Predators

Mid-West Man-Wolves, by Lichart

Lections: The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 23), AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

For nearly 2000 years, the section of Matthew’s Gospel from which we read this morning has served as the gold standard for Christian church discipline. It’s simply good practice. Should a member of the community, of the ἐκκλησία, wrong you, Christ counsels us first to point out the fault in private, to have a discrete discussion.

If that doesn’t work, you ought, as your next step, to bring in a couple of witnesses; not to gang up on anyone, but to provide perspective and accountability. We all need sounding- boards. Am I in the wrong in this particular situation? Should the conflict persist after that, then you must speak openly and plainly about it to the community as a whole. Lay all your cards out on the table, and let the assembly decide what to do. In the worst-case scenario, the offender would have to be removed from the church—what we’ve come to call excommunication, or shunning.

And that’s all well and good, insofar as it goes. Who doesn’t love parliamentary procedure? But I think there’s more nuance to this scenario than we typically afford it. This isn’t just a license to bring the gavel down, but Jesus’ intent, as ever, is to protect the vulnerable.

Keep in mind the context. At the beginning of this chapter, Jesus’ disciples ask of Him who is to be the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. And in reply, Jesus calls a child, whom He places in their midst. “Whoever is humble as this child is the greatest in the Kingdom,” He says. “Whoever welcomes such a child in My Name welcomes Me.” And I know that this sounds like an aw-shucks Hallmark moment to modern ears, but this statement really does have teeth. It’s a slap in the face to most people’s expectations.

In the Roman Empire of the first century, children were the lowest of the low. They had no intrinsic value, no inalienable rights. Children could be discarded on a whim, left exposed upon a hillside with their heels pinned together. If a Roman father did not recognize his son, did not literally lift him up to “raise him” in his household, then that child would not be seen as a citizen. And a paterfamilias had the right, at any age, to kill his offspring. After all, they only existed because of him.

This doesn’t mean that ancient peoples didn’t love their children. Of course they did—though high infant mortality led many to think of their progeny as only potential people. But in a society of perpetual hierarchy, where you always had someone above you and always had someone below, children represented the powerless, the weakest, the disposable, the most vulnerable, the bottom of the heap—sometimes all too literally.

These, Jesus shockingly said, are to be the greatest in the Kingdom, the greatest in His Church. So those disciples jockeying for position could put that in their pipe and smoke it.

Jesus then continues, presumably with this child still upon His lap, to say that if the sin of any Christian should cause such a child to stumble, it would be better for that offender to have a millstone tied about his neck and thrown into the sea. It would be better to cut off your own hard, cut off your own foot, tear out your own eye, than to sin in such a way that this child should lose her faith. And I tell you, Jesus says, that every young one has an angel who stands and speaks for them before the face of God.

Don’t you dare abuse this child, He admonishes His disciples. And by extension, don’t you dare abuse the weak, the powerless, the vulnerable. God help you if you do! For God is like a shepherd with a hundred sheep, He says, and when one little lamb goes astray, God then leaves the 99 and goes in search to bring that one wayward lamb back home. All of this is part of the same dialogue, the same teaching, with the child in their midst.

Only then does He lay out His instruction on Church discipline. And that’s why the context is important. Because Jesus isn’t talking here about some random sinner in the church. We’re all sinners; that’s why we’re here. He’s talking about one who specifically “sins against you,” that is, one who causes harm, one who is hurting people within the church. That has to be dealt with. Because the Church of Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven, is precisely the community of the vulnerable, of the weak, of the wounded.

Remember the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus inaugurates His ministry by throwing down the gauntlet? Those Beatitudes made it clear exactly whom He’s come to call: the meek, the mourning, the merciful; the hungry and the thirsty; the peacemakers, the persecuted, the poor and the pure of heart—all of whom are going to be vulnerable by their nature. Christ’s is not a Kingdom of the strong, not in any earthly sense. And so the Church has always attracted predators.

There are those who come to the Church as a shark scents blood in water; some seeking self-righteousness, others to defraud you of funds. But many just want power, and to prey upon the weak. And so Jesus’ bête noire, in the Gospel According to Matthew, the thing that Jesus simply cannot stand, is religious hypocrisy, those who cloak rapaciousness and violence beneath a mask of sanctity.

Anyone who uses religion as an excuse for abuse is a hypocrite, in Jesus’ words a “play-actor.” And any community that tolerates such behavior is hypocritical as a whole. With such a diagnosis, Christ prescribes the cure: speak discretely yet honestly with the offender; bring witnesses if you must; and if worst comes to worst, expose the wound before the community, and cut that disease out of the Body of Christ.

Yet even in this, Christ’s concern remains that of restitution, not retribution. “Let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector,” Jesus solemnly pronounces. But those of course are precisely the populations singled out for evangelism in Matthew’s Gospel. Gentiles are to be brought into the Kingdom; Matthew himself collected taxes for the Empire. Jesus’ aim, and so our own, is never exclusion but correction.

St Paul wrote that if someone is expelled from the Church, it’s so that they’ll come back. And when St Peter asked how often he must forgive someone who sinned against him—that is, who offends him personally, yet repents—Jesus responded that Peter must forgive the penitent seventy times seven! Church discipline clearly isn’t aimed at just anyone who ticks you off. It’s targeted at those who harm children, who prey upon the vulnerable, who treat people as things to be misused and abused. Such behavior has to end, definitively, authoritatively.

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven.” That’s the same promise that we heard Him give to Simon Peter two Sundays back. He bequeaths to us authority to rule on religious matters, so that when the Church stands up and says, “We will not tolerate this behavior; we will not let you hurt those in our midst,” we then know that we do so with the blessing of God.

“Truly I tell you,” He continues, “if two of you agree on earth about anything yo ask, it will be done for you by My Father in Heaven.” Obviously that doesn’t mean that God will be our genie. He isn’t writing us a blank check for whatever we might want. Rather, unified prayer, rooted in God’s will and community agreement, carries profound spiritual authority. So whatever the outcome, whatever the decision, God will be with us in it.

“For where two or three are gathered in My Name,” Jesus vows, “I am there among them.” And that should remain a very sobering thought. When we gather for worship, when we study the Scriptures, when we serve our neighbors, when we deliberate our life together through the councils and committees of our church—then is Christ among us. And that’s as much a warning as a comfort.

God’s Kingdom must be a hospital for sinners, a refuge for the vulnerable, and a voice for the voiceless, where all the Father’s children may know love and peace and joy. All of this He says with a child upon His knee.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

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X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026