WRITTEN THINGS
Sermons • Songs • Etceteras
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” These are the words of Indigenous Australian artist, author, and poet Lilla Watson who, in 1985 delivered that timeless and transcendent message at the UN Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi just four years after I was born, in 1985. It wasn’t until many, many years later, probably about 10 years ago, that I read her words for the very first time. And when I did, they vibrated and echoed in my bones like a trumpet through a canyon, and I understood -- viscerally, if not yet intellectually or practically -- that she was preaching the Law of Love and speaking gospel truth. Her words recast Scripture for me in a way that utterly transformed my theology, my actions, my whole person, and grounds me still to this day in a vision of Christ and eternal salvation through the lens of Mutual Liberation in the right here and now. So I was thrilled to find today’s epistle is Galatians 5:1 and 13-25 which opens with this trumpeting proclamation from St. Paul: “It is for freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to your own enslavement… You were called to freedom, beloved siblings, not to give you an opportunity for self-indulgence, but that through love you may become slaves to each another.” Across that canyon of two thousand years and countless empires raised and felled, Paul’s words resounded and rhymed and were echoed in Lilla Watson’s. And both, of course, were echoes of what Christ said -- and didn’t say -- in today’s gospel. But to hear them like the bell they are, I want to go back a bit for a birds-eye overview lest we forget how we got to the Samaritan village in the first place. Because leading up to today’s text, Jesus had performed countless miracles, among them being last week’s gospel where he liberated the Geresene demoniac from a legion of demons, after which he stilled a raging storm with a word of rebuke, raised a girl from the dead, and staunched the heavy menstrual cycle of a woman whose natural but “unclean” bleeding had long relegated her to the margins of society. That was chapter 8. Chapter 9 then begins, in verses 1 through 6, with Jesus sending the 12 disciples out with his same authority over diseases and demons, to proclaim God’s kin-dom “everywhere,” the text says, but with one crucial caveat: In going, they were to leave literally everything behind but the clothes on their backs, and make themselves entirely and exclusively dependent on the hospitality and mutual care of those who received them. Between verse 6 when they’re sent, and today’s text beginning in 51, we see Jesus feed more than 5,000 hungry people in a single afternoon, perform three more exorcisms, warn the disciples twice of his coming death and resurrection, affirm Peter’s monumental confession of his Messiahship, take Peter, James, and John up a mountain where he transfigures before them, and then rebuke them, just as he did the storm, for having the audacity, after all that, to argue about which of them was the greatest. Now, whether all this happened chronologically or was written down by Luke in this particular order for narrative continuity and dramatic effect, I do not know, nor do I think it matters. What matters is that Jesus and the 12 have been B U S Y up to this point when, as the end draws nearer, he sets his face toward Jerusalem and sends messengers ahead to secure lodging. And this he does because -- as verses 57-62 make plain -- Jesus is also homeless, penniless, and utterly dependent on the mutual aid of those he visits. So I want us to notice, here, before we look at anything else, that Jesus never asked his disciples to do anything he was not already doing, to live with any less than he himself had, or to make themselves any more vulnerable to hunger, houselessness, poverty, or rejection than he already was. His invitation to discipleship was more than an offer of cosmic authority over the powers of the realm; it was also -- crucially -- an offer to become nothing. Again and again, Jesus affirmed they were all in the same boat, and that whatever God gave him, he in turn gave to them -- be it the power to command the natural and spiritual realms, or powerlessness against the realities of unnatural, human-made perils like the hoarding of resources and refusal to share. They were alike in both power and poverty, both totally dependent on the generosity of reciprocity of strangers with whom they were sent to share the exceeding abundance of the Creator, regardless of how they were received. And while he instructed them in verse four to “shake the dust from their feet” and move along when leaving towns that did not welcome them, it’s apparently not something they actually had to do often or at all, if James and John’s reactionary outrage today is any indication. It would seem they were all so used to receiving both generosity and reciprocity, in abundance, that this village’s unwelcome was new. And, as Luke implies by explaining that it was “because Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem,” this new unwelcome signaled a critical turning point in his and the disciples’ ministry. It set them on what commentators call “The Lukan Travel Narrative” marking the beginning of the end of Jesus’s journey to the Cross. This was the final turn, and there was no going back. Which is to say that the Samaritans’ rejection of Jesus is not the story here, except as an example of what can happen to those who actually follow Jesus and are treated like him. Instead, what Luke intentionally draws our eyes and ears and full attention to in this moment, is the total polarity of responses we see from the Brothers versus Jesus. We already know James and John to be zealots whose unyielding beliefs and unwavering allegiance to Jesus’s cause are alive and