Matthew 10:37-42
Proper 8 (13) - Year A
"Who do you love more?" is one of those imponderable questions. Parents can be quick to affirm they love all their children equally. For them it is not a question of more or less, but how they will evidence their love in this circumstance, with this child.
Trying to parse out degrees of love, qualities of love, always runs into further debilitating debates of worth and deservedness that further divide us.
Do you love G*D more than Neighbor, self more than "one another", and any of these more than an enemy? For every ranking there is a loss. This leads us back to the mystery of one and all. If I don't love one uniquely more than another, how can I love any other? If I don't love all more than this one, how can I love this one at all. This unrelenting slide along a continuum can be a most false and soul-wrenching ride or a most life-giving reception of the depths of joy.
Hear Eugene Peterson's much clearer statement of the intertwining of lives alongside one another rather than the competition of above and below a cut-line:
"Accepting a messenger of God is as good as being God's messenger. Accepting someone's help is as good as giving someone help. This is a large work I've called you into, but don't be overwhelmed by it. It's best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice."
The smallest amount of love (given or received!) is large enough to open a way for more.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
Often times we think about mission work as an "us" to "them" proposition.
Listen to Eugene Peterson's picture of how we are "intimately linked" beyond an "us-them" duality.
"Accepting a messenger of God is as good as being God's messenger. Accepting someone's help is as good as giving someone help."
This is certainly an unexpected turn of events. Just when we think we have the tests of life figured out we get thrown another of these last-to-first kind of promises.
If we begin to think this backwards way around we find that hospitality is a key to life. Living a welcome demonstrates the message of GOD-news that welcomes us and oftentimes speaks louder than words.
How do you wrestle with being humble enough to receive help and not to always be the one to give help? How is this an example of the way of Jesus opening us to GOD? Can you see the resurrection in this picture of Jesus needing to receive GOD's help and not just exhausting himself in healing and preaching?
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/june2002.html
What a relief, no good deed goes unrewarded. This is a basic stance toward life.
The reverse is the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. An interesting example of blowback is found in an article entitled, "Case Studies of Incidents and Potential Incidents Caused by Protective System".
Either of these approaches has its danger of entitlement to a reward or avoidance of involvement. As we proceed it is helpful to remind ourselves that we are actors because, like all prophets, a call has come that cannot be avoided. It is not a question of the result of our deeds, but the careful proceeding to listen for what is needed and supplying it, whether rewarded or not or even punished. A sense of non-attachment is even more helpful than all this talk about rewards.
This kind of talk sets up the threat of competition of goodness. Is it not sufficient to simply welcome someone? Anything more gets us in dangerous water.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/june2005.html
It is helpful at this point to remember this is a conclusion to a longer story.
We began this section with disciples being called. Their call was into being put on trial (finding the consequences of their call and persevering nonetheless). The positive result of their living out their call is that others will see and be offered choices just as Jesus brought a sword of division or clarity of purpose. This same choice that others find will be a tool of continual evaluation regarding the disciples initial call and living out of that call -- will they persist in finding life by giving it away?
Now we come to the larger conclusion, rather than specific instances. Call is welcoming, a uniting of creation and creator. This gets played out in a three-fold process of a prophetic and progressive proclamation of a brokenness and separation -- an appropriate and righteous response of individual and community to the identified issue of arbitrary division -- resulting in a smooth and willing reassessment, revisioning, and resolution of injustice.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/june2005.html
Welcoming is bedrock evangelism. A first rule of thumb of expressing our discipleship is to love one another and, presuming we are expanding our "one another", its logical extension is that of hospitality.
So we need to welcome the unexpected goat or exile. It saves us from inbred craziness (slaughter of our own) and denial of our common family (if they have been away).
In so doing we will find G*D's absent face wasn't so absent after all and we are part of the generations who experience steadfast love in the midst of every wavering.
Thanks be that we are not limited to the sin of self-assurance and closed doors. Our escape from such sin is a participation in welcoming.
- - -
sit in a new house
experience its idiosyncrasies
wonder where its secrets lie
where children were hurt
what kept blessings from flowing
who was exiled here
or escaped exile
if walls talked
what shame and glory
would come forth
were its doors ever opened wide
or barricaded even more tightly
how will we interactenough of sitting
though not enough
a start is a cup of cold water
taken through the house
sprinkled here
there and everywhere
that more cups
will be ready
when family and strangers
call
and beckon them in
before they know
their need
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html
We are in life together. We hold more than six degrees of connection within us. Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me and those I know and those who know them. Basically, we don't welcome one other without welcoming all others. We can talk all we want about all-being-all, but if it is not lived out in the welcome of particular people we have not been welcoming and so are not welcome in parts of the cosmos.
As we are still working out of Pentecost, welcome is wider than our temporary divisions of culture, language, or wedge-issue. Without getting into a reward/punishment mode of interacting, imagine the phrase, "None will lose". What might this mean for your level of courage to engage. Might that have been a phrase that blew through a locked room whispering in each ear. No wonder they arose and went into the streets. They were so poor they had nothing to lose. They had already lost all they had, except for their fear. Now with this vision, the fear could be set aside and, lo and behold, they were again a part of everything.
Even a day in Carolina couldn't be finer than this—"None will lose". Remember. Proclaim. Remember again.