Matthew 18:15-20
Ezekiel 33:7-11
In August 2023, an emaciated twelve year-old boy with duct tape around his extremities and deep woulds from rope restraints knocked on a stranger’s door in Ivins, Utah and asked for help. Police would discover his ten year-old sister in the home from which the boy escaped, and two days later arrested the homeowner, Jodi Hildebrandt, and the children’s mother, Ruby Franke. The two women were business partners and parenting “influencers” on social media, though Hildebrandt had been engaged in therapeutic malpractice and cult-like control of client couples for years before she cultivated Franke as an acolyte.
You may have seen the story on the news, on one of several documentaries, or on the Lifetime movie “Mormon Mom Gone Wrong,” where Heather Locklear played Hildebrandt. Though both women were convicted on multiple charges, Utah’s system of indeterminate sentencing means they could be out in as little as four years or serve as many as thirty.
Hildebrandt and Franke believed their behavior was discipline, not child abuse, and was justified by their faith.
In fact, tough love, as you might label it, actually became a faith of sorts in the 1970’s and ‘80’s when the teen drug rehabilitation program Synanon incorporated as a tax-exempt religion. Synanon was really the pioneer in a for-profit troubled teen industry that started with drug abuse treatment, but grew to take in rebellious teens scapegoated in the satanic panic at the end of the last century, and the conversion therapy concentration camps of this century, camps that still terrorize LGBTQ+ youths, driving many to suicide.
Troubled teen wilderness programs are particularly notorious for deaths, though almost all companies in this industry engage in forms of confinement and abuse that would be criminal if the victims were adults.
There is a long history of failed attempts to regulate reckless youth, from Shakespeare’s fictional Romeo and Juliet to Scared Straight, a program that took teens and pre-teens into prisons, often with broadcast rights included. Let’s not forget the school-based DARE programs that were so incredibly effective in glorifying drug use and teaching children exactly how those drugs were to be used, a failed program that was intended to stigmatize and frighten.
There is another end of the spectrum of course, a cruelty that comes from a lack of discipline, that comes from not setting boundaries, from creating a sense of entitlement that is going to meet a harsh reality with the arrival of adulthood, if those pampered and protected kids make it that far.
Every generation since before Jesus, including Jesus, and to this very day, bemoans the generations that follow.
Both of our readings today have to do with discipline. The first, from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, is about a member of the worship community who sins. Specifically, one who sins against you. This passage, at least, is not about other people’s business, despite the Evangelical obsession with what people are doing in the privacy of their bedrooms. “If your brother or sister sins against you,” the teaching begins, brother and sister here referring to other members of the faith community.
And notice that the instruction begins with a private conversation. It doesn’t start with public shaming. Or parking lot whispers. You have a beef with me, you talk to me. I have a beef with you, I talk to you.
If that doesn’t lead to reconciliation, try again, with one or two others there as witnesses. Only if that fails do you make the dispute public, bringing the matter before the church. Finally, if the offender still refuses to keep covenant, they are to be shunned.
Treat them like a tax collector doesn’t mean treat them they work for the IRS. In the context of the gospels, tax collectors were Jews who collaborated with Rome and profited from the military occupation. They offended God and country. They were ICE and Palantir and Paramount in today’s terms.
The passage doesn’t spell out what sort of offenses warrant such a response in the early Christian church. Grace and humility mean we need to do some thorough self-examination before we start throwing stones, for as the Bible reminds us, all have sinned. But there have to be limits.
Sadly, churches often fail to follow this process, fail to set limits. Top-down churches are prone to the abuse of power and people, while bottom-up churches deal with a different sort of bully, one that threatens to withhold financial support if they do not get their way. The former is not democracy while the latter is a perverted form of democracy, one where money means power. We don’t like it in our nation. Why would we tolerate it in church?
If the passage from Matthew asks us to attend to how we manage covenant relationships with one another, the passage from Ezekiel focuses on the relationship between the people and God.
