Sermon September 9, 2007

Pentecost/Proper 18, Year C

Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Psalm 139 Philemon 1.21 Luke 14:25-33

What wonderful readings! Well, mostly! The Gospel's a hard one - and so I want to spend some time on it. But first a brief comment on the others.

Deuteronomy has this sharp dichotomy of life and death and exalts the reader to "choose life". But look at the order in which being faithful is defined: first Love God, echoing the Great Commandment, and only then looking at Law, at Torah.

And the same theme - of the centrality of love over law - comes through in Paul's letter to Philemon. Onesimius is an escaped slave from a friend of Paul's. As a favor to Onesimius Paul asks Philemon to accept him back not as a recalcitrant slave but as a friend and equal. "Let love and forgiveness reign", Paul is essentially saying. We miss "the rest of the story." In Clement of Alexandria's first letter - written to the Roman Christian community a few years after Paul wrote - Clement refers to "your bishop, Onesimius". Forgiveness had won the day, and in return, a new person was born, who became a bishop of the Church.

But then there's the Gospel. Hard words. Do you love your family? Okay, mostly do you love your family (no one's perfect, after all)? Do you think families are a good thing? You know why I'm asking, don't you! That darned Gospel reading about hating family! Pretty devastating, huh?

I doubt very much that there's one person here today willing to say that they hate their spouse, or their parents, or their children, or their grand-children, or their nieces or nephews - their families - hate them more than their faith.

If that's the choice we're given then it isn't really a choice.

So is that a place where we and Jesus diverge? Where we have to disagree with him?

The only way to answer that question is to look at what the bible's understanding of "family" was, and it was different from our own.

In the Old Testament "family" didn't mean "husband, and wife and 2.4 children"! A family was a patriarchal unit of wives (yes, plural - polygamy was the name of the game), children, slaves and property clustered around the central and most important person in this unit: the man! The classic Patriarchal system. It's certainly a different perspective than modern culture's view of family.

At the same time individuals didn't matter at all as individuals, only as members of the family. Your identity and worth was as a member of a family, not as an individual.

Part of the reason why is because the Old Testament is almost exclusively filled with threats of extinction toward the Chosen People. The central purpose of the family was not only to preserve the father's name and clan, but also - and primarily - to ensure the continued existence for the twelve Tribes - of Israel, using this patriarchal model. It required community effort, family cohesion, where individuality was not of value, to save the nation.

Such a goal put limits on the power of the patriarchal system. For instance, the biblical family system of justice was designed to make it clear that no one owned anything, but held whatever they had responsibility for in trust to God who alone owned both land and people. The patriarchal head of household was always understood primarily as a steward responsible for God's creation, not an owner of people or things.

This is especially clear in the time of the Judges - which recounts a time in Israelite history when there were no kings (before David, in other words) what you discover is that one of the central ways this was accomplished was to replace the power-at-the-top/poverty at the bottom Canaanite society with a social system which assumed there was fundamental equality with the community, that there was no centralized elite power such as a monarchy. If you now read St. Paul's theology of baptism and his image of the fundamental equality though different functionality of the Baptized within the Body of Christ, you should hear the echoes of the Judges, where we see this positive, powerful vision of family played out before us.

And, throughout the Old Testament, when figures like Esther, or Tamar, or Ruth, or Hannah, or Abigail (all women, notice) violate the Torah and disobey the patriarchal system for the greater purpose of protecting the integrity and continued existence of the Jewish Community, the Jewish "Family of families", the Bible always and unreservedly praises them.

But something happened to Israel. The time of the Judges drew to a close because the Israelites started looking at their neighboring countries and envied their political structures. "If we're to be a real country", they seemed to be saying, "we need a king".

The early prophets, like Samuel, opposed the idea of having a king because they say it as creating a new elite.

The later prophets issued searing indictments of royal households and their patriarchal structures because they were exactly that - power elites who oppressed the powerless and the poor of their countries.

Jesus can be seen as in the lineage of those later prophets. He lived in a time where the values of the Judges - of equality, shared identity, no power elites - were constantly violated. He lived in a time when the idea of family as a seat of justice for the poor, for widows and orphans, was ignored and frequently ridiculed by those referred to in the Gospels as the "leaders of the people" - the rulers of the synagogue, the scribes, Herod the fox and his court.

You can see this in his parables. Look at the Prodigal Son, where he sought subvert the patriarchal legalistic Torah system represented by the elder brother with the tremendous grace and love and compassion of the father.

Jesus was looking back to the vision of Torah that existed in the time of the Judges and in the prophets, a vision of Torah that was a gift from God designed to keep human beings human against the great temptations of selfishness and greed of the rich and powerful. What he faced was perverted understanding of family that placed power, selfishness and individualism over against the fundamental values of community and compassion.

He was also reflecting another important perspective that we find developing through the later part of the Old Testament and most of the New Testament, which was the influence of Greek philosophy, and especially that of Socrates and his view of the rights and responsibilities of the individual as separate from the family unit.

As one scholar has said: "The whole of the bible and Christian tradition can be viewed within the tension between the bible's focus on family, or community worth and responsibility, and its struggle toward affirmation of individual worth and responsibility within the larger family." (James A. Sanders)

We miss much of that tension today because we are so much more influenced by the rugged individualism that developed from Socrates and was a central feature of the Reformation. We're at the other end of the spectrum. For us in the 21st Century the rights of the individual are much more prominent and important an understanding than the communal vision of Jesus and the Judges. This is a vivid example and reminder for us of how important it is to understand context before we can understand what the bible does or does not say.

In today's reading Jesus is throwing down the gauntlet in front of the Jewish elite, the leaders, and saying "you have perverted the true understanding of family - I call on everyone to hate that exclusive, elitist vision." Jesus' vision - of family as the seat of justice and compassion in relationship - can therefore serve for us as a metaphor for the Covenant relationship between the Chosen People and God and an invitation to us to seek that similar balance between the centrality of the community for us as Christians and the importance of continuing the struggle for individual worth and responsibility within that larger family. It is the pilgrims' journey.

Biblical scholar James A. Sanders has said this of that struggle for us as "Church": "The church is a pilgrim people on the way. This should never be understood as a form of escapism--the "this world is not my home" syndrome--but as the essential character of the church, that church called by the Spirit to press on, to be on the move to address ever new challenges, to sing a new song to the glory of God, to break camp morning by morning from where we have been, to seek God's will to live by it, to change what can and should be changed, to accept what cannot be changed, with a prayer for wisdom to know the difference--constantly vigilant to oppose dehumanizing others just because they are different. Such vigilance is to witness to the power of Scripture and of Christ, as led by the Spirit. That is the vocation and the true identity of the human family called forth by God in Abraham and Sarah and expanded in Christ to the whole world." ("The family in the Bible", Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall 2002)

We are that family. We are that Church. May it be so for us that we can do this.     Amen.