It's
that silly season again, that happens every four years or so, and this time
it’s somewhat sillier than usual, with two apparent candidates with the highest
negatives—whatever that means—in the
history of candidates, I guess. And the national
race has overshadowed the local races, the ones that often have “family values”
prominently displayed. You know . . .
when one of the candidates tries to set him (or her) self up as the protector of
family values, whereas the scum he (or she) is running against is a heathen
socialist (or fascist, depending on the candidates political proclivities), and
if that other person is elected, there will be—lo!—wailing and gnashing of
teeth, followed by which Armageddon will surely ensue.
Of
course, human nature being what it is, and power breeding—among other things—a
certain hubris, some rather sad and/or
humorous stories have resulted over the years.
One of my favorites concerns one Kirk Fordice, governor of the great
state of Mississippi when Pam, the kids and I lived there. Kirk was a businessman from Vicksburg, over
on the River, and he ran on a platform of “a businessman knows how to get stuff
done” and, Mississippi being the buckle of the Bible Belt, “Christian Family
Values.” One day, not long after he was
reelected, he was heading South from Memphis down I-55 when he flipped the Mississippi
State motor-pool SUV he was driving into the ditch. Of course, the State Patrolmen escorting him immediately
called for an ambulance, and they life-flighted him down to Jackson where he
was hospitalized for several weeks, recovering.
Now,
the press asked why he'd been to Memphis, and why it wasn't listed on his official
travel schedule, as if it were any business of theirs, the nosy parkers. After
some sniffing around, and some blabbing by Mississippi State troopers (shades
of one William Jefferson Clinton), it came out that he'd been visiting a woman
named Ann Creson who, as Pat Fordice, the woman with whom the governor had
celebrated 44 years of connubial, family-valued bliss could attest, was most definitely
not his wife.
From
there, it descended to music-hall comedy: shortly after he was released from
the hospital, Fordice stood on the state-house steps and said he and Pat would soon
be getting a divorce. Shortly after that, Pat stood on the governor’s mansion steps and said it was
news to her, and that it would take a
regiment of rebel soldiers to pry her out of there. So the governor moved into a hotel, where he
refused to resign, despite the fact that after campaigning at least in part on “Christian family values,” he
was caught using state vehicles and personnel—i.e., tax-payer’s money—to conduct an extramarital affair.
Now,
there are many lessons one could draw from this tale—which I swear is all true. We
could go with the ever-popular “power corrupts” motif, because it surely does.
We could go with “the governor protests too much, methinks,” which isn't
in the Bible, but should be. One of my
favorites is related to last week's lesson on representing Jesus to the world:
be careful how loudly you advertise your faith, and what aspects of it you
choose to emphasize. Ol’ Kirk proclaiming
what a Christian family man he was didn't do Christianity any good in the
end. Maybe that's why Jesus hated
hypocrisy as much as he did.
But
what I want to talk about is the common misconception that so-called Christian
family values are in any way “Christian.”
And before you call a special meeting of the Session, let me say that I
think it's good to care for our
families. It's bad to cheat on your
spouse, to abandon your kids, to rear them without love, compassion or
understanding. It's just that like a lot
of things, such as like paying our taxes (giving unto Caesar doesn't mean quite what we've all been taught), neither
Jesus nor the Hebrew Scriptures have a lot to say about it.
In
fact, they seem to be a great witness to what we might call today anti-family values. Take the Hebrew
Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, et al.,
had multiple wives, and women and children were distinctly property, part of a man’s wealth.
Remember Abraham whiling away the heat of the day in front of the tent,
while Sarah sweated over the feast inside? Or letting her become the Pharaoh’s wife–twice!—to
save his own miserable skin? What about
Jacob receiving not one but two wives
as pay for his labor, or the Psalmist’s words, comparing his children to weapons,
arrows in the bow of an archer? Ah,
those were the days . . .
And
then there's the New Testament: the author of Ephesians telling wives to obey
their husbands, construing the family unit to be like a mini-Empire, with the
husband/emperor at the top, to reassure the Romans that they were just like
them, not subversive at all, no siree, not us. And then, of course, there was Paul and his
thorn, who recommended against marriage, against forming a family unit at all.
Finally,
we come to Jesus, who had something to say about divorce—hint, he were agin’ it—but little good to say about one’s biological family. Didn't he say “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?” And that “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 wasn't it Jesus
who, when his mother and brothers came to see him refused to meet with them,
saying that those who do the will of God are his mother and brothers? Oy vey . . . A family man he was not.
