Matthew 10 – Where the Wind…

Sermon for Sunday, August 17, 2014 || Proper 15A || Matthew 10:21-28

Good morning! It’s good to be back after three weeks away. I know I’ve only been next door, but it seems like another world when newborns are filling all your waking (and the few sleeping) moments. I seriously thought about skipping this sermon entirely and just showing you baby pictures for the next ten minutes, but then I realized lemonade on the lawn might be a better venue for that. So, let’s get down to the sermon.

Having newborns in the house has a way of making you get back to basics. It’s not easy to care for them, but it is simple. Feed. Change. Soothe. Try to catch a few zz’s. Repeat. Likewise, today I’d like to get back to one of the basics of following Jesus Christ. I’m going to talk about faith – specifically about how faith works in our lives. Hopefully, at the end of this sermon we will all rejoice that, while faith seems like an abstract, ephemeral concept, faith is in truth the fuel that fires our lives.

To start this little discussion about faith, we need to clear up one minor issue. In the English language the word “faith” is a noun. This grammatical construction makes it normal for us to ask a question like “Do you have faith?” Faith here is the object of your possession: “Yes, I have faith.” This sounds like completely correct and acceptable English, right? The trouble is, while faith is a noun, it should be a verb. I should be able to say “I’m going faith-ing today” or “We faith-ed yesterday and we’re going to faith again tomorrow.” But those sentences sound really strange, don’t they? I wish they didn’t. The word “faith” is a noun but whenever you use it, I hope you will remember it should be a verb.

Here’s why. We can possess things like concert tickets and hiking boots, but such possessions just sit on the counter or in the closet until we need to use them. If we have faith in the same way we have concert tickets, then we run the risk of storing our faith in the kitchen cupboard until we think we need it. But faith doesn’t work like that. Faith cannot be stored up or hoarded. We might get into situations where we say, “If I just had a little more faith…” But this turns faith into a commodity, something we can trade for something else. That’s not how faith works.

Thinking of faith as a verb removes it from the kitchen cupboard and puts it in our actions. We cannot store up or hoard our actions like we can our possessions. Rather, each action tumbles into the next in a never-ending stream. The problem we run into here is that, since the word faith isn’t actually a verb, we have trouble imagining what faith as action looks like. You know exactly what I mean when I say, “I saw someone running on my walk to church this morning.” But you’d have difficulty conjuring up the image if I said, “I saw someone faith-ing on my walk to church this morning.”

Because of this difficulty, I’d like to invite you to imagine with me a reality that we don’t often think about. When God created animals, God gave us all sorts of biological systems that allow us to live. The respiratory system lets us breath, the circulatory system cycles our blood through our bodies, the digestive system turns food into nutrients. There’s the nervous system, the endocrine system, the lymphatic system and so on. But we were made in God’s image and likeness, which means we have one more system that other animals don’t have. We have a spiritual one to go along with all our biological ones. We have a faith system.

The faith system works a lot like our muscular system. We all have muscles. We need our muscles to do simple tasks like getting out of bed, standing up, even smiling. We also need our muscles to do more difficult tasks like running a marathon or lugging a couch to a third floor walkup. Exercising hones and strengthens our muscles, making them more durable and less likely to fatigue. But whether we exercise or not, our muscles still put in work day in and day out.

So, too, with our faith system. The faith system spurs us to seek out life-affirming relationships, to support one another in our daily walks with God, to reach out to those in need, to welcome anyone into our midst, and to share with them the good news of God’s love. The faith system also sustains us through dry, desolate periods, giving us enough endurance not to give up quite yet. Like our muscles, our faith can get weary and fatigued. But also like our muscles, we can exercise our faith to hone and strengthen it, to make it more a part of our actions and less a thing sitting on the shelf in the kitchen cupboard.

If we’re going to exercise our faith, then we should figure out exactly what we mean when we say the word. We’ve already said how faith is a noun that should be a verb. Faith then is the action that happens when we participate in our relationships with God. Faith borrows the best parts of trust, confidence, humility, and zeal and molds them into our response to God’s presence in our lives. From trust, our faith borrows the willingness to give ourselves over to the power of another. From confidence, our faith borrows the courage to take the leap into God’s waiting arms. From humility, our faith borrows the recognition that God (and not we ourselves) initiates the action that results in the giving of ourselves up to God. And from zeal, our faith borrows the passion actually to get going and do something.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the Canaanite woman actively engages her faith system. She trusts that Jesus can help her. She has courage actually to do something about that trust, even in the midst of the disciples’ and Jesus’ own dismissal of her. She shows humility when she kneels before Jesus, calls him “Lord,” and asks for help. And her passion erupts when she counters Jesus’ statement about the children’s food. All she needs is a crumb, she says, a scrap discarded to the floor. Jesus calls her faith “great.” But no matter how great our faith is, we each have a faith system that God gave us so we would be able to join God in relationship. The more we exercise our faith system – the more we act out our faith – the deeper can we go in our relationships with God.

Imagine if we exercised our faith in the same way we exercise our muscles. Going to the gym once doesn’t do much, but going every other day can work wonders on our bodies. God yearns for us to have this kind of dedication to our lives of faith. When we are serious about exercising our faith systems, we build time into every day to be in prayer with God. We start with faith and allow it to motivate all our other actions. We take part in the act of worship, both on Sunday mornings and in the moments of our days when our faith shows us special signs of God’s presence that our eyes alone might not see.

I invite you today to remember that faith is not a commodity or a possession. Faith is the active component of our relationships with God. Faith is a noun but in our lives let’s make it a verb.

