Uncomfortable Stories

Genesis 21:8-21, Matthew 10:24-39

These are uncomfortable stories, today.

Stories about God dividing families – Abraham’s family and our own.

Jesus offering us rejection and mockery, danger and division.

So much for church as a refuge from the world, or a comfort in the storm!

The storm is right there in the stories, today.

Hagar’s story is always hard for me. It’s unjust and unfair. And black women theologians and friends have helped me see how her story – abused, used, and cast away – sheds light on the stories of women of color today and through the centuries.

It’s hard to read and hear both the fear and the cruelty in Sarah’s instructions to cast away her slave with her husband’s first born son and recognize that temptation to treat people as problems. It’s hard to hear the anguish of Abraham, worried for the son he’s losing – and recognize in myself and in friends the self-absorbed protectiveness that has him hustling Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness with ridiculously inadequate provisions before anyone else is awake. 

It’s hard to read and hear the anguish of Hagar, feel her abandonment and grief that makes her step away from her child in the wilderness, unable to watch him die, and recognize the anguish of mothers today watching their children die of injustice, cruelty, and division.

It’s hard, too, to hear God tell Abraham and Hagar (separately) that things will be okay in the end because God is going to make a great nation out of Ishmael. You see, I hear that and feel the way I often feel when I hear someone tell me or a friend that “this suffering is all part of God’s plan.” 

I feel angry.

Because while I believe that God sometimes accepts the suffering of God’s people, I am convinced that suffering itself is never what God intends for us.

And I am convinced that an injustice from which God ultimately makes good happen is still an injustice.

God’s eyes are always on the goal, yes. Dividing Abraham’s family creates two great nations instead of one; and it begins two different stories about how God chooses the unlikely leaders – both the younger child and the child of the slave, the ones supposed to be written off – as instruments of God’s work.

But Sarah could have served God’s purpose of creating a separate people with generosity rather than fear. Abraham could have established Hagar and Ishmael in their own home, or at least given them real wilderness supplies. Abraham and Sarah, God’s chosen and faithful, are just as capable as you or I of creating injustice – often because we’re trying to protect ourselves from whatever we fear. You and I, too, can choose justice, love, and healing even when we’re faced with danger to ourselves, family division, and any other loss we fear.

That’s what Jesus is telling his disciples today.

“They’re going to call you agitators. even evil. The world isn’t going to treat you any better than me, and you know what happens to me.”
 There’s real physical danger, sometimes, in healing and curing, real risk that comes with bringing God’s power to confront the evils of this world – to healing not just the injuries and illnesses of individuals, but healing the systems that break and sicken and kill God’s people. The transformation we are involved in is so powerful – so much is going to change – that

there’s a lot out there to fear. But you don’t have to be ruled by that fear, even when it strains relationships with those who are closest to you.

You and I have seen this happening ourselves. People you love, right now, are saying someone else’s lives matter. And it hurts.

We’re calling one another agitators and oppressors; police are saviors and enemies at the same time. So are protestors.

Transforming our world so that we’re even a little closer to the kingdom of God, to the gospel that Jesus preached, is an expensive and chaotic process, dangerous to a lot of people’s comfort, and to what we’ve gotten used to as safety.

Jesus wants to be very sure we know this today, because he’s talking to the people who are in this for love – who have seen God’s healing at work, and want to spread it more widely.

Because he’s talking to people who have shared at least some of God’s vision for the world, who yearn for the God’s kingdom from the depths of our being, who long to share God’s dream, Jesus wants to be sure we know the risks.

Know that choosing to work against the evil embedded in the world, choosing healing of deep and powerful injury, choosing God’s priorities over our own, means telling uncomfortable stories. It's going to be expensive, uncomfortable, and at least a little dangerous.

And that the stakes are pretty high. Jesus tells the disciples – tells us – that the way we claim or deny Jesus – and Jesus’ priorities – is how Jesus will claim or deny us.

That sounds like the opposite of unconditional love, but really, it’s about how we respond to that love. 

Jesus comes to love and save all God’s people - unconditionally.

And if that transforms us so that we actively join Jesus in the risky work of transforming the world, then we are seen and known to God and to the world, as part of Jesus, the Body of Christ.
If not, we’re not.

God is bringing the kingdom whether we help or not. We choose whether we belong to that kingdom of heaven with our actions here and now, or whether we instead watch and wonder at the sides.

In our time and place, joining the healing Jesus brings, raising hope from the dead, restoring the outcast, and proclaiming God’s dream, means working intentionally and specifically to seek and serve Christ in black and brown women and men and transgendered people of every race. To seek justice for people living in poverty or on the wide and slippery edges of poverty, for anyone who can’t get access to immediate, affordable health care. To lift up the human dignity of anyone who is stereotyped and dismissed because of religion, national origin, rural or urban residence, or who you voted for last time.

The world needs that from God and from us because the pressures of systemic evil – racism, fear, the commercialization of greed, the public shaming of faithfulness, the fiction that we are in this alone – work to bury the image of Christ, the love of God, in everyone alike, whether victim, oppressor, or bystander.

That work is expensive to our self-image, our comfort, and sometimes our safety. So it’s important to remember that this isn’t about arbitrary rules, or even simply doing what is right. That we’re not suffering, struggling, or risking ourselves because God’s planned it that way, but because we’ve been invited to share God’s vision, God’s deep, all-powerful hope for the world, God’s unconditional love for us all.

Division, ridicule, danger and suffering aren’t the road itself. They are the hazards of the road, the side effects of living in the unbreakable love of God for us and for one another when the world around us is still broken by greed and fear.

I read these hard stories of division and discomfort today, and I am convinced by this that suffering is never God’s plan.  I’m convinced that you and I are called to choose justice, love, and healing – to relieve suffering – even when we’re faced with danger, division, and any other loss we fear.

