Proper 7A
Finding Yourself
Romans 6.1b-11; Matthew 10.24-39
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home.
(It is probably most effective if the preacher sings the spiritual. For a version by Paul Robeson go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiJx1Hbn_KM&feature=kp)
Orphaned and alone. Scared and desperate. The old spiritual in its striking simplicity hits hard. This is the experience of loss and lostness. When the conventions of belonging, security, trust, no longer work. Far from home – emotionally and spiritually, as well as perhaps physically.
That the words of the song come from a people who knew for themselves the reality of being torn from home – the degradation, violence and torment of slavery – makes them all the more powerful. Here’s a people whose mothers were rendered childless, whose children were orphaned, whose belonging was destroyed. The anguished weeping of human experience at its bitterest. It hardly bears thinking about.
We dare not speak too easily of the consolations of God in the face of such things. To say that the love of God is all that really matters compounds the hurt, piles on the agony, fuels the terrifying isolation of cruelty and despair. So we've got to handle these hard words of Jesus with care and circumspection (Matt 10.37). '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,' does not come as the good news of Jesus to the doting parents awed with the responsibilities and the delights of their new baby.
They are not words of consolation to the wrecked soul struggling to come to terms with the death of a parent.
They only add burdens to the failed one who has mucked up this or that vital relationship, and feels guilty and care worn and lost.
In these, and a multitude of other human circumstances, to be told to make sure I love Jesus more than my baby, my lover, my mum, doesn't come as good news. All of us define ourselves by such relationships. We know how crucial the love in them is. The baby learns to be a person by being loved. In loving we create each other and in the creating find ourselves anew. What’s life without others on whom we may rely? When these relationships fail us, or we fail them, every one of us knows what a struggle life becomes. It is hard to see the good news in these words of Jesus, but the good news is there.
Listen to these familiar words of scripture (Deuteronomy 5.1):
Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today, you shall learn them and observe them diligently. And the fifth commandment, which is the first one that deals with actions between people, reads,
Honour your father and your mother, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you (Deut 5.16).
And Jesus said,
'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' (Matthew 10.35+36).
Do you notice it? Honour your parents; child against parent. These are all generational relationships. In Jesus’ saying married couples, friends, and siblings aren't mentioned. What Jesus is presenting is a corrective to that fifth commandment.
In Jesus’ day a family was usually several generations living together. This household was ruled by the oldest father. And I do mean ruled, by tradition this oldest male was referred to as Lord of his wife and children. He was the patriarch. Much religious language starts from this household structure. The patriarch’s authority in the family was supreme, for example, he could annul any vow his wife made. The patriarch made sure that the life of everyone in the household worked towards the continuance of the family. Marriages were, therefore, a matter of contract between patriarchates.
Such households made for strong bounds of responsibility and care. They located every individual within a clear network of relationships. They maintained family property, and gave everyone a place. Aristotle taught that similar Greek households were central to the existence of the state, and no doubt Jews would have understood exactly what he meant. This is how a person was defined.
Those household structures had two big drawbacks. First, such a patriarchal ordering of relationships pushed women to the edges of social significance. In the politics of the whole thing, they really didn't count for much. And second, organising life in these authoritarian generational terms meant that troubles often lasted across the generations. Disagreements, enmities, and blood feuding was passed on generation by generation. So in this way of understanding belonging, women are defined out of the social system, and old hostilities are maintained as fundamental to what an individual is. 'NO,' says Jesus, God’s priorities aren't that narrow. So God’s people’s priorities mustn't be that narrow either.
It isn't that we must be careful not to love too much, heaven forbid! Rather that the source of our love isn't social conventions or romantic ideals, but the perfect and eternal love that comes from God.
A poor Nicaraguan farmer called Laureano put it this way, 'To love God is to love your brother, but not your brother because he is the son of your mother, but because he is your brother who is everybody.'
That’s why these strange words of Jesus are good news. We define ourselves by our significant relationships. We count ourselves as successes or failures by those relationships. We are easily guilt-ridden and neurotic, or maybe self-absorbed and complacent within them. We worry and fret. It’s so hard to give yourself away, to rest secure, to be at home with ourselves and ourselves.