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* Art: detail from “Allegory of Faith” by Tintoretto (c. 1564)

Sermon for Sunday, June 22, 2014 || Proper 7A || Matthew 10:24-39

Sometimes when we pull a piece of the Gospel out of its natural habitat and read it in our cozy New England church, the impact of the words changes. Take the lesson I just finished, for example. How surprised would you be to learn that Jesus is trying to comfort his disciples with these words? You just heard them. They don’t sound very comforting, do they?

Certain passages of the Gospel cut through the dusty weight of years and touch our hearts in the same way I’m sure they touched the hearts of Jesus’ original followers. Others, like today’s, meander towards the present time and get a bit lost along the way. So let’s see if we can follow the path back to Jesus’ lips and hear anew these difficult words. Then we can bring them back to the present and hear what they have to say to us now.

Today’s Gospel lesson comprises the end of a set of instructions, which Jesus gives to his inner circle before sending them out to do the work he has appointed them to do, namely to cast out unclean spirits and cure disease. If we had started the passage sooner, we would have heard Jesus instruct the twelve disciples not to take any extra clothes or food with them, but to rely on God’s provision in the form of hospitality. If we had started the passage sooner, we would have heard Jesus tell them not to worry about what they will say when brought before the authorities, but to rely on God’s Spirit to speak through them. If we had started the passage sooner, we would see what a challenge Jesus sets before his friends, a challenge to rely on God – for sustenance, shelter, endurance, eloquence, in all things really.

This show of reliance on God in the face of challenging circumstances might even be the reason Jesus sent his friends out in the first place. They were living billboards for the kind of life Jesus promoted: a life of trust in God, a life in which you put God first and everything else fell into place. Jesus’ disciples trudged from town to town with nothing but the clothes on their backs, good news on their lips, and the power to heal in their hands. Now some scholars tell us that they didn’t bring extra clothes or food so they wouldn’t be juicy targets for bandits out on the dangerous roads. And I’m sure that’s part of it. But the more compelling story is their acceptance of the challenge to rely on God for all things.

And I’m sure the story was compelling: compelling enough to make new disciples and new enemies. And this is where Jesus’ supposedly comforting words for today arrive on the scene. First he reminds his friends that his opponents have openly called him Beelzebul (that is, the father of demons). If they call me such a name, he says, then don’t expect kind treatment. But even if they treat you poorly, “Have no fear of them.” In fact, Jesus tells his friends not to be afraid three times in this passage, just to make sure the words sink in.

Don’t be afraid, he says, because, while they slander you now with false words, all will be revealed in time. Don’t be afraid because, while they can hurt your physically, they cannot touch the soul, which resides with God for safekeeping. And don’t be afraid because your Father in heaven knows you intimately, knows even how many hairs are on your head. If you do happen to fall to the ground, God will be there to pick you up again.

So far, Jesus’ words are speaking comfort to the challenge. Jesus trusts his disciples to rely on God, and this trust will help them overcome their fear. But now we move to the more difficult words, the ones which the long march of time has mangled. As we listen to them, we have to remember one immutable fact that separates our experience from that of Jesus’ original followers. We do not live in a part of the modern world that is charged with religious fervor. Indeed, in our part of the modern world, the religious fervor tank is approaching empty. I don’t know about you but when people discover I am a practicing Christian, their responses range from total indifference to mild surprise to pleasant curiosity. I can count on less than one hand the number of times my identity as a follower of Jesus has been met with unmitigated derision.

Not so for his original followers. Their world was charged with religious fervor. The very idea that someone like Jesus might be teaching something new would be downright offensive to many people. Jesus’ reinterpretation (and in some cases strengthening) of the Jewish law was a punishable act. The words Jesus speaks in the rest of today’s passage are not intended to strike fear into the hearts of his listeners (as they might do to us), but rather to lay out plainly the state of affairs if you were to take the leap and join Jesus’ team. Such a leap would cause division, as symbolized by the sword. Such a leap could separate families. Such a leap could lead to physical death.

The religiously charged atmosphere was hostile to change, and with his words here, Jesus shows that he knows exactly what he is asking his friends to do. But in the final verse of our passage, he also tells them that it’s worth it: “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” he says.

So, as we bring Jesus’ words with us back to our modern moment, what do they say to us? Well, the comfort remains. “Do not be afraid” always rings true and always will. But the things we might be afraid of have changed. In fact, our fear might ironically spring from Jesus’ own words: what he meant as comfort has become our challenge. He says, “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” As religious fervor leeches from our land, speaking about how we make choices because of God’s movement in our lives – indeed, being on fire for God’s service – has somehow become impolite, even taboo. But we have good news to share, and we have God’s work to do. And we can do so invitingly, unapologetically, and – yes – fervently. Our faith is nothing to be ashamed of. So be open, and rely on God to find the right words and actions to display your allegiance.

In Jesus’ day, he upset the status quo by deepening and expanding the meaning of what it meant to be a follower of God. He spoke comfort and challenge in equal measure to attract and galvanize people to join him in his mission to re-imagine what God was doing on earth – indeed, to make earth more like heaven. In our day, we follow Jesus’ lead when we continue upsetting the status quo. With God’s help, we offer hospitality to the stranger when society tells us to shut our door. We offer generosity to the needy when society tells us to hoard what’s ours. We offer friendship to the lonely, dignity to the outcast, love to the unlovable. This is our story, and it is a compelling one.

Just as Jesus sent his friends out to heal and serve, so he sends us out. He sends us out in trust and not in fear. He sends us out, knowing that our road will not always be an easy one. But he sends us out always walking a road he trod before us, a road that leads, yes, to the cross, but then past the cross to the empty tomb and the glorious new life God offers to all.

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