Hard words of Hope

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Broadway United Methodist Church, Chicago

www.brdwyumc.org

Hard Words of Hope

Lectionary scriptures:

When Jenny and Vernice and I were dividing up Sundays to preach, I would have been wise to consult the lectionary first. It’s tougher than usual, this morning, to say, “This is the good news.”

In our Hebrew Bible reading from the prophet Jeremiah, we have what on the surface seems like a threat from an angry God to destroy the people as a potter would smash down the soft clay of a ruined pot still on the wheel. The gospel confronts us with a statement from Jesus that his followers must hate family, must give up all their possessions, must carry a cross.

Susan Thisthlethwaite, the president of Chicago Theological Seminary and author of several books on just peace and other justice issues, once edited a new translation of the Bible that attempted to be as inclusive as possible, to avoid, as much as possible, non-inclusive language. Needless to say, this generated a fair amount of controversy at the time. She was invited to appear on the Phil Donahue show. In the audience that day a woman stood up, clutching a large leather-bound Bible to her chest. She declared loudly, “I believe every word of my BIBLE as absolutely true!” Susan replied, in her trademark ironic tone, “Oh, really? Have you actually sold all that you have and given it to the poor?” The woman gasped and responded, “Well, THAT’S not intended to be taken literally!”

For those of us who don’t look at the Bible as a literal and infallible letter from the pen of God, it is important that we have the courage and curiousity not to avoid texts that seem hard and challenging, especially when they bring up central themes in the teachings of Jesus. Where is the life in the text? What did it mean in its own time and context? What is it really challenging us to do or to be in our context? These are important questions that we should use to re-claim a liberating understanding of scripture.

I find it helpful to remember the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. The tale is told in the book of Genesis, chapter 32. Do you remember the story? Briefly, Jacob encounters either a man or an angel, depending on which translation you are using. They get into a wrestling match and Jacob tells the man/angel,
“I will not let you go until you bless me.” Then the angel asks Jacob’s name, and blesses him, giving him a new name, “Israel.” After the encounter, Jacob, now Israel, limps away because his thigh bone was injured in the struggle. He went away limping, yes, but blessed and transformed, and saying that he had seen God face to face, and yet his life had been preserved. We need not be afraid of our encounters with God, and with scripture, if we remember that God is interested in us and in our neighbor. God comes to us where we are and whatever transformation happens as we allow ourselves into the struggle, whatever the encounter may cost us, it can be life-giving.

At Wednesday evening at Bible study, the first thing we did with the gospel passage was to read it through once and then simply name, in a word or two, how it made us feel. I wonder if you can name that now. Take another look at the gospel text. How do these words make you feel?

[Give a moment or two for people to think.]

Wednesday evening people responded to this question with words like these: “scared, anxious, sad, left out”…but others said “challenged, liberated, FREE,” etc. Now I do not want to try to dismiss, minimize or eliminate the discomfort we experience when encountering this gospel passage. Quite often, the prophets and the gospel writers intend to do just this: to push against complacency with words of warning and challenge or, on the other side of human experience, to push against despair with words of hope. I stand here as a middle class, middle-aged, white gay American, in a country that has about 5% of the world’s population and uses about 50% of the world’s resources, in a world in which 840 million people are hungry. Now there’s a war on terror that would be worth supporting! I would wager that spending billions of dollars per year on a war on hunger would do much, much more to reduce terrorism in our world than a war of firepower and ground forces ever will.

The people among whom Jesus ministered were subject to the brutalities of the Roman empire. Who is the aggressive empirical force in today’s world? As American Christians, we should be disturbed and challenged by this passage.

It’s also important to remember that the writer of this gospel also wrote the Book of Acts, which records the life of the early Christian community, in which people did indeed live communally, owning things in common rather than individually, and were expected, if they claimed to be Christian, to take care not only of one another, but also of the poor and sick around them. But having said that, let’s look at a range of options for how to interpret this gospel passage, this “good news.” I invite you into the struggle:

1. OPTION ONE: It says what it means. Although God loves me as I am, I cannot be a true disciple until I give up my wealth and become identified with the poor. And if I do that, I’ll probably lose most of my friends and probably my family, too. But what will I gain? A connection to the poor that would ensure that I have their best interest at heart because the myth of individual self-reliance would, at that point, reveal itself as the lie it is and I would understand more clearly that the fate of the poor is my fate, too. Also, I would have no other choice at that point but to fall freely into the arms of God, relying on God for everything and thus being freed from the power of wealth and possessions and the expectations of other people to dull my passion for social justice.

2. OPTION TWO: Jesus purposefully sets the standard so high that we know we will fail before we even start. In this way, he humbles us and makes us painfully aware of our need of grace and mercy. I like this option a lot. It’s calls for some much-needed humility and it emphasizes God’s gracious love. But I wonder if it lets us off the hook and asks too little of us in the way of active love and a passion for social justice.