Well, says Jesus, it feels to you as if those things are all you are, but they are not. There is a prior relationship that is absolutely gracious. The love of a God who counts every hair on your head, as it were, and that God will never ever abandon you. You are beloved of God. Let that be the definition of you from which all others flow. Let that be the orderer of your priorities. Let that be the bedrock on which you can love, and forgive, and hope, and strive, and belong. Lose your life in this love and you will find it.
We are born into relationships. The biology is unavoidable. But that is not the sole source of our identity. St Paul says we are also born into 'newness of life' (Romans 6.4). Baptism is the sign that our identity as people is more than the sum of biology, psychology, economics and sociology. We are being drawn into the life of God.
Martin Luther famously said, 'Remember your baptism.' In one of his Cherry Log sermons (page 8), Fred Craddock points out that in Luther's church, like ours, most people were baptized as infants, so how could those who came to confirmation to claim their baptism remember their baptism? Did Luther say, 'Do you remember your baptism?' to make people feel guilty. What comes next is the implied or explicit condemnation, 'You've strayed from your baptism.' Surely everyone one of us at many points in our lives strays from our baptism, forgets our baptism, denies our baptism. This is common experience. Just like every one of us messes up relationships that are most dear to us, sometimes. We all don’t live up to our own commitments. As Craddock puts it, "Show me a bird who can say ‘I look like my song.’" Not a single one of us lives up to that. What Luther meant by 'remember your baptism' was this (as Craddock sums it up): 'Remember your baptism by claiming yourself to be a child of God and by going about God’s business – loving other people.'
Remember that you are of the household of God.
The Theologian Paul Tillich once famously preached on this prior gracious acceptance by God. He said, 'remember the miracle of grace when you are able to look frankly into the eyes of another. Remember the miracle of grace when you understand another’s words, not just literally but also what lies behind them. Remember the miracle of grace in being able to accept the life of another even when it is hostile to you, for you know it belongs to the same God who accepted you. And experience the miracle of grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation between sexes, generations, races, nations, even humanity and nature itself. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those whom we belong. For life belongs to life.'
Don’t be fooled, we are not a long way from home; we are at the door of God’s welcome. Let’s go in, together.
References:
Ernesto Cardenal (1977) Love in Practice: The Gospel in Solentiname. London: Search Press.
Fred Craddock (2001) The Cherry Log Sermons. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Paul Tillich (1963) The Shaking of the Foundations. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home.
(It is probably most effective if the preacher sings the spiritual. For a version by Paul Robeson go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiJx1Hbn_KM&feature=kp)
Orphaned and alone. Scared and desperate. The old spiritual in its striking simplicity hits hard. This is the experience of loss and lostness. When the conventions of belonging, security, trust, no longer work. Far from home – emotionally and spiritually, as well as perhaps physically.
That the words of the song come from a people who knew for themselves the reality of being torn from home – the degradation, violence and torment of slavery – makes them all the more powerful. Here’s a people whose mothers were rendered childless, whose children were orphaned, whose belonging was destroyed. The anguished weeping of human experience at its bitterest. It hardly bears thinking about.
We dare not speak too easily of the consolations of God in the face of such things. To say that the love of God is all that really matters compounds the hurt, piles on the agony, fuels the terrifying isolation of cruelty and despair. So we've got to handle these hard words of Jesus with care and circumspection (Matt 10.37). '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,' does not come as the good news of Jesus to the doting parents awed with the responsibilities and the delights of their new baby.
They are not words of consolation to the wrecked soul struggling to come to terms with the death of a parent.
They only add burdens to the failed one who has mucked up this or that vital relationship, and feels guilty and care worn and lost.
In these, and a multitude of other human circumstances, to be told to make sure I love Jesus more than my baby, my lover, my mum, doesn't come as good news. All of us define ourselves by such relationships. We know how crucial the love in them is. The baby learns to be a person by being loved. In loving we create each other and in the creating find ourselves anew. What’s life without others on whom we may rely? When these relationships fail us, or we fail them, every one of us knows what a struggle life becomes. It is hard to see the good news in these words of Jesus, but the good news is there.
Listen to these familiar words of scripture (Deuteronomy 5.1):
Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today, you shall learn them and observe them diligently. And the fifth commandment, which is the first one that deals with actions between people, reads,
Honour your father and your mother, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you (Deut 5.16).
And Jesus said,
'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' (Matthew 10.35+36).
Do you notice it? Honour your parents; child against parent. These are all generational relationships. In Jesus’ saying married couples, friends, and siblings aren't mentioned. What Jesus is presenting is a corrective to that fifth commandment.
