Just a couple of days ago, many in our country celebrated the holiday of Juneteenth, to “honor the day in 1865 when enslaved men and women in Texas found out they were free,” a day of liberation that occurred two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the surrender of Robert E. Lee. Also this week, we marked the five-year anniversary of the tragic day when nine innocent black lives were stolen by a white supremacist who targeted those who had just welcomed him into a Bible Study at the “Mother” Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Even if we were not in the midst of a national uprising focused on police violence against people of color, those two anniversaries coming in one week should be enough to make us pause and do some deep soul-searching about race, violence, and the unfinished work of becoming a nation in which all people really do have the same unalienable rights.
At this moment, when our country’s soul is once again in peril, it should be impossible to ignore the prophetic voice of Jesus ringing out in today’s Gospel. In a tone we find uncharacteristic and perhaps uncomfortable, he proclaims, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother […] and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
For most of us who grew up in safe, privileged, middle-class families, we’d much rather focus on the Jesus of a few verses earlier who promises that God cares for the life of every sparrow and has counted every hair on our heads. The thing is, there’s actually only one Jesus. Jesus did not sometimes proclaim liberation and good news to the poor and sometimes focus on pastoral care. The profound love God has for us and the judgment that God pronounces upon our systems of oppression and the way we uphold them are not in conflict—they are two sides of the same divine coin.
So, should we take Jesus literally about this sword business? No, probably not. But we should take him seriously. We do not need to advocate violence in order to hear in the Gospel a call to arms. The sword that Jesus wields is the sword of righteousness, used to set us all free. It is the sword that cuts away everything that keeps us in thrall to “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”
During his time on earth, Jesus could have become the leader of a violent faction bent on overthrowing an unjust and oppressive state by any means necessary. There were others all around him doing precisely that. Instead, he did something even more revolutionary, living his life with perfect freedom while always siding with those on the margins. To insist that Jesus chose a nonviolent form of revolution is not a copout—it’s a core part of his mission and his message.
In the end, even though Jesus advocated turning the other cheek, he was still executed as a criminal, the victim of state-sanctioned violence, as were many who followed him. Even a metaphorical sword, when it is wielded on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised, is a threat to the powers that be.
The life and death and resurrection of Jesus ushered in a new reign—a reign during which God will pull down the mighty and exalt the humble, will fill the bellies of those who hunger while sending the rich empty away. Today’s Gospel, though, reminds us that to be part of building that new reign we have work to do, hard and dangerous work, with no guarantees of success.
His first disciples answered the call to follow him by throwing away their fishing nets, their respectability, and their place in the social order. We too need to be wiling to risk losing family, friends, and jobs; indeed, we have to risk taking up our own cross in order to follow him. Otherwise we have are like those people spoken of by the prophets who cry, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace, and who try to cover up mortal wounds with band-aids.
We want to follow Jesus, but we also want people to like us. We want to follow Jesus, but we also want job security. We want to follow Jesus, but we don’t want to rock the boat. History, including salvation history, tells us that we can’t have it both ways. Scripture is telling us we can’t have it both ways. Jesus leads us along the way of liberating and live-giving love, but emancipation is hard work that takes time and it is going to bring out the worst in those who are threatened by the loss of power and privilege it represents to them.
I said a couple of weeks ago that it feels like we’re at a crossroads, or maybe a tipping point. We can acknowledge the pain and anguish once again coming to the surface in our country, and use it as the impetus for real change, or we can fall back into old patterns and continue along the well-worn path of inequity and injustice. If we truly want real change, those of us who most benefit from the systems in place, systems of white supremacy and patriarchy and heterosexism and ableism and all the rest, we are going to have to take some big risks. This is going to be hard and scary and messy. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to hurt others and get our feelings hurt. We are going to disagree on the best ways to accomplish our goals.
In the face of all this risk and discomfort and messiness, it might seem easiest to pull back, to keep silent and let others do the work. Churches are especially apt to do this, to keep silent because we don’t want to offend or wound. Jesus has something to say about this, too, something I overlooked the first hundred or so times I read today’s Gospel. He says, “So have no fear […] What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”
Jesus is practically begging us to stand up and speak out, to make our voices heard even if that leads us to some scary situations for which we don’t feel prepared. For some of us, that means working harder to amplify the voices of people of color, learning and then telling the truth about our history, speaking up when we hear other white people say things that are hateful or just plain incorrect. For all of us, it means speaking out about the ways the church and other institutions in which we participate have been complicit in oppressive systems.
Years ago, the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde wrote a near-perfect essay called “Turning Silence into Language and Action.” Written from the perspective of someone who was too often silenced because of her gender, her sexuality, and her race, the essay asks us to interrogate the reasons behind our silences in the face of injustice.
Lorde affirms that many of us remain silent because we are afraid of the consequences if we speak up and then she lays down this great truth: “My silences have not kept me safe. Your silence will not keep you safe.” Silence is not the answer. Silence is complicity. Silence is violence. In words that seem prophetically appropriate for this current moment, she concludes, “It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” Amen.
