Lectionary readings
I think most of you know that I’ve just returned from my 7-week summer sojourn to South Korea, during which I taught at a university. Toward the end of the program, I took my students to the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone that has separated North Korea and South Korea for 60 years. This past July was the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended formal hostilities that killed more than 4,000,000 people, about 20 percent of the entire population, and cost the lives of 36,000 US soldiers. At the Joint Security Area, the place where officials between the two Koreas meet for formal discussions, where soldiers from the two Koreas stare each other down in silence, we saw a 10-inch concrete strip that demarcates the boundary between the two Koreas. 10 million families are separated because of this division. The DMZ is both a geographic and existential scar that cleaves the peninsula and the hearts and minds of Koreans on both sides of the border, all 80 million souls waiting, praying, hoping for that dividing line someday to vanish into a reunified people no longer at war but finally at a durable peace.
This image of the ongoing, haunting division of Korea, and the horrifying images of bloodshed this past week that has marred the revolution in Egypt, make Jesus’ words in this morning’s gospel lesson profoundly troubling, so counter to the image of Jesus that we see in the rest of Luke’s gospel, the one who is supposed to bring peace on earth. What in the world is going on, to have the Prince of Peace claim that instead of peace his ministry divides parent against child, family against family? What on earth might be the good news in division? Especially when we see how tragedy can result through division, what it can do to a family, a community, a nation, how in the world might we see God’s grace in these words of Jesus? These are hard words to hear this morning, for me very difficult given what I and my students saw last month near the 38th parallel. I wonder if these words are hard for you too, especially those of us caught in the midst of some kind of strife or division that makes our very souls feel torn apart. It makes me, perhaps you and me, want to close our Bibles, pretend that this passage doesn’t exist, and get on with church that will make me feel happier, to go back to a God that takes care of us, to a Jesus that holds baby sheep in one hand and heals the sick and calms storms with the other. This passage makes me want to get on with church that makes me feel better after the service is over, allows me to say that we’ll all be alright, that we and the rest of humanity and God’s creation will be OK, can’t we all just get along? Can’t we just set this passage aside and get back to nice Jesus?
But perhaps that’s the point. Maybe that’s what Jesus is getting at when he says that his message brings not peace but division. Maybe this passage is here to remind us on this dog day of summer that the gospel calls us not to complacent happiness and satiated numbness, but instead to wake up to the fact that things actually are not OK in God’s creation. This passage reminds me of the prophet Jeremiah who 500 years before Jesus said of and to his community, “They have treated the wounds of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” Jeremiah asked his community, particularly the elites, those in power in 6th century Judah, what kind of peace can you really claim when children go hungry, when poor women are left to fend for themselves, when landowners fatten themselves and their families while landless peasants go hungry on the very land on which they toil? There isn’t any real unity when a society blinds itself to the very real gaps that produce the real divisions of profound inequality and exploitation, discrimination and marginalization. To claim we’re all together while ignoring the miseries that people suffer is really nothing more than a false unity, a false peace. It’s not real peace, but a deathly silence that muffles the cries of the poor and hurting in our midst.
That, I think, is the gospel challenge that Jesus throws to his followers and to us in the church today. When we affirm our baptismal covenant to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace among all, to respect the dignity of every human being and every part of God’s creation, Jesus tells us, we’d better be ready for the consequences. When we enact the radical love of God’s embrace of God’s world, when we sit at table like our Savior did, with the outcasts and the marginalized, those who suffer in body and spirit, you and I better be ready to get some serious blowback. Because for loving our LGBT sisters and brothers, we will be called heretics. For being stewards of God’s creation, we’ll be teased as tree-huggers. For standing with our brothers and sisters of color, we’ll be demeaned as reverse racists. For claiming that our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, and women friends have every right to be who God calls them to be, inside and outside the church, we’ll be labeled radical feminists. And for honoring the traditions of those who call God by a different name, we will be pilloried as liberals, as secularists, as fakes. Make no mistake: we who call ourselves Jesus followers will not bring superficial peace when we live out his message of reconciliation for all of God’s people and creation, because we are telling those in the world, especially those in power—especially those who wield authority, political, religious, economic—that God is bigger than your ideology, your agenda, your theology, your false unity can hold. And that, sisters and brothers, is scary, scary stuff, because it threatens to break down the walls that institutions, inheritances, and enclosures try so hard to erect and keep up. This radical gospel that relentlessly calls all of us into God’s embrace shatters every status quo. God’s agenda is sure to divide because it calls us to engage one another and every one we meet as God’s beloved, not predetermined by where you come from, who your parents are, what skin tone you have, or which gender you love.
So brace yourselves, people of God, you’re going to get blowback, because that’s what Jesus got and what everyone in history who have struggled to follow Jesus has received. Later this month, our nation will remember the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the incredible gathering of God’s people that culminated in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” Most of us remember the soaring rhetoric of King’s dream, but it is important to remember also that his dream, like God’s dream, like God’s agenda, is not about a false peace or false unity but about a dream that comes from the clarity of what we as a society are facing and the costs that one might pay if we are to realize this dream. Two years after this speech, 48 years ago this week, on August 20, 1965, an Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Daniels paid the ultimate price for realizing God’s dream. Moved by Dr. King’s call to clergy earlier that year to come to Selma, Alabama, to join the famous march to Montgomery, Daniels returned to Selma in August 1965 to participate in a voter-registration drive for local African Americans. Arrested on August 14th with other demonstrators, Daniels and his comrades were released on August 20th. As he and others approached a local store to get some soda, Tom Coleman, a deputy sheriff, made a racially derogatory and sexist statement to 17-year old Ruby Sales, and then pointed his 12-gauge shotgun at her. Jonathan Daniels pushed Ruby aside and stepped in the line of fire, and was killed instantly by the blast. Before his death, Daniels would regularly bring Black youth to the local Episcopal Church in Selma, where parishioners would scowl at them for their audacity to integrate the church. Of his ministry in Alabama, he wrote the following before he was killed: “I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and resurrection...with them, the black men and white men, with all life, in him whose Name is above all names that the races and nations shout...we are indelibly and unspeakably one.” In 1991, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church unanimously voted to make Jonathan Daniels a saint and martyr of the church, and we commemorate his life and ministry in our church calendar every August 14th.
Sisters and brothers of Messiah, brace yourselves, for in living out God’s agenda, in following our Savior Jesus as he throws down the gauntlet, the gauntlet where the proud are scattered, the powerful are brought down, the lowly are lifted up and the hungry are fed, where God’s spirit and God’s people break through and break down the barriers of every hierarchy the world throws up, you and I are going to get blowback. There will be no peace, but division, but really there will be no false peace and no false unity as the light and truth of God’s radical grace come pouring into our lives and the lives that you and I encounter when we leave this place this morning. May we, like our Savior, like our brother Jonathan Daniels, be faithful to our call to be agents of God’s true reconciling love, even and especially when it upsets people and the status quo, so that so we can indeed move ever closer to turning the human race into the human family.
No comments:
Post a Comment