Jeremiah 18:1-11; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
September 5, 2010
Each of our passages this morning has a hint of something disturbing. Yet each also offers something so hopeful and liberating, it’s a little hard to know what to do with it all. Jeremiah begs the question, does God destroy us when we’re bad? Luke’s passage makes us ask, did Jesus really mean we’re to “hate” our families? And finally, in this letter from Paul it is impossible not to ask whether Paul was endorsing slavery. A pretty good argument could be made for the answer to all three being “yes”. But I think such an answer is undermined, if not negated, by the overall meaning found in these texts.
Paul writes to Philemon, an early Christian who hosted a house church in his home. Paul’s writing on behalf of one of Philemon’s slaves, Onesimus, also a Christian. And Paul writes knowing good and well what it means for Onesimus to be a slave of Philemon. Slavery was common – embedded in the culture – and it implied very definite roles and relationships between master and slave. And, it seems to me, in this letter Paul leaves little doubt that such relationships can only be bad for both Philemon and Onesimus.
Admittedly, it is hard to tell from the letter whether Paul thought slavery was bad in every instance. I suspect it’s more likely than not that Paul was not seeking to end slavery completely. But I’m not sure we can place the entire burden of fulfilling the realm of God on Paul’s shoulders. In any one person’s lifetime we can effect some change, and some things that should change stay exactly as they are – both with our tacit and explicit approval. So too with Paul.
What we do know is that Paul in this letter says, “Not here. Not in this community. You are both Christians of the same household of God, and so you are brothers. When you choose Christian community, no longer is there a difference between slaves and free persons.” When Onesimus returns to his community, Philemon is to treat him only as a brother because that’s what Christians do. The former system, the former ways of relating to one another, are gone and all is made new in Christ. This is one of the most consistent, overarching themes in Paul’s letters, and even though he doesn’t always get it right, doesn’t figure out how to fix heterosexism, racism, classism, misogyny all in his lifetime – he’s at least giving us the model: “Not here. Not in this new kind of community.” Here, Paul says famously in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you all are one in Christ.”
Jesus too is taking on the issue of family – the family as it operated in 1st century Palestine. The household was the basis for society. These aren’t just nuclear families with parents and children. These households were made up of many, many people, and each had their role within the system: patriarchs and matriarchs, grown children and their spouses, young children… and servants and slaves, as we’ve already seen in Paul’s letter. These were not like our families, nuclear, extended or otherwise, so it might be hard to imagine how it felt to be stuck in these roles – especially if you fell near the bottom of the totem pole.
This was what Jesus was talking about that people should “hate”. In order to follow him they needed to turn from this household system – embedded in the culture and harmful because of its set roles, hierarchy and potential for abuse. They were to let go of what defined them, whether they were at the top or the bottom of the household chain of command. Family, for Jesus – just as it was for Paul – was now defined in new terms with new relationships. Everyone in this new community was a brother or a sister: nothing more, nothing less. Jesus wasn’t advocating hating people – he was saying trade one kind of family – an oppressive kind – for a new kind of family.
Jeremiah called for the same kind of turning away from how things were operating to something much better. Remember that Jeremiah is talking to the ruling class who are supposed to be ruling according to God’s law. But they are choosing otherwise…mostly they are choosing whatever bolsters their wealth and status, and it’s at the expense of the people they were to be caring for. Repentance is a theme for Jeremiah: repent of your ways and live according to God’s purposes. Repent meaning to “turn from”. Turn from what is toward what can be.
Jeremiah uses this beautiful image of the potter and her creation. And the bottom line of the metaphor is that if we insist on the same destructive ways of doing things, we will always work against the vessel God – the potter – is trying to make. The vessel will be distorted and so it will collapse in on itself. Turning, repentance, means abandoning the distorted vessel and starting again as a part of something new. Only this time, we don’t insist on our ways, we don’t resist what the potter is yearning to create; we join the potter in making the new vessel – the one that won’t crack and collapse.
When you think about abandoning the old vessel for the new, Jeremiah invites us to imagine the process of how a potter sculpts. Change – repentance – is a “letting go” into the potter’s hands; that’s how we join in her creation. Or, if anthropomorphic metaphors don’t work for you, maybe it’s imagining yourself melding with a divine energy or purpose or pull in creation. The point is we’ll be formed and shaped by God, by a divine energy, if we let go of systems and cultures we participate in that destroy, and instead seek something new.
We don’t like to talk about class much. I don’t mean class as in school, but class as in upper, middle, lower. It’s uncomfortable. I read an article recently that made me uncomfortable for this very reason. It talked about class and the price our avoidance of the issue exacts on people. The article was written about small liberal arts colleges – but let me be clear from the outset, I did not read it with Grinnell college in mind. Grinnell may very well not be indicted by this author’s observations…I would have no way of knowing. I was uncomfortable because I had no trouble substituting the word “church” for “college” and recognizing how apt the critique was.
