Matthew 18:15-20
A little over a week ago, the highly-anticipated video game Starfield was released. Its success is critical to both the studio that produced it and to Microsoft’s XBox platform, which needs a new high profile game. There were articles and reviews in the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, though I suspect many of you skipped over them. I did not. You see, I am a gamer, spelled both g-a-m-e-r and g-a-y-m-e-r.
The first personal computer I used was a friend’s Commodore 64 in the barracks while serving in the Army. The first personal computer in my home was an Apple IIc. I’ve been playing video games ever since.
The early games were on big floppy discs, the kind that were actually floppy. School kids in those days were cyber-trekking on the Oregon Trail, though we weren’t using the term cyber yet, while I was exploring the universe in Hitchhiker’s Guide, based on the Douglas Adams novels, or engaging in more earthy explorations as Leisure Suit Larry.
You don’t want to go there. Trust me.
Computer games back then were all text-based, nothing more than choose-your-own-adventure decision trees, though there might be some primitive graphics in blocky green and black. These days, my watch has more processing power than those early personal computers, and the top-tier games, on computer or console, are a whole new world, quite literally, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter or a galaxy of space colonies. The games are immersive and interactive entertainment with scripts and actors.
Folks who are not gamers often imagine that all games are first-person shooters like Call of Duty, or simulation games like Sim City, but role-playing games like Starfield are plot-driven, more like movies where you change the outcome. Some games are narratives without any violence at all, and some are immersive environments with no discernible plot.
And while snowflakes in Florida are terrified that reading a book is going to make their kid gay, one of the first important characters their kids are meeting in Starfield is a gay widower.
Today’s best role-playing games are morally complex, asking you to make tough decisions. Even in a game like Red Dead Redemption, where your character is part of a gang of outlaws, you have opportunities to do the right thing, to show compassion, and to reap the karma of your decisions.
Sometimes in role-playing games, as in real life, you are faced with a version of the Trolley Problem, a classic exercise in ethics. It comes in a number of variations, but the most common elements are this: You see a trolley coming down the track. If it continues on the current track, it will kill five people who are stuck on that track. Maybe they are tied up by some Dastardly Dan, or are stuck in a vehicle that has broken down, or are simply construction workers jackhammering away with ear plugs in and backs turned to the oncoming trolley.
But you happen to be standing next to the switch that can send the trolley to a side track, where only one person is on the track.
If you do nothing, five people die. If you take action, you will have made the decision that killed one.
There are no other choices in the exercise. This is not the Kobayashi Maru, and you are not Cadet James T. Kirk.
Dilemmas of this type, action vs. inaction, the value of the one and the many, come into play all the time, the decision to drop Oppenheimer’s creations on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the debate over whether or not to shoot down the fourth plane twenty-two years ago on 9/11, triage and treatment in the face of resource shortages during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the world of economics, this decision making process comes under the rubric of game theory, though as you can see, it isn’t always about games. And game theory works as theory but not as practice, for it assumes that all decisions are made using reason, which isn’t true because, newsflash, humans are not always rational.
Besides, natural selection works on the collective level, not the individual level, so decisions may seem counter-intuitive if the individual is the only actor in view, but anti-fascists still stormed the beach at Normandy though thousands would die. Game theory is incapable of factoring in things like art and love and patriotism, for these things can not be quantified.
Now, religion does a lot of things, most though not all good, and one of those things is create an ethical framework, a moral code that helps us make complex moral decisions.
We turn to the Bible, and there is Jesus and the parable of the lost sheep in Matthew. “If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?” This is D-Day, or Bonhoeffer deciding to join the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, or every firefighter who has ever run toward the danger to save others.
The parable totally doesn’t really solve the Trolley Problem, but at least it gives us some sense that in the eyes of God as interpreted by Jesus, every single human life is priceless.
Except, oops, there is the very next teaching in Matthew, the one we read today, the one so frequently taken out of context. People constantly use “where two or more are gathered in my name” as a positive, but the phrase comes in the context of church discipline, and while the teaching offers a path to restoration, it also leaves the possibility that the offending church member will be cut off, treated as a tax collector or a Gentile.
I know we think “Gentile? You mean like the folks Paul brings into the Jesus movement? Tax collector? You mean like Matthew?”
That isn’t what we are supposed to read into this passage. We are to read this as “other,” and maybe even as “enemy,” for tax collectors were shady characters who enabled Rome’s economic exploitation and skimmed a little off the top, and there was a powerful faction within ancient Judaism that was hostile to the influence of other cultures, that despised Gentiles. More than anything, the Maccabean Revolt of the 2nd century B.C.E. was a revolt against the influence of Greek, or Hellenistic, culture.
And then, bang… next passage… forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven. Which doesn’t really help that hand you cut off, because cutting off the hand that leads you to sin is in this same section of the gospel too.
It is a mess.
Now, we don’t know Jesus actually said these exact things in this exact order. In fact, we know Matthew re-orders some things. Both Matthew and Luke use some version of Mark as a source text, as well as a lost gospel we call Q.
The earliest information we have about Mark comes from Papias of Hierapolis, who died in 130 C.E., so not that long after the apostolic age, and he reports that Mark was Peter’s interpreter, and wrote down the stories of Jesus as best he could remember them, though he was unsure of the order.
And the trolley is still on the tracks, and barreling toward the librarian who thought that book sounded interesting and besides it won all sorts of awards, toward the PTA parent who brought the wrong kind of cup cakes, and toward the church volunteer who picked the wrong color carpet.
And I’ve gone from atomic bombs to carpet color, because it is all the same question in the end. How are we to be in relationship with one another? How do we want the holy mystery we name as God to be in relationship with us? Because Chris McCandless might head “into the wild,” but the rest of us would rather not die alone, malnourished and poisoned in the Alaskan wilderness.
What Jesus is teaching is accountability in relationship, and in dialogue with his other teachings, a willingness to walk away from destructive relationships. This is a church problem, for all too often congregations are afraid to confront abusive and toxic members. I have seen this play out in churches I’ve served or observed again and again. Pastors get thrown under the bus or simply walk away, faithful volunteers vote with their feet and just stay home. And it isn’t just churches. Did I mention the PTA? Or the Homeowners Association, another form of organization that speaks in terms of covenant? Or Thanksgiving with that brother-in-law who believes he is oppressed while driving a brand new $70k dollar pick-up? Even if you want to say “You are not oppressed, cupcake.”
There are Christians who believe we can never draw boundaries. They are wrong. And they are not following Jesus. Jesus tells us to draw boundaries. Jesus let’s the righteous but rich young man walk away when he isn’t willing to go “all in” for the kingdom.
There may be people in your life at times that you need to let go, because you’ve tried talking, and it didn’t work. This isn’t being a bad Christian. You are only being a bad Christian if you don’t offer a path to repentance, redemption, reconciliation.
You cannot control the trolley. But you do control the switch. Choose wisely, faithfully, lovingly, this day and always. Amen.