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“SWORDS AND SPARROWS”SCRIPTURE: MATTHEW 10: 24-39GRACE COVENANT PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ASHEVILLE, NCSunday, June 21, 2020, Live Streamed The Rev. Dr. Marcia W. Mount Shoop, PastorMatthew 10:24-3910:24 "A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master;10:25 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!10:26 "So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.10:27 What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.10:28 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.10:29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.10:30 And even the hairs of your head are all counted.10:31 So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.10:32 "Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven;10:33 but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.10:34 "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.10:35 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;10:36 and one's foes will be members of one's own household.10:37 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;10:38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.10:39 Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.The Word of the LORDThanks be to God. (Picture of sparrows—show while I am talking)Sparrows are resourceful. They can make a home out of a lot of things and in lots of different kinds of places. They are wired to make home where they need to and with what they have to work with. Once they make a home, they do everything they can to keep it—even to the point of being a nuisance if they built it in an inconvenient place in your home, or where other songbirds want to nest. God made the sparrow with the impulse to make and keep home with what they have around them, an impulse to be resourceful. Those are the kinds of details God attends to in each creature—in every living, breathing, crawling, flying, walking, talking thing. (end picture, go to MMS)That’s the kind of attention to detail stitched into how we are made, too. Human beings have trouble sometimes trusting the way God provides and the way God’s created us to thrive. We can be strangers to our created nature—we can succumb to the rewiring of greed, of fear, of self-loathing, of pride, of domination, of violence. Those rewired impulses can override the trust and the deep connection to creation that God wired into us when we were made. And when that rewiring overrides the way God made us, we do harm—harm to the world around us and harm to ourselves. Do you struggle to trust God these days? Are you struggling to feel at home in the world these days? Jesus’ word in Matthew Gospel today may not help you much if you are looking for a way to escape the tumult and the challenges of our time. In fact, it seems Jesus assumes that anyone following Him needs to have the sparrow thing understood, without him having to spend a lot of time on it. Trusting that God knows us, in intricate detail, every hair on each of our heads, no less—trusting that God knows us that way, and takes care of us that way—it is that trust that takes away any fear we might have about the challenges of following Jesus. If you are struggling with that trust, take that struggle into fervent prayer. The world needs courageous believers these days, not fearful ones. (sparrow picture) We trust the God who so tenderly attends to every detail of who we are and what we need. Take a moment to breathe that in—to give thanks for the depth of love God has for you, for us. (a few seconds pause)(sword picture)Jesus doesn’t tarry on the sparrow for long. And he doesn’t sugar coat the rest of the deal if we are going to follow Him. Swords are one of the oldest and most effective weapons human beings have ever created. Swords cut, they separate, they create distance, and they divide. It can be a struggle to understand the dissonance of a God who is so tender and yet unafraid of accountability and division. Following Jesus isn’t really about unity, unless that unity grows out of true love and true justice. That kind of talk is enough to afflict the comfortable. And that kind of trouble is the good trouble Jesus came to stir up.(Back to MMS)The God who made us is a God of sparrow and swords. And staking our lives on that reality is dangerous and delicate work—not for the faint of heart, not for the keepers of the status quo. Grace Covenant, God is not messing around these days. Jesus’ words to his disciples should be ringing in our ears. Jesus suffered. He was persecuted. And so will his followers. Jesus made powerful people nervous. He was a threat to them—he was a threat to their power, to their wealth, to their influence, to their way of life, to their ways of seeing things. And powerful people don’t usually give up their power without a fight. One of the first lines of defense when powerful people and institutions get challenged, is they try to discredit their challenger. And in Jesus’ ministry, the powerful accused him of being demonic, of getting his power not from God, but from evil sources. Jesus doesn’t let that stop him. His answer is transparency. Jesus says let’s put it all on the table. “ I have nothing to hide, nothing to apologize for.” He told his disciples to be worthy of Him, they must follow suit. The Gospel can break relationship, divide community, split a family. Jesus changes our priorities. Jesus expects us to take a stand. Jesus expects us to stake our lives on love without counting the cost. (Sparrows and swords picture at the same time) We follow a God of sparrows and swords. Jesus is reminding us that we must trust both in order to be faithful. God loves us fiercely. And Jesus showed us what that looks like—the lengths to which God will go for God’s beloved. The sword, you see, is not about domination or terror, the sword is about justice and accountability. And God didn’t create us to be helpless or hopeless. God created us to be courageous and connected. (back to MMS) Jesus is asking us to take up our crosses and follow Him. And in this moment, taking up that cross means laying down white supremacy and all that it has taught us to protect and cling to. The fear and trepidation that Mainline Christianity has traditionally had about social unrest in this country is about white supremacy and all the ways it tries to protect itself, and keep itself in power. As Presbyterians we must reckon with the fact that our denomination has been deeply shaped by whiteness—and that formation has disfigured our ability to be the Body of Christ in the world. If your first reaction to that fact of being Presbyterian is defensiveness, remember the sparrows and the swords. God loves you and provides for you and God will not let us deny the blood that is on our collective hands. White Christianity—and in America that has been synonymous with Mainline Christianity, has desecrated the Gospel. We must repent of that stark reality. I may have spent too much time these last four years trying to convince you of this fact of white Christianity, and not enough time provoking justice. There are some resisters—some keepers of the status quo in the ranks of white Christianity. They want us to focus on making people feel comfortable, being nice, being cozy with the powers and principalities. Jesus is warning his followers here that such self-protection counts us out of being His