Sermon: Matthew 18:11-20 - dealing with each other's sins

Sermon 2: Matt 18:10-20 – the role of the church in shepherding God’s flock

Good morning, Waitara Gospel Chapel! This is Ben Carpentier speaking to you all the way from the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, Penny and I were forced to leave Namibia, but we arrived here safely and are staying with Penny’s uncle and aunt. Once again, we are thankful to the Lord for his goodness, and it’s such a blessing for me to be able to share with you all again today.

For those of you who watched last week, we were looking at Matthew chapter 18 verses 1-10. We learned that God loves the weak, the vulnerable and the powerless so much that he says in the kingdom of heaven they are the ones who will be considered truly great. And we reflected a little on what that means for us as Christians: it means we have to recognise our own position before God as lowly, vulnerable and powerless; it means our job as Christians is to welcome the weakest and most oppressed into God’s kingdom – women, children, the poor and refugees; that God’s wrath will be upon anyone who causes those who believe in him to stumble in their Christian walk, so we must avoid false teaching and ensure that we are equipping Christians to identify and avoid it; and we also saw that we have an individual responsibility to avoid those things that will make us stumble in our faith ourselves.

The reason I’m giving you a quick reminder of what we learned about last week is because this week we are continuing with the next 10 verses of Matthew 18 – verses 11 to 20 – and this whole section is actually linked together. We shouldn’t look at these passages in isolation, but instead see them in their context, because that really guides our understanding of what is being said, and avoids what some people just read into the passage without it really being there. You might remember last week when I was talking about Jesus saying that we must become like little children, there are a lot of things that we might think about the qualities of little children that we should emulate, but Jesus makes it clear that he is focusing on their low status and vulnerability. Well this week we have another passage that often gets misunderstood and misquoted, and where the context helps enormously in our understanding of the passage. As we learned last week, God takes false teaching seriously. We need to make sure that we are being faithful to God’s message and not misleading people with our own ideas, because the consequences of doing otherwise are serious, and even eternal.

We start with verse 11 which, if you’re reading the new NIV, isn’t there. Instead there’s a little note saying “Some manuscripts include here the words of Luke 19:10”. As we know, Bible translators don’t have the original manuscripts of the gospels to work from, but instead have many copies, and fragments of copies, that were made and distributed in the ancient world. Some later manuscripts have this verse included, but those manuscripts closest to the writing of the actual gospel don’t, so the translators have left it out. In this instance it’s no big thing: the verse is simply a repetition of a verse from the gospel of Luke – “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” - and if you do include it here, it is a lovely bridge between last week’s section about keeping God’s people from stumbling, and this week’s section about what to do when we are confronted with sin within the fellowship of believers. But even if we exclude the verse, the message about God seeking to save the lost is clearly provided to us in verses 12 to 14, where Jesus tells the story of the shepherd who leaves his 99 safe sheep to go and rescue the one sheep who has wandered astray, and rejoices over this one sheep more than the 99 who were never in danger. Verse 14 says it well, “In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.” God cares deeply about keeping his people safely in the boundaries of his heavenly kingdom, and those who wander he wants to see restored to their rightful place in the kingdom.

Now I’m a city boy through and through, so I have only come into contact with sheep a handful of times in my life. But back in Windhoek, many people who live in the capital city still have farms in other parts of the country, and sheep are regularly farmed there. I am told by my sheep farming friends that the loss of a sheep represents a considerable loss of income, but also small scale farmers know their animals individually and care for them. So if one does go missing, you will go looking for it! And here in Namibia, that can be perilous. Not only are there leopards and lions, but there are also sheep rustlers who will come and steal from your flock. So when you do find your lost sheep safe and sound, you celebrate, because the situation could have been much worse.

Jesus here of course is not talking about actual sheep. In fact, in verse 14 he returns to his language of the previous passage talking about “little ones” – the weak, the lowly, the vulnerable who we talked about last week. And before we move on from here, there are two things I would like to remind us all about. Firstly, this is the context in which we read the following verses on what is popularly known as church discipline. The context is that God does not want to see any of his little ones perish. It’s not about punishment for wrongdoing - God wants to see those who are astray return to him.

That’s the first point. The second point that is so easy to miss or forget is that we are a part of this group of weak, lowly and vulnerable children before our God. We have been saved through his grace, not because we have made ourselves special, and we are just as susceptible to stumbling and sin as anyone else. One thing we were taught in our missionary training is to hold off on judgment of our adopted culture for as long as possible, because the truth is that you see lots of things that make it easy to get frustrated and point fingers and judge the culture and how it doesn’t glorify God. But it doesn’t usually take long before you start to reflect on your own western culture and see that actually our culture also does not reflect God’s kingdom values – it’s just that we’re more forgiving of our culture because we’re more used to it, or we simply sin in more sophisticated and culturally acceptable ways.

