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PUNISHING THE PASTOR

I’ve got some very tough church expressions to share with you today, and they all link up with this strange little story Jesus told about a field where there were weeds — deliberately planted “sabotage weeds” — in with the wheat. And right away a story like that makes us think of expressions like: “Excommunication.” “Defrocked.” In my own Adventist faith community, we say: “Disfellowshipped.” If someone is voted out of church membership, and their name is taken off the books, they’ve been “disfellowshipped.” “Booted out.” You’ve probably read stories where somebody sued their local church because it had publicly removed them from the group. Sometimes pastors — this is true in my denomination, and I think it runs pretty much across the board — have their “credentials” taken away. “Turn in your papers; you’re through” is something no preacher never wants to hear from the local conference office or the presbytery or diocese. But it happens.

And here in this Matthew 13 story, where the owner of the field — Jesus Himself — says to the workers, “No, DON’T pull out the weeds; no, DON’T gather them up and burn them. Just leave them right where they are,” we have to wonder: Is the Christian Church obeying this parable of the wheat and the tares? Why are Christians always throwing their own people over the side of the ship? Why, when a pastor has what we call a “moral fall,” which is usually a euphemism for a problem with the seventh commandment, is he or she let go? Just in recent years, I’ve heard close-to-home stories of men who stood in the pulpit Sabbath by Sabbath. Leading the flock. Preaching good sermons. And later it came out that they were regularly visiting prostitutes. They were addicted to Internet porn. Sometimes it’s revealed that a minister is also a pedophile. And listen — those people are gone! They’re history. They’re stripped of their credentials.

One issue we have to grapple with is this: who does the story apply to?

“The kingdom of God is like a man,” He said, “who sowed his whole field with good seed.”

All right, so what is that field? Does it refer to the church? Is this a story dealing with internal church discipline, where a congregation has to fire its pastor, or banish a person who is indicted for tax fraud, or say “Let her be anathema!” to a woman who is brazenly living with her lover out of wedlock?

We’ve already quoted Dr. Richard T. France, author of the Matthew section of the Tyndale New Testament Commentary. He correctly points us to verse 38, where Jesus runs through the whole story and says: “The good seed is this. The bad seed is that. The harvesters are the angels. Etc.” And Christ plainly says, “The field . . . is the world.” Not specifically the church — the world. Here’s France’s comment on that:

“The canvas is broader than the specific issue of church discipline. Jesus announced God’s kingdom, and this would lead many of His hearers to expect a cataclysmic disruption of society, and immediate and absolute division between the ‘sons of light’ and the ‘sons of darkness,’as the men of Qumran put it.”

You remember how the children of Israel were very eager for Messiah to come sweeping in and split the world’s population right down the middle. “The Chosen People” and the “Eternally Lost.” But that didn’t happen. Dr. France finishes his thought:

“Yet things went on apparently as before. It was to this impatience that the parable was primarily directed. God’s kingdom does bring division, and that division is final, but while it is already present in principle, its full outworking is for God to bring about in the final judgment, not for man to anticipate by human segregation.”

So as we look out over the six billion people living all around us, it’s God’s place to divide things up and say: “Saved . . . lost. You stand over here on My right; you on My left.” The church isn’t supposed to segregate itself, go off into its own little corner and be exclusive.

However, is it possible that this parable does still have a secondary application to the Church? Are there lessons for us to learn within the body of Christ, as we read this story? Many Bible students think so, and we mentioned yesterday that the example of how Jesus treated Judas, the betrayer, is worth considering. Judas was in the infant “church” of Jesus; in fact, he was a charter member. And Jesus Himself followed the principle of this parable, leaving Judas in, bearing long with him, tolerating his mistakes and even his disloyalty. Keeping Judas in, instead of throwing him out, was very much a church issue. And one group of commentators remark about all of these parables by Jesus:

“Taken as a whole, the parables as recorded by Matthew, present a composite picture of the essential facts concerning the kingdom of heaven.”

Most of these stories start, in fact, with the same six words: “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .” So how Christians in the church should deal with fellow Christians in the church is very much part of this discussion. In an old book entitled Christ’s Object Lessons, the author brings this parable right into the sanctuary as well. Notice:

“‘The field,’ Christ said, ‘is the world.’ But we must understand this as signifying the church of Christ IN the world. The parable is a description of that which pertains to the kingdom of God, His work of salvation of men; and this work is accomplished through the church. True, the Holy Spirit has gone out into all the world; everywhere it is moving upon the hearts of men; but it is in the church that we are to grow and ripen for the garner of God.” Then she adds: “By bringing into the church those who bear Christ’s name while they deny His character, the wicked one causes that God shall be dishonored, the work of salvation misrepresented, and souls imperiled.”

So the enemy, Lucifer, wants to put weeds right in the church. He worked to poison the heart of Judas. He works to bring about those “moral falls” that so pain a local congregation. It works to his advantage when a person sits in the pew of a believer, and yet is an unbeliever. In fact, Satan himself was the first “weed” in the heavenly church above . . . and look how patient God has been with him, allowing the devil these many centuries to work out his failed, fallen plan and demonstrate it to any who will watch and show sympathy.

So friend, if this story has application to the Church, then what is the Church to do? The parable seems to say, “Hang in there. Be patient with the wicked. Don’t kick them out.” And yet we DO kick them out. Frankly speaking, we don’t want pedophiles running our Sunday Schools. We don’t want brazen liars and adulterers to be standing in the pulpit. And there are other places in the Bible where God’s people are told very clearly that some kinds of sin have to be dealt with. I’ll share a marvelous story tomorrow about a church that wrestled with exactly that dilemma and how they handled it.

For today, let’s simply make one point, and in a moment I’m going to turn to a most knowledgeable source. There are times when the Church must say to someone: “Friend, brother, sister . . . you are sinning. And it’s a kind of sin that can’t be in this fellowship.” But there’s a difference between saying, “You are sinning. You must leave” — and saying, “You are lost. You must be destroyed.”

Notice in the parable that when the weeds were gathered up and burned, God did that. He and His angels. Not the workers. Not the diocese or the presbytery or the Southern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. When people are declared lost, and when rebellious sinners finally meet their end and are no more, that grieving moment belongs to the Lord and not to fallible men.

We found on the Internet an actual sermon by one Pastor Martin Luther on this exact topic: “The Wheat & The Tares.” He observes that there will always be, along with true Christians and pure doctrines, “false Christians and heretics.” He should certainly know, having himself been violently accused of being one. But the parable, he says, teaches patience and forbearance toward even heretics and false teachers.

“We are not to uproot nor destroy them,” he writes. “Here [Jesus] says publicly let both grow together. We have to do here with God’s Word alone; for in this matter he who errs today may find the truth tomorrow. Who knows when the Word of God may touch his heart? But if he be burned at the stake, or otherwise destroyed, it is thereby assured that he can never find the truth: and thus the Word of God is snatched from him, and he must be lost, who otherwise might have been saved.” Then he adds, again from agonizing personal experience: “What raging and furious people we have been these many years, in that we desired to force others to believe; the Turks with the sword, heretics with fire, the Jews with death, and thus outroot the tares by our own power, as if we were the ones who could reign over hearts and spirits, and make them pious and right, which God’s Word alone must do.”

It’s hard to stand back, isn’t it, and let God be God? But this quiet countryside story by Jesus reminds us to do just that.