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Not Exactly Family-Friendly
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, June 22, 2008
Matthew 10:24-39
Last Monday I met a woman who told me, proudly, that she was a hundred
years old. I was at the Masonic Home, having lunch with one of our members who
lives there, and this woman just happened to be sitting at the same table. She
was about the size of a house sparrow, with eyes that were just as bright. I
introduced myself and she did the same and then she added, “I’m a hundred years
old!” It seemed a little odd, coming out of the blue like that, but I thought
later that if I ever make it to a hundred I will probably share the news with
complete strangers, too. A hundred years ago would have been 1908, which means
that when this woman was born there was no Internet, no Interstate, no laptop
computers, no television sets, no jet airplanes streaking across the sky, or
automobiles rumbling down the road. It was a different world, is what I’m
saying, and as I looked at her last Monday I marveled at how much change she has
experienced in her hundred years. It’s a wonder she’s lived through it.
I haven’t lived even half that long, but I’ve experienced a good bit
of change myself. Every once in a while my children will remind me just how
different their world is from the one in which I grew up, like the time I talked
them into watching “All the President’s Men” because it was filmed in Washington
and I thought they would enjoy seeing the familiar landmarks. At one point
Robert Redford stepped into a telephone booth and began dialing a number and
they said, “What kind of phone is that?!” I realized they were talking
about a phone with a dial on it. They had never seen one of those before. And
when it comes to church there are some things they have never seen before
either. For example, they haven’t seen a time in history when it seemed like
everybody got up on Sunday morning and came to church, though some of you have.
Those of you who were here in the fifties, especially, can probably remember
when people would talk about you if you didn’t go to church, and you
didn’t want that to happen. So you got up, shined your shoes, and went. I’ve
seen pictures from those days: men wearing dark suits and skinny ties and women
wearing fabulous hats with white gloves up to their elbows.
Do you remember that? The
war was over. Our boys had come home, gotten married, and moved into little
houses with white picket fences. The Baby Boom was almost inevitable. There
was a kind of general optimism in the air, a sense of gratitude to God, and a
subtle social pressure that pushed people toward church. Someone asked one of
my predecessors in Washington how he grew such a large congregation back in the
fifties and he answered, honestly, that in those days it was a matter of opening
the doors and getting out of the way. Going to church was the Sunday morning
thing to do and if you didn’t do it, people noticed. But it’s not that way
anymore, is it? My guess is that if you decided to stay home next Sunday
morning and sit on the front porch in your shirtsleeves no one would object.
You could probably get off the porch and cut your grass without anyone noticing
or caring. The world has changed.
William Willimon says that
although it may sound trivial he is tempted to date the shift to a Sunday
evening in 1963. “Then,” he says, “in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance
of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven
of us—regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street
Church—made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly
slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox. On that night
Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the
Western world—served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church.”
Willimon goes on to say, “You see, my parents never worried about whether I
would grow up Christian. The church was the only show in town. On Sundays the
town closed down. You couldn’t even buy a gallon of gas. There was a traffic
jam at 9:45 on Sunday mornings when all went to their respective Sunday
schools…. People grew up Christian simply by being lucky enough to be born in
places like Greenville, South Carolina” (pp. 15-16).[i]
But if that was ever true
it’s not true anymore, is it?
When I was a pastor in
North Carolina ten years ago parents would come to me wringing their hands
because their children were playing in soccer games that had been scheduled on
Wednesday night. “I’m sorry,” they would say. “I know it’s church night, but
his team really needs him.” Did you hear that? “Church night.” That’s what
they used to call Wednesday night in North Carolina. These parents knew it, but
apparently the coaches who were scheduling soccer games had forgotten it, or
maybe they were just tired of being “a prop for the church.” And so parents
were forced into making a choice: “Do I take him to Music Makers and Mission
Friends or do I take him to play center forward on his soccer team?” I was
surprised at how often soccer won out, and how helpless the parents seemed to
feel in the face of such a choice. “Well, what can we do? They’re having a
winning season!” Just before I left North Carolina to go to Washington I heard
that in Charlotte—that godless metropolis—they were starting to play soccer
games on Sunday mornings.
What is the world coming
to?
Well, I can tell you what
it’s coming to: a culture that was once generally supportive of the church is
now mostly indifferent, and if things continue to go the way they are that
culture will become increasingly hostile toward the church. I’ve seen it
already. For nearly eight years I was pastor of a church in one of the
trendiest neighborhoods in Washington, DC, a place filled with bookstores and
coffee shops frequented by educated, affluent people. There, as here, I was
determined to love our neighbors, but can you imagine the responses I got when I
introduced myself as the pastor of a Baptist church? These people knew all
about Baptists, or at least they thought they did. They read the papers; they
watched the news. The Baptists who made headlines were not people they wanted
to have anything to do with, but they didn’t seem to care much for Christians of
any stripe. If someone had put up a sign saying our church was going to be
turned into a museum or a restaurant I think there would have been general
rejoicing in the neighborhood. It was a tough place to serve. But if it’s that
way in Washington now what will it be like in Richmond twenty years from now?
