Family Trouble

Image Sarah and Hagar by Svetlana Tartakovska

There is always a temptation as preacher to steer clear of difficult passages. But maybe I’m a glutton for punishment as they say – because the 4^th Sunday after Pentecost presents us with challenging OT and Gospel readings.

In Matthew 10:24-39 Jesus seems to be suggesting that conflict between family members and by extension, conflict in wider society is to be expected. The passage concludes with this dire warning – I’ve not come to bring peace but a sword – for I’ve come to pit family members against one another and one’s foes will be one’s kith and kin.

Once over our shock at his words, we might begin to notice that the picture of familial and societal conflict Jesus presents is actually the one we are most familiar with. What’s shocking about it is for some reason we don’t expect Jesus to talk this way. After all –isn’t Jesus the prophet of turn the other cheek not the prophet of strike back? Isn’t Jesus’ message all about love and acceptance?

The reality is that we live in a conflict riven society set in an increasingly conflict riven world. Riffing a little on my own responses to this passage – it’s as if we cry out for peace and yet Jesus rebuffs us with don’t cry to me for peace, when you have no real appetite for what it takes to establish it.

The reign of God’s Kingdom ushers the promise of peace. But it’s not any kind of peace. It’s not peace without cost. It’s peace predicated upon the establishment of justice. To the extent to which there is no justice in the world then there will be no peace. For the reign of God’s Kingdom is at odds with the ways of the world. Jesus does not so much bring the sword as many of his more crusader minded followers believe. The sword of violence is already in play when God’s reign breaks into a world not yet committed to peace with justice.

Love is the abiding principle by which we as Christians should live. We prattle on about what a complex word love is and how can we even begin to know what it should look like. But it’s actually very simple. Justice is what Christian love looks like in action. Justice is Christian love’s expression of solidarity with the stranger, the vulnerable, and the outcast. It’s one thing to acknowledge we may not be up love’s demands, but it’s quite another to say we don’t know what love is.

This gospel from Matthew 10:24-39 is preceded by the reading from Genesis 21:8-21 which relates a curious incident of conflict in Abraham’s family life. It’s a story about a wife and a concubine. It’s a story about the heir and his bastard brother. It’s a story about power and the victims of power – about the jealousy of a wife for vengeance on the one who threatens her son and his future – and the failure of a husband to intervene in order to protect both his sons – bastard son as well as heir. Talk about family drama!

The shock value in this story is a reminder to us that we cannot impose a 21^st Western veneer of monogamous family life upon Abrahams domestic arrangements. This is a warning to popular American religion that likes to take early Biblical figures and modern role models. It requires a lot of airbrushing out to maintain this fiction.

In 2017 Linda+ preached on this text in a sermon titled Families are Complicated. In it she drew the following conclusion from the story about Abraham’s domestic arrangements:

God continues to work within the framework of the gift of free will and the resulting complications and chaos that accompany it. …. In doing that, we gain a window on our own lives and the lives of our neighbors. Hagar’s suffering is redeemed through us; it calls us to see and hear her lament in the abused, rejected and marginalized of our own time, and it further calls us to offer them God’s healing wherever we can, like a well of cool water in the harsh wilderness. By God’s grace and with God’s help, that’s not really complicated at all.

Linda’s+ final sentence expresses her desire for a hopeful conclusion to the otherwise disturbing story. Yet, I also hear a note of irony in her final sentence. The irony of not really complicated at all is the hint that it’s very, very complicated indeed! Well, without God’s grace, that is. But often we human beings are not much interested in God’s grace when it comes to sorting out interpersonal and wider societal conflicts. A note of irony lies in our continued deafness to the point of this ancient story – because it endlessly complicates our lives if we see and hear God’s lament in the abused, rejected and marginalized of in our own time.

Although the actors in this Genesis story are far from modern persons with modern sensibilities – and again, I warn against viewing them through our 21^st-century Western cultural lens – they nevertheless represent archetypal human choices. We see in Sarah our human desire to protect what is ours both now and in the future by sacrificing others whose existence threatens our control. In Abraham, we see despite the helpless hand wringing and genuine heartache – a response of I can’t get involved – a nothing to do with me response. In Hagar and Ishmael, we see the responses of the powerless who have no protection but that afforded by the love of God. It seems it’s only God who is listening and loving.

Kathryn M. Schifferdecker, Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St Paul, MIN, in her 2014 commentary on this text in Working Preacher notes:

God opens Hagar’s eyes to see a well of water nearby, just as Abraham in the next chapter will see the ram caught in the thicket. And in both cases the seeing leads to new life for [both] Abraham’s sons. …It is easy to overlook this story of Ishmael, set as it is between the story of Isaac’s miraculous birth and the story of his (near) sacrifice. Yet, it is worth pausing and considering what Ishmael’s story tells us about God’s care and providence. As the old hymn reminds us, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” We cannot limit God’s mercy. God hears the cry of the abandoned. God hears the cry of the outcast, and God saves.

