“Brothers and sisters, if someone is overtaken in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual, restore such a person with a gentle spirit, watching out for yourselves so that you also won’t be tempted.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I’ve been talking more and more often about the church lately, and today is going to follow in that pattern. I was reminded just last night while watching one of the shows my bride and I enjoy together of yet another reason the church matters so very much. This time, though, the reason is hard. It’s hard on both sides of the equation too. Yet in spite of the difficulty of this reason and its expression, its significance to our lives and to the life of the church more generally is hard to overstate. Let’s talk this morning about birthing babies, nearly missed affairs, and why the church is so important.

The show we were watching last night is a British drama called Call the Midwife. It is now in its thirteenth season. It started on PBS as most British dramas that are popular in the United States do, but has since moved to Netflix which is getting more and more desperate for inexpensive, audience-drawing content. The irony of the fact that many popular British dramas begin their rise to fame on a network that used to be funded in part by American tax dollars is not lost on me. In any event, the series is about what you might expect given the title. It follows the lives and adventures of the nuns and staff of Nonnatus House, an Anglican mission in a fictional district of London called Poplar, as they offer their midwifery services to all the pregnant woman of the area from the 1950s through now 1970.

The show is subtle (did I mention it is British), but very well done. My bride started watching it first, I joined her a bit later, and after thirteen seasons, I am thoroughly invested in the lives of the various characters. The production values are high. They invest quite a lot of effort into making the many, many scenes of women giving birth as realistic as possible without being graphic. The acting and writing and directing are all excellent. The various storylines are often enormously compelling. If you even remotely enjoy British dramas, you’ll probably really like this one.

One of the characters I have come to enjoy most is a pastor at a local church in the district who has become part of the Nonnatus family. Cryil Robinson (played by Zephryn Taitte) is an Anglican minister from Jamaica who has been assigned to the local church, which seems to have a fairly sizable Jamaican community, to serve as their pastor. The church doesn’t ever actually get named, but plays a pretty central role in the lives of the people of Poplar. While Cryil serves in Poplar all by himself, he does have a wife who lives back in Jamaica.

Over the course of this season, Cyril has been working closely with one of the midwives from Nonnatus named Rosalind Clifford (Natalie Quarry) as they have both served in the local community. Three or four episodes ago, I noticed the writers slowly adding more and more moments between the two that were clearly, if subtly (again…British), supposed to indicate a growing romantic attraction between them. In worldly, realistic terms, such a budding relationship is fairly easy to imagine. They’re both young, she’s single, and his wife is about 3,500 miles away, leaving him feeling very alone in his work.

As soon as I picked up on this, I said out loud, “Oh no! I hope they don’t take him down the path of having an affair.” I hate seeing that kind of thing in TV shows generally, but as a pastor myself, I really hate seeing stories of pastors having moral failings. While the series doesn’t mention God or the Christian faith directly very much (which is really interesting considering the show is about a Christian ministry), it has generally been pretty sympathetic toward the church, its mission, and its people. There was one exception to that earlier this season, but that was genuinely an exception to the rule.

In any event, in the episode we watched last night, the pair were working on a project together and they had that moment. You know, the one where their interest in each other suddenly changes from hypothetical to something that has firmly entered into the realm of possibility. In true Hallmark fashion, their hands lightly touched and they briefly looked into each other’s eyes. And I said once again, “Man, I hope they don’t let him go down that path.”

Well, in the next scene, something happened that both shocked and thrilled me. Cryil was talking with one of the members of the church, an older woman, and she observed to him that she had noticed his spending a lot of time at the soup kitchen. She didn’t say it, but they both knew this is where Rosalind regularly volunteered and served. The implication was clear: You’ve been spending a lot of time with Rosalind, and you need to be careful. In a few words, she gently, but clearly reminded him of the importance of his marriage and of the fact that marriage takes work. Two people stay married over a lifetime even in spite of difficult circumstances because they want to stay married.

Now, Cryil could have responded in a number of ways to this conversation. He could have deflected it, insisting that his marriage is just fine and he was on an okay path. He wasn’t, of course, but he could have put on a show in order to keep exploring this deviant path. He could have angrily insisted that this sister in Christ had no business sticking her nose into his private affairs and that she needed to focus more on her own issues than worry about his. Either of those responses would certainly have been understandable and even expected. But in the next scene, Rosalind comes running up to Cryil as he is coming out of his apartment building, almost giddy in her attraction to him, but rather than returning her excitement, he looks at her with sadness in his eyes and a suitcase in his hand. He is going to use the leave he has acquired over the last several years to make an extended visit to his wife in Jamaica. Their foray down a path of immorality was going to come to an abrupt end.