And
now we come to our passage, wherein he chastises some would-be followers for
being just a little too family-values
oriented. Well, he doesn't chastise the
first one, he just tells it like it is. Jesus
and his followers are going down the road and the man comes up to him and
gushes: “I will follow you wherever
you go.” And you can almost see the
stars in his eyes, it must have looked like such
a romantic way of life, out on the highways and by-ways, doing the work of the
Lord. But Jesus bursts that bubble,
thank you very much: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but
the Son of Humanity has nowhere to lay his head.” It's a hard life, traveling around with this Son of Human beings, you don't have
any nest or hole or place to lay your head, you don't have any home. And it's important to note that this is the
set up, this is the lesson Jesus wants to get across: you follow Jesus, you—as
the song goes--ain't got a home.
And
what Jesus tells the next two would-be followers elaborates on the no-home motif: if you don't have a home, you can’t
very well look after your family, now can you?
He tells another guy “follow me,” and the guy says “first let me bury my
father,” and Jesus comes back with “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as
for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
You're alive, he's saying, not dead.
Your ministry is to the living,
just as mine is. Elsewhere, he makes a
similar point when he says “God is not a God of the dead, but of the living.”
Let
the dead deal with the dead, Jesus’ mission is to the living . . . And then
another promises to follow Jesus, just as soon as he says bye to his
family. But Jesus uses that as another
teachable moment, warning him that “No one who puts a hand to the plow and
looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
In the ancient Middle East, plows were fairly light affairs, and if you looked
around, they would go off course, the animal pulling it would respond to the
change in pressure on the reins, and the lines would be crooked. Kingdom-living requires concentration, single-minded
focus . . . A heart split in two, focused on more than one thing, will not get
the job done, will make for crooked Kingdom furrows.
And
here I need to pause for truth in advertising, and acknowledge a subtext here .
. . And that subtext is one Elijah the Tishbite, greatest of the Israelite
prophets. You'll recall that some folks
thought Jesus was Elijah reborn, and also that Elijah himself appeared, along
with Moses, at the transfiguration which, not coincidentally, is just a few
passages before ours. And in that
mountaintop tableau, Moses and Elijah disappear, leaving Jesus alone, replacing
them and surpassing them. And here, James
and John, the disciples who went up on that mountaintop, along with Peter, want
Jesus to act like Elijah, who called
down fire on some hapless soldiers. But
Jesus rebukes them, that’s not the way he does business.
By
the same token, Jesus forbids the man to go back to say goodbye to his
family—or at least he strongly discourages it—something that Elijah specifically
allowed. And so we have a picture of
Jesus, considered greater than Elijah, and does this greater-than-ness consist
of (a) being merciful to those who oppose him, of not seeking vengeance and (b)
being much more single-minded about the mission of God? Certainly, the Desert Fathers and Mothers
felt that way . . . this passage, along with the sending of the seventy which, again
not coincidentally, comes right after this one, was viewed as a call to emulate
Jesus and his isolated, nomadic ways.
They took this to mean they were to follow Jesus and give up family and have
no place to lay their heads, and they headed for the desert.
But
you know . . . times change. They do. And as the Apostolic era wore on, and segued
into the patristic age—the age of the church fathers —Christianity became established in cities
and towns and a different kind of ministry was needed. Oh, there was still call for semi-crazed
evangelist church planters with fire in their bellies, who could tell it like
it is, the unvarnished truth, and then like Paul get out of Dodge. But as house churches grew into permanent, dedicated
gathering places, a need for continued, local nurturing in the faith arose. One could preach the gospel, could do God’s
work, without leaving hearth and home.
One could have one’s gospel and eat at home, too.
So. Is this passage hopelessly
historically-conditioned? Are we all
supposed to ignore Jesus’ admonitions about dead burying their own and looking back
from the plow? Lord, I hope not! Our ministry is to the living, not to the dead, and once we have set out to do a
task or a ministry, we need to focus on it, give it all we've got. But like everything, there is a balance to be
had, a Middle Way between the extremes of Desert-Father dedication and just
showing up on Sunday morning to “be fed.”
We are called to spread the
Gospel, after all.
Jesus
said that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but his followers don't have a
place to lay their heads, but now that we do
have holes and nests, does it mean anything for us? Well . . . Consider the parallels. Although we are more settled, the folks we’re
called to serve are by definition “on the road,” they're outside our doors, in
the community. And while we might not be
called to become nomadic evangelists, erecting our tents in vacant lots, living
off the kindnesses of strangers, we have to go out into the community, we have
to become turned outward, looking outward to do it. God calls us to be nurtured not just for
nurturing sake, but for the road, for our tasks of carrying the Gospel in thought,
word and deed. Everything we do should be pointed towards
that. Amen.
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