by David Bales Klamath Falls, OR

Gospel: Matthew 10:34-39

The years of Jesus' ministry were times when the Hebrew people had their emotionally charged phrases. They had their traveling and local preachers who made people wish for the ways things used to be, and plenty of people then equated what they thought USED to be with what OUGHT to be.

A good portion of Jews in Jesus' day expected a Messiah who would come and set life straight. He would gather an army, toss out the non-Jews from their country, and institute eternal peace. In Scripture "peace" is almost always a social word: welfare for a society, spiritual and physical well-being. Peace was not mainly an individual, inward reality.

So when Jesus pops up announcing that he has not come to bring peace but a sword the idea doesn't fit with what the nostalgia freaks hoped for. Jesus' realism continues to offend people, especially those who want life "nice" and cannot understand why everyone can't be as "nice" as they themselves. Yet with one flick of the wrist Jesus erases false hopes from the blackboard of sentimentality.

"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; and one's foes will be members of one's own household." Don't jump ship. Wait here a moment and consider that Jesus never advocated conflict; and he said plenty of things for family.

Jesus wouldn't let people use the excuse of religion to get out of taking care of their families (Mt 15:1-6). It is not sub-Christian to love your family. It is only HUMAN to love your family. But that's the rub. Jesus said, "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children..." (Mt 7:11) And he said, "If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" (Mt 5:46). All humans love their children. It is only the exceptional culture or individual which doesn't love their children.

However, Jesus' morality was beyond love for one's family, because Jesus set out to lift us above the natural bounds of goodness. When he says in verse 37 "Whoever loves father or mother more than me," the word in Greek for "loves" means, "natural human affections." Jesus doesn't wipe out the natural, he wants us to live in a super natural way.

For many people their highest value is merely their family. Their life is their family; and for all practical purposes, their family is their God. Jesus measures himself against family, he lays the "good" family next to himself as the "best" and says: "Choose me above all." This is where the banging begins and the sparks start to fly, because precisely here is the clash between loyalty to family and loyalty to Jesus. Jesus will not allow himself to be an appendage or an after thought. He refuses to play music as second fiddle. He wants to be tied down to the center of our life, not flapping loose out on the edges. So, in a way Jesus brings peace, but also he brings division.

He says, "Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me." This is the first time in Matthew's gospel he mentions the cross. Those who hear know what he is talking about. He mean gallows. The Romans forced a condemned person to carry the horizontal beam of his cross to the place of execution. So Jesus says, "you'll be on your way to death when you follow me."

And he did go to death by a cross. He left his family. He taught us to trust God in all things; then he laid down his life next to his teaching and there was a perfect match. When he says, "follow me" he means to trudge on obeying him, living his way, even to a kind of death. Our only hope in such a life is that Jesus helps us carry our cross, and helps us live onward till we discover, after the cross, new life.

The cross is where Jesus fails into success. He dies into life. And doing so, he teaches us life. We can see his principle still operating. Those people who are constantly gazing at their own navel are doomed to life fenced round by their own pains and problems. A psychologist writes:

"Nowhere is the New Testament statement, 'he who finds his life ... will lose it' illustrated more dramatically than in the personality of the impulse-ridden individual, whose excessive demands for immediate need-satisfaction from every person in his environment brings ultimate alienation and separation." (1)

If you clutch to life, you lose it. If you cling to health you get hypochondria. If you try to sleep you toss around awake. Those straining to make a good impression seldom do. Happy people aren't those who are struggling to be happy. In a sense you need to abandon yourself to life and let life take care of you.

A newspaper article included a summary of studies showing that "those who did regular volunteer work had death rates two and a half times lower than those who didn't." And other studies conducted over a 40 year period found that altruism helped people "overcome stress and improve their lives." (2) Our congregation makes no apologies for asking people to give their money to the ministry here. Nor do we need apologize for sending around clip-boards to have people sign up for service. Doing so says, "This is who we are. This is what we believe. This is why we call our worship a service of worship."

