Ezekiel 33:7-11; Romans 13:8-14; Matt. 18:15-20
If you heard me preach two weeks ago and you experience a bit of déjà vu this morning with today’s gospel reading it will be understandable. It’s either a déjà vu or a second chance. I have a sense that the winds of the Spirit that we want to pay explicit attention to this summer are giving me a second chance this morning to preach on a challenging text. The text in question is Matthew’s twice repeated injunction, the last time in 16:19 and this time in 18:18, “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.”
My context for speaking about this text last time was pondering what it meant that Jesus called Peter the rock upon which the church would be built. I was asking what is the rock that the church stands on in order to withstand both the unpredictable winds of the Spirit and the ill winds of the pressures of this world. In the verses from last time Peter and the disciples are told that they have the authority to bind and loose things and what is bound and loosed on earth will be bound and loosed in heaven. In Jewish Rabbinic understanding the priests and those who study Torah, as bearers of the divine presence on earth when they are gathered together to discuss Torah, have the authority to bind and loose or to forbid and permit certain things. By extension then, is the church’s authority to bind and loose certain things that rock or the kind of divine authority upon which we stand? At first I noted with concern that without the winds of the Spirit, a rigid understanding of this concept as it applies to church authority to forbid and permit things could lead to lifeless rigidity. I used the metaphor of petrified wood that in a matter of a brief 100 years a piece of wood buried in the earth, completely devoid of oxygen, becomes crystallized into solid rock. This I believed is the type of fossilization within the church that we want to avoid. This would be a wrong use of authority and an unhelpful rock to stand on.
I also noted that the authority of the church, according to the context within Matthew must be exercised with the utmost humility for in the verses between Matt 16 and Matt 18, we are reminded that the messiah will suffer and die and be raised, that we should take up our own cross and follow him and that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is a child and that whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him/her if a millstone were tied around her neck and she was drowned in the depths of the sea – let the one who dares to preach beware.
And yet, whether we want to or not we need to struggle with our Scriptures, these sacred texts, that spend so much of their time talking about the importance of how we treat each other and how we live out our lives in the community we call church. Mennonites have always taken the gospel of Matthew seriously because of our four gospels this one has some of the most explicit instructions for how a community might get along with each other when things, as they inevitably will, go wrong or when we go through periods of our life together that are more challenging than others. For example today’s text presumes that sin happens and the injunction to bind and loose presumes that the church as the gathered body of Christ has something to say and do about it.
I realize we don’t talk about sin explicitly in church very often, but in an Easter Sermon I preached, when I talked explicitly about sin and salvation I named sin as our collusion with the powers of darkness that mar our relationships with self, other, creation and God. Sin is not a specific list of do’s and don’ts but rather a darkness that has the potential to creep into our lives and tries to make a mess of God’s desires for us – desires that are for our healing and wholeness as individuals and as communities. As I’ve said, the gospel text for today presumes that sin or sins occur within the community and then these verses spell out a step-by-step process to follow if someone sins against you. The first thing to note is that it is the one who is sinned against who is advised to take the first step. He or she must go to the person who has wronged them with the expressed intention of regaining that one. If the person doesn’t listen then the same process will occur with two or three witnesses and if there is still no change then the matter might be taken before the church.
These steps may be helpful in some circumstances, but what I’m more concerned about this morning is the context within which this process or any other process in the church might be carried out, because it is the context that may enlighten us on the challenging subject of the authority of the church to bind and loose things. We may get some insight into the context of these steps first by looking at where these suggestions of steps for reconciliation come from. There is evidence that these steps find their bases in the Jewish law or Torah. In Leviticus, 19:17 we read, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor, lest you bear sin because of him.” And in Deuteronomy 19:15 only a charge with two or three witnesses will be sustained. In a sense there is a kind of judicial bases in the Jewish law for these steps and then in Romans, Paul reminds us of the most important part of any context for dealing with challenges in the community of faith. Romans 13:8 says, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” So according to Paul, love is the most important part of the intent and fulfillment of the law. And if you’ll follow me back to Matthew again a few verses later, it tells us that when the church gathers to bind and loose, in fact when two or three gather together and ask for anything it will be done for them for where two or three are gathered together in Jesus’ name then the divine presence will be with them.
These verses in Matthew tell us not only about the steps involved in one possible process of reconciliation, but within the context of Torah where love is the fulfillment of the law and within the b
roader context of Matthew where profound humility is a mark of greatness and where the gathered community somehow contains the divine presence; all of these things together begin to be the broad strokes of a picture in our imaginations of a place where one or several processes might be fruitful. The place or context for the process is as important or more important than the actual steps for addressing something.
There is an image in my mind of what this place looks like that I want to convey to you today. My hope is that this image will help to connect the question of binding and loosing to real challenges within the church. The purpose of binding and loosing or authority in the church, is to guard this place, a safe place where the most difficult of situations can be met, discussed, understood and most of all loved into fruitfulness; fruitful responses, fruitful decisions and fruitful ways of being with each other.
I picture this place as a field, a beautiful grass meadow. It is a place we want to be, a place we can explore together and enjoy. The authority of the church to guard this place, the authority of the church to permit or forbid certain things is like adding a fence along the side of the field that runs along the edge of a cliff. The purpose of a fence in certain places is to keep us safe, not to keep anyone out. Continuing to look then at this place in our imaginations, this place where we find ourselves, a verse from the 13th century Poet Rumi comes to mind, ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” There is something really appealing about this saying by Rumi. It speaks of a place of love without judgment. However, in our Christian understanding of this saying we don’t completely let go of our ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing. Complete release of our understanding of wrongdoing and rightdoing might be possible in a mystical world or state of mind, but we mortals live in this world, not a mystical world where the things that we do or don’t do, how we speak and act can have real consequences. The Torah, the sermon on the Mount in Matthew, Romans 13:8-14 and other texts remind us that the Reign of God, which might be another way to describe this field, is a place of both love and justice. Justice implies some sort of accounting of what is right and what is wrong. When love and justice meet in this field then we have a place that is safe and beautiful and a place where we can take a good hard look at how we might be community with each other in ways that build up community not only for the sake of the community but for the sake of God’s reign among us and in the world.
And this brings me to my next question, what are we the church for? If our mission as the church is to be a place of hope and healing in the world (as our Mennonite mission and vision states) if it is to be a precious place that guards and promotes love and justice, if it is a place where we are on an adventure that we’d like to call others to join us on, then in this place in the nitty-gritty of our lives we need to bind and loose things in keeping with that mission. Keeping in mind that our guide for binding and loosing is love, profound humility and awareness of divine presence when we gather, we can safely process in a variety of ways the most challenging of circumstances. All that we do together and need to discern together in community, our Christian education, how we live in our families, our parenting, our singleness, our marriages, our lamenting of divorce and other deaths, our conversations about sex, and sexual ethics, our brokenness, our successes, our failures, our health and ill health, all of these things take place in the context of our desire to live God’s reign of love and justice bound and kept safe with love, humility and the divine presence of God as we discern the things that we need to bind and loose.
Love, humility and the divine presence of God among us. I have been with this congregation long enough to know that these things exist here. People in this congregation are passionate about their journey with God and each other and regularly find concrete ways to live and walk in a field where love and justice and the reign of God are being explored and promoted. Are we perfect in this regard? No, of course not, that’s why our scriptures give us examples of communities before us who needed to deal with difficulties, but that promise of the presence of God among us when we gather can sustain and strengthen us, encourage us and humble us. There are some rocks in this field upon which we can build.