Instructions for the Journey

Matthew 10:24-39

Late last summer, I saw the movie “Hacksaw Ridge” for the first time. The movie tells the story of a young man, Desmond T. Doss, who served as an army medic during World War II, and specifically during the Battle of Okinawa. Before the war broke out, Doss was for the most part a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist, his faith was very important to him, and that, together with some early life experiences, led him to make a decision to live his life as a pacifist. He didn’t have a great deal of education – his family was too poor for that, but Doss did have an interest in medicine.

Then World War II broke out and Doss felt called to serve his country. As a pacifist, you can imagine the dilemma this created for the young man. Added to the tension, was his relationship with his father, who himself had served during World War I, and today would likely be diagnosed as having PTSD – his action during World War I left him scarred for the rest of his life, and his family bore the brunt of his war-induced mental illness.

The elder Doss was vehemently opposed to his sons serving in the war. Going against his father’s will created huge conflict and ultimately a schism between them. But the young Doss made up his mind. He had it all figured out. He liked medicine; he would serve his country as a medic. He couldn’t bear arms, but he could still serve, and he seemed to have an understanding with his recruiter that that would be exactly as things would go. But of course, they didn’t.

No sooner had Doss arrived as boot camp than he ran into problems with his drill sergeant and his fellow soldiers over his decision and refusal not to bear arms. He excelled physically but became an outcast in his unit for his refusal to handle a rifle or drill on Saturdays – his Sabbath. He was assigned physically grueling labor. An attempt on the part of his superiors to have him discharged for psychiatric reasons failed, and one night he is pretty badly beaten up by some of his fellow soldiers.  Still, he resists going against what his faith – and the Scriptures – had taught him.

He ultimately completed basic training but was then arrested and court martialed for insubordination. He refused to relent. He would not bear arms, could not go against biblical teachings nor his conscience. All he wanted was to serve as a medic, come what may. Finally, his father barged into the military tribunal bearing a letter from a former commanding officer of his, pointing out that pacifism is protected by an Act of Congress.

The charges were dropped, and Doss was assigned to the 77^th Infantry Division, deployed to the Pacific theater, which is how he ended up at the Battle of Okinawa, where through his actions, he saved the lives of 75 men and earned Medal of Honor, the first conscientious objector to ever earn that coveted award.

Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is not easy. You and I might never have to make the kinds of choices and decisions that Desmond Doss did, but I think that looking at this morning’s gospel text through the lens of Doss’ story might help us to understand what Jesus is telling his disciples about the cost and meaning of the mission in his name.

In this chapter from the Gospel of Matthew Jesus, in fact, has very pointed advice for his disciples, and his words help draw a picture of the cost of Christian mission and ministry. The picture isn’t all that pretty.  Jesus paints a picture of discipleship that is more than just a little off-putting.

The Gospel text we heard this morning is a continuation of what is referred to as the mission discourse, or “Sermon on Mission.” It was being delivered to a people who were persecuted, who were needing to make tough choices about what following Jesus means, who were experiencing opposition and divisions among families and friends, and the cost of being disciples.

Last week our gospel contained the words of Jesus that come just before these: “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. ¹⁷Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; ¹⁸and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me…..  ²¹Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; ²²and you will be hated by all because of my name….”

As this Sermon continues today, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one own household.”

Between last week’s text and this week’s, the Sermon on Mission has moved from the sources of mission (Jesus’ compassion, praying disciples, spiritual gifts, and church fellowship) through Jesus’ travel instructions (travel light- “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, ¹⁰no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff”), and now move on to the “trouble instructions” which basically, boil down to: “expect the worst”. Finally, we come to Jesus’ “trust” instructions - believe in me, acknowledge me

, and love me.

With all these instructions, Jesus seeks to bind the disciples to himself. He wants them to remember their bond with him, and to honor their relationship with Jesus and their identity as his disciples even and especially in the midst of the hardship and suffering they will surely face, as they serve this mission and ministry in his name.

“So, what does it mean to be a disciple of Christ?”

Bible commentator Frederick Dale Bruner puts it this way: “Jesus comes crashing into history, and then into our lives, and takes over, preempting our most instinctive loyalties, presuming on our deepest affections, usurping our natural ties, and asking (and so claiming) to be the most important person in our lives.”

Jesus knows that for the mission to be served well, the whole lives of his disciples must be marked by our relationship with him, by loyalty to him and that they be consistent with his own cross-shaped life, where the decisions we make, the interactions we have, and our every choice be made with God’s mission in the forefront of our actions.

Jesus knows well how difficult this journey will be and he isn’t pulling any punches. To follow Jesus is to cause the same kind of trouble Jesus caused, because Jesus’ way is countercultural. Absolute adherence to the ways and commands of Jesus are what Jesus demands from his disciples. Anything less brings destruction and chaos.

