Sermon 6-21-26
Sermon 6-21-26 4 Pentecost Matthew 10:24-39
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.
Do you recognize those words? There are twelve more. Do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. It's the preamble, the beginning, to the Constitution of the United States. It defines the big three core values we as Americans believe in. Freedom, equality and justice, or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Mediterranean people, in Jesus' time, as well as today, have two core values, honor and shame. Honor is a public claim to worth and a public acknowledgment of that claim. It doesn't matter what you think you're worth if other people don't agree with that assumption.
My Dad used to talk about a family that lived a couple of miles from us. He'd say, “If you could buy them for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they're worth you could retire”.
Family and kinship is and was the central institution in the Mediterranean world. Just as economics is in our world. Everything revolved around the family, it was us against them. That is what our Gospel reading from Matthew is about today.
Everyone identified with their family group. You would never, ever do anything to bring shame on your family. And you didn't leave the family. Sons with their wives and children lived in their father's house or compound. That's just the way it was. In Judaism especially, the family is the center of existence.
What your family believes, that's what you believe. And the families were thousands of years old. Living in the same small towns. Following the same Jewish and Mediterranean principles. Listening to the same interpretations by the Rabbis every Saturday, if not every day. That's just the way it was.
The real consequences of leaving one's family were dire indeed. One gave up the family's acquired honor and status as well economic, religious, educational and social connections. Remember the parable about the Prodigal Son? He ended up feeding hogs and eating the hog's food. He had left the family.
Matthew's Jesus in our reading, continues to turn His middle eastern world upside down.
The people have been following the teaching of Moses, or what they were told were the teachings of Moses, all these years, thousands of years. But slowly, slowly, slowly, inch by inch, step by step, those teachings had been added to and changed, just a little each time, imperceptibly. Until it was time for God to step in, and He did.
God became incarnate and was made man. And He was called Jesus Christ. And Christ's ultimate purpose was to reconcile His people to God, and to one another. That, that was not going to be easy.
First and foremost God had to abide and work with the rules He had set up in the beginning. Free Will could very well have been one of the most important ones. The type of rules and Free Will that led to the development of the social structures in place during Jesus' time here on earth.
The social structures that had most of the people living in small villages. And their adopting a set of cultural norms, what they considered acceptable conduct in their societies, and some core values. Like I said earlier, the Mediterranean people valued Honor and Shame.
There was no privacy in those villages. Everyone knew what everyone else was up to, and they liked it that way. We do too. How many of you can't wait until 6:30 every morning to hear what Bruce Kropp has to tell us, on the radio, about what happened to our neighbors yesterday.
The common suspicion in their society was that if one does not know what others are up to, they must be up to no good.
Jesus tells them all their secrets will come out in public. He also offers them a new family group, a church family, that will serve as a replacement for their own blood
relations. A safe haven for those who will lose economic, social and religious connections by following Him.
There are costs and rewards to discipleship. The costs are high, especially to those ancient Mediterranean folks. “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more will they malign those of his household”.
Jesus here is talking to His close disciples, the ones Matthew is calling the twelve Apostles. They are the first ones who have walked away from the family structure. The first ones to witness first hand what Jesus means when He says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”. A sword is a tool. A tool used for dividing things. An arm from a body or a man from his father, a daughter from her mother.
People will always take sides, even families will be divided.
Matthew in his writing, collects together all of Jesus' sayings on any one subject, even if they were spoken at different times. We have here part of a discourse by Jesus of what His disciples are to expect. While they are in His company they have not really run into any great inconveniences or difficulties. There are rumblings and grumblings, but there have been no physical attacks to them. That is yet to come.
Even though Jesus knows the type of trouble His disciples will encounter, He sends them out anyway. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows”.
Sanhedrin courts in towns outside of Jerusalem where held in synagogues and consisted of 23 members of the local synagogue. They would convene and review actions considered as unacceptable social behavior. Floggings were administered by a synagogue attendant. The good news is that the floggings were limited to a maximum of 39 strokes.
Jesus was a devout Jew. He came to explain the real meaning of God's laws spoken by Moses and rebuke the ones that had been misinterpreted. It was a daunting task and He did not intend to do it alone. He knew without a shadow of doubt there would be trouble and that trouble would be poured out on His followers as well. They would have to take up their own cross too.
There are costs and rewards to discipleship. The costs are high, but the rewards are much, much greater. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it”.
Amen.
