Sermon thoughts and other musings

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." - Matthew 10:34

This is tough language, and to hear it from the lips of Jesus is difficult indeed. From a scholarly perspective, it's important to know that the translation incorrectly conveys a sense that Jesus' purpose may have been to create dissension, while the sense of the Greek is more toward suggesting that Jesus was simply saying that dissension was a foreseeable consequence of his ministry.

But in and of itself, that's still bold - bolder than most church people (particularly pastors) are. We're often afraid to upset each other, let alone speak prophetically to the world. All of us tend to shy away from hearing the truth about ourselves. We want to hear about how vibrant our economy is, not about 13 million children living in poverty. We want to hear about the good things we've done, not the ways in which we've exploited others. But we have to face the truth. William Sloane Coffin ("Credo") wrote: "Nobody will love you for being the enemy of their illusions."

We also have to remember that the truth isn't all bad. We get the courage to face the truth because God loves us. The truth is hard to hear: we don't have our priorities straight, we don't love others as ourselves ... but the truth that trumps all other truths is: nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

This passage ends with Jesus saying: "those who lose their life for my sake will find it." The life we have to lose is the life of illusion we valiantly struggle to hang onto. And it's an illusion we hang onto often because we're afraid that what is beneath that illusion isn't worthy. But Jesus tells us that the real "me" is worthy. So we can lose the illusion that masquerades as our life, and in so doing, find the real person beneath. And that is life as God wanted us to be.

I'm sure you've played the game "Rock, Paper, Scissors." That game never quite made sense to me. Rock breaks scissors, okay. Scissors cuts paper, obvious. But paper covers rock? C'mon! Paper can't defeat rock!

But the logic of faith is like the logic of paper covers rock. What the world thinks of as powerful is overcome by what the world thinks of as weak.

In this passage, Jesus does three "unclean" things: he eats with sinners, he is touched by a hemorrhaging woman, and he touches the dead girl's body. The religious authorities of the time would have declared Jesus "unclean" for any of these acts. But instead, Jesus turns all of these situations to the good!

We're taught to believe that what is pure is tainted by anything that isn't pure. A drop of anything put into a bucket of pure water and the water isn't pure anymore. But the world's logic of purity doesn't work with Jesus. When Jesus is touched by anything that isn't pure, it isn't Jesus who is made unclean - instead, the dead live, the sick are healed, and the sinners repent.

Paper does cover rock.