Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Cliffcrest United Church – 19 June 2005 – Michael Kooiman
Matthew 10
34“Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth! No, I came to bring a sword. 35I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36Your enemies will be right in your own household! 37If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine. 38If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. 39If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give it up for me, you will find it.
Romans 6
1Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness? 2Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? 3Or have you forgotten that when we became Christians and were baptized to become one with Christ Jesus, we died with him? 4For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.
5Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised as he was. 6Our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. 7For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. 8And since we died with Christ, we know we will also share his new life. 9We are sure of this because Christ rose from the dead, and he will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. 10He died once to defeat sin, and now he lives for the glory of God. 11So you should consider yourselves dead to sin and able to live for the glory of God through Christ Jesus.
When did parents begin to surrender all their power? Listen in with me on the kinds of statements the contemporary parent will make:
Don't you think it's time to go to bed, honey?
You tell mommy what you want to eat instead.
Do you think that was a nice thing to say to your little friend?
You tell me what you think is an appropriate curfew.
It makes me feel sad when you use those kinds of words.
Come on, parents, wake up! Kids need structure and limits, clear guidelines that they can internalise and draw on later. And so, bed time is 7.30, you eat what is put in front of you, be nice to the other kids, curfew is 11, and no, I'm not sad at the use of those kind of words, I'm actually a little mad.
All the educators in the room are cringing. Perhaps I overstate. There is, in fact, a balance to be found between the authoritarian ways of my parents and the "empowering" style of parenting that has emerged in recent years. It is important to build a child's sense of self by allowing them to make decisions and have a say in what happens to them. A child that is in the practice of making good decisions while a parent is with them is more likely to make good decisions when a parent is absent.
Yet the power struggle between parent and child remains. Even as we seek to find that balance between "telling them" and "helping them find out" there will emerge the clever child who seems to see through the whole enterprise and pose a challenge for the most conscientious of parents. When my daughter was 6 or 7 (Hazel is now 21) she would misbehave and face a serious talk. Just before her mother or I would begin to review whatever occurred she would break in and say, "don't tell me what I did wrong because you will make me feel badly about myself." How do you discipline a child who continually outsmarts you?
***
34“Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth! No, I came to bring a sword. 35I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36Your enemies will be right in your own household! 37If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine.
Jesus had a unique take on the concept of family. It is tension that we most frequently ignore, given that we most often imagine that faith and the importance of family go hand in hand. We seem to pile up all the things that are good and important try to make them live together under the same room. It seems like a really odd choice of scripture for Father's Day ("If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine") but we follow a cycle of readings, so you could say that rather than choosing the text for today, the text chose us.
Jesus says a number of things about family, most of which remain jarring to the ear.
"Jesus," they said, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.”
Jesus replied, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” Then he looked at those around him and said, “These are my mother and brothers. Anyone who does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3.31ff)
As Jesus was speaking, a woman in the crowd called out, “God bless your mother—the womb from which you came, and the breasts that nursed you!” He replied, “But even more blessed are all who hear the word of God and put it into practice.”(Luke 11.27ff)
Aside from making Jesus the master of the quick come-back, these passages underling the extent to which Jesus was calling his followers to a new way of being--a revolution--where the traditional ways of understanding the world were turned upside-down.
The usual interpretation of Matthew 10 is that some within the family will accept Jesus and others will not, and therefore there will be interfamily conflict. Dom Crossan suggests we look deeper. Rather than see this as a "me versus family" picture, we need to reread the passage and find the point of division: "I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."
Crossan finds the lines of conflict between the generations. It is not one member against others, but rather a conflict that undermines the traditional lines of power that existed between the first generation and the subsequent ones. Jesus underlines this for us when he places the reader in the middle of this new struggle: "If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine."
In a world where power was vested in the leader of the clan, and lines of accountability and responsibility were clearly defined, Jesus entered with a new vision, one based on the principles of the Kingdom. "Forget family," he said, " even more blessed are all who hear the word of God and put it into practice." His real family? "Anyone who does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother."
***
Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? 3Or have you forgotten that when we became Christians and were baptized to become one with Christ Jesus, we died with him? 4For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.
We seem to regard baptism as a significant family occasion, spurred on, no doubt by the fact that we baptise mostly babies. We gather around the font to bless and pray, and recognise the new life that has entered our lives. This is all good and true. What we lose when we imagine baptism as a family-oriented ritual is the power of the personal revolution that is happening. A baptism sermon about death and babies is seldom welcome, and so we shift the focus to "christening" rather than baptism.
If there were infant baptisms in antiquity, they were few in number. Most baptised were adult believers, converted and immersed in the Christian life. Baptism was something you accepted, much in the way you accepted Jesus into the fabric of your life. Baptism meant dying to former ways of being, and rising to new ways of life with the risen Christ.
In order to understand this more completely, it may be helpful to turn to someone that found Jesus in later life and understood the nature of making a new choice: C. S. Lewis
The Christian way is different: harder and easier. Christ says, "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desire which you think are innocent as well as the ones you think wicked--the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours. (Devotional Classics, p. 8)
This, of course, brings us back to family. The shift from the power structure of clan to the radical equality of the Kingdom brings the whole tree down. There are no half measures as we are called to leave behind family and become part of the clan that lives primarily to do God's will: to hear the word of God and put it into practice. In many ways it gives greater meaning to the calling of the disciples, leaving family and job behind to follow Jesus.
But there is more. We are called to enter Christ. We remember that this a revolution and not just switching from a family-family to a band of disciples-family. We are to be one with Christ, buried with him, raised with him, and members of his body. The only power we have is the power of knowing Christ, the power of proclaiming his life and his death and his resurrection. We don't need or want the power of the clan or the group, but rather we want the power of God found in Jesus.
I want to conclude with a poem by an 11th century theologian name Symeon:
Then open your hear to him
And let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love him,
we wake up inside Christ's body.
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as him,
and he makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged,
is in him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in his light.
posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 3:04 AM
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