followers. The problem is, somewhere along the way, the church as institution decided it had too much to lose to really follow Jesus. And so it started protecting itself, instead of trusting God’s call to be like Jesus. (sparrows and swords picture)God provides for the smallest sparrow, and creates them to be resourceful, to understand how to make and keep home wherever they are. God provides for us with such tender attention to details. And God does not abide with those who unapologetically uphold systems of injustice. The sword that Jesus brings is about love—and the way loves holds us accountable to who God made us to be. We are not made to hate. We are not made to hoard. We are not made to terrorize. We are not made for lies. Jesus’ sword is not about death. It is about life abundant, and holding anyone to account for the ways any of us have desecrated the Gospel good news. God is always both—about sparrows and swords. Jesus is always about both—sparrows and swords. James Cone said, “White supremacy tears faith to pieces and turns the heart away from God.” Jesus wants to turn us back to God—and rid the world of the scourge of white supremacy. So, yes, he brings a sword—because of the sparrow. Because Jesus wants us to be at home in the world; Jesus wants us to be at home with ourselves. (back to MMS)The intensity of these times is undeniable. Each day history is made. Each day heroes are made. Each day abusive forms of power are being brought down. Each day the truth is making itself heard more audibly. Think about how much more clear things are now. Think about the ways COVID 19 is breaking us open as a nation—the suffering is not concealed, the hypocrisy is not concealed, the violence is not concealed---and with those revelations comes the refiners fire for what faith looks like in our world today. What does faith look like in your life today? What does faith look like in your body, in your heart, in your soul?There is not one way for us to follow Jesus, but there is a sure way that takes us off the path of following Jesus. If you feel your energy being spent mostly on how to maintain the status quo or get back to normal or quiet down the protests or just make everyone get along—it’s time for a gut check! Whatever it looks like for you, in your body—our energy is being called up into the service of love and justice, not order and normalcy. All of us won’t do it the same—but whether you are marching at a protest or writing an elected official or dismantling white supremacy within your workplace and within yourself or intentionally teaching your kids what it means to be anti-racist, or studying the real history of this country so you can teach your students to be critical thinkers, or sowing seeds of justice in the Garden or taking bold steps to deploy your resources to heal and repair the wounds of race in this country—no matter what path God calls you to take in your faith journey, the common thread that we all take with us is the power analysis Jesus has called his followers to since the beginning. Anyone from Grace Covenant should bring that power analysis to whatever the work of our faith is. At Grace Covenant that power analysis should be our faith language—the prophetic language of radical love. As Christians, we do not seek the approval of Empire—we maintain an engaged critical edge that keeps Christ at the center. And you can’t follow Jesus and hold onto white supremacy culture. You just can’t do it. You have to lay it down. We have to lay it down. To find our lives, we have to lose the way of life that has defined us. White Christianity has made it too easy to desecrate the Gospel’s prophetic message.Right here in Asheville—why has it been so easy for churches like GCPC to thrive while Black Ashevillians are suffering because of white supremacy culture? Why has it been so easy for white Christians to think the answer is charity instead of justice? Why do we need to share our resumes of good work in the community when life has gotten worse for our Black and Brown siblings for as long as this church has existed in this community?If you don’t believe me just look at the numbers on the State of Black Asheville website. State of Black AVLGaps in education have gotten largerThe number of Black people living in Asheville keeps going down. For every one white baby who dies, 3 Black babies die. On average, Black people die 6 years earlier than whitesIn 2015 40% of Blacks are homeowners, 60% of white people are homeowners. 2015 Median income Blacks $26,000, white $46,000Of ten economic sectors in Asheville, not one area had Black workers earning equal pay for the same work. Yesterday, Rev. William Barber spoke to over a million people in the Poor People’s Campaign march that was online instead of on the Washington DC Mall. It was a powerful day of first hand accounts of what it’s like to be one of the 140 million poor and low wealth Americans living in this country today—that number is pre-COVID19, so that number is increasing every day. The Poor People’s Campaign is “changing the narrative by changing the narrators.” Rev. Barber said that people ask him where the Poor People’s campaign gets its list of demands—he said, “People ask me, did you get this from Democrats or from Republicans, from the Left or from the Right. And I say no, we got it from the Bible.” Christianity has never been about protecting the wealthy or the politically powerful or about propping up military might or nationalism or capitalism or the destruction of the planet. From the Prophets of Hebrew Scripture to Jesus, the faith tradition we say defines us is about liberation of the oppressed. The kingdom of God is God’s creation healed. So we must take up our cross, Grace Covenant, and lay down our attachments to the lies that white supremacy culture has fed us our whole lives. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for Jesus’ sake will find it.”Sit with the fact that white Christians and white Christianity not only failed to see the connection between the cross and lynching, institutionally not only failed to connect God’s presence with the plight of the oppressed, but white Christianity desecrated Christ’s church by using it to prop up white supremacy and racialized terror. And the reckoning for that desecration is now. God’s reckoning is always about liberation and healing even as it is an accounting of the harm white Christianity has done. White dominant churches must disentangle our faith and the life that flows out of our faith from institutional trappings that have disfigured Christ’s church and deployed it to entrench white supremacy. And for many white Christians, that means crossing swords with our own families, even our own psyches. It’s easy to call out the current President—he makes it really easy. He’s a con man and his only hope for staying in power is to harness the violence and greed that gave birth to this country. He’s doing us a favor—he’s making the truth so clear. We can’t deny it anymore. But that’s easy!(sparrows and swords picture)If Jesus is your path to God, then you can’t pick and choose the sparrow or the sword. They are a package deal. And that’s hard, but the payoff is—with the sparrow and the sword we can let go of our fear at the same time we let go of the things we thought we couldn’t live without. Thanks be to God. ................
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