Third Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 7A, June 21, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis, OHC

Third Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 7A, June 21, 2020

Genesis 21:8-21
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-39

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I have heard and read plenty of sermons and commentaries that preface their writings about Scriptures like this one by saying, “Well, what Jesus really meant to say was ____ or “what Jesus really means here is _____.” However, there is just no skirting around this Gospel. Jesus does not leave much for interpretation or guesswork. He is sending his disciples out like sheep in the midst of wolves. So there’s no time to mince words. What he says is what he means.

Plenty of people have called Jesus Beelzebul, especially religious authorities. If the followers are not above their teacher or slaves above their masters, they better expect the same called the same if not worse. Jesus coming into this world is not necessarily a cause for celebration for everyone. His presence in this world, the coming of the Kingdom, will meet resistance.
Jesus demands a very different mindset than all of us. If we insist on our own value systems, he poses a threat to our false sense of control and power. Lies and secrets will be revealed; what we defend as morality will be investigated and called into question. 

Those who accept and proclaim the Kingdom of God, Jesus will acknowledge to God that they are aligned to Jesus’ way of bringing peace into this world. Those who deny Jesus’ way of bringing peace are the ones left with the sword.

The choice is stark indeed. As Jesus says on the night he is arrested, “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Jesus doesn’t just bring a sword; he casts or throws it down before us. We can pick up the sword and perish or we can follow Jesus. But the sword is also double edged. If we choose to become disciples, then, Jesus will use the sword himself to cleave us away from our own loyalties, clan or even family if we cling to these out of fear of attacks, persecution or even death.

While we shout from the rooftops what we’re taught in the dark, many will band against us because we are threatening clans, organizations, institutions and even families. The ones who prefer to keep their means of status, wealth and power covert feed us the lies that peace means maintenance of all of these values. They bring no peace to the marginalized, the outcast, the expendables. They bring no peace to any of us. 

We who accept and refrain from crying from the housetops to expose these lies are complicit in dehumanizing not only The Other but ourselves as well. Jesus tells us, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” The kind of peace that we think we’ve maintained for millenia with a few glitches here and there is not of God, but of Satan. God is not the one who condemns us to hell. Satan does.  We have been and continue to play into Beelzebul’s hands again and again. We really have become followers of the god of dung as the Greek New Testament translates the name.

However, what if we dehumanize because we dehumanize ourselves first? We refuse to believe that God values us more than many sparrows who are so cherished by God that they do not fall apart from God’s compassion. This same God who so grieves for what we deem cheap, expendable and sacrificial counts the hairs of our head as well. When we deny this we deny the opportunity for authentic relationship with him. Jesus will deny us before God because that is the choice we have made.

After such a fearful choice, no wonder we would turn from Jesus’ way of peace and subject others or the Other to our own codes of what we would call justice — law and order. It’s the sword that we’ve chosen to pick up to our peril as a society, institutions, clans, families. Our foes are members of our own household. Our foes are us. Our foes are within our own hearts. If we recognize this, then, the sword can become the blade that cleaves us so that what emerges is a soul that can’t be killed by any resistance to our cry from the rooftops.

Exposure will happen. It’s just a matter of when. So can we really afford to remain in our safe darkness and silence? Yes, Jesus makes this decision difficult. Whether we choose to acknowledge or deny him before others, we risk death either way. Or do we? He shows us the way of forgiveness and love culminating in his Cross. The Resurrection, then, goes further to upend the mechanisms of death, contradicting the world in which peace is upheld by violence. The lies can no longer function as they once did. Violence does not triumph. Life does.

Paul tells us as much in his letter to the Romans, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” If we relegate this newness of life to just a future beyond our own deaths, then, we’re already dead … not just our bodies but our souls as well. But like Christ, we could die to ourselves, to die to the illusions of scarcity, security by oppression and the myth that those on the outside of our clan are responsible for the fear and rage that we feel as a result of that oppression. We have been buried by baptism and are now considered to be the Glory of God where we too might walk in newness of life. ALL of us walking as one community who will find our lives by losing them for the Other. Amen.