We cry peace, peace, but there can be no peace until there is justice. The sons of Abraham are still at each other throats in multiple permutations of this family conflict that echoes still in our own time. Whether it’s Jew and Arab; Israeli and Palestinian; Christian and Jew; Christian, Jew and Muslim – however you define it -this is the timeless family struggle between the Sarahs and Hagars, between the Isaacs, and Ishmaels, and between the Jacobs, and Esaus. On and on – round and round it goes – to our undying shame.

Cleophus J LaRue, Princeton Seminary Professor of Homiletics sums it up thus:

Some think the divisions are little more than a family squabble, while others see in them a struggle against the cosmic powers of this present darkness (Ephesians 6:12).  …. The Christ whom God has sent among us does not come to usher in an era of peace but rather an era of engagement and challenge where convictions will be tested and decisions made about the things that matter in this life even as creation, along with humanity, groans for redemption. The struggle is not an easy burden to bear.

Jesus’ sword means that simply following Jesus will bring its own rejections and conflicts as we work to right wrongs, fight complacency – ours as well as others, speak truth to power, turn away from judgement and embrace service, and be genuinely open to a transformative encounter with Christ in our worship and work. All these are possible with God’s grace. Note, not a hint of irony in this last sentence.

June 24, 2023 1

A World not for the Faint-hearted

In the Church’s calendar today it’s the 6^th Sunday in Ordinary time- the 3^rd after Pentecost. In the secular calendar it’s Father’s Day, and in our local calendar the Sunday of the PVD Pride Weekend.

Over the decades Pride month with its customary Pride marches has morphed with changes in cultural attitudes towards homosexuality. I refer you to this week’s E-News Epistle in which I wrote a more detailed overview of the derivation and contested meanings of the term homosexual, along with an overview of the constituent communities that nestle under the umbrella of the LGBTQ+ Rainbow Alliance.

For me the significance of the acronym LGBTQ+ lies in its modeling not of a single community but of an alliance of different communities coexisting under a collective umbrella. The Rainbow Alliance is an alliance of differences in a celebration of diversity. Given the increasing forces polarizing our society, the toleration of contested differences within alliances of diversity is an important model for a possible way forward.

The adoption of the colors of the rainbow as the emblem of the LGBTQ+ Rainbow Alliance reminds us that in the Bible, the rainbow is the divine commitment to a regeneration of the creation after the total devastation of the Flood. The rainbow is a sign of God’s new covenant with humanity and the creation – a reminder of the divine faithfulness and mercy – a symbol of hope, beauty, and of the divine presence guiding us into a new future.

Someone recently sent me a cartoon which said God- the original they/them. Pride Festival has over the years become a wider cultural celebration – no longer just an LGBTQ+ event – but a true community-wide carnival.

Providence Pride comes at the end of a week in which the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) reaffirmed its prohibition on women exercising authority in the church – unless that authority is vicariously derived from the overall authority of a male leader. To emphasize their point, they expelled from the SBC all the churches with a woman in overall pastoral leadership.

Religious organizations are prone to delusion. SB thinking is that this move will stem the hemorrhage of members leaving the SBC. Currently at around 13 million members – its estimated that the Convention has lost 1.1 million members just in the past three years with half a million in the last year alone. From the outside looking in – it’s been a bad week for the SBC. Clearly their loss must surely become the American Baptists USA’s gain. Listen- you can hear the clapping in Providence’s First Baptist Church in America from here!

Conservative Christian traditions – evangelical, catholic, or orthodox, are at odds with the social and cultural evolution that has redefined relations between men and women. They cling onto a 1^st-century social structuring of gender relations rooted in the theological notion of a Bible-based Fatherhood of God that is immutable to change.

God is male and sits at the apex of the authority pyramid. Therefore, men are the human beings most like a male God. According to Genesis it was Adam whom the divine community created first from the dust of the earth. As the male God reigns from heaven, so the men exercise the male God’s vicarious authority as the heads of family units within which women and children nestle in protective custody.

This argument is on shaky ground when we remember that in Genesis God gave all authority over creation not to Adam alone, but to Adam and Eve as a couple. But hey, who cares about this small discrepancy, because as the argument goes we know Jesus only called men as disciples and Paul said women must not be allowed to speak in church.

