Matthew 18:15-20. "Jesus' People Take Sin Seriously."

This Sunday sermon, based on Matthew 18:15-20, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran on September 10, 2023.  The other readings this Sunday were Ezekiel 33:7-11 and Galatians 2:11-16. Scripture selections come from the New International Version. 

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Transcript

Jesus’ People Treat Sin Seriously.

Matthew 18:15-20

Grace and peace to you in Jesus’ name, friends. Amen.

I was up at our regional Labor Day Retreat this past weekend - thanks again to Dwight for leading worship here. Great event; I highly encourage you to join us next year. Up there, I was chatting with a man I met at last year’s retreat. He and his family are fairly new members - four years - at our sister church outside Albany. Interesting guy. One of the things he told me is that he deeply values the way that our church network - the Wisconsin Lutheran synod - talks about church discipline. In fact, he appreciates it so much that on the day he and his family joined that church, he asked to briefly address his new brothers and sisters during the service. His central comment to them was, “Please practice church discipline against me when I need it.”

Looking back on that day, he told me, he’s not certain that everyone understood exactly what he meant. And I wonder: Do we all, when we hear the words “church discipline,” understand what they mean? We’re going to talk about those words today.

The chapter of Matthew’s Gospel we’re reading from this morning - Matthew eighteen - is sometimes called the “church discipline” chapter. And really, all that phrase means is, the way by which Jesus’ people deal with sin. That’s all that “church discipline” is. Dealing with sin in the church. What Matthew eighteen lays out for us is that Jesus’ people treat sin seriously. 

At the beginning of the chapter, the disciples come to Jesus with a question. It’s one that they ask him not infrequently during their time learning from him. “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” they ask him. What they mean is, “Who is the leader among us? To whom should we defer? Whose concerns should be prioritized?” 

In response, Jesus calls a little child out of the larger group following them. He has the child stand among the disciples. Picture these twelve grown men all looking down, one little face looking back up at them. And Jesus, sitting off to the side, says to them, “There’s the greatest one. There’s the most important one. There’s the one for whom you, as my church, my people, should be primarily concerned.”

He goes on and says, eighteen verse six, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” That is to say, drowning in the ocean with a rock dragging you down is preferable to the wrath provoked in God when harm is brought to a child. Child neglect, child abuse, child endangerment, all fill God with unspeakable anger. Being onboard the submersible that imploded in June would be more pleasant than falling into the hands of God after hurting a child.

That’s what we need to have in mind before we talk about what Jesus lays out as the method of church discipline. We need to have the proper motivation in mind. We practice church discipline to protect people from sin. That’s our motivation.

So we need a clear definition of sin. What is it? The easy answer is, “sin is what God doesn’t want us to do.”  But what is that? I’m going to give you a practical definition of sin, and then I’ll show you how I arrive at this definition. To sin is to harm another person. “Sin” is the opposite of “love.” To love someone is to interact with them toward their benefit. To sin against someone is to interact with them toward their harm. 

Now, it’s not always obvious that things which the Scriptures call sin cause harm to others. An example: Jesus clearly calls lust sin, but if lust isn’t acted on, is someone actually harmed? The Ten Commandments prohibit coveting, but if I don’t move to act on my covetousness, has someone been harmed? I’ll argue that, practically speaking, these things can’t remain theoretical. They do intrude in our interactions with others. Lust can poison all your interactions with the other gender. Covetousness can divide you from the person who has what you want. And if you are caught up in lust, in covetousness, as you interact with the people in whose lives God has placed you, they are harmed. We aren’t talking about the temptation toward lust or covetousness. We are talking about actually lusting after someone; actually coveting what belongs to another. That inherently plays out in the way you interact with them.

But those sins can be well hidden. So while such sins are sin, what Jesus tells us here can only be applied to sins that involve action. Verse fifteen: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you.” Sin needs to be dealt with. I have a note in your bulletin that points to a couple of places where the Bible offers a different approach to dealing with sin. Because at times, Christians are called to cover over the sin of their brothers and sisters with love. Someone is unkind to you? Someone acts selfishly toward you? Someone in your church unthinkingly says something that wounds you? At times, we rightly decide to cover over sin with love. We don’t call them on the carpet. This is especially true when it’s principally our ego being wounded. Sure, they may have said or done something unkind, but to make it into a big deal is also unloving. So when are we called to unflinchingly deal with sin? The context of this section teaches us that when sin is harming someone else, we deal with it. We practice church discipline to protect people from sin.

