Matthew 10:24-39

Matthew 10:24-39

‘A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!

‘So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by 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.

‘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.

‘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.

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. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’

Our Gospel reading this coming Sunday is a hard one to understand, out of context. The whole of Matthew chapter 10 is concerned with Jesus preparing his disciples to be sent out, and their unspoken question, how will we be received? Indeed, Matthew’s Gospel frames the story of Jesus as the clash between the kingdom of heaven and the powers of this world; of light breaking into darkness; of Jesus’ very presence provoking a response: those who receive him and those who reject him. And as it was for Jesus, so it is for his disciples. To experience rejection, for his sake, is to share in Jesus’ experience.

As they proclaim that ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matthew 10:7), they will face verbal and physical violence from those who want to maintain the status quo, and, understandably, this might cause them to be afraid. Yet Jesus invites them to experience the undoing of fear, through insight and reassurance, or as he puts it earlier in the chapter, being ‘as wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ (Matthew 10:16).

The insight has to do with what is going on behind the scenes, in this clash of kingdoms. Jesus and his disciples are accused of belonging to Beelzebul, or Baal, a foreign god, a deviation from true Israelite religion. The earlier prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah chapter 32) records Yahweh’s intention to hand Jerusalem over to the Babylonians, on account of his people’s apostasy, their worship of Baal in the valley of Hinnom (hell) and their offering up their sons and daughters to the god Molech by fire. So, Jerusalem itself will burn, and experience sword, famine, and pestilence. And after judgement, Yahweh will restore the fortunes of his people, through the return from exile of a faithful remnant.

Just as the people in Jeremiah’s time were not to fear the Babylonians, but rather the consequence of their own self-destruction, so, in Jesus’ context, the real issue was not the Roman occupiers and their puppet-king Herod, but rejecting the giver and sustainer of life in favour of destruction. In a moment of existential crisis for the nation and their identity, Jesus speaks insight, and with it, reassurance: the invitation to discover that our fears are calmed by God’s care for us. We become a community whose fear is being overcome because our true value is given by God.

And then there are those strange words about family, that if you love your family ahead of Jesus, you are not worthy of Jesus. These words must be taken alongside Jesus’ words in chapter 15, where he confronts those who void God’s word by dishonouring their father and mother on account of piety towards God. Jesus is not demanding that his disciples reject their families, but needing them to know that their families might reject them. This has always been part of the experience of those who would follow Jesus. It is the painful experience of some of the asylum-seekers I know in this city.

The experience of rejection is a painful one. Indeed, to believe that you have been rejected, that everything you believe and stand for has been judged and found wanting and turned away from, is deeply painful, even if objectively speaking you have not been rejected at all. We have seen this played out in the news over recent days. There has been a call to reassess Britain’s history, the officially sanctioned way in which we have told our story, what we have floodlit and what we have hidden in the deepest shadows. A call to repentance, and to different thoughts, words, and actions. And there has been a reaction to this. For some, this is nothing short of an attack on Britishness, or Englishness. Protests and counter-protests.

Underlying it all is a clash of kingdoms. Not Black against White, or Left against Right, but the clash of the kingdom of heaven against the powers of this world. The Church is neither White nor Black, nor of the Right or of the Left, but wholly other. By which I do not mean that we should not involve ourselves in the injustices and the incredible sense of grief for lost lives—the grief of those who have never had a fair stake in society, and the grief of those who no longer recognise the society they grew up in. Rather, I mean that there are powerful, unseen forces, hell-bent on destroying as many as possible by any means possible. And we are sent to proclaim the good news, ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ The enemy is not the protestor pulling down a statue of a slave-trader, nor the bare-chested men making Nazi salutes while defending a statue. We are sent to proclaim the good news, ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ This kingdom call on our lives, that calls us to repentance and action, sends us to proclaim: fear does not need provoke you to agitation and aggression; though you are considered two-a-penny by those who hold worldly power, your worth in God’s eyes is immeasurably more. Whatever you have, you will always lose it, sooner or later; but, with Jesus, there is always—always—new life to be found.

Sometimes what we lose—even an entire way of life—is God-ordained, and resistance is futile; but even such judgement is always in order to address systemic wrongs, and in the hope of restoration, not of what was but of the promise of good to come.

