Journey's Weekly Homilies

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A,  30 June 2002
Homily by Joe

2 Kings 4:8-11,14-16a
Romans 6:3-4,8-11
Matthew 10:37-42

In his prose-poem “Knoxville, Summer of 1915”  James Agee recalls an evening from his childhood spent outdoors with his extended family, lying on quilts on the rough wet grass of the backyard, watching the stars and talking casually “among the sounds of the night. “ The language is beautiful and evocative – it was later set to equally beautiful music by the composer Samuel Barber – and conveys both nostalgia and great affection for his family. Toward the end, Agee asks God’s blessing on his mother, his father, his uncle, his aunt, but also states unequivocally that no matter how familiar and well beloved he is in that home, they will never tell him who he is.

He is writing in hindsight of course, back across those years when he struggled to discover and form his own identity. He is also exaggerating for dramatic effect. Our families are where our identities begin and will always be part of who we are. But what Agee says is ultimately true: the greater part of our self-understanding is found only when we leave the nest; it cannot be provided for us by our families, no matter how well-intentioned, but must be discovered for ourselves by ourselves. As a gay man, I can tell you a few things about having to find your own path, but there are plenty of ways for children’s and parents’ paths to diverge.

It was not this way in the ancient world. If you lived in Jesus’ time, everything about you was determined by the family into which you were born. In a mostly farm-based economy there was little social movement; people in the countryside stayed in the countryside and people in the cities stayed in the cities. You became part of your family’s economy at birth and most likely stated there your entire life.  There were no aptitude tests to help you chose a vocational school or a college. Farming, fishing, trading, even priestly ministry, your life was mapped out for you. Marriage was of course arranged. Only women changed their family affiliations, but that was only to be incorporated into their fathers-in-laws’ households. In short, who you were was determined by who your parents were.  

All the more extraordinary, then, that this preacher and faith healer, Jesus, is wandering around the countryside with no family structure or history to back him up. Even more amazing, he’s creating a new society around himself, a surrogate family drawn from other families or welcoming those who had no families. Even though Jesus sometimes calls Simon “Son of John,” it’s clear from presence among the disciples that he’s no longer acting as John’s son would. Martha, Mary and Lazarus seem to have their own household, without parents or spouses. When his own family appears – at one point in Mark’s gospel even trying to “collect” him – Jesus tells them that he prefers this new family.

We’ve been reading the gospels as normative for two thousand years so it’s hard to imagine how revolutionary this would have been at the time. This idea of self-discovery, of finding our own path in life, is something that we take so much for granted that we don’t give a second thought to the new understanding Jesus is offering his disciples. And in doing so we risk missing his imperative to “go against the grain.”

Imagine your family and other received sources of identity not as oppressive or restrictive but as sources of comfort and security. Remember that it’s sometimes desirable to be part of a group. Maybe your family is reasonably well-off; this means you don’t go hungry and you have a place to sleep. Maybe you’re a member of the Christian faith, of the one true Christian faith, so you’ve got the answers to life’s questions readily available. And being a citizen of the most powerful nation on the planet is still something to proud of, if all the flags on our cars are anything to go by.  Now imagine Jesus telling you that something is more important than these things, that, as egotistical as it seems for him to say it – you have to love (that is to say honor, stand up for, cling to) him more than your family, your church or your country. That, extrapolated to our modern world, is just what Jesus tells his disciples they must do if they want to be “worthy” of him.  

That’s asking a lot. It sounds like everything you have, everything you know, everything you believe could be at risk. We all know of people who have loved Jesus above all things and carried the gospel message in their lives, those who have embraced the baptism into death that the letter to the Romans speaks of. We know of martyred civil rights workers, of imprisoned war protesters, of silenced advocates for compassion and equality. We know of people who have given up lives in one way or another – lost them for Jesus’ sake in the hope of finding them.  “But,” you protest, maybe with relief, “I’m not Dorothy Day or Medgar Evers or Jeannine Grammick or Daniel Berrigan.” But maybe you are.

So many things tell us - and others - who we are: birth family, church, school, spouse, children, neighborhood, etc. But they don’t make us who we are.  When Jesus called and taught his disciples he didn’t make them different people, he only drew on what was already there. And when they carried on his ministry of healing and justice they were being the people they had discovered they were. Our response to Jesus’ question “who do you say that I am?” says a lot more about us than it does about him.

Jesus’ disciples were with him because he told them who they were. They knew themselves in him as they never had in their families; his response to the world was theirs, too. We are here because this is who we are, because we hear ourselves in the songs and the scriptures, because we see ourselves when we look across the circle around the table, because we know ourselves in the people of the beatitudes, who learn from love how to love and from injustice how to resist it.

It’s tempting to read a two-class system of discipleship into tonight’s readings. You’ve got support staff, like the Shunammite woman, and the heavy lifters, like Elisha.  But their relationship could not have been more reciprocal From their encounter came a stronger self-understanding for both of them: Elisha was more and more the prophet of God, announcing challenge and encouragement. The Shunammite woman knew herself to be a nurturer and life-giver.  Our journey to authentic discipleship, to our own ministry of justice and reconciliation, is a long one. In this gathering we give each other that cup of cold water and we receive it gratefully.