The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
June 22, 2008, Proper 7A
St. Peter’s Church in the Great Valley
The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud
Genesis 21:8-21; Matthew 10:24-39
“Come lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” This is a persistent theme in the book of Genesis: one man will become a great nation. God seeks out Abraham. God gets to know him—sends angels to him, talks to him, calls him into a new land—God makes a relationship with Abraham and finally, God promises that through Abraham and his wife, Sarah, God will make a great nation. It will be a nation who will know God, and love God, and live in God’s way.
“Come lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” It is a persistent theme—only this verse from our Old Testament lesson today is not about Abraham. It is not even about Abraham’s legitimate son. This verse is about Ishmael, Abraham’s son with his slave, Hagar. God promises that he will make from Abraham and Sarah a great nation. And God gives them Isaac. And they are so old when Isaac is born that they laugh in delight.
Meanwhile, Hagar and the illegitimate son wander off into the wilderness to die in disgrace. But then comes God’s angel: “Come lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.”
And once again, God gives the gift of relationship. God wants a great nation. God wants a people who will know God and love God and worship God above all others. God knows that Abraham and Sarah are just the right folks to parent that great nation—but even so, God cannot turn away from any beloved, created one. Maybe Hagar’s son won’t be part of the nation of Abraham—but that doesn’t mean that God will abandon him. The text tells us that “God was with the boy.” And not only that, his mother was with him, too—for God gave Hagar the sight to find the water that they needed to live, and years later, when the time was right, Hagar found a wife for her son. And so Ishmael had a hard life—sent out by his father, estranged from his half-brother—but still it was a life lived in relationship—with his mother, with his wife, with God.
Today’s
texts offer a leaflet full of disturbing images—images of broken relationships
and painful death—starting with the mother and son who wander off into the
wilderness to die, and Paul’s stirring reminder that through baptism we have
died with Christ, and then Jesus’ words that he has come to set “a man against his father and a daughter
against her mother.”
Forty years ago, I stood in Trinity Episcopal Church, and I heard this Gospel lesson for the first time that I remember. My mother stood next to me, and maybe my older brother stood on the other side, or maybe he was already in college. I know that my younger brother was on Mom’s other side. In those days, it seemed prudent to my parents not only that my brother and I be separated in the pew, but that he sit between the parents. And so my dad was at the end of the little family group. And we heard this Gospel lesson. And I prayed, right there, while Fr. Carroll was reading the Gospel.
My prayer went something like this, “I can love you, Jesus. I do love you Jesus, but I don’t think I can possibly love you more than I love my mother. I guess I could maybe love you more than I love my father. I’m sure I can love you more than I love my brothers. I wonder if Mom loves Jesus more than she loves Nannie?”
Well, you will gather that my prayer became more like that kind of wandering day-dream that sometimes happens, even during a good sermon. I suppose that at some point we sat down, and that Fr. Carroll preached. And after that sermon, probably still worried about whether or not Jesus would love me, if I could not love him more that I loved my mother—still worried—Fr. Carroll put the bread in my hand and told me that the Body of Christ would keep me in everlasting life.
And if that Sunday was like most Sundays forty years ago, on the way home from church, my mother said something like, “I do like that Jim Carroll—he always has something interesting to say.” And my father said something like, “Such a fine mind! I cannot understand why he is in the church instead of business, where he could really make some money.”
For the life of me, I cannot remember what Father Jim Carroll said on that Sunday morning when I heard the Gospel say that I should love Jesus more than I love my mother. But I do know this, the next Sunday I was there again to hear what Jesus had to say to me. Maybe it had to do with Father Carroll’s sermon, and maybe it had to do with Judy and Stu Webb, who, when it got to be 9:30 on a Sunday morning, told us all to get in the car so that we would be on time for church. Maybe so, but whatever reason I was there, I approached the Altar, and a piece of Bread was put in my hand, and I was told that the Body of Christ would keep me in everlasting life.
