Proper 8: The Relational Cost to Real Transformation
Introduction
Good morning dear friends. It is wonderful to be with you this morning and continue together in the Gospel of Matthew. As we look at Matthew 10, I want to invite the kids down.
Kids’ Sermon
I was thinking about an analogy in a book I was reading and it reminded me of our passage today.[1] Cars have these great dashboards. Anyone want to guess what any of these lights might mean? Now I want you all to take a pen cover up things one by one. Ah.... now that it is all covered we can drive in peace, right? We don’t have to be scared or anxious anymore do we? No way! Those lights are meant to tell me to go get something fixed. I know it is hard to stop what I’m doing one day and get the car fixed, I know I have to risk spending a lot of money and potentially putting myself into debt. But the reality is, if I don’t fix the car and I ignore its signals, there will be a moment where everything just gives out and there will be no hope of getting to my destination...or worse — We might get into an accident.
Our bodies have indicators just like a car’s dashboard. When we start to get angry, we might start to feel our shoulders tense up, our neck might feel warm. When we get sad, we might feel something like a lump in our throat. I got into a disagreement the other day; I had this feeling down in my left side, something despair and guilt. We should pay attention to these things: anger can give us energy to push back against something wrong, sadness can point us to what is important to us, and guilt may illuminate something we need to apologize for. They are all indicator lights that something is happening inside us.
If we cover the dashboard and keep driving it will be hard to follow Jesus with our whole selves. Someone may make us really angry and we want to lash out and hold a grudge, someone hurts us and we want to hurt them back. Perhaps we feel ashamed and we go off by ourselves and don’t let anyone else into our life. We keep everyone at arms length can’t figure out why things feel off. Will we pay attention and let Jesus bring peace and healing so that we can share the goodness of Jesus with others?
Sometimes when we are honest about who Jesus is, what we need from Jesus, and what others need from Jesus, it can make them upset. Is it worth the risk? This is what Jesus is talking about today with his followers. It can feel really risky to respectfully tell our parents that we feel hurt by what they did. It can be risky to ask a friend if we can pray for them. When we do this, we’re not being disrespectful, we’re giving a gift. It’s up to the other person to accept it as such. That risk is the only way to real peace and healing. When we do the hard work of following Jesus and being honest, it might be hard, and there might be pain, but you know what we discover? We discover life as it ought to be because Jesus is in charge and we will know his loving friendship even when it is hard. Can you please pray with me?
“Dear God...thank you...for loving us...you died for us...and rose from the dead....and you are with us...even when....doing the right thing...is really hard....thank you...Amen.” Thank you all, go ahead and head back to your seats.
34-39Though costly, prioritize God’s kingdom
In St. Matthew’s Gospel, we have just read a really challenging passage. In the overall picture, Jesus has just commissioned the twelve disciples to carry out his ministry. Then he tells them that as they are following him they will encounter persecutions and trials. This is to be expected. Today’s passage is intentionally provocative. Jesus, what do you mean you came to bring a sword and cause family members to hate each other?!?!
He’s not saying that we ought to hate each other. There are plenty of other places in Scripture where the reign of the Messiah is associated with peace and where we are called to love our family members and our neighbors. There is nothing virtuous about loving violence or hatred, but when Jesus and his kingdom are our first priority —which is virtuous— the result might be violence and the breaking of relationship. This is the risk of following Jesus as Lord. It is about priorities: Following Jesus more than pleasing other people.
Jesus is quoting from the Bible and putting us in the line of the prophets when we follow him.[2] Another prophet told the religious leaders, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying “peace, peace,” when there is no peace.”[3] Jesus’ disciples, including you and I, enter into the prophetic burden of his messengers where we do what is good and right, following Jesus in the midst of chaos, waiting for God’s vindication. Rather than sweeping things under the rug in the name of niceness, we seek for real transformation.