That we are invited to throw our hearts and selves into God’s plan, God’s risky dream, because of God’s own great and unbreakable love for us, and for the world.

Paul's Bi-focals

Genesis 1:1-2:3, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20

God saw that it was good.

That’s the refrain, the returning theme, of the whole story of creation.

God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.

I find it easy to see that goodness when I look at the beauty of our gardens, the stars, the extraordinary variety of animals and plants, and moments of love and generosity between people.
But looking across the world, at everything…. Well, these days I see the devastation of viruses and violence, uncertainty and discord, and it gets harder to see the goodness of creation. Very hard, sometimes, to imagine that God can look at us now and see good, let alone very good.

My perspective these days feels a lot more like Paul, in the throes of his conflict with the church in Corinth, than the perspective of God looking at fresh and full creation.

You see, “super-apostles” have come to Corinth since Paul left, boasting that they’ve got a new and better gospel to share, that their way is the best way and Paul is wrong. They are, it seems, stirring up division and discomfort in the community – Paul writes that he’s expecting to come back to a church full of “quarreling, jealousy, anger, selfishness, slander, gossip, conceit and disorder.”
(Sounds like Paul’s expectations of Corinth are much like what you and I might expect from Twitter or the nightly news!)
Paul pours out his frustration and anger, putting his hope in Christ, yes, but just about ready to write off his Corinthian friends as hopeless. And then, after pages of “you’re doing this wrong” and “I’m right but I won’t brag about it,” he suddenly seems to change tone:

“Finally, rejoice. Repair the broken, be whole, be encouraged, be of one mind, live in peace….”

What we heard today – Paul’s final words to that hot mess of a church in Corinth – proclaim a vision of that same church as a healthy, whole, unified community.

In almost the same breath as his cranky, exasperated scolding, Paul blesses that hot mess of a congregation with all the characteristics and gifts of God as Christ, Almighty, and Spirit. Paul blesses them in the name and the image of the Holy Trinity, calling them to share the characteristics of God the Three-in-One: shared purpose, a sense of completeness together, a peace that is a deeply mutual trust in one another.

I need to hear that right now. I want that for our world. Maybe you do, too.

Paul’s not interested in why we can’t all just get along. He doesn’t want differences suppressed and a cease-fire called “peace” papered over the divisions in the community. He’s calling the messed-up, confused, divided, and kind of selfish and greedy community in Corinth to be the image of God. To live as God lives: in deep, peace that can take on controversy and difference and hold all that in a healing trust; and a sense of shared dependence on one another that means we go forward together, not apart. He calls us to live in mutuality that feels one another’s pain as our own – the way Creator and Spirit are fully present in Jesus’ agony at the cross – and feels one another’s growth and joy and strength as our very own, the way the creativity of creation and the joy of resurrection belong to Father, Son, and Spirit in equal measure.

It’s easy for me – and maybe for many of you – to look around our nation and world today and see much of what Paul saw in Corinth: “quarreling, jealousy, anger, selfishness, slander, gossip, conceit and disorder.”

It’s easy to look at strangers on TV or the internet, or at our friends and neighbors, and be upset that the people who are supposed to be Christians are following bad teachers of all kinds. Easy to see and be hurt by the division that comes from too many teachers or leaders peddling their own rightness, their own slant on the truth.

Paul sees all that in the church in Corinth, and also sees – wants us to see – the image of God in one another and ourselves. Paul sees the division, and at the same time sees the truth that we were created to be united in our differences. To reflect the three-in-oneness of God and depend on each other in deep, mutual, inseparable trust. To find our life in the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Spirit.

Now, some of us are able to see God’s goodness in the world around us all the time.  Some of us never lose sight of ourselves and every other human being – enemies, strangers, politicians, and crowds on TV as well as beloved friends – as the image of God, created very good.

Others of us need help to see as God sees. We need Paul’s bi-focals, able to show us the image of God even as we look division and controversy straight in the face.

So Jesus gives us that.
Speaking to a much reduced and rather doubtful congregation of worshippers, in the uncertain days after his resurrection, Jesus gives them a truth, a command, power and presence that have been considered the “mission of the church” for hundreds and hundreds of years.

“All authority in heaven and earth is given to me” he tells them: a truth assuring us that evil does not rule the world, no matter what it looks like. So we know that we will be able to see good when we look.
“So go and disciple” – a command to welcome people into the image of the Father, Son, and Spirit – “and teach” – the power to be like Jesus in showing people how to live like God. So we know it can be done.
“Behold, I am with you always, to the end.” Not just a promise, or a suggestion, but the whole presence of God, Trinity and unity, every where and every when that we are. So we know we don’t do it alone.

We aren’t sent off into the sunset to preach and teach and welcome on our own, but carried in the creative, healing, life-giving power and presence of God as Father, Son, and Spirit.  Our power to heal and teach, to bring others into their identity as the image of God, to be that image ourselves, comes from our relationship to God, with us always.

It’s not always easy to see that when we look at the news. It’s easy, often, to see ourselves as powerless and disconnected, uncertain how to share this world with people who seem so different from us – people who seem or even are dangerous to us.

And yet God sees the same world, the same us, as deeply connected, able to share one another’s joys and hurts as our own, the good image of God with God’s help – not on our own.

So Paul – and Jesus, and God as Creator and Spirit – all invite us to learn to look that way, to look for God’s good image in the stranger and the enemy and the neighbor and the friend and know we will see it.

To look and see how our hearts are connected to every other heart in God’s creation,

how we, like Father, Son, and Spirit are eternally and always one.

To look, and feel ourselves strengthened by one another’s strength - and God’s. Feel our pain and joy shared and held in love, by one another and by God. To live in that deep peace of God’s shared heart: the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.