Tribe

Propers: The Third Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 12), A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Now obviously Jesus is not promoting violence. Rather He speaks here of the sword as an instrument of division: the severance of connections, the breaking of old relationships. The sword cuts away; it divides.

At first blush, this next bit may sound all too familiar. “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” And really, how hard is that? I don’t mean to be glib, but families these days tend to be brittle things, fragile, ephemeral. Yet 2,000 years ago, family was everything.

Throughout the ancient world, and through much of the globe today, family remains unquestioned. It is a human being’s source of highest loyalty and deepest identity. Related families make up a clan; related clans make up a tribe; and related tribes make up a nation, most of which claim descent from a common ancestor. The Greeks, the Jews, the Norse, all point to a progenitor, a patriarch. They’re all one big family.

Most of humanity throughout most of history have experienced transcendence primarily through the family. The family is the part of you that reaches back into the mists of prehistory and forward over the future’s horizon. Getting married, having a child, is the Copernican revolution of the soul. Our world stops revolving around ourselves and turns now upon the greater universe of those whose lives mean more to us than our own. There is not a true parent on this earth who would not gladly die to save and protect the life of his child.

Family comes first, before country, before creed. We inherit from the generations before us—their wealth, their wisdom, often their shame—and we pass on our own legacy to those who come after. Within a family, we are one, yet we are many, with shared faces and phrases and talents blurring the line between who I am and who we are. There’s a reason that ancient laws often punished the family for the trespass of the one. After all, you are your father’s son; you are your mother’s daughter. It was revolutionary when Ezekiel prophesied that guilt would no longer be generational.

Even in the modern Western world, where we emphasize the freedoms and choices and rights of the individual over the collective—the individual above all else, including biology—even here we inherit our names, our legacies, our traditions and fortunes and debts and dirty little secrets. That’s both the wonder and the horror of family: they know who we are; they make us who we are. And sometimes we wish we could escape that communal identity. And sometimes it’s the only bastion we have left amidst a fallen, broken world.

Our readings this morning cover a span of some thousand years, from the Psalmist and Jeremiah in the Old Testament to Paul and Matthew in the New. Yet they’re all telling the same story. They’re all talking about the same thing. In all of our readings this morning, people are in agony because God is tearing their families apart. He’s breaking up the ties of kinship, pulling down the loyalty of tribes, in order to call His people—to call all people—to a higher loyalty, a higher tribe, the Tribe of Christ.

In writing to the Romans, Paul is asking the question: What if all the things that define us, all the things we think make us who we are—my father and my father’s father and his father before him, my language and gender and culture and race, my report cards and police records and Google searches and bank accounts—what if all that were expunged, wiped away? And in place of all of that mess was written the single word, “Christ.”

What if our value were determined not by our height and weight and carbon footprint, by our IQ and by GQ, by our political affiliation and our hashtag activism, by our hairlines and our sex lives, but only by the God who loves us? By the God who loves us so much that He puts our lives before His own? By the God who lays down His life—nay, the life of His only Son!—in order to rebuild us, resurrect us, into His own flesh and blood, His own Body and Spirit? So that the only family who has any claim on us is the family of Almighty God, the Father, the +Son, and the Holy Spirit!

That’s who you really are! Not a Smith or a Stout or a Jones but sons and daughters of the Living God, children of the Most High, kings and queens of all Creation, co-heirs with Christ in the Kingdom of Heaven, in saecula saeculorum, world without end! And all the rat race, all the accounting, all the little judgments and comparisons and whispered accusations with which satanic intelligences afflict the backs of our minds day and night, they all go up like fatwood in the fire. A puff of smoke, a flash of flame, and we are free!

This is what both horrified and fascinated pagan Rome as regards the early Church: the fact that Christians treated everyone like family. They found this love at once beautiful and perverse. That is why they murdered us. And that is why we won.

When Jesus lays ahold of you—He who claims you as His own, who has bought you with a price—what that means is that nothing and no one else ever can. To be ruled by Christ is to never be ruled by anything ever again, save for Goodness and Beauty and Truth inexhaustible. And that scares people. It scares them because a man so bought by Christ cannot be bought again. A single man without fear, without price, without illusion can bring the entire house of cards tumbling down! And that’s what Jesus is making you into. He’s making you into Him—which is to say, you perfected.

Christ is making you free and strong and alive, even if it doesn’t seem that way at the time. It is a process, this smelting and casting, hammering and quenching. It is death and rebirth, ecstasy and pain. But it is agony with a purpose. In Jesus Christ, you are becoming what you were always meant to be: truly human.

And here’s the funny thing. Here’s the clever twist at the end of it all. When you love God more than your mother and your father—when you love God more than your son or your daughter or your country or your tribe—you will be opened up to love those people more than you did before, more than you ever could have before. A man who loves God more than his wife is able to love his wife far more deeply and beautifully than a man who thinks his wife is god. A father who loves God more than his children is able to love his children far more truly than he could without his eyes fixed firmly above. And a man who loves God above his country proves a far more powerful patriot than he who worships his country über alles.

God does not break down our families in order to destroy them. He breaks them down so that they can be re-rooted within their proper context, the greater family of God. And unlike the old tribal rivalries with their blood feuds and their battle fronts, this new Tribe of Christians has no borders, no limits, no zero-sum territories to defend at the expense of others. There is no “us vs them” in Christ. We used to be them. And someday, God willing, they will be us.

The family of God is open to all. And if the Scriptures are to be believed—which of course they are—then one day all of humanity, all of Creation, shall be gathered into one with Jesus our head and the Spirit our soul. Then shall Christ’s victory be complete, and God at last be all in all.

This is what we mean when we say that we believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism; one Body of the Risen Christ; one Holy Spirit pouring out His varied gifts upon East and West, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, the many made one—yet each unique as never before. This was the plan all along. This is the endgame of God.

“Indeed, the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow.” But this sword, brothers and sisters, does not come to murder or maim. No. For this sword is none other than the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. And the sword of Jesus Christ is bared only to sever our chains.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.