13th Sunday

13^th Sunday

Can we speak the truth?

2 Kings 4.8-12a, 14-17; Rom. 6.3-4, 8-11; Mt. 10.37-42

Today’s Gospel is the last of the sections of the big missionary discourse. The sermon that Matthew created from a number of disparate sayings of Jesus to describe the ministry. I suggested last week that there is a certain problem in the fact that Christianity has been tamed in a variety of ways so that we can talk about the eleventh commandment being "Thou shall not be offensive." This is really important in terms of how we are going to talk about the ministry because there are a lot of very big complications for ministers in general. Remember that film, "Mass Appeal" with Jack Lemmon: ministers in general, I think, tend not to lead with their chins but rather to seek to be acceptable. And there's even that tendency in the choice of the readings.

Today is an example, where the passage immediately before the assigned passage is much fiercer than the reading we get. I mean, this is fierce enough; "Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me." That's strong stuff. But at the same time it can be volatilized into a sort of general warning, I suppose, about nothing in particular. So, I'd like to read just a couple of lines before this verse which I think offers an appropriate context for this verse and put to you the interesting question as to why they did not include these two verses in today's reading. (Because in the lectionary there are a number of instances where the text are softened.)

So Matthew has Jesus saying, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I've not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I've come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and one's enemies will be the members of one's own household." And then he takes on with the passage I just read. That's not the remark of someone who is, by intention, inoffensive. But we have to be very careful though to figure out where the offense lies.

As I said from those melancholy and dreary statistics that I quoted a couple of weeks ago, there is a tendency to say the offense is to be found in the collision of some kind of doctrinal position, let us say birth control - which is not dogma of course - , and people's behaviour. Is that the sword? Well, maybe a dagger. But I'd like to propose that if you take the gospel as a whole, the storm that Jesus attempts to raise is of a different nature.

First of all, it is important to remember that Jesus was a lay person in his world. I mean, you have to always keep in mind when you hear this stuff that they didn't think Jesus was divine when Matthew wrote this. They thought he was a prophet. But prophets were lay people. They were non-bureaucrats. In fact they were counter bureaucrats more often than not. And it's really extraordinarily important to appreciate that in Jesus, here's some guy off the street, coming and saying these things, saying that the religious bureaucracy can suffocate people instead of liberating them. As a footnote, we Christians think that, well, Jesus has come and we're all washed in his blood and he's raised from the dead and we're all home free. And we're somehow immune from all those nasty problems that were there, present at the time of the writing of the New Testament, and in other religious groups. Well, we are not. and church history gives us enormous amounts of data to that effect.

So Jesus will say this totally outlandish thing that the Sabbath, which is one of the most important religious observances, was made for the sake of human beings rather than human beings made for the sake of these religious institutions. So it is not surprising that upsetting the bureaucratic tidiness offended His fellow Jews.

And we get all kinds of evidence of this in the New Testament But basically he was killed by the political bureaucracy. The Roman Empire was, if nothing else, a very firm, full developed, fully defined, political bureaucracy.

From here, we can go to a number of places at this point, but I think one of the most useful is to talk about that great danger that besets every bureaucracy: the abuse of power. Bureaucracies can be, I think, realistically described as a system for the distribution of power. Those in charge of the bureaucracy can exert their will on the lives of the people who are subject to them in some way or another. And so we get these outrageous statements from Jesus. The one who wants to be the first must be the servant of all. Beware of those who have power because they precisely will make their influence felt and get people to do, by violence, what they want done. Among you, that must be totally reversed. Now no bureaucracy can withstand that. No bureaucracy, whether then or in our own day, can withstand it. And so it is not surprising that Jesus became not just an irritant but a threat to the way power is distributed.

And then I'd like to update all this with a third reason wherein Jesus was offensive. The older I get the more I am convinced that the hardest thing in the world in life to do is to tell the truth consistently. It's embarrassing. I should have learned this by the age of three. But I really believe that truth-telling is the great testing ground of our integrity and of our humanity and it's the most difficult one. And yet, as you look at this fact in terms of the Christian life, love is either based on truth or it is impossible. To love anything fraudulently is to not love. And this means whether I buy somebody else's projection of who they want to be or whether I buy my own. Jesus had this extraordinary capacity it seems, to let everybody be with him so that they didn't have to fake it. Therefore room was created for them to be themselves, for their own truth.

I had, this past week, an extraordinary experience of truth telling. It amazed me. I went to New Orleans to visit some artist friends who work at the university down there The head of the art department and a long time member of the department, took me to this enormous space which they had bought to use as a studio. Massive metal sculptures. Very large canvases. And we were there for about an hour. I saw a variety of their work and some other people's work too. (It's a black university too and it certainly added something to the nature of the art that I saw.) I had the overwhelming sense that, in this space, these people told the truth. To be an artist, as they were, is essentially to say the truth. I was dumbfounded. I truly was. In this space these people are doing the truth. Now does that mean they are wonderful human beings? I don't know. But at least in that space, doing those things, creating their sculptures, their paintings, they were telling the truth and drawing from the deepest recesses of themselves, and the bureaucracies be damned! No, they don't have to be damned because they don't even enter into the consciousness of the artist who is truly working at her or his craft really seriously.

So I offer this instance, not just to take you down memory lane, but because we live in a world where truth is a rare commodity. I shouldn't say commodity because we "commodify" everything. It is such a rare reality that it's hard to figure out where we can find it. And in the lives of these two artists at least, there was a palpable sense that they were telling the truth.

So, what is the ministry supposed to look like in the church? Can we truly speak the truth to power - that great Protestant summary statement of what the gospel is supposed to do? Can we speak the truth to power? Whether the power of the church, or the power of any other bureaucracy that we have to deal with. Can we speak the truth? Do we speak the truth to power? Because if we do, I really think that's going to very closely match this description that you're not bringing not peace but the sword. So, the ministry is cruciform, just as the Christian life is cruciform. And we are all, by reason of baptism, called to ministry, to priesthood. The priesthood of all believers is not some Protestant deviation but is standard Catholic doctrine. And so what Jesus said about the ministers he said about all of us. We need to avoid, I think, at all costs, the taming of the gospel., the rendering of the gospel as innocuous or inoffensive.

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