Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
“There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Genesis 21:8-21/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 10:24-39/NRSVUE)
If you came to church today hoping to catch a glimpse of happy Jesus doing nice things like healing the sick or talking about loving your neighbor, then today’s gospel passage from Matthew was probably a bit of a disappointment. Jesus says some pretty harsh things to his followers over the course of these fifteen verses, which makes this story a curious choice for this particular Sunday. I mean, “I have come to set a man against his father” doesn’t exactly scream “Happy Father’s Day!”
What you just heard was roughly the second half of Jesus’s “Missionary Discourse,” the first half of which we looked at last week — and Jesus’s words were pretty rough there too. In this lengthy speech, he gives his newly-appointed apostles a brutally honest view into what their lives as apostles will actually be like; the overarching message throughout the speech is that it isn’t gonna be easy. And while I know this might sound a little strange, having to reflect upon this passage on Father’s Day made me think a lot about my own dad.
He was an electrician for almost his entire adult life, and most of that time was spent working by himself (anyone who knows him understands that this was probably for the best). But for most of my summers during high school and college I was conscripted into service as his helper (because I worked cheap and because not a lot of other people in the world could have put up with him). In some ways, though, this was pretty a decent gig: I’d known my boss for my entire life so was already familiar with his quirks; I didn’t have to apply and interview for the job; I didn’t need to dress up; he bought me food every day; and he taught me some useful skills that would serve me later in life. Sounds good, right? Well, I soon learned, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously said, that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”
You see, I was born and raised in Northern New Jersey, which is a notoriously hot and humid place during the summer months; and a new electrician’s helper generally doesn’t get to do the most glamorous tasks on a job site. These two unfortunate truths aligned one swampy June day at the beginning of my relatively short electrical career when my father handed me a heavy coil of wire and told me to head up to the attic of the house at which we were working.
“What?” I replied.
“We need to run this wire from the kitchen on this side of the house to the breaker panel on the other side of the house and the easiest way to do that is to go across the attic,” he said.
“The easiest?” I asked.
“Well, maybe not the easiest for you,” he answered.
And he was definitely right about that. It was a hundred and forty degrees up in that attic. And there was only about two and half feet of clearance between the floor and the roof, which meant I had to shimmy from one end of the house to the other on my back as I pulled that wire across. Now, this would have been bad enough, but it was actually even worse because the entire space was insulated using those pink fiberglass rolls with the brown paper backs that are installed with the fiberglass side facing up — you know, towards me.
I was only up there for about fifteen minutes, but it felt a whole lot longer than that. When I finally came back down to a less hostile environment, I was drenched in sweat and covered in dust, which combined to form a kind of glue that made all of those little fiberglass shards stick to me, which then made me itch like my skin was on fire. And that was just the first of many times I had to do this — and other tasks that were equally as enjoyable — over the course of that long, hot summer.
One day we driving home (after I’d climbed down from yet another hot attic, or emerged from a dark and murky basement crawlspace, or pried my shoes off a hot tar roof, or something of that ilk) and I’d finally had enough. I unleashed a litany of complaint at my dad about my job responsibilities.
After letting me vent for a while, he finally decided say something, which, as I recall, was along the lines of: “Look, I understand. I’ve been there. But sometimes you just have to do what needs doing even when it’s tough.” And while that was pretty much the end of that conversation between him and me, it was just the beginning of the one inside my own head.
I realized that while my summer job wasn’t the greatest in some ways, I only had to do it for twelve weeks out of the year. My father, on the other hand, had to do my job and his job for the other forty weeks; and he’d been doing my job and his job every week for about twenty years before I was old enough to be his helper. Besides, I got to spend a lot of quality time with dad learning about the work he did and why it mattered so much to him. It gave me a whole new perspective on what made him tick.
