3rd Sunday after Pentecost

 

Gospel: Matthew 10:24-39

The first thing I said when I read this Gospel earlier this week was, “Happy Father’s Day!” What a Gospel downer!  But since then, I’ve been thinking more of God as father.  I try to use inclusive language for God.  Rather than say father or he, I often just say, God, because father language can be limiting—it is a finite way to describe the infinite.  However, father language is used all over the Bible, and in many of our hymns, and prayers, so let’s see what it might offer. 

Today, I’m thinking of this Gospel as Jesus passing on his father’s “Life is tough, or life isn’t fair speech.”  Did your dad have this speech?  It goes kind of like this, “Life isn’t a walk in the park, it isn’t supposed to be easy, so get over it.”  And it goes something like this, “Life isn’t fair.  Just because you want something or think you deserve it, doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. It’s not all about you.” 

Of course, this speech is based on dad’s own experience.  It comes from dad’s own pain.  By the time dad becomes a dad, he’s experienced a childhood and growing up of his own that has been a struggle.  He’s come to terms with the world as a hostile place.  He’s dealt with other people who have caused him hardship and pain.  He’s been taught to be a man which I understand can be a painful experience—physically attacked, verbally attacked, and told not to feel emotion.  At some point he has to differentiate from his parents, decide what from his growing up to leave behind, which can actually feel pretty good, even though it can be a sword between him and his parents.  Then there is the pain of bringing another life into this world, because it means sacrifice—giving something up.  It means having a steady job, no matter if that job sucks the life out of you.  It means another person’s needs come before your own.  And it means being replaced as the center of attention.  And eventually it means letting go of your vision for your child’s life to let them become who they are.

God, our Father, knows pain.  He made us on purpose in all his creativity as someone to relate to and provide for.  I think he liked the steady job part.  He was up for it. He liked setting up and maintaining this world in a healthy balance.  He is endlessly patient with our silly questions and the way we go on and on about ourselves.  But I do think it is painful when God sees us differentiating from him and going our own way, because he sees us leaving love and abundant life behind.  God can see the bigger picture.  He can see what’s coming next, but he has to let us make our own mistakes and learn for ourselves.  As painful as the cross is to Jesus, it is not as painful as when we turn our backs and cut off ties to God or when we go and worship other gods like money or strength and cause ourselves and each other so much pain.

Our own dads are flawed, so it makes sense to leave behind some of the damaging things he taught us or destructive patterns in our families—drinking, abuse, selfishness, racism.  But God doesn’t have those patterns.  So when we leave him behind, we are leaving life behind, and that hurts God way more than the personal rejection. Whether by denying him, we will be denied is still up in the air.  When Peter denied him, Peter was forgiven and given responsibilities to feed those sheep. 

When God tells us that life is painful and full of swords, he’s saying there are tough choices in life.  You can’t do what everyone tells you.  You can’t please everyone and even if you could, that wouldn’t be a good choice either.  Sometimes the people you let down or displease are your friends, and sometimes they are in your own family.  That was certainly true for the Disciples.  They had left their families to follow Jesus.  They gave up their families and followed him to the cross, the biggest sword of all.  This Gospel is also Matthew talking to his congregation.  50 years after the Disciples left their families to follow Jesus, the people in Matthew’s audience were being rejected by their own families and turned in, ratted on to the authorities because of their love for Jesus, and arrested and sometimes executed.  They may not have wielded the sword that came between them and their fathers and mothers and siblings, but they knew it’s sting.  God too, didn’t wield the sword that separated him from humankind, but knew the sting of the rejection and separation from his beloveds.

Today Jesus says the disciple is like the teacher.  He’s saying the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.  We take after our dad.  But not necessarily our human dad.  God our Father created us and all this world, and we are more like him if we search our heart and follow our true priorities. 

We are like God our father when we are creative.  Some of you are creative in woodworking, tying flies, fixing cars, making repairs, sewing, gardening, and building relationships.  It is good for us to be creative, as God is creative.  And God’s creativity pleased himself, but eventually he wanted to be creative to benefit others, and that’s partly why he brought us into the picture.  It was more fun to have someone to share it with.

We are like God our father when we are compassionate.  Every time we say in church, “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy,” I think to myself, “Lord you are merciful, Christ you are merciful.”  It’s more of a description than a request.  Mercy is the same as compassion.  This is who God is by nature.  There are countless stories in the Hebrew Bible about God getting mad because the people were stiff necked and turned their back on God, but God was merciful and spared them punishment.  God is often described as rich in mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.  Jesus on the cross calls for the forgiveness of those who crucified him, and when he is raised from the dead, forgives Peter and asks him to feed his sheep 3 times, one for every time Peter denied him. 

And it isn’t just a passive forgiveness and compassion, but a working toward justice for the little ones that get left behind.  I think of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.  Ebenezer Scrooge represented the selfish person who never saw Tiny Tim in all his vulnerability, who was by his greed, making his disease worse.  He might have thought to himself, “Life isn’t fair.  Survival of the fittest!”  But Jesus didn’t mean for us to bring more swords into the lives of little people who already face violence and destruction and disease.  God meant for us who are strong in faith to be willing to face swords in order to ease the burden on so many people whose humanity is denied.  God meant for us who are strong in faith to be willing to stand up and put our comfort aside and be uncomfortable in the face of many daggers so that someone else would know they are important to God, in order for God to be able to give them abundant life that knew so much rejection and adversity.

Jesus doesn’t himself carry a sword.  The worst he does is curse a fig tree and drive out the money changers from the temple with a cord.  When faced with Rome’s biggest sword, the cross, he doesn’t resist.  He doesn’t fight back.  He doesn’t even defend himself.  His presence, his compassion, his attention to the wrong people was more damaging than any sword he could have wielded.  Without a single parry, his actions called into question and cut at people’s assumptions of who mattered and what should be the focus of life.  The Roman Empire thought it should all be about growing the economy at the expense of all the little people, and keeping themselves in power.  Most other people felt life was about self-preservation and getting what’s coming to them.  But Jesus came and his actions were like a sword, a knife, a pruning hook, a purifying fire, a hacking and burning away what was not life-giving or merciful, or God-like.  And since we are united with him in a death like his, we also are united with him in a resurrection like his.  Out of that pruning, new life springs forth.  Out of that fire, a purification takes place.  It isn’t comfortable, but it is necessary for life to flourish.

No one bled more than Jesus.  He gave his life for living a godly life—a life lived for others, putting them first, showing them who their father really is, where they came from, and what ways of living are conducive for all life to thrive.  We are not alone in our suffering.  We are one with the one who made us and we have a vision for what that suffering will lead to, and that is that all the tears will be dried up, people will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character, the nobodies will be invited to the wedding banquet, and we will know who our Father is and live in and by his compassion, his love.