Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick Sermon
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
13th Sunday After Pentecost
August 18, 2013
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56
I’ve sometimes thought that there ought to be a saying that goes something like this: when the rector’s away the lectionary will play . . . . . . with the mind of the supply priest. What are sometimes called the ‘hard’ sayings of Jesus are generally scheduled for the summer months when rectors are away and other clergy come in to help out only to be challenged by the harsh language of the Gospel attacking all forms of immorality. That is particularly true about this morning’s gospel. For a religion that strives for reconciliation, peace, unity and concord among people, these words of Jesus are extremely unsettling. In an apparent state of great anger Jesus thunders to his hearers: Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
So much for the pious platitudes of those folk extolling the unity of the family in its traditional nuclear form as the supreme value of human life. Now, of course, taken literally and out of context these harsh words of Jesus may seem as if they are fundamentally devaluing family life as something alien to God’s mission for the world. That would be, I think, a profound misreading of what Jesus is up to in this morning’s gospel. What he is suggesting, I believe, is the importance of choice: of making decisions about how we structure our life that are grounded in basic values for trying to follow God’s call into and for the world, a world which God redeemed through the bloody death of Jesus on the Cross.
The unknown author of the epistle to the Hebrews reminds his hearers that many of the earliest Christians made hard choices for living in response to that crucifixion, choices that led them to suffer mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented. Those were choices whose consequences were clearly very costly to those who made them.
One of the great dilemmas for those of us living today in the first and highly developed world is that choosing to identify ourselves with Christianity, especially in its institutional form, hardly ever leads to these costly and often fatal outcomes, though it certainly does in less westernized and less affluent parts of the world.
The late lay educator in the Episcopal Church, Verna Dozier, in her book “The Dream of God”, talks about a number of ‘falls’ that have led to our present predicament regarding the viability of the Church as an instrument for carrying out God’s mission to the world. One of those falls was the embrace of the outward trappings of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century. Constantine brought Christianity from a state of being persecuted by the secular power to a state of being privileged by it. Before Constantine it was not safe in worldly terms to be a Christian: but after Constantine it was not safe or at least not advantageous to be anything else but a Christian. But with privilege comes moral risk.
The hard edge of many of the prophetic denunciations of corrupt political and economic power found throughout the Old Testament, tends to get blunted. The harshness of Jesus’ claim that he has come to bring fire and division to the earth have been dulled, tamed, and marginalized. Jesus’ words have often been spiritualized and mystified into airy and harmless bits of psychological advice with no social or prophetic bite remaining in them. As an institution the Christian church has learned how to play ball with the reigning political and cultural powers that be. The Church has even, on occasion, aped and copied the hierarchies of power that exist in the dominant worldly powers: bishops and archbishops have become, in some traditions, the princes of the Church and are, note the word, enthroned in their hierarchical positions.
But the Church has paid a high price for emulating and cozying up to the power structures of the world: and that price is often the price of acquiescence to, complicity with, and silence about the continuing injustices that political and economic structures of the world underwrite and condone. In some societies Christian Churches accept establishment by the state. In other societies, such as ours, churches have to survive, at least as measured by membership numbers and donations, by finding a message that will be the least provocative and off-putting as possible to present and future members. In either case, churches find it hard to challenge the prevailing social values of the dominant culture.
Now no one is seriously calling for Christians to seek out ways to return to the pre-Constantinian time of persecution and martyrdom. We have too much invested in our culture to abandon it entirely or to shirk our responsibility for it. As privileged members of our society, we have the opportunity, which the martyred Christians did not, to use what social power we do have to make a difference to the policies and practices that define our life together as a society.
It would be irresponsible to abdicate that power in the name of a purist, absolutist, and unrealistic option of withdrawal and powerlessness. But it would be equally irresponsible to wield what social power we do have to dictate to the society policies and practices which continue to protect our privileges. Many in our society are rightly suspicious of Christian groups seeking to gain political power in order to advance a purely sectarian agenda. We live in a political culture that encourages consensus in the public square and the finding of common ground, not one that seeks to advantage one religion at the expense of others.
Jesus’s words in this morning’s gospel should remind us that the Kingdom of God, for whose realization we should always be working, is not simply a name that consecrates the world as it presently is. We are not called out of that world but nor are we called to be fully of the world. We are called to be in but not of it: to be full participants in the worldly structures we ourselves and our forebears have helped to create, while at the same being critical prophets or prophetic critics who are courageous enough to point out its shortcomings and to call it to task when it fails to advance the Kingdom but without insisting on the right to impose the Kingdom on others without their full participation and consent. And in our role as wise and critical prophets we need to identify those divisions in the social family that still exist and not to paper them over with pious clichés and abstract spiritualizing.
In the wake of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman clash, for example, many sincere and well-intentioned people said we should now put this issue behind us. They joined a chorus of voices calling for us to believe that we now live in a post-racial society in which race is no longer an issue. That may be true for some people but we would be blind if we did not understand that race and racism still fester in large parts of our country and to some extent in each citizen of that country. Much of the continuing hostility to the President of the United States of America is not just based on ideological differences but on a pervasive and continuing sense among many people that as a Black American he is not one of “us”. And yet the President spoke forcefully and candidly when he reminded us, to our shame, that as a black man in America he could have been Trayvon Martin. Suspicion of young black men, wherever they are, still lingers in the American consciousness and leads almost daily to their humiliation at the hands of police and even, tragically, to death in some instances. So Jesus is right to remind us that simply crying peace, peace, or family, family, when there is division in our national family and between families within our society will not resolve the divisions that still exist. We cannot wish them away with the rhetoric of peace and tranquility but only with a realistic confrontation with racist realities on the ground.
Families are marvelous things and can be the communities within which love, trust, compassion, mercy, and justice are developed and experienced most fully. But families unfortunately can also hide dysfunctionality, bitterness, resentment, and even abuse. The only family beyond corruption is the one that is founded on the love and mercy and grace of God as manifested in Jesus Christ. Our human families can, at best, approximate such a holy family. And until the Kingdom comes in its fullness, we are obligated to both care for and to critique, both lovingly and prophetically, those family structures, as well as political and economic structures, that fail to advance the mission of God for the redemption and justice of the world. Love makes a family, and when love is absent (or when families define themselves solely in gender restrictive terms), then division between families and within families can be expected. Family structures in their present form are not unblemished exemplars of divine love but a prophetic critique in the name of love can move them, however slowly and imperfectly, toward greater love and the healing of division.