On Matthew 18 and excommunication

Those preaching on Sunday’s Common Worship Lectionary Gospel (Matthew 18:15-20) may be Googling policies and procedures on excommunication.

The Book of Common Prayer rubrics in the Communion service direct the Curate (i.e. the person having the cure of souls, not the assistant training curate) to read out the Briefs, Citations and Excommunications (p241). The rules for Excommunication are given at the beginning of the service. If the minister thinks that there is malicious and open contention or grave and open sin without repentance, he should give an account the Ordinary (normally the Diocesan Bishop). If there would be grave and immediate scandal, a minister may suspend someone from Communion but the decision is with the Ordinary who must give the suspended person the opportunity of an interview.

(See also Canon B 16 Of notorious offenders not to be admitted to Holy Communion – etc.)

This grave and open stuff is important. We don’t want to excommunicate people over trivialities (though perhaps chronic issues could lead to excommunication). Neither would we normally excommunicate someone for secret sin (e.g. I have hateful thoughts) or in debatable cases. When you begin to think about this, you can see why a bishop’s court is desirable.

We should not absolutize or totalise this text. For example, there may be times when it would be very foolish to go and see someone entirely on your own.

No one is perfectly righteous. And rarely is one party totally in the right and the other totally in the wrong. Nevertheless, someone can be mostly innocent and someone else mostly guilty.

It is possible for victim or perpetrator or both to err in the application of this text.  

The power of the keys (excommunication) should be exercised by the successors of the Apostles – the Bishops acting collegiately with the college of presbyters and the whole church through synod and parliament.

The quality of our church life – eucharistic and otherwise – should be such that someone would actually miss being somewhat excluded from it!

The goals of excommunication include: (1) justice (2) repentance (3) deterrence (4) the purity of the church.

It must be said that the church in England and of England is very far from where it should ideally be in terms of church discipline.

It is possible for local churches and denominations to err in all kinds of laxity or excess rigidity.

It would be a painful shame to excommunicated from your local church, but the penalty is hardly what it ought to be given that a number of churches down the road will likely welcome you with open arms.

Given that you are not the King / Archbishop / General Synod / Parliament, it may be that you cannot apply this passage exactly as you would like. This does not mean that there’s not much to learn from this text and many ways in which you could think, live, pray and work in the light of it.

For example: Christians sin and disagree. Christian relationships in the church matter. We should seek truth and reconciliation. We should avoid unnecessary gossip and scandal and make it easy for people to say sorry and be forgiven. We should be reluctant to tolerate really serious ongoing sin. Sometimes it is helpful and appropriate to deal with something privately, sometimes it is good to involve others. We could go on. Given that the job on Sunday is to preach the good news of Jesus Christ, we will want to put this passage in that context of love, sin, the cross, forgiveness, holiness and so on. No one comes to church for a seminar on what the Vicar thinks church polity should be like! 

Reforming the church in this area is clearly desirable. Probably more urgent are three generations of weekly Communion and Psalm singing, as well as ecumenical progress. After that we should certainly come back to this passage again.

Oh, and if you have an all age version of this sermon, I’m all ears!