3 minute read
Within the Beatitudes our Lord declared, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” There’s no question that a Jesus-centered spirituality points to shalom rather than détente. Thankfully, this is an area where the Christian tradition contains robust resources. 20th century authors such as Martin Luther King, Jr., John Howard Yoder, and Desmund Tutu have contributed excellent reflections on peacemaking themes such as love, grace, empathy, reconciliation, forgiveness, conflict resolution, restorative justice, and holistic restoration.1
The trouble is the baggage of Christian culture. I wholeheartedly affirm the profound wisdom of Jesus’ teaching in passages like Matthew 18.2 There’s an elegant simplicity there that I love. Unfortunately, more often than not two-way exegesis of this text is nowhere to be found during instances of conflict within Christian community. As the intensity rises people seldom bother to carefully study the passage, let alone carefully consider the context into which the passage is being applied. The result is like a beautiful diamond placed into loose setting on an ugly ring.
That Matthew passages starts out, “If another member of the church sins against you…” OK, but where’s the line between deviating from cultural expectations and sinning? I once had an Anglo-Catholic priest formally appeal to Matthew 18 about my divisive behavior. What had I done? I’ll tell you. It was a very, very bad thing. After he refused to answer my questions, I’d gone around asking questions about the diocese’s beliefs and practices before committing to their split-off church plant.3 See, I hadn’t sinned, but I had violated his unquestionable presuppositions.4
I have real issues with the expectations of Christian culture into which the Beatitudes are applied. Remember the holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation? It runs programs that allow the crew to participate in real or imagined environments like a gangster novel or a jazz cabaret. They would raise or lower certain settings to create the desired experience.5 I truly wish I could say, “Computer, restart the Matthew 18 reconciliation program without authoritarian structures, complementarian gender roles, Southern honor-shame culture, or collective narcissism.”6
The original beatniks didn’t care for the social expectations of Christian culture and neither do I. It reminds me of the time I dropped a well-timed, “That’s what she said” during a college small group. Everyone laughed but the next week I was confronted by the leaders. They insisted I needed to repent because it was offensive and inappropriate. This despite the fact I’d heard each and every person there crack the exact same Michael Scott joke. The issue was labeled as “sin,” but that assertion was bogus. It wasn’t a Jesus problem. It was a Christian culture problem.7
Author
I’m quite aware of Yoder’s sexual misconduct. It would be easy to cancel his legacy within the Anabaptist tradition and dismiss everything he ever wrote as hypocritical. That makes sense, but I also don’t think it’s the only reasonable path forward.↩
Matthew 18:15-20 reads, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. 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. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”↩
He had this chain-of-command view where faithfulness to Jesus involves laity trusting and obeying the clergy’s spiritual authority. In his view of the world, you don’t ask questions first. You submit first, then get rebuilt in the process of spiritual formation. In other words, in his cultural-spiritual paradigm grunts like me were supposed to broken down and then rebuilt like it’s a spiritual boot camp.↩
I replied that I’d take part in his process “if and only if” it was a dual directional Matthew 18 process where we also discussed his pastoral misconduct, which I carefully documented with screenshots. As you might imagine, he never scheduled a follow-up but for three years screwed me over at every conceivable opportunity.↩
For example, in Star Trek: First Contact Picard disengages the safety protocols on order to shoot the advancing Borg drones with a Tommy Gun.↩
Then maybe we could apply this passage for its intended purpose: actual sin issues.↩
I’d violated the enculturated pious façade expected in that social setting.↩
