Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Conflict is a normal part of relationships, particularly close relationships, and we all have different ways of dealing with it. Sometimes those ways are healthy, and sometimes they aren’t. There are those that love a good fight and will launch into any which arises. At the risk of dealing in stereotypes, such pugnacious people often find there way into politics, for reasons which are obvious enough. It being a particularly divisive time in our national politics, I’ve noticed more and more friends of mine from all political persuasions who have tried to decide whether or not to even bring the issues up in conversation. My rule (as I’ve mentioned to some of you) is always to ask myself “is this a ditch I’m willing to die in?” The cost-benefit analysis is often a difficult one for me; it’s one of those examples of how my role as a pastor can complicate things. I’m called both to preach the Gospel and to be in relationship with God’s people, and sometimes the former (especially at the confluence of faith and politics) can threaten to complicate the latter. Sometimes that’s a good thing (close relationships being predicated on the acknowledgment of even fiercely held differences of opinion in order to be adult relationships), but sometimes it’s so potentially threatening to a relationship that the most loving course of action is just not going there.

That brings up the converse problem, though- there are those who avoid conflict at all costs, even when sharing the truth as one sees it, and (more importantly) as one believes God sees it, is of the utmost importance. It might seem to us the wise path, but often it means that issues of the greatest import are neglected because too few had the courage to stand up and fight for what they believe to be right. What might have been avoided if, say, Neville Chamberlain hadn’t appeased Hitler? That, of course, is an extreme example, but there are so many times when conscience may lead us into conflict, and for those of us without the natural temerity of a politician, acting conscientiously could be a most difficult thing.

Sometimes our problem is in misunderstanding the requirements of the Gospel. We’ve watered down Jesus’ teaching, domesticated it, and believe its principle command is something like “be nice”. Now, don’t get me wrong: I like to be nice and for people to be nice to me. I think I’m a pretty peaceable person, which comes in handy because I’m pretty guileless, so if I were also naturally prone to intentionally stirring the pot, as it were, I might find myself constantly in conflict. Peevishness and petulance are not a good way of showing the love of Christ. Even so, running from conflict when the stakes are high, when the truths of the Gospel and the well-being of God’s people are on the line in an effort to “be nice” can be terribly harmful for the cause in which we as Christians are engaged.

Jesus says to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel, “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” That’s Luke’s version, and Matthew’s is even stronger “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

What follows is even more shocking. I’m sure it was upsetting to hear Jesus validate discord in families. It was to me, and it is every time I’m confronted with this hard teaching of Jesus. But put yourself back in the first century, and imagine that you were raised in a good Jewish family, or even a Greek family which had been faithful in serving the pagan gods of Rome. Then imagine that you hear the Good News of God in Christ, that you are convicted of the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection, that you wish to serve the one true and living God as His Son had revealed Him. This would not have been a popular choice. It would most certainly have led to discord, and perhaps you would have been disowned by those you loved most of all. Would it then have been better that you never received the Gospel of life? Would it then have been better to shun that glorious news for the sake of peace at home? Would God have preferred it if you had taken the path which avoided conflict? By no means!

We still have these choices today, and sometimes they can even have consequences as dramatic as the choices those early disciples had to make. For the first time in our nation’s history there is now a whole generation of people being raised by basically irreligious parents. We’re about a generation behind secular Europe in this trend, and there is still some hope as now it seems that more young people without a background in the faith or with a complicated religious upbringing are finding their way into the body of Christ. The highlight of my time on the high seas this summer was conducting the baptism of a young man who had been interested in Christianity for some time, but whose very strict Buddhist grandmother made entering the Church a difficult proposition. Perha[ps being in international waters finally made the young man comfortable enough to follow through on that to which the Holy Spirit had been calling him for some time.

And all that is not to mention all those countless people today in the less open parts of the Muslim world or in the atheistic countries of the old Eastern Bloc and China who are shunned because of their commitment to Christ and his Church. By the way, lest we start thinking of ourselves as the victims, so too are Muslims the victims of discrimination in good old Christendom and Hindus in Pakistan and Baha’is in Iran and Jews just about everywhere.

While few of us have ever faced being shunned because of our religious convictions, there are still choices we make for the sake of conscience that carry with them the danger of unpopularity or something even worse. Plenty of people became outcasts in their families or their communities when they acted on a conviction that securing civil rights for blacks was a Christian imperative. Plenty of Christians in our own country in recent years have faced fines and even arrest for breaking municipal ordinances against feeding programs, which ordinances are, not always but often, thinly veiled schemes to keep unsavory people (i.e. the homeless and the mentally ill) from congregating. Plenty of Christians faced criminal charges for their participation in the Sanctuary movement thirty years ago, and, this might be controversial, but I do wonder if we ought, both as churches and individual Christians, to be making a lot more noise these days, even getting ourselves in trouble, considering the fact that our Lord himself and his family were refugees.