Before that summer, I saw my father when he went off to work in the morning and I saw him when he got home from work at night, but I didn’t see any of what he did in between. And having the chance not only to witness that, but also to experience a little bit of it myself, was a real eye opener for me. I finally understood why he took such pride in his work, and why his hands were always all cut up and why he fell asleep on the couch before nine most nights.
It also dawned on me that he wasn’t asking anything of me that he hadn’t done and wasn’t willing to do himself; that he wasn’t trying to convince me that the job was any better than it was; and that he wasn’t diminishing the difficulty of doing it. He was simply stating the reality of the situation: the job isn’t always pleasant and it isn’t always easy; someone needs to do that job and that someone is you; and I get what you’re going though because I’ve experienced it myself.
“A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master,” is what Jesus says at the start of today’s gospel reading; and, once you cut through all of the strange ancient language about slaves and masters, and teachers and disciples, he’s basically saying the same thing to his apostles that my father said to me.
Because we’ve heard Jesus’s story before, we know how the details of his life, death and resurrection are going to unfold, but it’s important to remember that these apostles don’t know a lot of this yet. Up to this point, they’ve pretty much just witnessed Jesus preaching and teaching and performing a few miracles, and they probably thought that all of this was pretty cool. So when Jesus invites them to follow him, they accept the invitation without really knowing all that they’re in for.
It’ll be another three chapters before they see Jesus being rejected in his hometown synagogue, and six chapters before he lets them know that part of this whole being the messiah thing is “that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” But today is really the first time that Jesus explains to his apostles that discipleship, while it is necessary and satisfying work, is full of challenges too. And that’s the whole point of Jesus’s speech.
Unfortunately, though, it’s a point that can get lost amidst some of the wild things that Jesus says here, and I kind of get that; all of his talk about fearing the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell, and of him not bringing peace but a sword, and setting family member against family member is pretty heavy stuff.
But we need to take a wider perspective and consider that Jesus — the Prince of Peace who blessed the peacemakers just a few chapter earlier — didn’t come here bearing an actual sword, and that this vocal advocate for loving God and our neighbor doesn’t really want us to hate our own family.
What I’m saying is that, while Jesus always speaks the truth, he shouldn’t always be taken literally. He’s speaking provocatively here in order to make a point — which, as I said earlier, is this: while an invitation to do the work of discipleship is a wonderful gift, it’s one that will come with challenges and require sacrifices. Said slightly differently, to paraphrase theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Grace may be free but it certainly ain’t cheap.”
Jesus understands (better than anyone) that living into the gospel is always going to make some people very mad (if you’re doing it right, anyway). And the fact is, the decision to follow Jesus — to care for people at the margins, to welcome the stranger, to love God and your neighbor in a world where everyone is your neighbor — really did strain a lot of relationships way back then, and we all know that it continues to do so today.
So, is Jesus telling his followers to alienate themselves from their families as general rule? The answer to that question would be “no.” What he is saying is that being a disciple will inevitably put you at odds with some folks (perhaps even those with whom you’re closest); and if you’re left to choose between living the gospel, on the one hand, or conforming to familial and societal expectations that are contrary to the gospel, on the other hand, then the decision a true disciple would make is pretty clear — not easy, by any means, but clear.
At this point in the story, the apostles are just starting to get a sense of how hard this work is going to be — and, for some reason, they decide to keep doing it anyway. We’ve been reading these stories for a few thousand years now; we know what’s going to happen to Jesus next; and we know what’s going to happen to his disciples as they go into the world do the work that they have been called to do. And knowing all of this, we marvel at their commitment. But what about ours?
We gather here every single week to worship God, to celebrate our relationships with God and one another, and that’s all well and good. But make no mistake about it: part of worshipping God and celebrating our relationship with God means discerning — with eyes and ears wide open — what God is calling us to do in our place and time, and deciding for ourselves whether we are ready and willing and able to incur what Bonhoeffer would call “the cost of discipleship.”
So, what do you say — are you in?
After all, Jesus isn’t really asking us to anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.