In God’s eyes both Namibian and Australian cultures are corrupt, even if in one culture people steal money directly, while in the other they funnel it into business or campaign accounts. In God’s eyes both cultures are greedy, even if one is poor and wants handouts while the other is rich and doesn’t want to share. Often western culture simply hides these problems better, and it is the obviousness of the sin that appals us rather than the fact of it; and it is the blankets we use to cover our sin – the thin veneer of politeness or the separations of accountability or the distancing of responsibility – that comforts us, rather than a true repentance and casting away of sin as something which stumbles us and others.

We are sinful. We are lowly little children, undeserving and yet graciously invited into God’s heavenly kingdom. When God talks about not wanting the lost sheep to perish, it is so easy for us to think of ourselves sitting in our churches as the 99 safe sheep who aren’t causing any trouble. And as the Holy Spirit’s sanctifying work takes place in our lives, there is some truth in that. We are becoming more like Christ each day. But this passage is written to Christians – the one lost sheep is not a non-Christian! You can’t use church discipline against people who aren’t members of the church. Let us never forget the words of Isaiah 53: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way.” We are all lost sheep that need saving, even as we are also called to be shepherds tending to God’s flock.

Now that we have these two truths in our minds – that God’s desire is that none of his lowly, weak and vulnerable children perish, but rather are kept safe from stumbling; and that we are all weak and vulnerable, we are all sinful and we are all in need of God’s grace and protection – we are ready to move on to the second part of our passage today. We’ve already learned last week that we have a personal responsibility to ensure that we ourselves do not stumble. Now we learn how we as a community are to deal with one another when we stumble, and Jesus’ words are wonderfully practical in this regard.

Starting at verse 15: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.” The truth is that we are all going to sin. Sometimes that sin is visible; sometimes it will even negatively impact another of our brothers and sisters in Christ. When we see one another sin, or when we are impacted by one another’s sin, Christ’s command is that we go to our brother or sister and point out their fault privately. This is us dealing with sin in community, even though we start with a community of only two. As Christ says, the goal here is to win them over. That’s especially important to remember if the sin has had an impact on you personally. If you have been harmed by another person’s sin, it can be tempting to call them to account so that you get some sort of satisfaction, or revenge, or perhaps even recompense for their wrongdoing against you. But that is not the concern of Christ in this passage: his concern is to see the lost sheep found again. And that should be our concern as well. On the other side, if we have been approached by a brother or sister and find we have been at fault, our reaction should be that of Zacchaeus when he received God’s grace: “If I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Verse 16, “But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses’.” Now things get more serious. Here we see the community aspect becoming more obvious. The reference to ‘two or three witnesses’ comes from the Old Testament law on evidence for crimes and offences in Deuteronomy 19. Suddenly we have stepped up from a personal conversation to a concern about having witnesses. These witnesses are not necessarily witnesses of the actual sinful event itself though – they are likely just witnesses of the Christian confronting the sinning Christian going through these steps, and not just dragging someone before the whole church unnecessarily.

This is important, because bringing other people into this situation means that the action you are drawing attention to must actually be considered sinful! After all, if the person who is approached doesn’t agree with the person raising the issue, it might be because the thing they are doing actually isn’t sinful! Raising it with a couple of other people from the church community will definitely help to clear this up. It might be that the two witnesses will say, “Actually, I see their point: I don’t think what they did is a problem.” This ensures that someone does not get dragged before the whole church before ensuring that there really is a problem that needs to be addressed. It prevents someone from being unnecessarily shamed – and honour and shame were a big component of the culture at the time, and still are important to many cultures.

Even in our culture, we know how much damage can be done to someone’s reputation if they are arrested at their workplace, for example, especially if they are arrested for a crime that is particularly shameful. When police just go around arresting people with no reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed, this can cause someone irreparable damage to their reputation even in Australia.

And it is possible that the person bringing the accusation is in the wrong. If we find ourselves in such a situation, we should be gracious. If we made an accusation that others think is not legitimately sinful, it is our thinking that actually needs to be adjusted. If we have an accusation made against us wrongly, we should be able to trust that the accusation, though wrong, was done in a spirit of ensuring our spiritual wellbeing, and not out of spite or revenge. In Deuteronomy 19 - where this rule of two or three witnesses originally comes from - the Old Testament law makes it clear that malicious accusations against another person are a sin and a crime: the malicious accuser is put to death! Obviously in church we don’t put people to death, but it shows us the seriousness of making sure that accusations against one another are not done recklessly. If our heart is really in the right place, and what we are hoping for is to lead a lost sheep back to the fold, then we should be thankful if we discover that - once we seek some advice from one or two others - actually there isn’t any problem. Obviously if the two witnesses agree that there is a sinful problem here, it might be that, when confronted with this by a small group, the sinful person will acknowledge their wrong and seek to repent. Again, they will have been won over, and the process can stop there.