The thing is, Jesus knows that we like our comfortable little lives. We strive to make a “good life for ourselves” – for most of us, that kind of comfort and security is our ultimate goal and priority in life. Our lives include the relationships we have with family and friends. They include attaining and maintaining a certain status, perhaps living in the best neighborhood we can afford, to have the best things in our homes, to make the best connections in our community, all those things that go into making our lives pleasurable and secure. Given a choice we will choose the “easy way” of things.

And so, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Jesus isn’t advocating violence here. These words have been misinterpreted in that way over the centuries. Rather, the peace that Jesus is here to disrupt and even tear apart is the “peace” of the status quo – the “peace” of self-sufficiency; the “peace” that allows tyrants to oppress and persecute those with little power; the “peace” of keeping about our neat little lives safe and secure while scores of people face death, disease, hunger, abuses and persecution.

The sword of Jesus is meant to cleave us from our complacency, our blindness to the inequality happening all around us, or our adherence to earthly values, idols, even those relationships that keep us from being wholly centered on Jesus and on the mission he sets us forth to serve.

Jesus says to us, “You know what? If your life passion is to “make it” you will be lost. If security is what you are after, your search will only lead to your destruction.”

We hear those words and realize that really, truly, this Jesus is trouble.

So central is trouble to the Christian mission that Jesus says that his purpose in coming to earth was division. Jesus will bind disciples to himself in faith and then move them out into life to love people on the edge, but the historic consequences of faith and love have always been as much persecution as reconciliation. A few will believe the truth of Christ, but most will oppose it. Jesus shoots from the hip here. This is as true today as it was in Jesus’ time.

Jesus is not triumphalist about the future of Christian mission; he knows that his mission is a rugged minority movement, a tough, divisive affair, and he prefers to make this clear rather than to give false hope. “The gate is wide and the way pleasant that leads to destruction, and many people [a majority] go this route; but the gate is narrow and the way tough that leads to real life, and very few people find this way.”

            Yet in the midst of all this sobering news, there is gospel good news for us as well. In the midst of this passage Jesus tells us, “Do not be afraid.”  These words for us are both challenge and promise. God will always be with you. God does not leave us alone to face this battle, but with the kind of care and love that knows and counts each hair on our heads, the Lord God will strengthen, supply, and keep us in steadfast love. Jesus encourages his followers to step out into the light and tell the truth about their lives – a truth that is seen as healing, as life-giving, as witness to the goodness of God who cares for the little sparrow, the faithful soldier, the struggling, disciple, and all those who cling to Jesus and to his Way.

            Jesus tells us that in losing our life we will find it. Paul reminds us in baptism we died to sin, and we were buried with Jesus in death, that we might arise and walk in newness of life. As disciples of Christ, we follow in the footsteps of Jesus, going without fear, knowing that though this new life, the life of discipleship might be costly, by his death and resurrection, Jesus has already made us alive to God, counted, treasured, accompanied and restored, for the sake of the kingdom of God.

Amen.

What's God Doing?

Romans 9:1-5

          Paul has a problem. It’s a problem that causes him such enormous struggle and grief that he says that he would sacrifice his own salvation and place in God’s kingdom if it could make a difference. I think it is a problem many of us can probably identify with.

In the chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans that precede chapters 9 – 11 which we enter today, Paul has been writing about the wonder of God’s love. He has been writing about the wonder of how God has opened up the gates of heaven first to the Jews and now to the Gentiles as well. He has expounded on the grace of God that frees humanity through the righteousness of Jesus Christ. He affirms, over and over that God’s faithfulness is revealed in God’s covenants, and that nothing can eradicate the promises of God.

          Paul goes to great lengths (that’s another way to say that Paul can be wordy and his arguments rather circular) to assure the reader and hearers of this letter that salvation is God’s doing and is neither earned nor deserved by Gentile nor Jew. All have fallen short of the glory of God, and been judged guilty by God. All have been condemned to death by the utter failure of humanity to ever live in right relationship with God, to ever live in covenantal fidelity. That is, Paul says, we would be condemned, we would be overwhelmed by the power of death if it were not for God’s love, God’s faithfulness, and God’s determination for us.

          The first eight chapters of this letter to the Romans contain nothing less than Paul’s powerful confession of the veracity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He develops a strong argument for the power of the faith in which God engages us; he makes connections through scripture to God’s providence throughout all of history. Paul has set the stage in these chapters, by telling his story, by testifying how God has intervened in his own life – with a truth so powerful that he, Paul, a faithful Jew, was converted from his persecution of Christians and became a dedicated proclaimer of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul is convinced that all God’s promises of life and redemption are found in Christ and belong to the “providential hand of God.”

          Just last week we heard the apostle’s powerful words of conviction regarding God’s absolute reign over the powers that might threaten us, a reign that is sealed through faith in Christ that is itself God’s doing. Paul writes, “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ, our Lord.” (8:38-39) Paul is convinced that God’s righteousness saves us, that God’s faithfulness redeems us from the grave, and that it is through God’s grace revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that salvation is won, and that believing in Christ, nothing ever can or will change that, nor take away from us the status of God’s beloved, redeemed, inheritors of the kingdom of God.

          So what is Paul’s problem?

