Freedom to Follow

Proper 8C

“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” As a mother who has raised two sons, I am well versed in the primal human desire to incinerate things. But Jesus immediately rebuked James and John for suggesting that the inhospitable Samaritan village be destroyed, and the disciples continued towards Jerusalem without invoking further pyrotechnic effects along the way.

And since you and I would never blow up a village, except perhaps in video games, we too can move right along to the more interesting questions of foxes and fathers and following that are raised by today’s Gospel, right? Except that… we really can’t. Because in order to follow Jesus—to follow him into uncertainly, to follow him even when it puts us in conflict with our other ties and traditions—we first need to be free. And unexamined anger—of the kind that would secretly or publicly have us wanting to incinerate villages— is one of our most pervasive spiritual prisons.

Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian pastor who has written with great humor and wisdom about the spiritual life, observed that “Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

By that measure, there are a lot of skeletons at the feast of our common life right now. It’s a scary time in history. England just voted to leave the EU knowing that it would rain down economic fire, we are in the midst of an especially nasty election season, and there’s an extraordinary amount of weaponized anger out there. Most of it not manifested through firepower, thankfully. Although I do wonder if our evident unwillingness to address the epidemic of gun violence perpetrated against the most vulnerable—children, students, and LGBTQ people—is related to our inability to engage anger in healthy ways.

While summoning fire and shooting semi-automatic weapons may be particularly unhealthy ways to deal with anger, there are also plenty of polite ways to wreak havoc on people we’re angry with. We can scapegoat them and—if we have political or positional power—punish them, as our justice system has been know to do with people of color. We can call them out and cause them shame, as our culture has been known to do with woman and queer people. We can troll them online. There are flameless ways to summon fire down from heaven.

So little wonder that Paul included anger in the list of works of the flesh, right alongside fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. “I am warning you,” wrote Paul to the church in Galatia, “those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

And as Jesus himself pointed out, what’s at stake in our everyday decisions is no less than the kingdom of God, for which “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back” is fit. By the ninth chapter of Luke, the stakes have gotten pretty high for Jesus’ ministry. He has set his face towards Jerusalem—where prophets go to be executed—as Jesus himself observed. So it matters whether his disciples are free enough to follow him.

But on the other hand, remember that when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, he himself was plenty angry at—for example—those who were exploiting the Temple. Which suggests to me that what Paul had in mind—when he listed anger among the sinful desires of the flesh—was a particular kind of anger. That is, the anger that would cause us to smack our lips over grievances long past—as Beuchner poetically described it—or the anger that would do damage to other people by raining down fire or its contemporary equivalents, or the anger that would hold us back from following Jesus.

Read within the overall context of our scriptures, anger is not a bad thing: indeed it’s often prophetic stance. One of our faithful Old Testament students, Rhoda Benedetti—who has herself been something of a professional prophet for justice in her legal career—reminded me this week of God’s words to the despondent Job: “Pour out the overflowings of your anger… look on all who are proud and bring them low; tread down the wicked where they stand.” That’s anger… righteous anger in the service of justice.

The difference seems to be whether our anger causes further damage, or whether it disrupts the damage-doing. Does our anger increase the number of victims—that’s the anger that binds us—or does it act in solidarity with victims and increase the possibility of reconciliation? That’s the anger that frees us. Recall that even the Holy Spirit herself was known to appear as fire from heaven. But rather than destroying, the flame-like tongues of Pentecost gave the gift of communication.

This week I was implicated in both kinds of anger. A colleague angrily posted his frustration about something he perceived as a failure of the Episcopal Diocese of California on facebook, tagging everyone he could think of, including me. He was actually inaccurate in the facts of his post, which annoyed me even more. So of course I went straight to the sinful desires of the flesh, and started imagining how to get back at him online. For the record, I want to say that I didn’t do it—one of the fruits of the Spirit being self control, of course—but my friend Molly did something far better. She listened to the deeper longing for justice in his angry message, empathized with him, and assured she would show up at the Pride parade that he thought had been neglected by the diocese.

Well the San Francisco Pride parade is indeed happening at this very hour, and I—an employee of the diocese—am not there because I’m here. And I’m sorry to miss it because the Pride parade is a critically important statement of solidarity and empathy with people who have long been victimized, especially in the aftermath of the Pulse massacre. But the parade I’m called to be in this morning is the Eucharistic procession at St. Stephen’s.

For those of us who belong to the motley procession of Jesus followers, our parades happens in all sorts of venues. Starting with the dangerous road to Jerusalem. Martin Luther King and the Tiananmen Square protestors know about that kind of procession. But there are plenty of everyday Jesus movements that we can join in anytime: I think of the people in this congregation who take communion to the sick every Sunday, or our youth on mission trips, or the many who will line up at Target over the coming weeks to fill backpacks for students in Richmond.

When Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem, he also set the example for all of us to move out of our comfort zones into greater solidarity with the least, the last and the lost. Which means that we have to fearlessly examine what holds us back. And I think that’s what Paul had in mind when he enumerated the desires of the flesh. These are not so much character traits as they are compulsions, which we are invited to let go of in order that Christ may dwell in us and lead us. And fortunately the Spirit has given us other habits to cultivate in the place of our compulsions: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. May each of these be our walking meditation, as we step into the parade and practice the freedom of following Jesus.