But, moving to verse 17, “If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” If the steps have been properly followed, then whether the issue at hand is truly sinful has already been raised with two witnesses, and so is likely to be agreed upon to be sinful by the entire church. But it still exists as a failsafe, and I have been in a church where, when an issue got to the stage of being brought before the entire church, a significant number of the church members disagreed with the leadership about whether something was or wasn’t sinful.

The main point in this verse is the consequence or punishment that the church can enforce upon the one found to be sinning and unrepentant. As I said, in churches today we don’t stone people to death. What do we do? The verse itself says “treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” And some have said that this means we should treat them with love and dignity and seek to persuade them of the truth. This is of course true – we should treat all people with love and dignity and seek to persuade them of the truth of the gospel. But when we read other parts of the New Testament, like Romans 16, or 2 Thessalonians 3, or Paul’s extensive words on this in 1 Corinthians 5, we see that included in this action is an idea of temporary exclusion from the community – sometimes called excommunication. One reason the whole church is involved is so that everyone in the community knows that this decision has taken place, and that they must all abide with it.

Now of course this is challenging, and that’s fair enough. This is, after all, not meant to be an easy situation. It’s perhaps one of the most difficult situations that church leaders can find themselves in today, especially in the modern world. In the early church exclusion was more straightforward – there was no other church in the area! And even throughout the Catholic era of the church, you could not simply be excommunicated from one parish and move to another – there was no other denomination to accept you. But today, especially in places with a long Christian heritage like Australia, being excluded from one Christian community seems like a small consequence: there is probably another church within walking distance. Even in small country towns there will often be more than one church. People move churches all the time, for many different reasons. When we moved to Namibia, it took us 7 months to find a church where we were comfortable enough to settle down and begin serving seriously. How can we meaningfully exclude someone from our church community when they can just up and join any number of other churches with little or no consequence?

I want to put two challenges to us in this regard. The first one is for us as individuals. When you join a church community – that is, when you adopt it as the place where you will fellowship regularly, and contribute meaningfully, and seek the benefit of that community as part of God’s kingdom – to an extent you are putting yourself under the spiritual authority of that community. And this happens any time you join any community really. I’m in the UK at the moment, and as you may know most people in the UK want their country to leave the European Union. But the fact is that decades ago they put themselves under the authority of the EU – they ceded some of their sovereignty to it, they made a commitment to abide by what the EU said. Now that doesn’t mean they can’t leave; but it does mean that it will be painful. And it’s the same when we become true members of a church: yes, we could leave at any time – true churches are not cults, they cannot and should not restrain someone from leaving – but while we are members of a church, we are under that church’s spiritual authority and we should respect that. Penny and I have moved around a lot, and been members of many different churches, and preached in even more, and we can tell you that there is no such thing as the perfect church; they all have flaws, or shortcomings, or things we disagree with. But they still should have that authority in the life of the individual Christian who calls that church home.

That’s the challenge we bear as individuals – to accept an authority that we could just walk away from. But there is another challenge we bear together as the community: our church community should be so authentic, so representative of the gospel truth, so together, so caring and nurturing and important in the lives of its members, so trustworthy in their portrayal of the gospel and the words of scripture, that it is a real tragedy to leave it behind! When Penny and I left Waitara Anglican Church to serve on the mission field, that is how we felt! It is not a perfect church by any means, but we felt we were leaving behind a support network, a circle of brothers and sisters, a place of joy and contentment and service, a place of spiritual refreshment and learning, a place where we were a part of God’s kingdom expressed on earth. It hurt to leave. We cried. I would sincerely hope that Waitara Gospel Chapel is the same for its members. If someone moves away from your area and they are more upset about leaving behind their cycling club than leaving your church, then something is probably wrong.

And so it should be if someone should ever need to be temporary excluded from the church community because they refuse to repent of a certain sin. Yes, they might be able to go to another church. But they should be able to trust the church’s grasp of the Bible so much that they can think “if the church said I am wrong, I might be wrong about this”; they should miss your church so much that the loss of community is deep enough that they say to themselves “maybe I have been mistaken”. When a non-Christian visits your church community they should say “I really wish I had this in my life.” In the same way, a Christian who has gone astray should say “I really wish I had this back in my life”. That is Christ’s purpose in this whole passage: to see that his little children do not stumble, and that they do not perish out in the cold outside the walls of the kingdom.