If there is a trend here it seems to be a trend against the church, and not for
it.[ii]
Now, all of this may be
the longest, slowest buildup you’ve ever heard in a sermon, but I am getting
around to our Gospel text for today, in which Jesus tells his disciples that
things are going to get bad. Things have started to get bad for him, and he
says, “If they will do this to the teacher you’d better believe they’ll do it to
the student.” Here we are in the tenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Within a
few pages Jesus will turn toward Jerusalem and warn his disciples that when he
gets there he will suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and
scribers, and be killed, and Peter can’t believe it. “God forbid, Lord! This
shall never happen to you” (16:22). He and the other disciples were assuming
that when they got to Jerusalem Jesus would be recognized for the Messiah he
was, that he would be greeted with shouts of Hosanna and placed on the throne of
his ancestor David. “Not so,” Jesus said. “They’re going to reject me and kill
me, and if they’ll do it to me they will do it to you.”
Sure enough, by the
time this Gospel was written the Christians had been put out of the synagogue,
cursed by those people who used to be their brothers and sisters in the Jewish
faith. A culture that had been initially friendly to these followers of Jesus
had become indifferent and finally hostile. So Matthew reminds his readers of
what Jesus had said, that the proper response to such hostility is not to cave
in or cower with fear, but to take a stand, and to do it boldly. “Everyone
therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my
Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before
my Father in heaven.” And then he says this, something that has troubled
Christian congregations for centuries: “Do not think that I have come to bring
peace to the 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's own household.”
That’s not exactly
family-friendly, is it? But in Matthew’s time that’s what was happening.
Someone would convert to Christianity and the next thing you know they would be
put of the Jewish synagogue, disowned by the members of their own family. It
made it very tempting to give up their new-found faith and go back to the way
things were, but Jesus says no. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is
not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy
of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of
me.” I read this passage last week and wondered why anyone would become a
Christian if this is the price they had to pay, but then I read the last verse:
“Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my
sake will find it.”
I was thinking
about that on Wednesday of last week, thinking about losing your life in order
to find it, when my lunch appointment showed up, a man named Faysal who works
has a special ministry to Muslim background believers. Faysal grew up Muslim,
in fact he is a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad. He used to live a
very privileged life, and confessed to me that he once ordered a $1,500 bottle
of wine at Maxim’s in Paris. But then he became a Christian. Over lunch he
told me the fascinating story of his conversion but he also told me that until
the week before his extended family hadn’t found out. He pulled out his cell
phone and said, “On Thursday I got this text message from my brother-in-law,
Ali.” He showed it to me, and I share it with you with his permission. This is
what it said: "Faysal… I have never heard of any of Mohamed’s descendants to
apostatize from Islamic faith to Christianity except you. What a shame &
disgrace!! May Allah guide u & bring u to your senses. This is totally absurd.
Ali.”
Faysal said when he
got the message he wept for two hours. He has learned since then that his
extended family has disowned him, and that they have entered into a formal
period of mourning as if he had died. “So, Faysal,” I said, “these verses in
Matthew 10 are true, aren’t they? Your faith in Jesus has separated you from
the members of your own household.” “Yes,” he said. “Like a sword.” “So,” I
asked, “have you thought about renouncing the Christian faith, going back to
being a Muslim?” I could tell he was shocked by the very suggestion. He told
me how much Jesus meant to him, how he loved him more than his own family, and
how he wouldn’t dream of going back to his old life. In his testimony I heard
the first hand account of someone who had lost his life in order to find it.
You may wonder what
any of this has to do with you. You are probably not a Muslim background
believer. And yet you live in a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile
to Christianity. Have you ever kept the secret of your faith when sharing it
would lead to ridicule? Have you ever been in a situation where it was probably
best not to mention that you were a follower of Jesus? “The one who denies me
before others I will deny before my father in heaven,” Jesus says. Yes, Lord.
We know that. We don’t want to deny you. But it’s getting harder and harder to
be a Christian, and who knows what it will be like in twenty years? “I know,”
Jesus says. “I know. But don’t be afraid. There isn’t a sparrow that falls to
the ground without my father knowing and caring, and you are worth more than
many sparrows. He knows you. He cares about you. He has numbered the hairs on
your head. So, don’t be afraid. Just pick up your cross and follow me. Faysal
will tell you that sometimes you have to lose your life…
…in order to find
it.”
—Jim Somerville, © 2008
[i]
Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: a Provocative
Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People Who Know that
Something Is Wrong (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989).
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