Whitney Williams: Rattling the cage

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 9th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: a surprising lesson on church discipline. Here’s WORLD commentator Whitney Williams to rattle your cage a bit.

WHITNEY WILLIAMS, COMMENTATOR: I don’t think my husband and I will ever forget the sermon that followed our eldest son’s baptism. Here’s our pastor, Rodney Hobbs, speaking last March.

RODNEY HOBBS: We’ve finally made it to First Corinthians chapter five and uh, this is how the chapter starts, can I just read verse one to you? It starts like this: It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans: For a man has his father’s wife.”

Let that yuck sink in, and then imagine you’ve invited your entire family to join you for church that morning–parents, in-laws, grandparents, little cousins, plus your son’s two school teachers. That was us.

Hobbs acknowledged the tension.

HOBBS: If you are new with us today, we are so glad that you’re here. (audience laughing) I am so thankful that you’re here today. And you couldn’t have picked a weirder day to be here.

To make matters even more awkward for my husband and me, our newly dunked nine-year-old sat right in between us with his two six-year-old brothers flanking us on either side. But the main topic of our pastor’s sermon wasn’t the particulars of this man’s sin. The message was about another touchy subject: church discipline.

“Oh great,” I thought, because sadly, we’re all familiar with the ugliness of church discipline done wrong. But as our pastor so graciously reminded us, the end goal of church discipline is not shame and derision. It’s restoration and redemption. Or in other words, I thought later, it’s to provoke a sinner out of his captivity.

The illustration played out even further that afternoon, when my son leapt from our minivan to check on a box trap he’d baited with a fish carcass earlier that morning.

SON: I caught one, I caught one! I caught a possum!

He'd caught a possum. He ran and told his grandparents and great grandparents, who were just arriving in our driveway from church.

So our entire family hobbled out back, past our junky shed and through some overgrown underbrush to get a good look at the animal before my son let it go. Turns out, they didn’t have to hurry, because when my son propped open the cage door, the possum didn’t budge, as caged possums have a tendency to do, or not do, rather, 

G-DAD: Just reach in there and pull on his tail.

SON: No. Give me a stick, I need a stick.

My son beat on the back of the cage with a stick to encourage the possum toward freedom.

SON: There he goes.

As we walked back toward the house a few minutes later, I decided to make the experience a teachable moment: “That’s kinda like what Jesus did for you,” I told my son. “He set you free.”

My nine-year-old retorted: “Yeah, but He didn’t beat on my cage with a stick and scare me out.”

‘Not literally,’ I thought. ‘But I pray He does, if it ever gets to that point, spiritually. I love you THAT much.’

I’m Whitney Williams.

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