When Albert Schweitzer was twenty-one he came to understand Jesus' way of life. After reviewing his childhood blessings he wrote:

"While at the University and enjoying the happiness of being able to study and even to produce some results in science and art, I could not help thinking continually of others who were denied that happiness by their material circumstances or their health." He awoke one morning with the realization "that I must not accept this happiness as a matter of course, but must give something in return for it." So he decided to dedicate his life until age thirty to learning preaching, science and art, in order to devote himself from that time forward to the direct service of humanity. He had tried many times before to wrestle with the meaning of Jesus' saying, "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (3)

Now the answer was found. In addition to the outward, he now also had inward happiness.

The extra-ordinary Christian life is possible, even for us who are less than such heroes as Schweitzer. Jesus promises his strength to all of us; that's why this morning's text is not a threat, but a promise. Jesus simply tells us this is true life: Following Jesus, loving God and others. True life fits such a pattern. Eternity merely confirms it. You lose your life to save it. You fling yourself into the ways of Jesus, and trust the everlasting arms to catch you. Jesus says,

"Do not worry, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear?' For it is the gentiles who strive for all these things: and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well."
(Mt 6:31:-33)

Nothing here about family life. Hardly anything here resembling earthly life as we usually endure it. In fact it is about dying to natural life. Jesus' ways are beyond every human tradition and institution. His path leads above the ordinary to the exceptional kind of life he lived with God. And it was enough. Yes, the cross was pain and suffering; but it led to true life, for Jesus and us and everyone. You don't know it until you do it, and until you do it and know it, you have to believe it.

In a scholarly way C. S. Lewis sums up our text in the last paragraph of his book 'Mere Christianity':

"The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end...Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in." (4)

In a more scholarly way Kenneth Vaux portrays our text in the last paragraph of his book 'Health and Medicine in the Reformed Tradition':

"She lay under the oxygen tent: a young woman with young children. She was a nurse in the best tradition, one who knew the terrors patients faced in their last hours. She also knew the peace they experienced. Now she herself lay dying with a fulminating leukemia that took only weeks to seize her life. Through the misty plastic tent she could see me standing nervously, wondering what I should say or do. She was a good friend and I was scared - for her, for me, for her husband, for her family. She beckoned with her hand. I zipped open the tent and leaned in. She looked up and smiled, 'What are you worried about?' In death she gave life in the name of her Lord who had done the same for her." (5)

References:

1. Robert A. Blees, Counseling With Teen-agers (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968).
2. January 22, 1993.
3. Charles E. Joy, Albert Schweitzer, An Anthology (Boston: Beacon, 1947).
4. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Collins, 1952).
5. Kenneth L. Vaux, Health and Medicine in the Reformed Tradition (New York: Crossroads, 1984).

by Mary Louise Bringle

Gospel: Matthew 10:34-42

Those Christians who loudly proclaim the church's endorsement of "family values" must surely have difficulty with this Sunday's gospel text, " I have come to set a man against his own father, and a daughter against her mother. Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." This harsh teaching complements in difficulty the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, found in the Old Testament. Anyone who loves a son or daughter more than God is evidently not worthy, either.

There are all kinds of bad ways to interpret the Matthean text. Clearly it cannot have been intended to create active disrespect for parents, since just a few chapters later (15:4 and 19:18) Jesus repeats the commandment to honor our fathers and mothers. Nor can it have been intended to sanction abuse or neglect of children. Just a few verses before Jesus recites the fifth commandment, he lays his hands upon the little ones brought to him and says that the kingdom of heaven is theirs (19:14). In encouraging his followers to pray, he acknowledges that we as parents, even though we are "evil," still "know how to give good gifts to [our] children"; how much more, then, will God who is the perfect parent give unto us! (7:11) To take the text from Matthew 10 as sanction for destroying family loyalties would be as wrong-headed as to take any other isolated passage from the New Testament as evidence that "family values" are, at heart, what Christianity is all about.

