The Tribe

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

06.15.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 10:24-39

It’s been a very intense and bookish last few weeks in my life, as I’ve inhaled my way through a couple of thousand pages of churchy reading for my doctoral program.

My interest and the revised focus of my project, for some reason, is what makes for a spiritually healthy and vibrant small church.   One book after another, all of them talking about the way little congregations function or don’t function.  You read one, you put it down, you pick up the next one, until you start realizing that you’ve read pretty much everything the experts have to say about little tiny faith communities.  I’d be reading one book, and I’d realize that the quote I was reading in the book in front of me was familiar, because it was from the book I’d read the day before.

There aren’t a whole bunch of people who’ve looked hard at small churches.

Most churchy books tend to talk about how to build and manage the giant churches, the great sprawling Jesus Malls of AmeriChrist Inc..  How do you get huge?  How do you stay huge?  Grow grow grow!  Bigger Bigger Bigger!  Books with titles like Seven Reasons Christ Wants You to Build a Parking Garage  and Take Over the World for Jesus: How a Robot Army Can Help You Grow Your Ministry.  But having spent the last year in a sustained effort to make myself a little less huge than I’d been, that just doesn’t sound appealing.  

Bigger is not always better.  I like a faith life that exists on a human scale, and communities that reflect that.

In those books, little churches like ours are described in so many different ways.  It’s been a festival of metaphors.  Church researcher and small church pastor Carl Dudley described the very smallest churches as being exactly like a cat.  Independent, self-sustaining, and totally capable of taking care of themselves.  In another place in the same book, little churches this size are described as collies, friendly and loyal and totally willing to go running to get help when little Timmy falls in the well.  I like these metaphors, but it does seem that you’d be vacuuming up a whole bunch of fur.

There’s one book that puts small church life entirely in terms of the slow food movement, which is cool and kind of true, but also makes us sound a little bit too much like something out of Soylent Green.  Small churches are made of people, I can hear Charlton Heston howling.  Peopllllee!

But the metaphors that I most appreciate have to do with relationships.  There’s the idea that a small church is like a family, a gathering that is so intimate and lifelong that it’s like the folks in the world who are closest to you, your own flesh and blood.  But it’s more than what we Americans think of as a family, more than the mom and dad with their quarter acre, two point five children and seven tenths of a dog.  A gathering of a small fellowship is like a cluster of families in a delimited space.   And there’s a word for that, this family of families, the most elemental organic unit of human societies.

Little churches are like tribes.  

Which, according to what I’ve been reading, is a good thing.  You’ve got the intimacy of family connectedness that stretches around and through multiple generations.  You have storytelling, and shared sacred spaces.  You have a place of belonging, a home open to many.  As Presbyterian author and pastor Carol Howard Merritt wrote a couple of years back in her book The Tribal Church, this is something for which human beings increasingly hunger.  As our industrial society and the shattered, scattered nature of net-culture make us feel isolated and alone, that need for organic, human, tribal connection grows all the stronger.

And of course, right as I’m reading that little churches are like families and tribes, we get what our triannual cycle of readings pitches out today, one of the most peculiar and difficult passages in all of the teachings of Jesus.

The words of Jesus feel like a blow: “For I have come to set a man against his father…” they begin, and I thank the Creator of the Universe that this passage didn’t show up last week.  Jesus says hate your dad!  Happy Father’s Day!  But then it goes on to lay into mom, so I suppose at least Jesus is an equal opportunity offender.

Why is Jesus saying this?

While a Freudian psychoanalyst would have a field day with this passage, (“Zo, Jesus.  Lets talk more about your feelinks for your mother,”)  I think it’s absolutely essential to read this in the context in which it was first heard and first spoken.

This is Matthew’s Gospel we’re hearing, and while the passage sees analogues in both Luke and Mark, it would have been a tremendously timely teaching for Matthew’s community.  Most of the scholars who study Matthew consider it the most Jewish of the four Gospels.  It assumes a deep familiarity with the sacred texts of Judaism, as Matthew vigorously and aggressively seeks to put all of the teaching of Jesus into the context of Torah and the Hebrew Prophets.  The sacred story of the Jewish people matters to Matthew--even more so because most scholarly dating of Matthew puts it right at the same time that Christians were being removed from the synagogue.

Mark came too early for this to be a major issue.  Luke and John both wrote to mixed communities, where to be of another faith didn’t matter as much.

But for the community that heard Matthew, it was a time of conflict, in other words, when to follow the teachings of Jesus meant that you would find yourself torn away from family and friends.  If you chose to be a disciple of of the Way, all of those sustaining connections with the community that had given you your most fundamental sense of identity would be broken.   This was their reality, and so this remembered story had real significance for Matthew.

The reason for this saying goes deeper, though, beyond the context Matthew’s remembering and into that moment when Jesus first spoke it.  It comes to us from a larger teaching about going out into the world in mission.  He’s in the middle of giving his disciples instructions about how to go out on a mission trip, as they prepare themselves to spread the message of the coming Reign of God.

The instructions Jesus gives are, I will note, nothing like the instructions you give your kids when you’re sending them on a trip.  When my boys go away, there are lists upon lists, hats and sunscreen and wallets and chargers, giant backpacks and duffels full of clothes every possible need.  Have nothing, he says.  No money, no extra shoes.  Can I bring a change of underwear, asks Simon Peter.  No, says Jesus.  Be unprepared, says Jesus, sounding like the worst scoutmaster ever.  Go, and force yourself to trust that you will be cared for as you bear this message of universal love and grace.

They arrive as strangers on the doorstep, and theirs was a deeply tribal culture.  The dangerous reality of being a stranger in a tribal culture is that while families and tribes can be deeply hospitable and welcoming, they can also not be.  Sure, you’re fine if you’re recognized as “us.”  But if you are truly strange?  You are a threat.

Those deep ties of primal human identity are the “us,” and the us is something that we both cherish and defend fiercely against those who are not “us.”  The bonds of extended family and shared story that make for a tribe go from being a blessing to being a curse.  Tribal identity is part of human hubris, in which the very same thing that makes us strong makes us weak.

So sure, family is sacred, and those bonds of loyalty and mutual care go deep.  But precious though that may be, it is those bonds of loyalty that unite the young men you see in pictures of Iraq these last difficult days.  There they are, young and strong and handsome, with the other young men who make us their community.  They laugh and encourage one another, they sing the songs of their childhood, and they love each other with a deep love forged from being part of the same blood story.  And they dance in a circle with their Kalashnikovs raised high, and they go and do terrible things to those who are not the “us.”

We should not allow ourselves to imagine that we’re better than those young men.  They are human beings, just as we are.  That is what Jesus challenges in all of us, as he seeks to heal the brokenness of the world.

If you really love me, Jesus says, and really want to say that I have authority over your life, I have to matter more than those ties of blood.  If you want to bear my message, loving the world with the same impossible, generous grace as the God who loves all of us, then you need to set aside anything that gets in the way of that love.  

That’s a hard path.  It is.

But it’s the one he challenges us all to walk, because it is the way along which good news lies.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.