The point this author makes is that since the civil rights and feminist movements many institutions have worked hard on racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. They have programs about it, classes, policies, procedures all designed to address these things that over the years became so entrenched in our educational institutions; colleges have worked on recruitment of diverse students, on hiring of diverse faculty and staff, and on retention of both.
This certainly applies to the church as well. We too have worked on issues of race, ethnicity and gender. Now, we can, and should, legitimately debate the success of these things – Sunday morning worship is still a very racially segregated hour in this denomination, if not in this country. But, our denomination, the presbyteries, and local churches have been intentional in working on such things for many years. My being here is undoubtedly a function of the concerted effort at gender diversity.
But what the author noted and criticized was that class diversity was rarely if ever included in the discussions. Colleges, universities, churches are far less intentional about socio-economic diversity than racial, ethnic and gender diversity. In fact, it rarely makes it into the conversation.
The church does talk about “reaching out” to people in the lower socio-economic classes, but rarely, if ever, do we talk about how to make our congregations more socio-economically diverse. “Reaching out” has come to mean “helping”, “giving to.” Yet our congregations – our worship services – remain largely bereft of folks from the lowest socio-economic classes.
Changing this would be hard – in part because class is hard for us to talk about, and acknowledging the reality is a necessary first step to change. Without talking about it – making the discrimination explicit – we can’t move to a new reality. But making it explicit does mean talking about money, privilege, discrimination, and other uncomfortable subjects. Our culture, the middle class, is entirely resistant to speaking about such things – you just don’t talk about money, for instance, because it is “private”.
Middle class culture is the dominate culture in our society. This is our equivalent of the household in Jesus’ and Paul’s day. It’s all set up, and those not a part of the dominant class – specifically those in lower classes – are at much greater risk of suffering at the hands of society. In our society, everyone plays their roles – and other cultures – people outside the middle class – just don’t “fit” in the dominant culture. So they don’t feel invited into familial relationships with us. And if someone is not my brother or sister, I do not need to treat them as such.
Not that long ago, someone who doesn’t attend church here came in to see me. He needed some immediate assistance in order to get to his new job. I knew he was coming, and I was glad he was, and glad the church could help out. After we had finished what I thought was our “business”, I stood up and started walking toward the door. While he did too, he also began to tell me about his work: about his boss, his coworkers, the project they were working on, the challenges they faced, the tools he was using, how they worked, and on and on. I had a lot to do, I was getting anxious as the time ticked on. I finally cut this person off, and likely he left feeling like he didn’t get to make the point he wanted to.
For the most part, he and I live in different cultures. And I think his culture may value story telling as a way to get a point across…middle class culture, especially as it plays out at work, values efficiency and accomplishment. One thing I communicated to this person is that when he steps into the church, he has to set aside his culture in order to have access to our community, because the dominant culture always dictates the terms of interactions. Maybe he wanted to say thank you. Maybe he wanted me to understand the value of his work. Maybe he just wanted to deepen his relationship with me and this church. But he was taking “to long” by my standards, so now, I don’t know.
Where do we even start in letting go of this system we live in – this old vessel set up to fail? How can we join the potter in the creation of a new vessel? Maybe you have ideas – I think there are already things we do as individuals and a congregation that loosen the ties we have to the old vessel. But I also think there are things we do every week, every month, here in worship that have the potential to break us free in order to become new vessels.
The communion table is a pretty good place to start. We claim Christ is present right there at the table when we come and take the bread and drink from the cup. So as we approach, we remember that he said, “in this community things are different.” This is not a place where we are a part of the hurtful systems; we take at least this moment to detach completely from what usually forms our identity. Here, we are stripped of all identity except as followers of Jesus. Because in this time we remember that to be connected to Christ, through the bread and the cup, is to be connected to all. We share a common loaf, a common cup not just here among ourselves – but it is Christ’s bread and Christ’s cup that is offered and shared in this place and everyplace all at once. And when we share this common bread and cup with everyone everywhere, we can only be brothers and sisters.
When we come, we are once again formless clay in the potter’s hands. We allow ourselves to be remade by the power of symbol and ritual. We walk in as cracked, maybe collapsing, vessels – only to be received at the table by the one who yearns for us to be made new. We come as a part of systems that do not reflect the family Jesus and Paul envisioned. But when we enter this space, we say “Not here. Not at this table. Here the systems fall apart; here there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, poor nor rich, housed nor homeless: for all are one in Christ.” When you come this morning to the table, allow God to begin to reshape you – remold you. Give yourself over to the project of becoming a new vessel. Amen.
