March 5, 2023 Lent 2 Matthew 18

             You would think that a job of inspecting long and tall bridges would be a job of excitement.  And indeed, when I was at my former job of inspecting bridges there were exciting things.  Climbing hundreds of feet in the air inspecting a bridge tower, or walking on the cables of a suspension bridge is exciting.  But for the most part it was hours of mundane drudgery.  One particular bridge that I will never forget, but that will remain nameless today, was over 7700 feet long and 180 feet high.  It was built in the 1950s.  It was typical in those days for the erecting crew to use tack welds to hold the pieces of steel in place temporarily until they were permanently riveted together.  Tack welds were frowned upon because they can be dangerous down the road, but a few were considered acceptable.  That is, as long as they were ground off right after the riveting. 

On this bridge someone must not have been paying attention.  They did not use just a few tack welds.  And they had not ground them off later on either.  And so the end result on this 7700 foot long bridge was some 40,000 tack welds.  And, true to the problems tack welds cause, several thousand of them had cracked.  Each and every one of those 40,000 tack welds had been catalogued.  And every last one of the thousands that had cracked had to be monitored and measured each and every year.  Working on that bridge was like being in the movie Groundhog Day.  Every day, day after day, for weeks, 10-12 hours a day was the exact same thing: checking tack welds; recording their condition.

That thought came back to me as I was studying our gospel reading for today.  When Jesus uses a child to talk about who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven he was not just referring to those who are young.  He was referring to anyone who is a little person in the eyes of the world.  He was referring to those who toil away day after day doing mundane things yet are overlooked by the world.

Think about it.  What makes for a better news story: Professional football player breaks team record for rushing yardage in a single game; or, bridge inspectors reviewed another three thousand tack welds on the local bridge today and deemed them safe?

What really makes our society a safe, enjoyable, meaningful place to live?  It is the thousands and thousands of overlooked little people who each and every day go about their jobs toiling away at the mundane drudgery of things.

What do Jesus’ teachings really mean?  They mean that God sees all that.  God knows all that.  And God values all that.

It is easy for us to be drawn to people who lead exciting lives.  We want to have a part in their excitement.  But Jesus says not to despise one of these little ones.  If a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, he goes out and searches for it.  So it is with God’s desires for everyone, not just the thrilling and powerful.

That is both a challenge and a blessing for us.  It means that we value those the world often overlooks.  And it also reminds us that when we are in the midst of things that seem small, insignificant, unnoticed, and maybe even unimportant, that God does value the work that we do.

The context of all of this helps us to understand the vivid language Jesus uses in verses 8-9 when he says, “If you hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into the eternal fire.  And if you eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the hell of fire.”

Again, context is everything.  Back in the Sermon on the Mount in Chapter 5 Jesus gives almost the same words in reference to controlling one’s sexual desires.  Here it is in reference to controlling one’s desires for power.  If your drive is for greatness, and your ambition to achieve it leads you to put down others (or exploit them), then that drive needs to be controlled.  What is of absolute and central importance here is the community of faith where all are valued.

The second part of the gospel reading continues the same theme.  It talks about conflict among Christians, church discipline, and forgiveness.  It is all solidly constructive advice.  Jesus says that if someone in the church sins against you to and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.  This can take courage, but it preserves the dignity of the other.  There’s no calling out someone in a way that embarrasses them, or you being called out in public either.

Failing that, then bring in a couple close witnesses.  Again, keep it contained but not unhealthily secret.

Failing that, then bring in the whole community of faith.  Hopefully things can be worked out and restored.  If not, then Jesus’ directives are not naïve.  Sometimes a person’s actions are so destructive that they simply cannot stay as a part of the community.  This passage from Matthew is cited in our church constitution and it actually has the force of law among us. 

It might seem to get contradictory though.  Peter then asks how often to forgive.  Jesus’ response of seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven, is effectively an endless number of times.  But that is mistaking Jesus’ intention.  Jesus’ intention is that you not keep count of how often you forgive.  If you keep count then it’s not true forgiveness at all.  It is just bookkeeping until you can justify doing what you’ve wanted to do all along.

The chapter wraps up with a parable about forgiveness.  It’s a pretty well-known parable.  The king forgives a debt of ten thousand talents of a slave.  There isn’t an exchange rate between 1^st century Roman talents and American 21^st century dollars, but I understand it’s in the range of 3.48 billion dollars!  So, the guy’s been forgiven a lot!  We’re left with the question of how someone could have wracked up such a debt?!?

With that huge forgiveness fresh in his mind we’d expect him to be willing to forgive pretty generously too.  But when he encounters a fellow slave who owes him 100 denarii, say roughly 5000-6000 dollars, he has him thrown into prison.

When the king finds out what happens he is not pleased to say the least!  He reinstates the debt and orders the man to be tortured until he pays back all 3.48 billion.  Good luck with that!

Like many of Jesus’ parables, this one plays on extremes.  But we get the point.  When it comes to forgiveness we are not to be keeping score.  We are all sinners in need of God’s grace whether we believe it or not.

You may be sick of hearing me say stuff like this, but that is the heart of this chapter from Matthew, the heart of Christian faith, and the heart of community.  If you recognize the truth that you do not and cannot live up to the trust in God that you should have, then you are in a good place for everything else in Christian faith to come together.

But if you believe the myth that you can indeed be good enough on your own to merit a place in God’s love, then you will never be able to understand any of Jesus’ teachings.  His teachings will sound like a complex mess of things designed to make you miserable. 

And let’s end with this.  We live in an individualistic culture.  We think we can do it on our own.  We think faith is something personal and private within ourselves.  But that is not the way faith works in Matthew’s gospel.  For Matthew’s original readers they needed to live in community.  And faith was not primarily an individualistic thing but a community thing.

When your faith is an individual thing then it is only as strong as you yourself are.  And if you go through life so smoothly that you’ve got everything under control then maybe that sort of faith will work for you.  These days I hear a lot of people who call themselves spiritual but not religious.  That’s a whole can of worms I’m not going to open right now, but the ‘spiritual but not religious’ person has a very weak faith indeed.  They have created their own system of righteousness that suits them.

While Jesus never advocated for the structure of church bureaucracy, and all sorts of church doctrines created in the name of God but actually made to suit a human agenda, everything he taught and lived was about community.  He created a community among his twelve disciples and then told them to spread that community throughout the world. 

Even prayer, when you pray the Lord’s Prayer yourself, you still say, “Our Father,” rather than, “My Father.” 

Faith is always in community.  We keep each other in line.  We support each other.  We learn from each other.  We grow in and through each other.  Jesus meant it when he said, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  Not that you can’t find Jesus when you’re all alone.  But community is where there is strength.  All together we are the Body of Christ.  That means equality, forgiveness, and a common purpose.