I know the scene was supposed to be sad, but I about shouted for joy. He made the difficult, but correct choice to prioritize his marriage, and to do the hard work of making it work. I can’t think of the last thing I watched that showed someone valuing their marriage and doing the hard work of maintaining it even when they had every reason to give up on it in favor of the easy and easier (at least for the moment) relationship standing in front of them.

Reflections on the challenges of marriage and its worthwhileness in spite of those aside for now, though, what most caught my eye is the fact that it was the church that saved him from a path that would have caused nothing but harm and pain to everyone touched by it. His affair with Rosalind would have resulted in the end of his marriage, the end of his ministry, the end of her employment with Nonnatus House, the wounding of his church members, the downgrading of the church’s reputation and ability to minister in the community. If they followed through on their affair and she got pregnant, it would mean a baby entering the world without married parents which automatically sets them behind peers who do have a mom and dad who are married to each other. Nothing good would have come of it. And a bit of gentle accountability from a member of his church is what saved him and everyone else from this fate.

This is one of the things the church is for – to help lovingly hold members accountable for walking the path of Christ with consistency and tenacity. The Christian life isn’t an easy one. Walking the path of righteousness and saying no to sin gets wearying over time. It’s hard to say no to demanding desires over and over and over and over again, only to wake up the next day and have to do it some more. And while in some sense, putting ourselves in a well-established pattern of does make our turning from sin a bit easier, in a more realistic sense, it’s always hard. And no one understands the difficulty of refusing sin time after time better than the person who is actively doing it. If you’re giving into sin when it comes calling, you’re not battling it, you’re taking the easy way out of falling into it. Don’t confuse spiritual laziness with the courage of firmly held convictions.

When Paul was writing to the believers in the region of Galatia, he offered them some advice on getting Christian community right that speaks right to what this church member of Cryil’s did for him. Near the end of the letter, he said this: “Brothers and sisters, if someone is overtaken in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual, restore such a person with a gentle spirit.”

When a fellow member of the body of Christ starts walking a path toward sin or just falls into sin, it is up to the rest of the body not to judge them and ostracize them for it, but to restore them back to righteousness and fellowship. Yet this restoring work is not to be hard or demeaning or humiliating. It is to be gentle and kind and loving. It is to be filled with understand that there, but for the grace of God, we would also be. How profoundly different is this command from how the church often responds to sin if it even does.

Too often sin just gets ignored in the church because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’ve certainly given into that particular temptation before. Yet to do such is not loving to the one who has fallen into sin. When someone is in a pit and a friend walks by, sees them in the pit, and leaves them there, that is not loving or kind. It is cruel. In the same way, leaving a brother or sister in our church community alone in their sin is not kind, but cruel.

At the same time, seeing that person in the pit and berating them for falling into it as you help them out may leave them wishing you had just left them there. At the very least, your relationship with them once they are out of the pit will be damaged. The connection is the same once again. Berating a brother or sister who has fallen into sin, embarrassing them publicly for their failings, or otherwise being harsh in our efforts to restore them is not the way to bring them back to the path of righteousness. That is the way to drive them from the church entirely.

We need to be willing to have hard, but loving conversations with wayward members of the body in hopes that they come to their senses, and we need to do this with all the gentleness and kindness and compassion we can manage. This unnamed church member did exactly this with Cryil. She wasn’t cruel. She wasn’t harsh. She wasn’t demeaning. She didn’t do it publicly. She quietly, gently reminded him that his marriage mattered, and challenged him to do the hard work of caring for it even in spite of the challenging circumstances he was in.

At the same time, though, we need to do this carefully and wisely so that we don’t wind up getting pulled down into the sin with them. Even as we are giving accountability, we need to be sure we are receiving accountability from others. We can fall just as easily as the next person. But when we are getting the community of the church right, we are giving this loving care even as we are receiving it. Everyone is busy one anothering each other, lending strength and stability to the whole body so that it can continue growing, building itself up in love. The church really does matter. If you aren’t in one, you should be.