active and buzzing in their bodies. It’s why Jesus aptly nicknamed them the “Sons of Thunder.” So their impulsive reaction here is unsurprising. That doesn’t make it any less jarring to witness, for at least a couple reasons. “First,” as Chelsea Brooke Yarborough writes, that’s quite presumptuous of them to make an offer like that to Jesus. “If [he] wanted [to call down fire from heaven to consume the whole town,]...he could have done it for himself (and it still would not have been right, emphasis mine).” Still more jarring than that, though, is how “their immediate response to a boundary or a ‘no' was violence toward an entire town. It would not have been the entire town’s decision, yet they were quick to conflate all people — including the elders, the children, [and] those on the margins — with whoever had the power to say no.” Let me pause here so we can name the elephant in the room. This scene is neither theoretical nor distant, but is, in fact, our own reality right now. We don’t have to conjure up or imagine examples of entire cities or groups of people being held violently responsible for the choices of a powerful few. In fact, I’d be willing to bet most of us already have in mind a few reports or images from the last week or two alone, of elders, children, and other marginalized people upon whom all-consuming fire and fury have rained down from the sky. We do not have to search for people who’ve been burned and bombed, scattered, starved, or shattered by violence for the choices of leaders whose power is well beyond their reach or influence. It’s everywhere, always right now. It is the natural order of this World, capital W, and the inherent impulse of the Flesh, capital F. This is what humanity does with unrooted, unmitigated power: we weaponize it against and over others. Whether as individuals or as a collective, the impulse is strong and pervasive to punish those whose autonomous choices undermine our more-righteous ways, or simply get in the way of us having whatever we believe our god has entitled us to. None of us are immune to such impulses. We all participate and are complicit. Jesus’s response, on the other hand, is that trumpet in the canyon, calling our whole selves to attention in the fundamental truth at the root of all of the gospel. Unlike James and John, he doesn’t call down fire upon the Samaritans because he does not consider himself entitled to their welcome, regardless of how their rejection surprises or affects his plans, and despite that He is actually God in flesh. In fact, it’s because he is God in Flesh that he honors their decision. To him, whether or not their choice was good or loving or reasonable, it was theirs and theirs alone to make. And by honoring it, Yarborough says, “Jesus reminds us how crucial agency and choice are to Love.” They are inextricably bound up together. What was not — and will never be — celebrated as a good, right, loving choice was the Brothers’ impulse to call down the power and authority of God, “to punish…harm…[and] destroy in Christ’s name, simply because they were inconvenienced or thought another choice” would’ve been better. In his simple rebuke, Jesus makes clear it’s not just that the reactionary impulse toward violence against those who oppose us is a reprehensible embodiment of everything the powers and principalities of the World embrace in their opposition to God (though it surely is). It’s that the Christ impulse to Love is the precise and perfect opposite, and is defined and proved true by its resolute fidelity and submission to the liberation and liberty of the beloved. Which brings us back, at last, to Lilla Watson’s theology of mutuality, and St Paul’s admonition to the Galatians about what their Baptismal liberation is and means in practice. He knew, like Lilla knew, like we all know, that no one is free to do whatever we want, regardless of the power we have. We are beholden to the laws of nature and the laws of the living. And the thing about living is that we will always be entangled with every other living thing. It is the inescapable reality of being made of the same stars and dust and water and soil and breath as everything else that has or ever will exist: We cannot ever be separate entities unto ourselves; we are inherently bound up with others. But we do get to choose our binding. We can, Paul says, use our freedom to bind ourselves to self-indulgence, hyper-individualism, and the self-destructive lie that ego is all that matters. We can bow as vassals of earthly kings who promise us freedom in exchange for submission to their bomb-dropping, warmongering, scorched-earth yoke of power. And all either will produce is “enmity, violence, injustice, warfare, slander, hatred, gossip, etc.,” leading us inevitably, if ironically, to one thing only. mutual cannibalization, and an inheritance of mutually assured destruction. We can use our freedom like that, and lots of us do. Or we can bind ourselves to one another in the transformative and liberating Love of mutual submission that does not come as a savior or leech, but as sibling. THAT, Paul says, is the Liberation to which and for which Christ set us free. We are free to embody the same radical reciprocity, interdependence, empathy, humility, and solidarity that Jesus and the Apostles not only survived on, but passed down to us on paper, in practice, and in Power of Spirit. We can be and bear the Spirit’s Love as we share the abundance of joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control which grow only -- but always and assuredly -- out of mutual submission. We can claim a better inheritance as heirs of the Kin-dom of God. And that is, as ever, Beloved: To be Loved, and Be Love, as One Beloved Community, the Body of Christ. So let us, let us, let us Love one another.
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