What, then, do we do with this difficult text? Certainly, it offers us an opportunity to reflect upon the fact of tensions in the ordering of our affections. The whole question of what it would mean to love one beloved person more than another is an intriguing - and a vexing - one. Do parents of multiple offspring love one child more than another? Or do they love them all equally, albeit in differing ways? When we move out of our childhood home into a relationship with a life-partner, do we love our spouse more than our mother and father? Or are these loves, too, equal but incommensurate and incomparable? When we work late at the office in order to meet a looming deadline, does that mean that we love our job more than the members of our household? Or does it simply mean that we have made a calculation based on the distinctive demands of a particular situation, knowing that under another set of circumstances, the ordering of our commitments would be quite different?

If we "who are evil" know how to understand our apportioning of attentions based on the needs of specific persons and situations, "how much more" will God know how to assess the variable expressions of our devotion? To give money to a love offering at church while one's own children starved at home would seem a misplacement of priorities; to go repeatedly to prayer meetings while one's aged parent languished, unvisited, in a rest home across town would seem similarly inappropriate. Heaven surely knows that any dualism which interprets divine love as competitive with and contrary to all human loving is dangerously overly simple.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his Letters and Papers from Prison: "For a man in his wife's arms to be hankering after the other world is, in mild terms, a piece of bad taste, and not God's will. We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us."1 If God has seen fit to grace us with spouses, children, parents (and even parents-in-law), we ought to find blessing in those very relationships - not in their denial or renunciation. More often than not, we love God in and through our extended families, not in opposition to them; dialectic rather than dualism connects our divine and human loving. Even as we cherish ones of the least of these, our brother and sisters (fathers and mothers, daughters and sons), we do honor unto Christ.

The problem animating Matthew's text emerges when this dialectic becomes imbalanced - when our human loves do not express and enhance, but rather impede and imperil our devotion to God. When loves come into conflict, when loyalty to any human relationship gets in the way of God's calling to us, then the proper priority is clear, however difficult: the demands of discipleship take precedence over our allegiance to the wishes of any who would prefer that we cling to safety or to the status quo.

Ultimately, then, the peace which Jesus brings to our lives is not evasion or the avoidance of conflict. Rather, it can land us in the very center of conflict, with those whose opinions matter to us the most. Still, if we take the Matthew text together with the Hebrew lesson of the sacrifice of Isaac, the final word of the morning on the balancing of loves remains dialectical rather than dualistic, a message of recovery rather than of renunciation. Abraham who is willing to sacrifice his son discovers that the sacrifice is not finally required; those who are willing to give up their lives find that they gain them instead. We who risk controversy and letting go of our closest relationships may find therein ultimate paradox of the dialectic of human and divine loving , the paradox expressed by William Blake when he wrote:

He who binds to himself a joy Doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise.2

References:

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison: the Enlarged Edition, ed. and trans. by Ebehard Bethge (NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1972), p. 168.

2. William Blake, "Several Questions Answered [Eternity]," in The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. by John Sampson (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), p. 196.

by The Rev. Dr. Janet H. Hunt

Gospel: Luke 12:49-56

The words of Jesus are hard to hear today....and yet I have learned that what he points to, while painful, often simply is.

And so it is that the story I share now still lies close to my heart --- never mind that the memory is nearly 40 years old, it still pains me to remember.

It was Christmas Eve when I was in the 8th grade. My grandmother had died the week before and immediate family had gathered at the funeral home that afternoon.

Immediate family included only my parents, my three sisters and my grandfather.

My dad's folks had moved to the Midwest the year before when Grandma's Alzheimer's Disease meant they needed the support of family in the day to day. My folks bought the house next door to us for them and a wonderful group of friends from our congregation showed up and cleaned and painted and readied it for their arrival. I remember that as an especially happy time --- a time when I witnessed the church at its best.

