Sunday, June 22
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Weekly Theme
Daring Discipleship

Weekly Prayer
God of strength and courage, in Jesus Christ you set us free from sin and death, and call us to the risk of faith and service. Give us grace to follow him who gave himself for others, that, by our service, we may find the life he came to bring. Amen.

Weekly Reading
Matthew 10:24-39

[Jesus said:] "A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!

"So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. 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. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

"Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

"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.

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

Reflection
by Kate Huey

The tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew shapes a number of sayings of Jesus into a set of instructions for "the twelve," his apostles, the ones we're familiar with (Peter, James, John) and the ones we don't know very well (Bartholomew, Thaddaeus, Simon the Canaanite), before he sends them out on a mission. Matthew writes for a community that claims a relationship--a kind of kinship--with these apostles, who gave up everything to follow Jesus. As this little community of early Christians listens for how God is sending them in their own turn, they're undoubtedly wrestling with how much they may have to give up, too. Perhaps they've already paid a price for being disciples of this Jesus, especially if their family ties are strained or broken by their new faith commitment. Family ties were even more important in that time and culture than they are today, if we can imagine such a thing. And broken relationships meant more than hard feelings and spoiled family functions and fights over inheritances: they could be a matter of life and death in a culture where family identity and connections protect you from the many dangers in life.

Matthew makes Jesus sound as if he's sending his apostles out on a dangerous mission. "Indeed," Holly Hearon writes, "the references to words told in secret, bodies killed, and oaths of loyalty sound like they belong in an espionage film." But that's how persecuted and oppressed communities like Matthew's, living under the thumb of the Roman Empire (or any empire that crushes the "little ones"), talk when they yearn for, and count on, a day of vindication. The day of vindication promised by Jesus in these verses has to do with the truth, and with light, with full knowledge and openness. Everything, Jesus says, will be known one day, so don't be afraid.

In the meantime, following Jesus was a costly thing to do in that time and place, a broken world pressing down on them, a world desperately in need of good news. It was a risky thing to do, too, as David Bartlett writes: "Matthew's Gospel was written in part to encourage synagogue members to risk separation from family and friends in order to follow Jesus. Christianity was not just counter-cultural; it was dangerous." We accept the idea that there were early Christian martyrs who gave up their lives--literally--for the gospel. But there were also those lesser-known Christians, the everyday, ordinary ones (like most of us) who stayed alive but suffered loss of family, place, security, "respectability," because they embraced a faith that challenged social structures, including even the stability of the family itself.

We often hear about "family values" in our own culture, and family is of course a good thing. Most of us would agree with Richard Swanson that family is "what must be honored for the world to hold together ... there is a dance done by parents and children that acts out the stable and orderly love of God so that people grow up knowing in their DNA that God is good and loving. This holds the world together." Even more then than now, family also provided security and safety because people knew that they had to stick together and face every challenge as a "household," not as vulnerable individuals. (Today, of course, we put a lot more emphasis on the individual than they did in the time of Jesus.) It's understandable that the fragility of life reinforced the value put upon family ties, and fraying those ties endangered not just the individual but the strength of the whole group. If you were an early Christian and found yourself expelled from your family, however, you would have also found yourself with a new family, with the loyalty and support of that new family surrounding you, and God at the head of your new household. Jesus knows how frightening all of this would be, and so does Matthew, so these words of the Gospel reassure them repeatedly not to be afraid.

Marcus Borg adds another layer to the "conventional wisdom" of security and identity that family provided in that culture. Yes, the Bible and the tradition of the community may reinforce and "justify the means" we use to establish and maintain our security, but, he says, "Jesus taught another way." The counter-cultural teaching of Jesus challenged "the primary allegiances cultivated by conventional wisdom" that protect us and make us less anxious. Is it any wonder that the Bible keeps telling us not to be afraid? Anxiety sinks us deep into the "the quest for security," Borg says, and, lamentably, "anxiety, self-concern, and blindness go together" (Borg's book, Jesus: A New Vision, expands on several other things we use to feel secure). This would be an interesting question to explore: what does this teaching of Jesus say about the canonization of the family that "good Christians" consider a core value of their faith? It's not a comfortable question!

Fred Craddock offers a slightly different take on this family controversy when he observes that "Jesus gave his call for loyalty over against the strongest, not the weakest, claim a person otherwise knew, the claim of family love. Jesus never offered himself as an alternative to the worst but to the best in society." Perhaps Jesus wanted to touch on the most basic, most heart-connected part of human life, and then to teach us that even deeper, even more important, even more powerful than that, are the love of God and the demands of faith.

On the other hand, Charles Cousar suggests that Jesus did not put "the family" up on the pedestal that seems to be required by many "good" Christians today: "Jesus' message, then, does not provide an unequivocal reinforcement of family cohesiveness. It does not suggest that the sticking together of families necessarily reflects faithfulness or that by family solidarity society's ills will be remedied. Instead, Jesus calls into question an idolatry of the family and warns that the gospel may divide rather than unite the home." In this showdown, Cousar writes, "Jesus' word states that there is no encounter between the new order and the old that will not at some level be fraught with conflict, division, and pain..." As usual, Jesus' word makes us uncomfortable, just like the faithful, religious people long ago who were offended and angered by so much of what he said and did.