Two millennia before I heard this Gospel for the first time, Matthew wrote down these sayings of Jesus to encourage the church. The first Christians who heard and read and proclaimed Matthew’s Gospel knew that Jesus had died on the Cross. And they believed that Jesus rose again—that the death of Jesus was, in fact, a victory over death—a way to new and transformed life. It was a new life that could be lived right here and right now—and a life that would continue when we were gathered into God’s mercy. And these were folks who needed life to be transformed, because their life was hard. They were poor, and more than that, they were persecuted for what they proclaimed about the risen Lord.
And so Matthew wrote the story of Jesus to encourage the new little church, to remind them of what they already knew of Jesus—that a relationship with Jesus gave life to all of their other relationships. Matthew encouraged them, because they were experiencing what Jesus told them, that he would set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother.
All these years later, life is still hard. Matthew might not recognize the church today. Today, not all of us who follow Jesus are poor. And not all of us who follow Jesus do so at the risk of our family lives. But there is still pain and sorrow and loss. And there are still families where relationships are broken because of bad behavior or differing beliefs or unforgiven acts.
Last week I had the opportunity for some continuing education. For three days, I met with 30 colleagues to ponder “transitions in parish life.” And as we studied and prayed and talked together, I learned about many different denominations. We were Episcopalians and Lutherans, members of the Reformed Church of America, and the United Church of Christ, and the Metropolitan Community Church, and one of us was a rabbi of the Reform movement of Judaism. Each of our denominations has different rules and different traditions—and some of us serve in churches with 30 members and some of us in churches with over a thousand—and all of us have one thing in common—we serve a community of people who assemble together week by week. And in every one of those assemblies there are people who are content, and people who are distressed. There are those who are joyful over a life event, and those who are suffering a great loss. And of course, there are many people who are both joyful and sorrowful at the same time. However people feel when they come together to worship—whether they are in the throes of death or in the midst of transformed life—they come together. Some individuals are lovely, healthy people whose behavior builds up the body—and some individuals fall short in one way or another, but whether a congregation is large or small—whether the people are rich or poor—whether their families are fabulous or dysfunctional—the people assemble so that they may experience God in relationship.
The old camp song goes, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” I have often wondered if that is true. I think sometimes we know we are Christians by our discussions and struggles that can break out into open quarreling. Our own Anglican Communion is struggling and wrangling over issues of Biblical authority and sexual ethics, and some of the conversations are not kind or nice. Matthew might not recognize any of today’s congregations, but Jesus would know us. Jesus knows us, because week by week we come here, looking for something—and week by week, we find it in our relationships with God and with each other.
Sometimes the relationships are easy and joyful. Sometimes the relationships are troubled or painful. Sometimes the relationships are broken—or even seem to be lost to death. Jesus knows us, we who struggle to follow him, we who struggle to live, even as we know that our lives will end in death. Jesus knows us, because Jesus knows that death does not end our relationship with God.
Gail Ramshaw is a liturgical scholar and author, and a woman who is very faithful in church attendance. She offers this story: “A Methodist minister tells that when distributing the wine, he calls out, ‘the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation,’ and that once a communicant looked him in the eye and said, ‘I’ll take the cup of salvation, thank you.’ Gail goes on: “Yes, we’d rather have the clear wine than the sticky blood. I’d rather think by myself about goodness than join together with you all in endless ethical struggles.”[1]
Gail Ramshaw, and my conference colleagues, and my late parents, Matthew, and Father Carroll and Hagar and Sarah and Abraham and their sons—and all of us who gather Sunday by Sunday, are drawn into relationship with God. It is the gift of God’s transforming love, broken like the Bread and poured out like the Wine. It is God’s gift to us, that we have each other. It is God’s gift to us, and God calls us to share it with everyone whom God loves.
[1] Gail Ramshaw, Under the Tree of Life: the Religion of a Feminist Christian, New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1998, p. 141.