          Paul enters some of the deepest waters of the New Testament here, as he contemplates the fate of the Jewish people. New Testament theologian Matt Skinner writes that at the time Paul wrote this epistle it was becoming more and more apparent that the Christian gospel would not receive a positive response from the majority of Jews who heard it.

With great compassion, Paul opens this ninth chapter of the letter with a heartfelt expression of anguish for his people; for the Jews. “I am speaking the truth in Christ,” he writes, “I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit. I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.” Paul’s struggle arises out of the love and compassion that he bears for the Jewish people – the Israelites – the people of the covenant. Are they “people of the covenant” no more he wonders? What happens to them? If salvation is brought through faith in Christ but there is a fundamental rejection of the gospel, what then? These are not questions and problems only for Paul. World events both past and present detail the stereotypes we assign to the Jews which bear evidence that this problem and the questions it inspires persist.

          Paul’s questions present a minefield. What does it mean to be “the chosen people” who reject God? What does it mean to fail to accept Christ as God’s new covenant? What does it mean for those who fail to receive Jesus as the Anointed One, the Savior, the Messiah? For, if the people of the first covenant, the one God made in antiquity with the Israelites – Paul intentionally uses that historic name as a reference - are not now saved, does that mean that God isn’t really faithful all the time? If God is not faithful to the promises made to the people of Israel, what does that mean for Jews, for Gentiles, for God?

          Paul’s suffering is personal because these are his people he is thinking about. These are the people with whom and for whom he locates his own history and faith formation. Paul is thinking about his family, his friends, the people from synagogue that he’s known his whole life. In broader terms, Paul is thinking about all those Jews to whom he is connected through his birth and their shared history– these are the people he knows and identifies with. These are the people he loves. This is more than a struggle for Paul. This is a crisis for him.

          Skinner writes, “Paul did not write Romans 9-11 as a “Christian” passing judgment on “Judaism,” as much as he wrote as a Jew trying, like the prophets of old, to make theological sense of the dynamics of disobedience and restoration among Abraham’s descendants. The question driving this section of Romans is “What’s God doing?” It’s not “What’s wrong with these unbelievers?” The situation threatened to ignite a theological crisis in Paul’s day, if it could be supposed that the gospel meant the expiration of God’s promises to those God had already chosen.” Could God have given up on the Jewish people?

          It might be tempting to think that these issues don’t pertain to us. After all, we are Christians, far removed from Paul’s experience of conversion and the crisis in which he finds himself. We are believers in Jesus and in the gospel of grace and redemption. But these are important questions, and important passages to think about, because they wrestle with serious questions about God’s character and about the limit of God’s love and the steadfastness of God’s word. And there is that burning question – “What’s God doing?”

          Friends, I submit to you that God’s history with Israel is our history too. What we encounter here is not an “us and them” question, but a “we” equation. The Jewish people’s rich theological heritage is part of our heritage. This is why it is important to consistently remind ourselves of the entire biblical witness – why we include Old Testament readings and psalms along with New Testament readings in worship each week. It is why our worship and liturgy is sprinkled throughout with references and biblical passages from the entire corpus of the scriptures both old and new. All of our worship and imagery, in fact, is rooted in the Old Testament – within the story of God’s relationship with the people of Israel as it was unfolding.

Further, to understand where Paul is coming from, consider this: how many of you know of someone who has struggled, or have struggled yourself because a loved one, a family member, an adult child perhaps, or even a friend has “fallen away” from the faith? How many of you may wonder about a friend who has never known Christ or rejects the gospel we proclaim? Where is their salvation? What will happen to them? If any of these questions resonate with you, then you might have a wee bit of understanding what it might have been like for Paul.

          I can tell you that in my ministry I have been met by parents, husbands, wives and siblings who have suffered anguish like Paul’s when their loved one has died outside the bounds of the church and therefore, seemingly outside the bounds of God’s love and saving grace. I can tell you that I have often heard the despair of parents of adult children who have turned their backs on the church, or their faith. I have fielded questions about what happens to people who die without ever having known or accepted Christ. What, they want to know, what, we want to know, is God’s promise to them?

          I cannot say with certainty that I can answer all of those questions – I do not know the mind of God. But I believe that God, who relentlessly pursues humanity, who expands the redeemed to include all of the creation, who saves even a lowly, insignificant creature like me – and you – and then feeds us endlessly from his own body and blood, this God is able to work for the good of all whom God loves. The same God who created the ordered cosmos out of chaos and man and woman out of dust and bone, can and will work in ways we cannot fathom or explain to bear good fruit for the new creation of the kingdom of God.

          Paul S. Berge, Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary writes, “The Jewish people are not only the recipients of all that God has to give, but they are the people from whom the seed of promise has come as they bear the very gift of God to the nations: "And from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen" (9:5b). Paul has saved the greatest of God's promises to last. The identity of the Messiah is the greatest of God's gifts to Paul's kindred according to the flesh. This brings Paul to the only words that can express the focus of all that he has said in these introductory words--a doxology of praise to God--"God blessed forever. Amen!"