So how do we make sense of this somewhat distressing passage? Barbara Brown Taylor calls it a "burr from Matthew's Gospel ... one of those passages I wish he had never written down." As always, she wrestles with the text and comes out with an elegant understanding of its claim on us: "I am a daughter," she writes, "a wife, a sister, an aunt, and each of those identities has shaped my life, but none of them contains me. I am Barbara. I am Christian. I am a child of God. That is my true identity, and all the others grow out of it...you are God's child first. That is no role. That is who you most truly are...." (Her sermon on this text is titled, "Learning to Hate Your Family"!). But claiming that identity, and living faithfully into it, has consequences in a world of empire and fear, in the first century and the twenty-first as well: "We live in a different world with different consequences for believing in God," Taylor writes, "but one thing that has not changed is our deep desire for kinship. Some of us find that in our families and some of us do not...Whether we do or don't, however, Jesus' demand remains the same. We are to love him above all other loves, and if that means losing those we love, we are not to fear, because buried in the demand is a promise: that what we lose for his sake we shall find again, returned to us more alive than ever before."

And Taylor is even more thought-provoking in her sermon on Luke's version of this message from Jesus, about families being broken apart, and swords cutting our world in two. It's hard for us to connect this to being "good Christians," and we certainly don't want our lives, and the world we inhabit most of the week, to be too upset by the things we hear on Sunday morning (or read each evening before we go to sleep, if we're in the habit of ending our day with the Bible): "Sure, it is the gospel, but there is no reason to get all upset about it. Being a good Christian is not all that different from being a good citizen, after all. You just stay out of trouble and be nice to your neighbors and say your prayers at night. There is absolutely no reason to go make a spectacle of yourself..." Perhaps the part about a sword is the most difficult part, but Taylor helps again: "The gospel is not a flashlight but a fire. It can warm and it can burn. The gospel is not a table knife but a sword. It can set free and it can divide. The gospel is not pablum. It is powerful stuff, powerful enough to challenge the most sacred human ties, but as frightening as it is, it is not finally to be feared..."

And so it comes down to what sort of Christians we're going to be. Thomas G. Long challenges us to ask ourselves: "Does one belong to the kingdom of heaven and share in its values, or not? One cannot decide for the kingdom in one compartment of life and leave everything else in a separate compartment unchanged. It is simply a fact that the gospel shakes up values, rearranges priorities, reorients goals. The gospel is not a salve; it is a sword that pares away all that is not aligned to the kingdom (Matt. 10:34), and this often causes strain and strife in family relationships." Who wouldn't want to avoid strain and strife and swords? No wonder that we try to keep our faith "private." But David Holwerda claims boldly: "Where public opinion prefers silence to engagement in religious matters, where many believe that the public voicing of religious beliefs promotes division rather than the social good, many Christians find it easier to opt for silence over shouting from the rooftops. Yet being silent lacks compassion for the crowds and constitutes a denial of Jesus." Most of us will not face martyrdom in any dramatic way, but we still make a hard choice in deciding to claim the name of Christian. Richard Swanson brings all of this together: "Just for the moment, imagine that the Bible is more substantial and interesting than a greeting card. Imagine that biblical stories are more challenging than uplifting, that they give life by provoking their audiences out of their dogmatic slumbers...." This passage, he claims, means much more than simply, "Love God a lot."

How does this passage sound to you here, in the beginning of the 21st century, in a country and conditions far different from those Matthew experienced as he provided instructions from Jesus to his disciples? Do they sound as if they don't apply to us here in the church in a nation that's often perceived as "mostly Christian"? Did the martyrs and heroes of the early church have a different call from ours? Does discipleship have to be costly? How has it been costly for you, and for the "heroes" in your own life? Thomas Long observes that the expression, "the cross," appears here for the first time in Matthew. What do you think Christians mean by that phrase today?

Much of the dissension and division and even persecution experienced by Christians today, including within families ("man against father, daughter against mother"), is actually between Christians who do not agree. How do you respond to that situation? What is your greatest loyalty? In the first century, the family had primary importance, so the words of Jesus lift the call to love him above the greatest good, not the lowest good. That's how it is with "great" discipleship. In what ways has the call to follow Jesus changed (or not changed) the decision-making in your personal life? What things had to give way, and what relationships had to be seen in a different light? What was the cost of that decision?

Fear may disable us at times, but Jesus reassures us of the ultimate importance and value of all that he offers, and the ever-present care and concern of the One who watches over and guides us on our path. No power compares to God's power, which extends far deeper and far beyond any power on earth. We may face persecution, rejection, criticism, and even hatred, even violence, for the sake of Jesus, but it will be nothing that he did not face himself, he says. In a "mainline" church like the United Church of Christ, when have we experienced ourselves as persecuted, rejected, criticized, or even hated? How is God still speaking to us today, centuries later and far away from the situation of the earliest Christians, calling us to faithful witness and persistent discipleship? In what ways do you experience God's love as tender and watchful, even in the face of hardship and deprivation, uncertainty and division?

Eugene Peterson's beautiful translation of this passage (in The Message) ends with an exquisite summary of Jesus' most encouraging and comforting words, words that encompass both the great issues of life and death, and the smallest moments of compassion and care: "Don't be bluffed into silence by the threats of bullies. There's nothing they can do to your soul, your core being. Save your fear for God, who holds your entire life – body and soul – in his hands...This is a large work I've called you into, but don't be overwhelmed by it. It's best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won't lose out on a thing" (we'll discuss these verses next week: Matthew 10:40-42).

For Further Reflection
Kaj Munk, Danish pastor killed by the Gestapo in 1944

What is therefore, our task today? Shall I answer: "Faith, hope and love"? That sounds beautiful. But I would say--courage. No--even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness ... [t]o restlessly seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God.

From The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne

All Readings for the Week
Genesis 21:8-21 with Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17 or
Jeremiah 20:7-13 with Psalm 69:7-10, (11-15), 16-18
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-39

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Weekly Seeds is a service of the Congregational Vitality Initiative, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ. Bible texts are from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The Revised Common Lectionary is © 1992 Consultation on Common Texts. Used by permission. The Ancient Christian Devotional is © 2007 by Thomas C. Oden and ICCS, and is published by InterVarsity Press. Used by permission.