We are sent to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons (Matthew 10:8). Those infected and those affected by hatred. Those who have had the life crushed out of them by the world. Those who are feared, who hear voices calling for their exclusion ringing in their ears. Those who have been demonised by society, and those who are oppressed by demons. By healing words and actions. In the face of welcome and rejection—both of which may feel uncomfortable at times.

This is, truly, a gospel for our days. Those of us who hold to it need to be converted to it afresh. How will we be received? Not with indifference.

Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2017

A sermon first preached at St Gabriel’s Church, Bishopwearmouth.

Acts 17:15-34 and John 6:56-69

Last week a small article caught my eye in the Church Times. It read:

Pagans demand restitution

A group of pagans have written to the Archbishops and several bishops asking for a public apology for what they claim is “centuries of persecution”, and that two Church of England churches be given to them to turn back into temples. The Odinist Fellowship, a charity that promotes English paganism, has accused the C of E of attempting a “spiritual genocide” during the conversion of England in the seventh century, and of turning pagan temples into today’s parish churches. “The Church has never come to terms with its past crimes,” the Fellowship’s director, Ralph Harrison, said.

Church Times 18 August 2017

Now, that might sound bizarre or even quite funny, and—at least, as reported—somewhat confused about history, but, given our reading from Acts this evening, I took a closer look at the Odinist Fellowship.

They are registered as a charity and as an official religion in England and Wales, with the legal protection from discrimination that being an officially-recognised religion provides.

They worship the northern European gods we might recognise as belonging to Norse mythology, gods and goddesses such as Tyr, Odin, Thor, and Frigg, after whom we name days of the week. These they consider to be our indigenous deities, brought by the Anglo-Saxons, and as opposed to Christianity and Islam, which they see as hostile immigrant religions.

They believe these gods and goddesses to be “true gods, divine, living, spiritual entities, endowed with power and intelligence, able and willing to intervene in the course of Nature and of human lives” [see odinistfellowship.co.uk] and in the mythologies not as literal figures and events but as human attempts to understand and speak of the real gods that stand behind the stories.

They hold to Nine Noble Virtues of courage, truth, honour, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, industriousness, self-reliance and perseverance.

They practice sacrifice, of food and drink, understood not as physically feeding spiritual beings but as a sacrament: “that is to say, it is a symbol which effects what it symbolises, and symbolises what it effects. The sacrifice plays an important role in the cosmic conflict between the forces of order and chaos, because the symbolism of ritually offering … life-giving sustenance to the gods actually brings what is symbolically portrayed into effect on the spiritual plane, thereby strengthening the gods’ hand in their eternal struggle against the powers of chaos.” [see odinistfellowship.co.uk].

We might contrast this with the sacrament we will take part in this evening, which we understand to bring into effect in the physical plane what is already determined in the spiritual plane in and through Christ Jesus.

What is at first glance faintly ridiculous is, at second glance, a true and living relationship with the local pantheon of gods. Which is, in and of itself, very interesting, in our post-Christian but also post-secular society.

But at a third glance, we may see something very ugly: the way in which this Teutonic religion sets itself against Christianity as a weak and despised Semitic religion that has failed Britain and left us exposed to the rise of Islam. They repeatedly affirm Odinism as being life-affirming, spiritual, nature-loving, cosmic, ethical, as opposed to Christianity which they present as being none of these things, but, rather, of stealing many of their stories, rites and festivals and debasing them. In Odinism, instead, they proclaim, is the indigenous and true answer to disaffected young people’s spiritual longing.

These are the gods that stand behind the rise of northern European and English nationalism, the resurgence of White Supremacy and its attendant blame-shifting. To be clear, I am not saying that all adherents of Odinism are neo-Nazis; but there is a very strong overlap with far-right fascism, as well as clear parallels with the ‘folk and hearth’ mythos that underpinned the rise of the Nazi movement.

But, you might say to me, these are not gods at all. They are nothing but stories. Not so.

The Bible does not paint for us what might be called philosophical monotheism—the belief that there is only one god; with the correlation that all other gods are either figments of the imagination or alternative approximations of the one god.