By the way – this is my personal opinion so feel free to disagree – I think it’s become a lot harder to point out these problems and stand up for a Christian response because so many Christians have claimed that they’ve been persecuted when they haven’t been or had their religious freedom constrained when it hasn’t been. Whatever one thinks about the controversial issues du jour, nobody from the government has come knocking on my door to have any sermons I’ve written be subpoenaed. I think there are fruitful debates to be had on what tax revenue can and should be used for and what equality under the law looks like in the context of religious diversity, but to claim religious persecution at the outset of these debates is like the boy crying wolf when there are real, tangible ways in which our ability to live out the Gospel of reconciliation and love may be constrained either by law or custom.

In all events, I preached last week about conviction, and today I want to add to those thoughts by suggesting that Jesus requires of us the development of a virtue which compliments it. That virtue is courage. Our convictions, as I said last week, compel us to act, but we must grow in courage to make it happen. When we learn that, as that wonderful hymn put it “the peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod”, then courage will be required if we are to confront the conflict into which our Christian commitments bring us. What all those people listed in today’s Epistle had in common was the courage to act on faith. Rahab and Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah and David and Samuel and the prophets and the whole people of Israel in their flight from Egypt— all of them had the courage to risk their lives and their livelihoods and all they held dear because they were convicted by God and His promise.

With so great a cloud of witnesses, how can we but do the same? Let us, then, face strife with courage, not running away, not deciding to “just be nice”, but standing up for that which really matters. We may think ourselves too timid, but the God of Hosts is with us, and by Him are we encouraged.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes that “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go.” I wonder how often, in the age of GPS, we set out without a clear sense of how to get where we’re going. I know that if I’m going someplace unfamiliar I connect my smartphone to the Bluetooth on my car stereo, and its soothing voice leads me all the way.

I did get a little taste of this recently, though, if only second-hand. Most of you know that I recently returned from being chaplain on a ship with 450 Merchant Marine cadets on its training cruise across the Atlantic. A couple days after we boarded I was on the bow of the ship talking to one of the deck officers when I saw the captain, coming up behind us rather quickly and looking less than pleased. Fortunately neither of us was in trouble. He came to inform the officer I was talking to that he had gotten fed up with the cadets relying too much on the ship’s navigation technology, and he was about to turn off all of the electronics on the bridge and in the chart room.

This was no idle threat. He did just that, and for the next couple of weeks one could see groups of 18-to-22-year-olds on the bridge-wing with their sextants or huddled over physical, paper charts in the aft navigation room. These kids were going to get us from Belfast to New York using celestial navigation, without the benefit of anything more technologically advanced than a hand calculator. It is hard enough, sometimes, to put one’s trust in God’s providence to take one by a way which is unknown, as did Abraham; expecting that providence to be mediated through a bunch of college-aged-kids requires some faith as well!

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Today’s Epistle uses a couple of words which transform our understanding of faith: assurance and conviction. Faith is not just about believing stuff; faith is about receiving an assurance that our greatest hopes will come to pass. Faith is not some tepid assent to facts that we choose to believe because we might as well; faith is about engendering conviction– a certainty about God’s promise which changes how we live our lives.

Abraham was not a captive to wishful thinking. His initial state was fear. God begins his conversations with Abraham in today’s Old Testament lesson, by bidding him “fear not”, yet Abraham remains fearful. He desires what every man of his era desired: a legacy in the form of descendants, and he is justifiably afraid that it will never happen. The normal means by which we come to know things, observation and reason, had taught him that his hope was empty. No man of his age, with a wife apparently incapable of conceiving, could have hope for children.

Yet, God gives Abraham an assurance that the promise will be kept, and Abraham immediately believes. Assurance only means something if the one giving it is in a relationship with the one receiving it. Abraham’s relationship with God was strong, and so the assurance was received. Despite all evidence pointing to the improbability of God keeping the promise, Abraham’s relationship with God was strong enough to elicit trust.

Now Abraham’s response was not just any kind of trust. It was what the author of Hebrews called conviction. Ordinary trust doesn’t require anything of the beneficiary save confidence in the trustee. Conviction, on the other hand, requires action. Immediately after this morning’s reading, Abraham makes sacrifice to God. Throughout the next several chapters he will obey God’s commands even when he doesn’t understand the point, most significantly in the binding of Isaac after Sarah does give birth. Ultimately, it is through this kind of conviction, the principle component of faith, by which God himself is proved faithful.