Abstracting sideways from the family we arrive at the church – which for the SBC at least seems nothing more than a collection of male headed families grouped under male religious leadership – an extension from the family of the same pyramid structure of authority and culture of protective custody for women and children. Like all forms of custody – protective or otherwise – attempts to challenge it -or to step outside its control – are met with punishment – the usual one of being cast out of family and church. Social death and still in some places, physical death is the ultimate punishment for challenging the hierarchy of male authority.

We should not miss two essential points in this debate around male authority. Gender rooted authority -resting on the privilege of maleness – is the root of all cycles of abuse in church life regardless of denomination. Gender rooted male privilege is conceived of as a zero-sum game. Like all authoritarian regimes no change is possible for fear that any change – no matter how seemingly inconsequential – will result in the whole edifice being swept away.

Last week SBC leadership signaled that they understand the core issue only too well. For if the wall of strict male dominated gender based authority is breached, where will things end?

Well, we all know the answer to that question. It means that any change in the status quo will result in so much more than allowing women a voice. One change opens the door to questions that go to the very heart of the construction of gender identity itself. Women in religious authority today – what’s to stop trans women exercising religious authority tomorrow?

The actions of the SBC this past week allow me to segue nicely into the celebration of Father’s Day. The notion of fatherhood along with just about every other traditional institution in our society is a hotly contested one. All roads lead to Rome – as the saying goes. If human fatherhood is in contention, then the fatherhood of God as identified with the exclusively male gender also comes into contention.

Underpinning shifting understandings around how gender identity is constructed lie the complexities of nature v nurture, biology v social conditioning, somatic bodies v psychological minds. All I have space to say here is that for many motherhood and fatherhood can no longer be perfectly aligned with traditional notions of gender identity-based roles. Because ultimately, both motherhood and fatherhood are essential qualities of the divine – and are thus reflected in our human nature without discrimination – taking us on a journey beyond all cultural gendered distinctions.

We can trace three great cultural emancipation movements that have changed the modern world during the last 250 years. The first emancipation movement took the 19^th century by storm with the ending of commercial slavery. The emancipation of women followed close on the heels of slavery’s abolition. In our own living memory homosexuality has been freed from the shackles of legal persecution and punishment – paving the way towards a growing social acceptance of lesbian and gay sexual identities. A fourth cultural upheaval is upon us with the questioning of premodern constructions of gender identity.

Each shift in culture has been accompanied by an interrogation of the Biblical voice – freeing it to speak its truth into new contexts. Episcopalians together with mainline Protestants have been in the vanguard of this evolution – an evolution fiercely resisted by Evangelicals and the official voice of the Catholic Church at every step of the way. The struggle continues.

The confluence of Pride and Father’s Day this year focuses attention on the questioning of traditional constructions of gender. Questioning leads to reaction and the tactics of traditional gender conformity reaction are taking an increasingly fascist turn.

No longer content to arrange matters within their own institutions and communities, white Christian nationalist traditions such as the SBC see no downside to supping with the devil in their pursuit of political power – such is their fear of any change leading to a loss of historic privilege. Through the courting of power, they seek to enforce their religious worldview on the rest of society through a very unconservative legislative intrusion into the arenas of freedom of religious conscience and individual choice.

When the historic champions of freedom of religion, freedom of choice, freedom of speech, and little or no government regulation become the party of religious infringement of women’s rights, don’t say gay, public library book bans, and an Orwellian intrusion into the arena of parental choice – we need to wake to the fact that we have entered a world no longer for the faint-hearted.

June 17, 2023 0

Epistles

Who do you think is has had the more lasting influence on the shape and development of Christian faith and practice – Jesus or Paul? It’s kind of an interesting question. Of course, I would want to put Luke up there as well – as it’s his historical structuring of the story of the transmission from Jesus to the Church that gives us the shape of the liturgical year from Christmas through Easter.

Who you think has had the more lasting influence on the content and shape of Christian faith also depends on whether you are a member of an apostolic or evangelical Christian tradition. For instance, you hear very little reading of, and preaching on, the gospels in evangelical churches compared with a heavy preponderance of long expositions on brief and selective soundbites from the epistles.

Conservative, white Evangelical thinking prefers rules-based black and whites – do this but don’t do that – this is good, that is bad kind of thing. While Jesus’ name is loudly and ritualistically proclaimed in evangelical communities there is little teaching on his kingdom message because his teaching does not easily lend itself to a follow-the-rules approach to Christian living . Whereas the epistles of Paul and even more so, the pastoral epistles – those which are clearly dated later than Paul’s own lifetime although often claiming his or one of the other the Apostles authorship – are crammed full of dos and don’ts. They lend themselves to attempts to apply 1^st and 2^nd century cultural norms concerning the patriarchy’s hot button issues – slavery, women, and sexuality to 21^st century life – while ignoring the clear challenges that early Christian communities posed to the existing imperial orders of the time. If you ignore the early Christian challenge to 1st century imperial world order, then you can go on excusing modern-day authoritarianism.