In Jesus’ day a family was usually several generations living together. This household was ruled by the oldest father. And I do mean ruled, by tradition this oldest male was referred to as Lord of his wife and children. He was the patriarch. Much religious language starts from this household structure. The patriarch’s authority in the family was supreme, for example, he could annul any vow his wife made. The patriarch made sure that the life of everyone in the household worked towards the continuance of the family. Marriages were, therefore, a matter of contract between patriarchates.
Such households made for strong bounds of responsibility and care. They located every individual within a clear network of relationships. They maintained family property, and gave everyone a place. Aristotle taught that similar Greek households were central to the existence of the state, and no doubt Jews would have understood exactly what he meant. This is how a person was defined.
Those household structures had two big drawbacks. First, such a patriarchal ordering of relationships pushed women to the edges of social significance. In the politics of the whole thing, they really didn't count for much. And second, organising life in these authoritarian generational terms meant that troubles often lasted across the generations. Disagreements, enmities, and blood feuding was passed on generation by generation. So in this way of understanding belonging, women are defined out of the social system, and old hostilities are maintained as fundamental to what an individual is. 'NO,' says Jesus, God’s priorities aren't that narrow. So God’s people’s priorities mustn't be that narrow either.
It isn't that we must be careful not to love too much, heaven forbid! Rather that the source of our love isn't social conventions or romantic ideals, but the perfect and eternal love that comes from God.
A poor Nicaraguan farmer called Laureano put it this way, 'To love God is to love your brother, but not your brother because he is the son of your mother, but because he is your brother who is everybody.'
That’s why these strange words of Jesus are good news. We define ourselves by our significant relationships. We count ourselves as successes or failures by those relationships. We are easily guilt-ridden and neurotic, or maybe self-absorbed and complacent within them. We worry and fret. It’s so hard to give yourself away, to rest secure, to be at home with ourselves and ourselves.
Well, says Jesus, it feels to you as if those things are all you are, but they are not. There is a prior relationship that is absolutely gracious. The love of a God who counts every hair on your head, as it were, and that God will never ever abandon you. You are beloved of God. Let that be the definition of you from which all others flow. Let that be the orderer of your priorities. Let that be the bedrock on which you can love, and forgive, and hope, and strive, and belong. Lose your life in this love and you will find it.
We are born into relationships. The biology is unavoidable. But that is not the sole source of our identity. St Paul says we are also born into 'newness of life' (Romans 6.4). Baptism is the sign that our identity as people is more than the sum of biology, psychology, economics and sociology. We are being drawn into the life of God.
Martin Luther famously said, 'Remember your baptism.' In one of his Cherry Log sermons (page 8), Fred Craddock points out that in Luther's church, like ours, most people were baptized as infants, so how could those who came to confirmation to claim their baptism remember their baptism? Did Luther say, 'Do you remember your baptism?' to make people feel guilty. What comes next is the implied or explicit condemnation, 'You've strayed from your baptism.' Surely everyone one of us at many points in our lives strays from our baptism, forgets our baptism, denies our baptism. This is common experience. Just like every one of us messes up relationships that are most dear to us, sometimes. We all don’t live up to our own commitments. As Craddock puts it, "Show me a bird who can say ‘I look like my song.’" Not a single one of us lives up to that. What Luther meant by 'remember your baptism' was this (as Craddock sums it up): 'Remember your baptism by claiming yourself to be a child of God and by going about God’s business – loving other people.'
Remember that you are of the household of God.
The Theologian Paul Tillich once famously preached on this prior gracious acceptance by God. He said, 'remember the miracle of grace when you are able to look frankly into the eyes of another. Remember the miracle of grace when you understand another’s words, not just literally but also what lies behind them. Remember the miracle of grace in being able to accept the life of another even when it is hostile to you, for you know it belongs to the same God who accepted you. And experience the miracle of grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation between sexes, generations, races, nations, even humanity and nature itself. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those whom we belong. For life belongs to life.'
Don’t be fooled, we are not a long way from home; we are at the door of God’s welcome. Let’s go in, together.
References:
Ernesto Cardenal (1977) Love in Practice: The Gospel in Solentiname. London: Search Press.
Fred Craddock (2001) The Cherry Log Sermons. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Paul Tillich (1963) The Shaking of the Foundations. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.