Rather, the Bible paints a picture of what we might term creational monotheism—that there is one eternal and creator God, whose creation includes many spiritual beings, or lower-case-g gods, endowed with power, intelligence, and free-will. Some of these choose to love and serve the creator God—Yahweh—while others are in rebellion against him.

Both Old and New Testaments assume a world populated by gods. Many are named, such as Tiamat and Rahab and Chemosh and Baal and the Princes of Persia and Greece; along with others who serve Yahweh, such as Michael, for whom the Minster where I am based is named, or Gabriel, after whom this place is named (we tend to call these gods ‘angels’ but that term comes with a great deal of unhelpful cultural baggage).

Other descriptions of gods include the Angel of the Lord, the Angel of Death, the Council of Heaven, the Sons of God, the satan (which might be a role, rather than an individual), the powers and principalities of the heavenly realms, and the unclean spirits Jesus drives out before him again and again.

In the plagues of Egypt, Yahweh takes on and overthrows one member of the Egyptian pantheon after another, culminating with Ra the sun god and the divine image-bearers Pharaoh and his first-born son.

The Ten Commandments assume the existence of many gods. The first is an injunction to have no gods besides Yahweh—and the sin of Israel is always to turn to other gods along with Yahweh, never instead of Yahweh. The second prohibits idols, images behind which gods stand.

Again and again, the Psalms refer to Yahweh judging the gods for the injustice with which they hold humanity in slavery. The gods are real. Many do not hold us in goodwill: we are to avoid them, as a matter of priority. Others, loyal to Yahweh, support us: but we are not to consider them his equal, for they are created beings like ourselves.

When Paul sees that Athens was full of idols, he was deeply distressed: not because they were wasting their time on things that were not real, but because they were exposing themselves to gods that were very real—albeit, as the Odinists understand, bearing no actual correlation to the idols they stand behind—and those spiritual beings were holding them captive.

Indeed, Paul was so distressed that he abandoned his usual practice of going to the local Jewish community before going to the Gentiles, choosing instead to go to both communities from the start.

His message was that there is one creator God, above all the created gods; a God who does not need us to empower him, but who longs for us to know him as our parent. This God stepped decisively into the world he had created, in the person of Jesus, to set us free and call us into relationship with him.

This Jesus has broken the power of the rebellious gods: they exerted their influence over people to crucify him, but God vindicated this Jesus by raising him from the dead; and in so doing has given assurance that there will be a day when this Jesus judges the world in righteousness, dealing once-and-for-all with the injustice of humans and of the gods.

It is a powerful message; and one that is rather strange. Indeed, on hearing about Jesus and the resurrection—in Greek, anastasis—for the first time, Paul’s audience think he is talking of two new deities, Jesus and his goddess-consort Anastasis. As Paul explains his hope to them, some reject his message, others ask to hear more, and still others became believers.

Regardless of how many Odinists there may be in the UK, we live in a society not dissimilar to that of the Athens Paul visited. The good news of Jesus Christ, widely misunderstood and rejected, is no longer familiar to many. Yet there is an impulse to worship, an awareness of—and engagement with—the predominantly unseen spiritual aspect of creation. There is an interest in magic, in healing powers, in divination, in seeing the future or in contacting the dead.

This is not good news. Promising benevolence, the gods provoke people against people, with the goal of devouring one another. By this, I am not diminishing human free-will and responsibility—Jesus will judge humanity—but I am saying that there is more at work than meets the eye—he will judge the powers and principalities too.

The good news is that God—the one eternal creator God—has not left us alone, but comes to seek and to save: to save us from ourselves, and from the gods.

In a world where we see so much going on that we, so shaped by a secular worldview, find hard to make any sense of;

in a world where many, having been persuaded to disbelieve in the gods, are left blaming the one eternal creator God for so much suffering;

this is a hope that, yes, still divides opinion, but one that sets the captives free. As Simon Peter recognised, in Jesus is eternal life—life in its fullness—for he is the believable, knowable, Holy One of God. In Jesus, the one eternal creator God is made known—relationally known—to us. This is not “spiritual genocide” but spiritual liberation.

The population of Sunderland needs to hear this good news. Are we deeply distressed enough by what we see around us to proclaim it?