The nub of the matter is that Jesus’ teaching is too counterculture for conservative leaning white evangelicals. Jesus confronted the conventional practice of Jewish religion of his time with a provocative radical religious challenge. He challenged the way religious practice inevitably submits to the pressures of culture. The hallmarks of religious submission to cultural norms can be seen in a reducing of the Christian message to one of individual sexual morality – ignoring Jesus social teaching – and conveniently exonerating the political, economic, and cultural norms of the status quo – the business as usual society.

When Christian faith is reduced to a message about cultural conformity, being different makes you vulnerable. If your view of salvation depends on following a culturally submissive, rules-based approach to faith – then you’ll harden your heart towards those whose vulnerability threatens that order.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung once remarked that he was glad to be Jung and not a Jungian – referring to the tensions that had already emerged in his lifetime between his visionary yet idiosyncratic thinking and his followers need for systematic consistency. This struggle to preserve the teaching of the founding visionary by restricting its application in the interests of consistency and cultural conformity is particularly prevalent in the history of religious movements. To ensure survival – the movement restricts the vision of the founder sacrificing the flexibility and creativity of the leader’s vision to preserve and protect for posterity, the leaders teaching.

And so, it was for the writers of the NT epistles. Their job was to preserve and transmit the memory of Jesus into a system that served living communities faced with the challenges of a continually changing and challenging world. If you embrace an early Christian patriarchal worldview but ignore their challenge of these communities to the violence of power, then contemporary, white American evangelicalism is what you end up with.

Given my earlier comments about the epistles being the go-to texts for conservative evangelicals, it’s important that we in the apostolic Christian tradition reclaim them.

With the Easter season now behind us we enter into the period of the calendar known as Ordinary Time which opens with several weeks of readings from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Here, Paul lays out the contours of what it means to live the new life of the resurrection. In Romans, Paul is at pains to distinguish between obedience to the Law of Moses and the life of faith in Jesus Christ.

From our vantage point, Paul is often difficult to read because he loves to get down in the weeds of the meaty issues of the time. He’s at pains to contrast faith with works, with baptism not circumcision as the mark of belonging. Paul’s letters are written in a cultural and religious context different from ours. I find the trick with Paul is not to be distracted by his words so as to miss the radical quality of his vision for the Christian life – a vision in which it is baptism not circumcision that matters.

On the 5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time we read Romans 4 in the light of Genesis 12 which details the call of Abraham. In Romans 4, Paul is reminding his fellow Jews that it is Abraham not Moses who is the father of the nation. That the first covenant with Israel is the one God makes with Abraham – a covenant not of circumcision or at least not at first, but a covenant of faith. Paul’s direct argument in Romans 4 is that Abraham was reckoned righteousness through his faith in God – and not simply for his own sake but for ours because like Abraham, our relationship to God is a matter of faith i.e., baptism and not circumcision.

In the readings for Pentecost 2 or the 5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time we see a continuous connecting thread. We have examples of the way both Paul and Jesus approach the Law of Moses. The difference is telling and demonstrates my earlier comments about why the epistles are the go-to texts for evangelical Christians.

Whereas Paul is the lawyerly lawyer – Jesus is the social renegade. Jesus challenges the aridity of a legalistic following of the Law not with complex legal argument like Paul does but by confronting the way the Law has submitted to cultural and social norms. He breaks these norms. He risks ritual impurity by eating with the unacceptable people. In response to Pharisee criticism, he notes God’s concern is with the sick not with those who define themselves as the healthy. God comes not to call the righteous but those who acknowledge their sinfulness. Jesus does not resort to complex invective but simply reminds the followers of the Law to soften their hearts – reminding them that God requires mercy not sacrifice.

We are living through a time in which the authoritarian politics of hate and exclusion are drawing energy from the submission of evangelical religion to the norms of white patriarchal culture with its values of racial superiority, hatred of women, and persecution of lesbian, gay and transgendered persons.

When religion submits to the values of a political culture of tribal exclusion – the result is the Reich Church of Nazi Germany with its wholehearted endorsement of the anti-Jewish laws, the Russkiy-mir of Putin’s tamed Russian Orthodox worldview promoting the virtues of a medieval conquest mindset, the Southern Baptist bully pulpit culture now feeding into a cycle of Republican sponsored discriminatory legislation amounting to a very unconservative governmental intrusion into the personal lives of Americans. The result is always the same. When religion submits to the values of tribal political culture – sacrifice replaces mercy and hearts are hardened against those who pose a challenge simply by virtue of becoming vulnerable.

June 10, 2023 0