Sermon for June 21, 2020 - The Third Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 7A - The Rev'd Jeffrey W. Mello

Jeremiah 20:-13, Romans 6:1b-11, Matthew 10:24-39

One week after George Floyd’s death, I posted something on my Facebook page about an action I was taking in support of racial justice.

A childhood friend commented on my feed.  “Enough!,” he wrote.  At first, I thought he was expressing his frustration at the centuries old systemic racism that exists in this country.  But his frustration was with me, and with those who were still talking about race a whole week after George Floyd was killed.  One week in, and he had had enough.  It was time to move on.

If only the past three weeks were enough to have “fixed” the systemic racism that has plagued this country for 400 years.  If only the books I have read, the videos I have watched and the rallies I have attended since May 25 were all it was going to take.

How I wish I was sitting before you this morning with systemic racism and the COVID-19 pandemic in the rear-view mirror.  I pray for the day when this time in our history becomes a cautionary history lesson.  “Remember when there was income disparity between white people and black people in this country?  Remember when the average life span on Beacon Hill was thirty years longer than the average life expectancy in Roxbury?  But that isn’t history.  It is present lived reality for to many.

It’s now been four weeks since George Floyd’s death, and as hard as it is for some to believe, we haven’t fixed the problem.

It has been 56 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and we haven’t yet fixed the problem.

It’s been 155 years since the word reached Texas that slavery had ended two and a half years prior to them hearing the news.  And we haven’t yet fixed the problem.

It has been 401 years since the first group of enslaved Africans hit the shores of what would become the United States.  And we have yet to recover from that voyage and the legacy it would unleash in this country.

Maybe you tuned in this morning to hear something new, something different, a sermon about something other than this uprising we are living through or this pandemic we are finding our way through.

But tuning out, turning off, or turning away is a privilege only some of us have.  Wanting to keep politics out of polite conversation is a privilege only some of us have.  Wanting to hear the “nice stories” from scripture that remind us of our belovedness before God, but without the work that belovedness calls us to is a privilege and it is a distortion of Jesus’ message.  

If Jesus had lived to make everybody feel better about themselves, he probably wouldn’t have been nailed to a cross for teaching that in the temples.  But he didn’t want to make people happy.  He wanted to set people free.  

As I reel from the almost constant uncovering of injustices, and as I fight feeling overwhelmed at how much I have to learn, as I live in fear of saying the wrong thing or not doing the right thing, and as I worry about who I am offending, or upsetting or what relationships are being strained under the weight of truth telling, I open my bible and I find Jesus.  

I find Jesus sitting with his disciples and as I read this passage from Matthew I see Jesus turn to me and say, “I hate to say I told you so, but, well, I did.”

There, in the 10th chapter of Matthew, Jesus is telling his disciples what they might expect their lives to look like, to be like, if they make following him their highest priority.

If they think that they are going to go into their neighborhood, or their church, or their family dinner table and start talking about a vision of the kingdom of God here on earth; a vision in which teachers and students are equal before God; a vision where slaves and masters are worth the same before God; if they think they can start talking like this and everyone is just going to fall in line, and nod in agreement they had better think again.

If they want to follow Jesus, if they want to put God first in their lives, things are going to get hard, and they are going to stay hard until the dream of God is brought to its full and complete reality.

Jesus knows that fear is the greatest threat to building the Kingdom of God.  The cross wasn’t just meant to kill.  It was meant to terrorize followers from continuing the work.

Jesus prepares them in a brutally honest appraisal of what awaits them should they continue the work.

Rejection.  Humiliation.  Suppression.  Conflict.

These were the forces at work in Jesus’ day.  And they are still the forces at work today.

What will people think?  What will people say?  How will I be treated?  What might I lose?  Why can’t we just agree to disagree?

Jesus tells his followers they will be ridiculed and made to feel worthless.  But, remember, God loves the sparrow, sold for half a penny each at market.  

How much more does God love you?  Is God’s love enough? 

The chants in the street remind us that without justice, there is no peace.  As William Allen White famously wrote, “Peace without justice is tyranny.”  

Jesus’ message was a direct threat to the Pax Romana.  Here, Jesus clarifies that the peace of tyranny is not the peace he was bringing to the world.  The Peace of Christ is the Spirit of the living God, meant to restore all the world to the creation God intended it to be.

Working for that peace would bring a sword of division that would split families in two.  And it still does.

Jesus finishes with letting his disciples know right up front that, in order for the work of God’s justice and God’s peace to get done, loving God above all else would have to come first. Following God would have to come first.  God above pride.  God above the perceived ease of the status quo. God above fear.

To do this work, we must choose as our sustenance God’s love for us, not the world’s approval of us.

When we have a choice between keeping things easy and picking up the cross, we must pick up the cross.

Whenever we have the option of keeping our lives the way they are, and laying them down, we must be ready to lay our lives down in order to live the lives God longs for us to live.

There is no shortcut to the dream of God that does not involve the sword of division, the cross of oppression and the loss of our lives as we’ve known them.  

But we must also remember that, when we do lay down our lives, in ways big and small, we are promised a resurrection, a new life every bit as glorious as Christ’s own.

“O Lord,” Jeremiah says, “you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.  I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.  For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout.”

We must cry out.  We must shout.  Love demands that we do.  No matter how hard it is to do.  No matter how many mistakes we make on the way.  No matter how long it takes. 

We must cry out.  We must shout, until we can proclaim that it is truly “on earth as it is in heaven.”

AMEN

© 2020 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello