"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows." (Matthew 10: 29-31)
Most
smart Bible scholar folks agree that the community to whom Matthew (whoever he
really was) wrote his gospel was having a pretty sucky time of it. Matthew
quotes Jesus a lot on the subject of persecution. In the Gospel appointed for
Pentecost 4 Year A (Matthew (10:24-39), Jesus warns his friends that people won’t
always take kindly to them. Hey! If people call your rabbi “Beelzebul,”
just think what they might call you! “Beelzebub” was a reference to a Canaanite
deity whom the Jews referred to as the “Lord of the Flies” or the “Lord of
Dung.”
There’s
been a lot of talk in the U.S. lately about “anti-Christian bias.” Frankly,
whenever I hear that term, I want to say, “Oh just shut up!” The folks who say
this have no idea what an anti-Christian bias is. Go to North Korea if you want
to see anti-Christian bias. You can be imprisoned or executed for owning a Bible
in that country. Same goes for Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and any number of countries
in the Middle East or North Africa. You think it’s hard to be a Christian in
America? Try being one in Palestine where you have to pass a checkpoint to get
to church[i]. I’d say being a Christian
in the U.S. is pretty easy.
Of
course, there will always be those who will accuse the Church of hypocrisy or
other acts or wrongdoing. Like trying to “Christianize” indigenous people and
wipe out their culture, or being anti-LGBTQ+, or anti-woman[ii]. They may bring up some unpleasant
things like the Crusades or the Inquisition or the Thirty-Years War or the
Roman Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal. All I can say is we have been
guilty as charged on all these counts, and some denominations still don’t seem
to have grasped that basic “Love Thy Neighbor” thing. We should be honest about
this. Jesus told us there is nothing that is covered up which will not be
uncovered.
Nothing,
however, should keep us from proclaiming the love of Jesus. It’s appropriate that
we admit the errors of the past. An open discussion of the Church’s history
could prove a very good opportunity to share the Jesus you know. The Church has
managed to survive over the centuries in spite of ourselves. We’ve made it
through real persecutions, barbarism, schisms, the Enlightenment, militant
atheism, and our own uncanny ability to make stupid, self-serving choices. We’ve
survived a whole lot of rotten stuff, but we can’t survive timid silence.
Proclaiming from the housetops might be a little excessive for your average
Lutheran, but a quiet discussion about what you believe and why it’s important
to you might just be what someone else needs to hear.
Now
let me switch gears.
In
addition to being the Furth Sunday in Pentecost and the commemoration of
Onesimos Nesib[iii],
it’s also Father’s Day. The Gospel reading makes me think of a student a I had
when I was a grad assistant at the University of Wisconsin. Brian’s dad was a lawyer,
and in Madison, Wisconsin in those days for every citizen there were about four
attorneys. Brian’s dad had left a government position to go into private
practice, but his practice never flourished and he became depressed. Eventually
he started up the family car inside a closed garage and asphyxiated himself. I
have vivid memories of Brain crying on my shoulder when I came to his dad’s
funeral. But Brian’s family tragedy made me more grateful for my own dad. He had
his financial and employment woes too, yet, for all his faults—and he had
plenty of them!—I have to give my father credit for never giving up. When he
found himself laid off, he did everything he could to keep us in Fruit Loops
and Hamburger Helper. He was an engineer, but he worked as a janitor. He tried
a number of self-employment schemes, all of which ended rather disastrously. But,
like Dickens’ Mr. Micawber, he had an unshakeable faith that something would
always turn up. And it always did.
On
this Father’s Day I give thanks for my illustrious Old Man whose faith and optimism
often annoyed my more practical mother. I can picture him doing yard work or
cooking something in the kitchen while lustily belting out one of the old gospel
hymns from his Primitive Methodist childhood, and I am reminded that God knows
what we need even before we know it ourselves. Even the hairs on our heads are
numbered, and not a sparrow falls apart from our Heavenly Father. Our
circumstances are temporary. Our citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven is
eternal.
There’s
a whole lot to unpack in these fifteen verses from Matthew 10, and I could probably
talk for an hour about each one (which would not set well with my congregation
should I chose to do so. They have definite views about how long a sermon should
be). I would sum it up, however, by saying we should be on our guard not to be
lost in the opinions of the world, but
to find ourselves in the goodness of God. This we should proclaim with
boldness.
Keep
the faith, and come back and visit with me again.
[i] Please
pray for Natalie Abudayyah, a Palestinian Lutheran college student who was abducted
from her college along with three other young women on June 1 by the IDF. She
has--as far as we know—been imprisoned without any charge being filed against
her and without access to an attorney. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of
Jordan and the Holy Land has demanded her immediate release.
[ii] Yup.
Just check out what the Southern Baptist Convention has done to outlaw women
pastors.
[iii]
Onesimos Nesib (1856-1931) was a Ethiopian
Lutheran who translated the Bible into the Oromo tribal language. The Oromo are
a people of Ethiopia and Northern Kenya.