Only my grandparents had never been involved with a church. It was never talked about though. To this day I have no idea what their thoughts were on the matter of faith, but their absence from all involvement spoke for itself I suppose.

Indeed, when Grandma Hunt died, this was especially evident, for this is what I remember from that day. The church was not there: not its people, not its pastor. This would not have been my parents' choice, I know, but they were following her wishes and that of our grandfather. My dad, her oldest son, was the one who stood at the head of her casket and spoke words which I have long since forgotten. I only remember his voice breaking as he spoke. I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for him.

When we left the funeral home that afternoon it was raining. I remember waiting for my grandpa to pick me up at the door for I was riding home with him and how sad I was and stamping on my memory that detail so I would not forget. When I got home, while the house was more quiet than it normally would have been, there was still the special day that was upon us. Looking back now I would guess my folks must have just been going through the motions of last minute preparations for our Christmas celebration then. I remember pausing in the kitchen where the grief was heavy and asking if perhaps we ought to ask Grandpa Hunt to go to church with us that night. No one looked at me. Finally my dad shook his head and said he didn't think that would be a good idea. I never brought it up again.

Years later when Grandpa died we gathered around his grave in Boston. By then I was in my first year of seminary and my dad and I shared the speaking then.

For years I pondered and worried and wondered over this. Some time ago though I finally let it go, entrusting them both into God's tender care --- whether it was a love they ever acknowledged or not.

So I know a little of what Jesus speaks today. I know it is so that family can be divided by matters of faith and its expression. I know something of the heartbreak it carries --- spoken or not. And I know that it just is. That though the life of Jesus and all that it was is meant to unite it doesn't always. Sometimes it does precisely what Jesus says it will do today.

It is a wonder to me, really, that my dad, his brother, and his sister, all were people of faith --- all deeply involved in congregations, and they raised their children to be and do the same. I choose to focus there --- knowing that no matter what has been, hope can still emerge. And while my dad was always a good son, he did not let that loyalty dictate his life choices. Some things, I expect he discovered, matter even more than that. Still, this must have been hard for him ---- harder than I ever thought to ask about. Even so, you never would have known. The belonging, the joy, the hope he found among God's people were always a wonder to him. Perhaps especially because he came to it as an adult.

And yet it is so that I am still shaped by those people, those events from so long ago especially in this way. You've heard me say this before. I'll do a funeral for anyone. If I can, I will stand with those who grieve so that no family will have to be as alone as we were that Christmas Eve. And I am not surprised to hear that others share the same experience with those they love. I understand the real grief they live with, for I share it, too.

So I hear the hard words that Jesus offers now as simply describing what can be so. Following him is so much more than choosing to worship on Sunday morning --- or Christmas Eve --- although that may be the first place the difference becomes evident. Even more than that, this journey we are called to impacts our life choices, our values, our priorities. One who even seeks to listen for the Holy Spirit's leading may find oneself at odds with even those most dear. It is not, I know, that the division is necessarily permanent, although my example above makes it appear to be so. Still, this is faith that matters, and as such, it is likely to make us look different than we would had it not claimed us in some real way.

Is there grace and gift in the fire and division that Jesus brings? I imagine there is, although in this life, perhaps, I will always grieve those most dear to me with whom I could not share this most important, this most defining of things. Maybe I will always wish this were not so, and yet Jesus offers the simple truth today that when we stand for that which matters most, not everyone will stand with us. Knowing this, while I acknowledge that I cannot fully know the mind, the heart of God, still I trust that God somehow holds us all.

What do you make of Jesus' words today? Do you struggle with this as I do? Are you able to find grace in what he has to say?

Where have you witnessed the truth that sometimes faith divides? Have you also witnessed reunion once more?

Is there some measure of 'comfort' in the fact that we who have experienced such division are not alone? If nothing else, do Jesus' words remind us that what we are called to be and do matters and as such we may find ourselves at a different place than others?