You’re going to have to wrestle
How do we follow Jesus’ example when our culture, laws and customs make that difficult? The Sadducees offer a legalistic point of view, with arguments about the law, but Jesus asks us to go deeper and look at God’s big picture. Recognizing that we all belong to God, and the implications of that, is messy, and it forces us to wrestle.
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Transcript
Give us eyes to see you.
Give us ears to hear you,
and give us hearts that can stretch wide enough
to live into your dream for this world, O God.
Amen.
Good morning. Just a few thoughts on, looking particularly at the gospel for this morning.
Some of us are coming back from Diocesan Council, which is the annual gathering of all of the clergy and delegates from every parish in the diocese. So there are around 450 people packed in Child Hall at Saint Philip’s Cathedral. And a great time was had by all. It’s a, it’s always a fascinating moment each year because one of the things that I get out of it is, it’s a wonderful and challenging snapshot of where the diocese, as the larger group, is at any moment in time.
If you think about it, to get everyone coming from all 96 parishes, 120 worshiping communities total, to sit in one room and to ask ourselves what, what are the most important things that are on each of our hearts that we feel led to put in front of the body as a whole? To decide really, at the end of the day, what do we think needs attention paid to it? For better or worse, any delegate or clergy person can submit something for the floor to consider, for better or worse. And it’s always one of these moments each year. This was my eighteenth, and it’s always fascinating to honestly notice and really approach it that way and say, this is a moment in time when we can see where we are, where we are, what we’re struggling with, what we’re wrestling with. And the dominant theme I will tell you for this year was this how do we practice our faith? How do we follow as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, having a public witness, given the uncertain times in which we find ourselves. What does that look like for us? How do we struggle with the sense of where our deepest loyalty lies? How do we name to ourselves that current laws, current customs, current orders fall far short of what the gospel calls us to do, to love our neighbor as ourselves. What do we do about that?
As we’re going to see in our baptismal covenant, if you open up your bulletin in front of you, this is deeply, deeply rooted on page seven. In a few moments, we’re going to all share in this. But if you notice on page seven, when we come to this part of the service, I went through and underlined all of the verbs. Notice the verbs. Nothing here is static.
Believe
Continue
Persevere
Resist
Repent
Return
Proclaim
Seek
Serve
Love
Strive
Respect
So what we wrestled with as a group these past two days, was that how do you do this? How do we do this? Given the pressures and the tensions that we feel and the sense of strain and stress and asking ourselves, where does our loyalty ultimately lie? To put a fine point on it, I put the American flag and the flag for the Episcopal Church in this space, but it’s the cross that we process down the aisle, and it’s the cross that we venerate, nothing else.
So we’re called to constantly ask ourselves difficult questions as a group. And it was not pleasant. It was not pleasant, as you can imagine. My favorite moment, you reach a point, and you just wish that someone’s going to make their way to the microphone to say, “I call the question” which everyone can relax because at least there’s a chance that you can stop debate. But it was a struggle, and it always is, and ever has it been, and in some sense, ever will it be. But I was thinking the whole time watching friends and colleagues go forward to the microphone wrestling, struggling together as gather as a body, I was thinking a couple of things. One, I was thinking about this gospel and we’ll get to that. But the other thought that crossed my mind is this: so many, so many times in our life when we feel pinched, when we feel stressed around that question of “what does a faithful witness look like in the world in which we live?” we easily revert back to a sense, and it all sounds something that goes back to this. “my faith is a private thing. My faith is a private thing, and my faith is between me and God.” Friends, nothing like that exists in our practice of faith. There is no such thing as a private faith. There are personal aspects of each of our faith that we incorporate personal things to each one of us, that we do personal things that mean a lot to us, but nothing is private. It. Think about that. Nothing is private.
When Jesus came into this world, Jesus didn’t meet with people, just one-on-one. He met with people and he called people into community. He formed bodies and the church in that sense, in the deepest sense of who we are, is the continuation of Christ’s own body in this world. And being a body, sharing a life together means it’s going to be messy. It’s going to be confusing sometimes just contradicting. It’s going to be wrestling. It’s going to be all of these things that we will share in a few moments from the Baptismal Covenant. It’s going to be wrestling with what it means to strive to respect, to honor, to repent, and to return once more to God to be in alignment with the dream that God has for this world. It’s not private. That’s where we go when we feel stress and anxiety about how to engage with each other. So I was thinking about that because I was thinking about the gospel.
Open up your bulletin, if you will, and let’s spend just a moment going through this, because the gospel for this morning gives us a snapshot of a wonderful moment that proves this point. It proves this point in a fascinating way. Notice right out of the gate that the Sadducees, who ask the question to Jesus about the resurrection, do not even believe that it is true. They’re not curious about it. They don’t actually want to learn and be transformed. They want to trap him and trick him. That’s their hope. That’s their plan is to trap and trick Jesus into something by bringing up something that they don’t even believe in.
So they tell this hypothetical story, which the person I feel most sorry for is the woman. I mean, let’s be honest about that. And I love that phrase “and finally she died.” Finally she died. She just had it. But they asked him this sense, and they say, here’s what happened. Try this one out. Let’s see what you do with this one. And they give him this hypothetical story about this woman and seven brothers. And then they say this “what Moses taught us, which is to say what the law says is this the law says this is what she has to do. She did what the law told her to do. Try this out. Who then? If that’s what the law says, whose wife will she be? Because according to the law, she married all seven of them.” And Jesus in the way that Jesus does. Flips it back on them and tells them, “if that’s all that this is about to you, then you’ve already you’re already off on the wrong foot to start with.” And he says, “those who are,” in that phrase, “those who in this age are given to” means this: those who currently see the world through that framework, through that point of view, understand it to be this way. But that’s not the only way to understand the framework, to understand and see the world. There is another way, a more expansive way, a more dynamic way to understand and see the world.
And then he tells that wonderful image and he brings them back and he says, “see, you come at it thinking that some are dead and some are living. But the fact is, all of them to God are alive,” which is to say, all is held in God’s embrace. All is held with hopes for healing and a transformed life. So Jesus cuts through this hypothetical that they use relying on, quote, “the law” and flips it back on them and challenges them to ask themselves. “This may be the way that you see those words on the page, but that’s not all that there is to life.” When we’ve come to what our common life is in community, here’s a difficult thing for us to wrestle with and always has been. Being a faithful follower of Jesus Christ is not equated with being a good American citizen. Never has it been and never will it be. Those are two different things. Being a faithful follower of Jesus Christ is to constantly critique what it means to be a faithful citizen of whatever nation in which we find ourselves and to do messy work together. Difficult work. Painful work. Vulnerable work. But constantly to ask ourselves “this is the way it is right now, but what is it like to be fully transformed?” If it were just about to go back to what they were saying, if it were just about following the law as the law had been written, play that out. Play that out. Go back in time and look at categories of people who would be completely excluded from sitting in this room. Categories of people who would not be allowed to vote, any scenario, and there’s umpteen of them that we could go through.
Jesus challenges us over and over to say, “every time you want to settle, it’s because of your own anxiety and your own fear. But that’s not what I want you to do.” He says, “I want you to live a transformed life. And what that’s going to look like is you’re going to have to wrestle, and strive, respect, repent, return” all of those things that make us squirrelly.
So as we go into this season, as we celebrate these baptisms, and we ask ourselves once more to renew our practice of faith, that’s what this is stirring up, friends. That’s what this looks like. It’s to really wrestle and pay attention and ask the deepest questions that we can think, to ask, and to listen for ways that the spirit is challenging us. Once more, what does it look like to dare to follow Jesus and call him Lord?
Amen.