Now if you’re like me, you will have been asking yourselves, possibly throughout this whole sermon, “That’s all well and good, Ben, but what about those cases where we struggle to determine what is sinful and what isn’t? Or what about those areas where churches disagree – like letting women preach, or baptism of children, or support of a certain political party or doctrine, or use of a certain piece of technology, or participation in a certain cultural activity?” If you weren’t thinking about that, then let’s think about that now, because Jesus actually deals with this issue in the next verse, verse 18: “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.” These words are almost exactly repeated from Matthew 16:19, when Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

The truth is that although it is very tempting to say something like, “Can’t we just follow what scripture says?” it is rarely that easy to apply when the question of excluding someone from our community falls into our hands. Take the sixth commandment: You shall not murder. You’d think there’s not a lot of wiggle room in that. But what about the person who pulls the switch on those with the death penalty in the USA? What about a police officer who shoots a man armed with a knife? What about the police officer who shoots a child with a water pistol, or shoots a woman running away from him? What about a soldier who is told to drop bombs on a town that has both enemy soldiers and civilians? What about those people on 9/11 who crashed their airline flights, killing everyone aboard to stop the plane crashing into the White House? Christian’s attitudes on what is and isn’t murder differs, and I’m afraid the Bible does not make all of these situations crystal clear. Some churches would exclude someone for all of these actions; other churches would not exclude someone for any of them; some might be in between.

That is why Christ gave us verse 18. We’ve already seen that the inclusion of one or two witnesses, and the need to bring an issue before the whole church, helps to deal with the problem of sin together – if the church agrees that some activity is sinful, then it’s likely there is a problem with the activity.

And yet the church has changed its mind on many practices over the centuries. If I were to express a desire to marry a 13 year old girl, you would be shocked and disgusted and say that is surely sinful: but it was the norm in biblical times; the church would not have even thought to interfere. If I wanted to buy and own a slave, you would think I was a terrible person and say that is definitely sinful: but many Christians owned slaves for hundreds of years after Christ without any church condemnation. Coming a bit closer to modern times, it wasn’t that long ago that musical instruments were banned in most churches in Australia; even more recently watching movies or dancing were considered sinful and were grounds for exclusion by many churches.

And I haven’t even touched on cultural differences! In Namibia I have heard a whole sermon on how failure to greet another person in the street as a sin. One church leader gets caught in adultery, and nothing happens; another church leader gets so angry in a leadership meeting that he takes off his shirt, and his sin is deemed so destructive that he has to leave the country! There are still churches that say a Christian husband can legitimately beat his wife – I’m sure most of us would find that shocking. But then, even in Australia rape inside a marriage only started to be criminalised in 1976 – and churches were one of the groups most against these laws… and other churches were one of the groups most for these laws as well.

The truth is that there are many sins that are invisible: either because we can’t physically see them – like coveting; or we can’t easily measure them – like not honouring your father or mother; or we are culturally blind to them – like greed; or they happen in private – like domestic violence. I was told by a church leader in Namibia that the sin most often punished by church discipline in the Baster community is sex outside marriage, and the people most often punished are pregnant girls – because the evidence is there for all to see. Meanwhile, people who are greedy, people who are idolatrous, who lack generosity, who beat their wives but don’t leave marks – or even the men who get girls pregnant! – are never confronted by the church. This sort of favouritism, even unconscious, is unconscionable. We cannot be a church that picks on little girls while the sins of their fathers go unchecked. Surely that flies in the face of the God who loves the lowly little children.

But even with all these difficulties, Christ has said that, within the revealed will of God in scripture and in the wisdom that the Holy Spirit provides us, God will honour our decisions as we seek to serve him in love, grace and truth. This is the context for those much loved verses 19 and 20: “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” When we talk about two or three gathering in God’s name and him being with us, we are often talking about a Bible study, a prayer meeting, or even meeting over coffee or for pastoral care. But when Christ says these words, he is talking about church discipline! He is talking about the temporary exclusion of a church member for the purpose of their returning to God’s kingdom! If anything, that gives these words even greater power, because it means when we do come together to make these terribly difficult decisions, we can trust that God is with us, and if we are working within the will of God and for his glory –not to punish, not to make ourselves feel powerful, not to unnecessarily shame people, and not to pick on things that we just don’t like – then he will be with us. And notice also verse 19: whatever we ask for, it will be done by our Father in heaven.

In the context of this passage on church discipline, what do you think we might be asking for? The return of a lost sheep back to the flock, perhaps? Again, that is the central theme of God’s will this passage. And it is absolutely no surprise that just after this Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” And we are given the parable of the unmerciful servant. Because alongside this whole issue of church discipline we must remember that our God is a gracious and merciful God, who says we should forgive seventy-times-seven times. If the central theme of God’s will in this passage is that God wishes to see his people remain in his kingdom and not perish or stumble, then it is clear that God does an awful lot of forgiving to make this happen. And we, as recipients of this incredible mercy, should be the same when we are faced with sin in the church.