Jesus says the first step is to privately speak with your fellow Christian. And this is almost always the hardest step. It’s very easy for us instead to tell someone else: “Did you know that he’s been doing this? She’s been doing that?” And sometimes the first person we want to tell is our pastor. “I don’t want to gossip, Pastor, but…” 

I want to be very clear: I am not the first person Jesus wants you talking with. I am always here for you. I am particularly here for you if that second step should become necessary, where “two or three witnesses” are needed. But Pastor is not the first person to speak with about someone else’s sin. They are.

You need to come into that conversation with certainty that you’re actually confronting sin. Because it’s very easy for us to decide that our opinions, our wisdom, determine what is right and wrong. You may look at decisions someone else makes and correctly determine, “That was not wise.” They made a dumb decision, a foolish choice. That doesn’t make what they did sin. And you might not even be correct in evaluating its wisdom. A choice which would under X circumstance be foolish might be the only option under Y circumstance, and you just do not know everything about other people’s lives. Over and over, the Scriptures call for humility in our relationships. Humility recognizes, I am not the smartest person who’s ever lived; in fact, unless I’m by myself, I am probably not even the smartest person in the room. 

So we don’t confront our brothers and sisters over issues of wisdom. It would be more worthwhile to go out for a coffee and ask your fellow Christian who comes to different conclusions than you, “How do you get there?” Humbly open up to hearing another believer’s thought process. And don’t assume that at the end of that conversation, one or the other of you will have changed sides. It’s perfectly okay for two Christians to come to different conclusions about issues of wisdom. The apostle tells us in Romans fourteen, “Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters.” Mature humility recognizes, “I might be the one with weak faith there. I might be the one overestimating my own wisdom.” May the body of Christ not be divided over such matters!

Sin, however, does divide. So Jesus says that the goal in confronting sin is to “win over” you brother. I don’t love that translation of the Greek; more accurately, Jesus says here, you’ve “gained” your brother or sister. Gained them, because their sin had separated them from you and from God. Should “gaining” not be the result of your private conversation, Jesus says, go and find a couple other Christians. I’m available; the elders of our church are available.

What Jesus gives here are not rules regarding church discipline, but guardrails. In real situations, with real flesh-and-blood fellow sinner-saints, maybe you have three or four private conversations. Maybe you tell one other person, and then you also ask Pastor to come along, before the church at large is told. In other situations where sin is already public, the private conversation may not be able to happen. 

This is what we see in our Galatians reading. The apostle Paul has to publicly rebuke Cephas for misleading and dividing the Christians in Antioch. Cephas means “rock.” It was the name Jesus gave to Peter because of Peter’s bold confession that Jesus was the Christ, the only Savior. But even Cephas, strong Peter, needed correction from his brother. This is what my friend at the retreat meant by asking his congregation to “church discipline” him. They may have thought, “What weird stuff is this guy up to?” But he simply meant, “Bring me correction when I need it!” As the hundred and forty-fifth psalm says, “Let a righteous man strike me; that is a kindness. Let him rebuke me; that is oil on my head.” Pouring oil on one’s head was a luxury aesthetic treatment. The psalmist is saying, “Being corrected by a believer who cares about me and cares about our church is like going to the spa.”

That’s the perspective of the one being corrected. Hopefully. Ideally. Of course, it rarely actually is. Correction and admonition are rarely welcomed. People get defensive and prickly. They throw your shortcomings back at you. It’s hard to carry out church discipline - to lovingly and humbly treat sin with the seriousness Jesus commands.

But this is one of the crosses that Christians are called to bear. As Jesus said to his disciples in the reading you heard last week: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Practicing church discipline - correcting one another - is a cross, and a heavy one! It’s hard to do it to someone else; it’s hard to accept it yourself. 

So Jesus ends this section with some beautiful promises. These are verses you’ve probably heard before, but notice that they’re connected to this church discipline section. Verse twenty in particular: “Where two or three gather in my name,” he says, “there am I with them.” We often use that verse to explain what happens as Christians gather for worship. And that’s not incorrect, but it’s not what Jesus is talking about here. What he’s saying is: “When you, my people, need to do the hard work of correcting one another, I am with you. And I am unafraid.” We heard what he said to Peter last week: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Poor Peter. Always getting publicly rebuked for saying and doing stupid things. What a gracious Lord we have, that he made Peter one of his innermost circle, a leader of his people.) 

Jesus is not afraid to say hard things to those whom he loves. Knowing that he goes with us, so can we.

Jesus’ people treat sin seriously. So did Jesus. He thought sin was so serious, he died to save us from its consequences. We also die our own little deaths as we practice church discipline. The part of us that prizes comfort over confrontation dies in the face of love. The part of us that would reject admonition dies as we instead welcome it, like oil on our heads. In all of it, we praise our Savior-God. Glory to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three-in-one! To you, oh blessed Trinity, be praise now and eternally! Amen and amen.