As they constructed their religion and identity, the Jewish people had come to believe themselves especially chosen by Yahweh. In a system where gods did things like that, chose certain tribes and heroes, tipped the scales of war in the favor of one party or another, bad things and good things were the result of divine decision. Yahweh causing the collapse of the walls of Jericho or allowing the Neo-Assyrian defeat of the Northern Kingdom is no different than the Greek gods interference in the Trojan War, or the follow-on journey of Odysseus portrayed in the summer blockbuster.
While we turn to the psalms and consider them, rightly, to be the hymns of the ancients, we might also consider many of them to be a sort of divine complaints box, for many psalms complain, whine really, that the wicked thrive and the good suffer, petition God to reverse the situation, something Jesus would promise in his upside down gospel. We might read the gospel of Jesus as a fulfillment of the psalmists’ petitions, that the faithful be rewarded, the wicked crushed.
Since most of the Torah and Deuteronomistic History was written after the defeat of Israel but before the defeat of Judah, it incorporated that former kingdom’s story. But the texts of divine election, the promise of Davidic royal propaganda, was already well known by the time Babylon destroyed Judah, leveling the walls of Jerusalem, leaving the Temple of Solomon a smoldering heap. Ezekiel was constructing the belief that the Jewish people brought the destruction on themselves through their failure to obey covenant, echoing a theology found in Jeremiah as the threat became clear, echoing consequences threatened by earlier prophets going all the way back to the original Isaiah. A god who gives boons might also punish, might send a chosen people into captivity in Babylon.
And if that is where it ends, we are right back to the worst depictions of God, an omnipotent version of a domestic abuser. “This is for your own good,” as the belt lands another heavy blow.
This passage from Ezekiel carries the same tone. “Don’t make me come over there,” says God, ready to deliver a blow. What more violence could there be? The prophet and the people are in Babylon, the divine promise a valley of dried bones.
And I suppose we could say “good enough.” It is good enough that God wants what is best for us. That best for us includes fidelity, refusing false gods, and we still struggle with that, worshiping flags and football teams and failing economic systems. That best for us includes justice, talks about paying a fair wage, welcoming the immigrant, caring for the least among us, so all good.
But there is another through line in the Bible, a narrative best captured by a father, a faithful son, and a spoiled brat who demands his inheritance, and ends up in the uncleanest of jobs, tending to swine. For God is that father, welcoming home that prodigal son, the shepherd leaving the flock of ninety-nine while searching for the one.
There are consequences. That is the way Creation works. But there is also this model for reconciliation, and more than reconciliation, for redemption, for restoration. If the wages of sin are death, then the gift of grace is life. And life now, not in some maybe tomorrow.
This is hard stuff, and I do not have the answers. When is reconciliation possible? When must we take action to insure no more harm is done? How do we deal with the Jodi Hildebrandts of this world? The Ruby Frankes? Bigots and traitors like Pete Hegseth and Linda McMahon?
There is no single answer in a two thousand year old book. We can find the one we want. But the last word seems to be that of a man being executed because he was an inconvenience to empire and its collaborators. “Abba, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”
Abba, forgive us. And breathe your Spirit into the driest of bones. Restore us, that we might live as your agents of restoration. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
This week, we lost a prophet of our time, farmer, writer, and philosopher Wendell Berry.
Let us pray.
The news tells us that we are getting
dirty oil from Venezuela
and dirty beef from Argentina
while our crops rot in the field,
and farmers teeter on the edge of bankruptcy,
and terminal despair.
We pray for those who are up before the sun,
who work long after it sets,
milking and ploughing,
milling and ginning,
for the children cleaning meatpacking plants
in the middle of the night,
and the families awaiting their remittances,
for busboys and dishwashers,
and the cashier at the grocery store,
six hours into their shift.
We pray that we might be awake
to the ways we are entagled
with a system that feeds
and starves
and honors
and exploits.
Jesus lived in an agrarian setting,
illustrating his teachings
with images from fields and pastures,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…