“For 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….”
How’s that for a “Happy Father’s Day!”?
Several times this week, as we read this morning’s scriptures for our staff meeting devotions and when we gathered for the Wednesday Bible study, I’ve related a story from a morning chapel service I attended while I was in seminary. I don’t remember which passage was read that day, but before her sermon the preacher for the morning read a difficult text, ending with the usual “This is the word of the Lord.” While most of us dutifully responded, “Thanks be to God,” someone in a pew somewhere around me uttered with a stage whisper, “Like it or not.” Maybe we should have put that option on the screen (or in the bulletin) today.
I am aware that these words that Jesus spoke to his disciples aren’t really the most INVITING words he ever said. They aren’t “Come to me, you who are weary, and I will give you rest.” They aren’t “I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.” They aren’t even “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.” The words here are much more striking, much more dramatic, much more shocking. “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
At the very least they are words of warning – – words of disclosure to those who might be preparing to follow Jesus’s call into radical discipleship. That’s a more helpful way to read this scripture – as descriptive rather than prescriptive. If you come along with me, Jesus is saying, or (more accurately) if you go along with my plans for you, people just might not like you. What we’re going to do together, it’s not necessarily going to make you popular in the way you might hope to be. This work we do might not get your picture taken for a feature in The Morning Call, one where you’re holding a certificate of commendation or receiving the keys to the city. Your family might not include a detailed description of your exploits in the annual Christmas letter. People around town might not invite you to their fancy parties.
Instead, following Jesus, going where he sends, with the words and the actions and the attitudes that he calls us to, it might ruffle some feathers. It might push against conventional wisdom. It might even set us at odds with those who are closest to us, because this ministry of mercy that Jesus proclaims doesn’t always line up with the values that get rewarded in the world. Mercy doesn’t always mirror what feels fair, and we sure do like things to be fair.
But what does Jesus say about our idea of fairness? Pay all of the workers the same pay. It doesn’t matter if they showed up at 6:00 in the morning, at noon, or at 4:59 p.m. Pay them all the same no matter what it might do to your bottom line. This is the word of the Lord. Like it or not.
Like it or not. Maybe there’s something more in that non-traditional response.
These difficult words about conflict between parents and children, about the ones who can destroy both soul and body, about the foes inside our own households, and about losing our lives for the sake of Jesus our Christ – they may make some of us nervous. This explanation of the cost of discipleship may sound like a scary warning for our journey of faith or possibly even serve as a deterrent from even following. It may even seem completely contrary to what we want to believe about who Jesus is and how he influences our lives, but it is, these words are, a part of the gospel. They may make some of us nervous, but they do speak, we affirm with faith seeking understanding, the good news of Jesus. So how is that? Whose good news is this?
On Friday, in observance of Juneteenth, the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (USA) posted a video reflection given by the Vice President for Ministry Innovation, the Rev. Dr. Jerry Cannon. A Black Presbyterian pastor born in 1962, just two years before the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, Dr. Cannon shares how important a theology of liberation has been in his life and family experience.
In the video, showing through his own family’s generations how close we are to the reality of emancipation denied, Dr. Cannon tells how if his maternal grandfather, born August 17, 1865, had been born just 10 months earlier, he would have been born under the sin of chattel slavery. That horrific institution was officially ended by the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 2863, but not enacted in the successionist states until after the Civil War, nor was it even told to enslaved people in Texas until June 19, 1865, months after the Confederate generals has surrendered.
When he was born in 1962, Dr. Cannon’s mother was admitted to the Colored Only section of her local hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina, but by a turn of history, he was born in the White Only section, becoming the first African American baby to integrate the segregated hospital. And although he began his formal education in a segregated environment, Dr. Cannon eventually graduated from high school as the first African American student body president in the school’s history.
Embedded in Dr. Cannon’s testimony is some truth-telling about the history of our country that exposes the false gospel of fairness – those who work hard aren’t always rewarded, the innocent are not always set free, all people are not treated as equal. And yet even knowing and experiencing those realities first hand, Dr. Cannon speaks with joy of the liberation he knows by the power of God and the resilience of his community – a community that was not satisfied with the worldview and civic practices of the “way things always were,” the generational bondage that for centuries had oppressed Black people. He connects his freedom to and finds strength for the on-going work for justice in the truth that some children (both literal and metaphorical) were not satisfied with the world that some parents were handing down to them. Dr. Cannon rejoices, and I believe calls us to rejoice, too, that some movements – spiritual, philosophical, and political – rose up and set themselves against the mindsets, practices, and principles of those who came before, demanding change, demanding justice, demanding mercy and life and freedom.
These “children” set themselves against their “parents” as they walked in the way of Jesus that recognizes the full humanity, the full inclusion, the full dignity of all of God’s children. They claimed this good news of the gospel on the lips of Jesus in the gospel according to Matthew. They knew their foes were members of their own national household, their own citizenship family, but they kept pushing anyway. They found themselves staring at the tips of swords, or down the barrels of guns, or into the gnashing teeth of police dogs, yet still they came with peace. Some even lost their lives as they were found in Jesus’s eternal life.
Whose good news is this? It’s certainly good news for those who are in the throes of the kind of opposition Jesus talks about. It’s good news to hear that they are not alone. It’s good news to hear that Jesus knew this was part of the way that leads to justice and mercy. It’s good news to hear that God’s kingdom can come, will come, even in the midst of division and strife.
Whose good news is this? This is good news for all those who find themselves on the oppressive end of unjust policies, practices, and mindsets and are longing for the day that enough people’s eyes will be opened, enough people will step in and step up and say, “We do not have to live this way.” This warning sounds like a promise to those who are held back and held down by long-standing structures and assumptions that privilege the comfort and success of a few who meet spoken or unspoken criteria over the flourishing of many. It might be bad news to those who benefit from tradition and norms, from some systems of fairness, but it’s good news for those who will finally be fully welcome and affirmed when God’s vision of justice is realized.
And truly, this is good news – that the children of God and followers of the way of Jesus and the way of justice will be willing to risk disconnection or ostracization for the building of God’s kin-dom – this is good news for all people, because when some are in bondage, we are all in bondage, being kept from being the hopes God has for us. I know that when it is disruptive to the comfortable status quo, it takes a little longer for us to see and feel and welcome this good news. But these hard, true words of Jesus tell us that even when it is hard to do the right thing, the right thing is still worth doing, for those who lose their lives for the sake of Jesus will find their lives in him. And it is always good news for all people when the world moves closer and closer to the world God intends, the kingdom Jesus brings near.
How do you respond when you see gospel causes being met with resistance?