutes, and other unlikely folks. Two weeks ago we saw the incident with the Canaanite woman and Jesus' own surprise that even someone as far outside the religious community as she should indeed be included within the scope of God's amazing grace. So how do we square this gospel's overarching theme of grace with the apparently harsh words of Jesus in verse 17?

In fact, it is that verse alone that has always made me stop dead in my tracks to wonder if maybe this passage needs to be interpreted in a different light. Consider an analogy: suppose there were some high-profile pastor in this country who for many, many years had pretty well devoted his career to preaching a message of love, acceptance, and compassion when it came to dealing with gay people. Over and again he had tried to put a human face on the homosexuality issue, urging that grace and forgiveness be extended to gays as surely as to all of us who struggle with one issue or another. Well, if you knew of such a pastor, wouldn't you consider it a bracing surprise, and a huge inconsistency, if one day this preacher was heard to say something like, "In my opinion, non-Christian folks are just a bunch of faggots, and I can't stand such unbelievers!"

How could someone who had preached love for a certain group of people turn right around and use some pejorative, slur-like term that refers to that same group? It wouldn't make any sense. Earlier this year most of us were saddened to hear Billy Graham deride in private the same Jewish people who in public he hailed as his friends. Such inconsistencies baffle us when we encounter them. What's more, we know that only hypocrites, people who are not true blue to the core, would ever be guilty of such things.

Surely Jesus was a consistent, non-hypocritical, true blue, and throughly loving person. And that's why I cannot accept the idea that when he uttered the words "pagan and tax collector," he was using those words in the same ugly, derisive, pejorative sense of all the other Jews of his day. In his commentary, John Calvin claimed that by mentioning these groups, Jesus was indeed flagging those people who at that time the Jews regarded "with the greatest hatred and detestation . . . unholy and irreclaimable men." Jesus wanted, Calvin said, to remind his disciples of folks with whom one may never associate. This was not, Calvin also wrote, just your rank and file sinners, because that would exclude the whole world. Still, there is a sub-set of sinners whom we may never approach but only hate.

Again, however, I have never been able to believe that Jesus, who showed so much love to the very people the Pharisees regarded as "pagans and tax collectors," would ever allow himself to be identified with that kind of hateful attitude. Within the context of seeking lost and wandering sheep (that came right before verses 15-20) as well as the context of forgiving over and over and over again without end (that will come right after these same verses), I regard Jesus' reference to pagans and tax collectors as meaning that we are never really finished in reaching out to people. Even as Jesus himself never hesitated to hang out with all "the wrong people," (as Pharisees defined things), so also we need to keep on reaching out, proffering grace, praying, and hoping without end. In fact, it may well be the "tax collectors and pagans" that should receive our most ardent proffers of grace.

Even if this angle on Matthew 18 is correct, however, it does not change one thing: there are those times when we in the church are required to recognize that certain people simply cannot be regarded as active members of our fellowship. There are times when we shut the door. And what all of that means is that even the most heartfelt desire to forgive someone can be wrecked by the other person's refusal to accept your forgiveness. If you want to forgive me--and if I am going to accept your forgiveness of me--then that means I will admit that I need your forgiveness because, alas, I messed up. I did or said something wrong. Whether or not I particularly intended it, I did wound you.

But suppose I don't want to own up to any of that? Suppose that the only thing I can manage to say when you offer to forgive me for your hurt is something like, "Keep your forgiveness, I don't want it! You were hurt by that!? Good grief! You're too sensitive!" Or suppose I say, "I think that this behavior you are calling sinful is just a lifestyle choice! Save your grace for people who really need it, like rapists and terrorists and like that!"

When we encounter that kind of attitude, forgiveness gets cut off at the knees. And if that happens in a situation that really does involve the whole church somehow, then we need to recognize the chasm that has yawned open between a certain person and the rest of the community. This is not an easy matter. It is made more complex today by a number of factors, not the least of which is that most people simply resign or transfer their memberships long before anyone has a chance to work with them on a certain issue. Someone once noted that Americans don't really solve their problems, they just leave them behind. They move. They bail. And this tendency affects the church as much as anything else.

But there may be a more insidious feature to our present situation, and that is the tendency to let a broad and squishy tolerance replace the need to forgive in grace. Tolerance gives us fewer things to forgive in the first place by chalking up ever-more behaviors not as sins but as personal preferences. I don't want to start questioning your choices in life because, hey, I'd just as soon you not snoop into my choices! So let's live and let live, OK?

There are myriad ways by which the process of confronting one another can go wrong. We dare never let our desire to take sin seriously eclipse the prior reality of God's grace, which ought to be the first thing people know about us and the God we serve. But grace is rendered weak when the thing grace is meant to address is reduced to "no big deal."

The church is in the grace business, of offering forgiveness over and over again. As I have suggested this morning, even if things go so far as our treating someone as "a pagan and tax collector," still we need to reach out to them. But when and where, even so, grace is spurned and our desire to forgive is rejected, we hurt. Granting forgiveness and experiencing forgiveness makes you healthier, that recent national study found. Not being able to forgive another person, for whatever the reason, creates stress and makes us feel ill at times. That should be true of the church, too.

If someone slips out of our desire to work with them on a certain issue by resigning or transferring, that shouldn't be the end of the matter for us. We should still want them to know and accept our forgiveness. But for now things don't always work out. Most of us could make a list of people who left our fellowship before reconciliation or forgiveness could happen, and that reality wounds us still. We don't feel spiritually healthy with such unfinished business dogging us. Jesus knew that the church would never be finished dealing with sin. But he also knew, perhaps with great heaviness of his holy heart, that there would always linger around the margins of our fellowships unforgiven sin, unaccepted grace.

It makes the church a sad place sometimes. That's not a message we usually tell people. If anything, church growth experts tell us to portray ourselves to the world as the most joyful, the most "together" folks around. You see it on church signs. "Got Questions? We've Got the Answers. Come Worship with Us." "Feeling Blue? Join Us Sunday Morning and Put on a Happy Faith!" But although the joy of the Lord and the peace that comes through union with Christ are present in all true churches, the grief of our broken world is also there. Things don't always work out the way we hope and pray they will.

But grief over, frustration with, and even anger at other people is never an excuse to stop proffering grace. Meanwhile, we like surely also Jesus himself, live with the ache of incompleteness, the sense that we're not as healthy as we'd like to be. For some of us, this is deeply personal. Earlier in the sermon I referred to a certain "Person X," but some of you don't need the anonymous "X," you can supply a name to someone who fits in this category of the unforgiven. Worse, it's the name of a precious daughter, grandson, parent, dear friend. As Pastor Bob reminded us before the evening prayer last Sunday, over and again he encounters this heartache among the elderly, people whose greatest fear is not that they will soon die but that they'll die before ever seeing Joey or Jill or Frank return to the faith.

And so we keep praying. Maybe that's why this passage ends the way it does in verses 19-20. Wherever two or three are gathered together in prayer to our Father in heaven, then there we can discover again the hope that God really will work through our prayers. And in the face of the sin that surrounds us, what is it that we pray for? The same thing Jesus always prayed for, of course: that we may be one, that we may know the love of God and engulf one another with that same love. That is our prayer as the Church of Jesus Christ. And we never stop whispering it, especially for those whom we've not been able to reach so far. As the old spiritual put it, "Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling. Calling to you and to me . . . calling, dear sinner, come home." Indeed. And Amen.