Real peace is hard-fought and costly. Here is a composite scenario; this isn’t anyone’s story in particular, but feels like several scenarios I’ve heard. Darryl comes to me and says that his supervisor at work is often rude and condescending to him. In the break room one day the supervisor comes in and tells Darryl, “Your coworker Alice told me that I talk down to people, what does she know? She doesn’t know anything.” Darryl follows Jesus, and has endured a long history of condescension from his supervisor, but has done the internal work to know that he is competent and a hard worker. More than that, he knows how beloved he is by God and now has the capacity to hold space for his supervisor’s condescension. He has a choice, he can tell his supervisor “You’re right, what does she know?” This is uncaring, but it is easy, and it does not take his supervisor’s wound seriously. He is preaching peace, peace when there is no peace. Or, he can risk. Depending on the amount of risk, he might say “I can appreciate Alice’s experience. I have experienced you that way too.” Or he might be more subtle and say “Huh, tell me more about what you think made her feel that way. Have others told you that before? What might it feel like to apologize for that and what keeps you from it?” Darryl would be giving his supervisor a gracious gift: an opportunity to see Jesus at work. The risk is that Darryl’s supervisor is provoked to anger, resentment, and a grudge. This could set up Darryl for real trouble at work, but this is the risk in naming the grace of God to help free people from disordered attachments to sin and evil. We have to do the inner work with Jesus on our places of disordered love, fear, and attachment, looking to Jesus for help, so that we can offer true peace to our relatives, friends, and even those in our church family. Triangulation and indirect communication, slander and gossip, dehumanization, resentments, and coping behaviors are all indicator lights that show us something is broken, but carefully helping others name their own brokenness is costly.... and the only way to peace.
Some people think that prioritizing the kingdom just means doing a lot of stuff for the church to the neglect of other duties. This is to have good desire and good intentions, but the wrong execution. The world is not split up into secular tasks and sacred tasks. Instead, and I get this from C.S. Lewis, the daily tasks are all invitations to the will and kingdom of God and it is up to us to participate in them religiously or irreligiously. It does take healthy rhythms of prayer, Scripture reading, and community to frame the day this way, but it also sanctifies and makes holy all the parts of our day: Those conversations you’re not looking forward to with a family member, coworker or friend, making lunches in the morning, correcting a child or apologizing to a child, going to doctor appointments, the inconveniences when things don’t work out the way we’d hoped. Doing the hard work of rightly ordering our interior world with Jesus creates the capacity we need to help others discover the kingdom of God. In other words, the hard conversations aren’t derailments from the work of the kingdom, they are the soil in which the seeds of the kingdom begin to grow.
What keeps us from the work of the kingdom? This gets us back to the warning lights on our body’s dashboard? What story does our body tell? Perhaps there is a fear of rejection (Which ironically is Jesus’ point). It could be the voice of self-condemnation: we have come to believe the voice of someone who told us that we are a trouble-maker, an outsider, unlovable, ugly, overemotional, just too much, clingy, etc. And as we hold to those scripts we begin to act out of self-defense and self-preservation, incapable of vulnerability because we’ve vowed never to let ourselves get hurt again. We need time in Scripture to know the God who longs to be at home among his people, especially when they do things that are evil and turn towards him in repentance. We need time in prayer to know the nearness of God or to be fully ourselves in the presence of the one who might seem distant sometimes, but who always holds space for our full selves. It is hard work to carve out time to pay attention to our good loves and desires have become distorted such that we now notice our overreactions, our sinful proclivities, our disordered loves, and our wayward desires. It is so much work. And it is precisely that work that Jesus uses to make all things new. And when he does this in us, we have capacity for that hard work with others — even in the face of rejection.
Conclusion
When it comes to discipleship, being nice and not making waves is like a ceasefire. It doesn’t move things forward in the work of God’s kingdom. It is just the path of least resistance. Kingdom work involves honest curiosity and wonder in the face of brokenness — and that starts with ourselves. Of course we must have wisdom about when to stay silent and when to speak, but the reality is that it is risky to be courageous, kind, and curious about what is true of someone and the world they’ve constructed because it involves us constantly reorienting our interior world toward Jesus and his kingdom. This is the hard work of following Jesus; this is true peace-making.
Let us pray:
Almighty God, from whom all thoughts of truth and peace proceed: Kindle, we pray, in the hearts of all people the true love of peace, and guide with your pure and peaceable wisdom those who take counsel for the nations of the earth; that in tranquility your kingdom may go forward, till the earth is filled with the knowledge of your love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[1] Chuck Degroat, Healing What’s Within.
[2] Micah 7:6
[3] Jeremiah 6:14.
