Of tax collectors and pagans

Romey's Place, a novel, is half memoir, a hybrid really, that doesn't try to pass itself off as memoir, in large part because in the writer's mind--which is to say, mine--it never was meant as a memoir, even though some scenes are drawn from my own life.

Several major scenes are entirely made up, for example, a scene that happens in church, when the preacher and an elder meet with the boys after it had been discovered they were not only smoking cigarettes but stealing them from a downtown grocer. What's true is that we stole cigarettes (Kent was the favorite--mild stuff). In one of the most significant moments in my childhood--of my life, really--was the moment Mom and Dad confronted me one night in my bedroom. It wasn't late, but I pretended to be asleep. They woke me. My mother cried throughout a long and painful interrogation. I was 11 or 12 years old.

In my boyhood, I couldn't help but believe the church was real authority. I honestly didn't fear the law. I don't know that my parents would ever have turned me in to the town constable. To my child's mind, the real authority--the law--was the awesome power the church wielded. As a kid, I knew that the institution of society I had to fear was the church.

No reader I know has ever suggested that scene is fantasy, that nothing like that would ever have happened--boys stealing cigarettes having to appear before a consistory. No one has ever questioned its veracity because most readers whose age is my own remember a church that was the law in the community. When I was a kid, I never feared cops like I did the church.

The basis for that fear was embedded in the Heidelburg Catechism, which went out of its way to make clear that "the true church" practiced church discipline, not simply because some theologian sang the praises of a disciplining church, but because the Christ himself instituted it in passages like Matthew 18, where Jesus tells the disciples how to deal with people who depart:

If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

For 75 years of my life, that final line--"treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector" meant to run that person the heck out of the congregation of the righteous. If all else fails to redeem the offender, the unrepentant sinner, then run him or her out of the community.

The church's great authority back then was in its ability to determine who would be and who wouldn't be in the fellowship. And those sinners who didn't seek peace, Jesus said, should be handled like "a pagan or a tax collector," which is to say stay the heck away from him or her.

But Sunday morning's sermon made perfectly clear that the old way of understanding Matthew 15 was bogus because, as we know, Jesus himself never practiced what he supposedly preached (with the exception of flipping gambling tables in the temple). Jesus hung around with deplorables, chose to love them vastly more than the Pharisees, the ruling religious elites, the seminary profs of his day, the officers of the classis, the local dominie.

I don't remember ever hearing an interpretation of a biblical passage so opposite to what I'd always assumed was there. If I am to believe that I have to believe the gospel writer's intent was to force us to interpret the line in a way that is the exact opposite of what it says--don't treat the unrepentant sinner as a pariah; instead, treat him as a true child of God.

You want proof? Who wrote the book?--Matthew, of course, who was a hated tax collector himself when Christ called him to be a disciple. What Matthew himself never saw once he became part of the Jesus movement was Jesus lambasting a tax collector. For Christ's sake, Matthew was one.

Never in my life has a single, simple interpretation so reshaped what I would consider a traditional reading of the biblical text as what I heard on Sunday morning. Jesus never meant to condone a species of church discipline that would keep people out of the circle of saving faith; there's just too much proof of the opposite, proof drawn directly from the life and ministry of Jesus himself.

Amazing. Enlightening. Helpful--all of those. 

The church I remember as a boy was right downtown. That church--the one in the photo--is gone now, has been for years and years--physically, that is, but spiritually too. We're different, much different.