This is good news for us, but it is also a great challenge. It is good news because it means that we can be assured of things unseen if we maintain our relationship with God. We can come to a place of profound confidence simply by maintaining that bond, as did Abraham and all the great heroes of our faith. It is, however, a challenge, because it means that something is required of us, namely conviction. The Christian life isn’t just about believing certain facts despite the lack of evidence, as important as believing those facts might be. It is about letting those truths change us. It is about bearing the good fruits of virtue: temperance and justice and mercy and love. Just as Abraham’s faith proved God faithful, so will our faith if we live with conviction. Just like Abraham, and just like all the saints, we can not only believe but know, know more sincerely and more powerfully than we can know the truths of reason and science, that God has prepared for us “a better country… a heavenly one.” We may not know the way. We may feel sometimes like our lives are being charted by chance, even less certain than teenagers with sextants. But through prayer and participation in God’s plan for our lives, even when we don’t know that plan–that is to say, when we live by faith and not by sight–we come to the joy of the knowledge that this plan is for our good and that of the world. And When we live in the joy of that knowledge, our lives will be changed, will be transformed into sacrifices even more pleasing to God than was Abraham’s.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning’s Gospel reading is a tough one. Jesus says some pretty disquieting things in the Gospels, but what we read today might strike us as the most offensive thing in the bible. A man who wishes to become a disciple asks “Lord, let me first go and bury my father [and then I will follow].” And how does Jesus respond? “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.” Another wishes only to say goodbye to his family before setting out, and Jesus responds “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” Jesus seems to be contradicting even his own prophetic heritage- you’ll remember from today’s Old Testament lesson that Elijah permitted Elisha to literally “put his hand to the plow and look back”, to take his oxen back home and say goodbye to his own family before following the prophet.

How do we deal with this hard teaching of Jesus? I don’t know entirely, and I’m starting to wish that I’d chosen to preach on the Epistle! Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel are shocking. This is the Jesus whom so many equate with “family values”, whatever people who use that phrase mean by it, and Jesus’ words here seem diametrically opposed to those values.

I think we do violence to Jesus’ teaching if we opt to spiritualize it entirely. That’s a trick we’ve probably seen before in another context. Often a preacher, when given Jesus’ teaching about money (namely, his command to give it all away), will turn the whole thing into a spiritual exercise, saying “well, you don’t have to give all your money away, just don’t place all your trust in the wealth you have. Be ready to lose it if it comes to that.” Certainly, the meaning of Jesus’ teaching in that matter is complex, but there’s something more to it than how we’re supposed to feel about money. We are supposed to do something.

It’s much the same with regard to Jesus’ teaching about family. He’s not just saying, “be ready to lose your loved ones in the normal course of events (as they die or move away or whatever) without losing your faith.” It’s not an entirely spiritual teaching, even if we wish it were because the spiritual meaning is so much more comfortable than a meaning with any practical implications.

But, then again, we can’t come to terms with an entirely literal reading of the teaching either. There is a chance that Jesus meant exactly what he literally said, but that would go against the expectation of the rest of scripture and of the Church’s historical teaching, namely that commitment to one’s family is not only “okay”, but is enjoined on us as a holy obligation.

So, it seems to me, there is something more complex in Jesus’ words than either the simple literal meaning or the entirely spiritualized meaning.

Perhaps, and this is just a hunch (albeit a hunch with some theological training backing it up), Jesus is warning his interlocutors and all of us, his prospective disciples today, against making excuses. Specifically, I think he may be warning us against making our commitments to family an excuse for not doing his work.

Now, before I seem to say something too scandalous, let me explain what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that there aren’t family obligations which affect how we approach our own ministries in the church and in the world. I’m not saying that missing a Sunday from time to time to be with a sick loved one is going to get us in trouble. I’m not saying that becoming a little less active in some role or another because you’ve got young children or teenagers is wrong. I’m not saying that family commitments shouldn’t figure in to how we discern what God is calling us to do and be. Quite to the contrary, family obligations are obligations given to us from God, and fulfilling those obligations is an important way to do God’s work.

What I do think we learn from reflection on the Gospel, though, is that sometimes misunderstanding the nature of those obligations can keep us from doing that to which we are called. In other words, we can convince ourselves that there is a barrier which doesn’t exist between our desire to serve and our ability. For example, I heard a number of anecdotes when I was in seminary from some of my older classmates. This is changing nowadays, but a decade-and-a-half ago very few young people went straight from college to seminary. I was the only one in my class who had done, and it took some effort to convince my bishop that I didn’t have to go have a career in some other field and enter the ordained ministry in middle age, as had been the ordinary pattern for the previous half-century or so. Anyway, many of these classmates of mine had felt a call to the priesthood for years, but believed it to be absolutely unfeasible because of their children’s need for stability. So, many waited until all the kids were out of the house and in college fifteen or twenty years later and then realized that they could have moved earlier, the kids could have been in a good school and had friends and probably would have loved going to seminary with mom or dad, particularly in New York City where we were.

Of course, this wouldn’t be the case in every family’s situation, but what I’m saying is that we’ve got to reflect on rather than dismiss the possibility of some sort of ministry out of hand. We might find that our family obligations preclude volunteering to serve at the mission, or serve on vestry, or whatever. Or, we might find that we can fit it in or, better yet, involve our family. The point is that individual situations with regard to family or work or any other commitment will open up new avenues for ministry and close others. It’s our responsibility to avoid making excuses and consider how precisely we might be able to follow, what that can look like for each of us in the context of his or her own life. Scale back involvement in one area if you need to, ramp it up in others if you’re able. We’ve just got to do the hard work of thinking about it and praying about it first. If we do that, we might be surprised what we can accomplish for the sake of the Gospel.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.