3. OPTION THREE: By using the words “hate” and “give up,” Jesus is simply telling those who have joined the rock star crowds that are by now following him that in comparison to their love for Jesus and their adherence to his principles of love of neighbor and love of God, their attachment to all other things and people would have to be secondary. Remember that Jesus was causing controversy among the Jews, and some who would follow him would end up being rejected by their families. In that culture, there was no alternative to the family for support. It would be like cutting the lifeline. So Jesus was being fair, honest and compassionate when he said, “Don’t get carried away by the excitement of the crowd…Don’t do this unless you’re really prepared to take the bad with the good, to pay the cost. It’s not going to be a picnic. You may actually have to cut yourself off from you family to hang out with me and let me change your way of living.”

4. OPTION FOUR: In Jesus’ day, the family was not only one’s sole means of survival, it was also the structure in which women were seen as property, or at least their gender and sexuality were understood to be owned by the men in the families. Also, under the control of the Roman Empire, you could only really be sure of your wealth if you were in some way complicit with the power structure because if you weren’t, the Romans could simply take it away from you and, probably, kill you. Jesus could effectively be saying, If you’re willing to pay the cost, you can set yourself free from all that binds you, holds you down, enslaves you, whether it is family, or riches, or something else. You will no longer answer to anyone but God. You will no longer need to fear anyone but God. This approach challenges us with the question, “What do you find interfering with your experience of abundant life in the way Jesus calls us to abundant life? What possessions, or status, or delusions of control, or respectability, or, yes, relationship, sucks the life out of you even as you cling to it so desperately? What is holding you back from committing yourself to the reign of God? To justice and peace, freedom and fairness in a world that seems increasingly to rely on exploitation, and war, on injustice and unearned privilege? Jesus is saying, count the cost and decide whether you are in or not, whether you are ready to be truly and terrifyingly free.

One thing is for sure. Jesus is not a “family values” candidate. At least not in the way that term is thrown around in our current political environment. A friend of mine at the seminary said she entitled her sermon, “Is Jesus a home-wrecker?” Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s clear that Jesus valued children and women and, yes, families, and would be totally in approval of whatever family structure actually gave people life and love and provided a safety net, but the myth that the patriarchal nuclear family as it was known in middle-class America in the twentieth century is somehow an eternal and divinely preferred form of human relations, that it contains something so sacred as to be practically worshipped, is not the gospel. The gospel is big enough for all, the single, the elderly, the orphaned, the single-parent family, the gay or lesbian family, or the group of friends living together and loving and supporting each other throughout their lives. And, it seems to me, that Jesus recognized the way his followers would need a network, a kind of village, not just one kind of family.

Many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer folks have tasted, at least in part, what Jesus may be hinting at. In order to come out of the bondage of the closet, to embrace who we are and to find our solidarity with others like us, many have had to risk losing our families, some of our friends, certainly our religious communities. And many have had nothing to fall back on for certain except the love of God expressed in Jesus and the support and affection of other outcasts. And what a shame that many religious people would want to take even that away from us. But Jesus, perhaps, calls all of us to just this kind of freedom, to face those kinds of odds because freedom is possible, justice is possible, peace is possible. But they wont’ come cheap.

Jeremiah, in an oracle of judgment, speaks of the clay on the potter’s wheel, which God will crush and reform. Jeremiah was very critical of a trend in Israel away from the observance of laws of justice and fairness, laws that made sure the poor were cared for and land and wealth were distributed in a way that people could provide from themselves and their families. What was happening instead was an accumulation of wealth and land for the rich and, especially, for the king. And the people suffered. At the same time, the temple priests obsessed about proper temple worship, and they preached a theology of the centrality of the Davidic King, but, according to Jeremiah, they did not do what God asked. And the people suffered.

Jeremiah warned of pending doom and he kept on speaking about it for many years. His friends and family rejected him. And Israel’s destruction and the exile did finally happen.

Jeremiah then went on to write a beautiful Oracle of Hope in chapters 30 and 31. And even in the image of the clay is an image of possibility. Wet clay, unlike fired pots, can be re-shaped and made into something new. It is still possible, he hints, to choose the good society, to follow God and not to substitute religiosity for God’s true desire, a just and merciful society, abundant life for all people, and the kind of personal transformation that might leave us limping, but certainly will leave us full of life.

What are we called to give up? What are you called to let go of? What am I asked to be freed from? These questions are always contextual. We have to answer them individually, within our own families, within our faith community, and, I think, we need to be asking them as a nation because the world is a very small planet. But I don’t think these passages, finally, are downers. They are calling us to freedom, and to a more mature understanding of what it means to love God and neighbor. If we had time, I’d ask for people to think and then share stories of people who have given something up, intentionally, and found that this action turned out to be a gift, both to them and to their community or the world. Might one give up a few hours a week to mentor a child through a big brother/big sister program? Might we give up eating out once a week to save money for a particular cause? Might we give up our precious TV time to contribute to an agency that is actually trying to change the structure of things? Might we give up on trying to shield our children from all the hurt in the world and instead volunteer with them to feed the hungry or visit the elderly? Admittedly, these are not quite on the level that the Luke passage seems to be calling us to, but in order to be disciples, surely we must do something that requires letting go and daring to receive a blessing in the guise of a sacrifice.

Like the wet clay, we can change without being destroyed. Our potter is the God of creation, the lover who knows that we are fearfully and wonderfully made…every one of us…in all the shapes and colors and particularities that we celebrate each week in our statement of diversity. And like clay, we can anticipate the beauty of becoming, in God’s love. Becoming through letting go.