Proper XVI                                               August 27, 2006

                                                              Seminarian Jon Chalmers

 

  Have you ever had something like the following happen to you?

 

  Your friend is having an emotional crisis and it looks like you are going to be on the phone for the next several hours, and you have a big work presentation the next day.

  or

  Your pregnant wife, is "starving," there is a full refrigerator, but "no food in the house" and she is going to starve unless she gets a giant bag of Doritos. Now.

  or

  Your child waited until the last minute, and needs help to complete a fairly complicated revolutionary war diorama that is due tomorrow,

  or

  You eat your fifth piece of strawberry rhubarb pie because your partner's mother mistakenly thinks that when you said "rhubarb, my favorite" that you were serious.

  or

  Your elderly father needs constant care and there is no one else to do it.

 

  We've all had times like these, moments when we think, "That's it, I'm not doing this anymore." However you want to couch it, maybe as a guilty or fleeting moment or perhaps a compelling and dominant thought: THAT'S IT! NO MORE! I'M DONE!

 

  We might call these times relationship deal-breakers. Today's Gospel is also about choice and deal-breakers. Something had happened: Jesus had taught something that caused many of his followers to leave him. There was something that he was saying that was too difficult, too hard to believe, perhaps even offensive or scandalous, for them to continue to follow him. It was a moment where they said, "That's it. No more. We can't accept this any more." He had arrived at a place where they could not follow,

and many of his disciples, people who had loved him and believed in him, then left him.

 

  Ironically, when Jesus fed the 5000 at the beginning of his work in Capernaum there seemed to be no shortage of those who would follow, so long as he would feed them. They were there with him when he said gave his great self-revelation of identity. They were there listening to his discourse on the bread of life, saying that feeding on him will give them eternal life. These were not rabble or strangers; these were his own people.

 

  However, by the end of this talk about the Bread of Life and at the beginning of our reading something he said, in modern parlance, was a deal-breaker. It caused people who had followed him to say "no more," to say that his claim had pushed past their credibility. I'd love to know what that deal-breaker was. We know from the text that it was something that people had to believe rather than do. But we cannot tell from the text what the critical point was, what broke the camel's back of belief.

 

  And then I wonder what would make me lose my faith in Jesus? Are there deal-breakers for me in Christian teaching? Do I say that believing something is too hard for me, that it defies my sense of the proper or reasonable, and then simply choose to walk away?

 

  For many of us, the reading from Ephesians may be just that same sort of difficult teaching that caused many of the disciples to leave. The epistle begs us to question whether this reading is something that should be resisted because of our Christian faith

or is it something that needs to be considered and embraced?

 

  On its face, the fact that Paul is counseling submission and subjection is hard for much of modern society to take seriously, and to many it is offensive. We are a culture that highly values individual freedom and independence and we find subjection to another to be an intolerable act that is a violation of one's dignity. To be subject to another suggests acquiescing to the paternalistic demands of fundamentalist family values. And certainly this passage and others like it have been used, and continue to be used, by those who wishing to concretize a first century understanding of gender roles    twenty centuries later.

 

  But perhaps upon further consideration this reading is not the deal breaker of Christian faith that we might first consider it to be. Paul enjoins both spouses to be subject to one another and gives it as a model for the relationship between Christ and his Church. When we take appropriate account of Paul's first century environment, with its less than modern understanding of the value and role of women, we see rather not the blunt tool of patriarchy but an expression of radical love and commitment that can be applied in many of our relationships with others. For the first century and the twenty-first, it shows us how to model Christ in our own lives. Accounting for the archaic expression of marital expectations, it is an injunction to be subject to one another, not out of fear, or force, or law, but in love and in Christ.

 

  Being subject to another is not something that is contrary to human individuality and dignity. Rather, the very act of choosing to put someone else's needs before one's own allows us to pattern our lives upon Jesus. Jesus' passion and death give us the ultimate example of submission, a submission based on love and freely chosen. Likewise, part of the responsibility of being Christian in the world is submitting to God and to each other. But it is harder, for me at least, to think about this than it is to actually do it. Put another way, being subject to another is within the definition of love.

 

  I, too, like to think of myself as an autonomous individual, subject to no one, who gives freely of my own choice to the people that I care about. I would like to think of myself as a sort of John Wayne character riding across the landscape of my life. It is, I admit, a sin of pride but beyond that it is simply not true. It's a fanciful and utopian view of my own reality. In fact it just doesn't work. For in order to live into that role of being totally free one has to slip the bounds of love and live as if love doesn't make a claim on you and your life.

 

  Anyone would be justified in thinking that a person who has been married and lived in community would understand that sometimes you do something for a person not out of conscious choice but because it is what love demands. But I'm not that smart. It took caring for my 17 month old son, David, for this to really sink in.

 

  For example: It's late, call it a Sunday night after Compline on a day that started with Morning Prayer, a dark and story night on the Connecticut Shore, and I've just driven home looking forward to a hot shower and a warm bed. I open the door expecting to hear the sounds of a house asleep and instead am greeted with an ear-piercing, pulse pounding wail of very unhappy toddler. Rather than try to quote him, allow me to translate and paraphrase: "Mommy, Daddy, Fix this. Now." The late night phone call to the pediatrician yields a prescription and right back out the door I go to the all night pharmacy.

 

  Did I have a choice in going back out to get the drugs? Maybe, but only in the most academic sense. Could this have been a relationship deal breaker? Could there be a relationship deal-breaker? No. Love makes the choice inevitable. And anyone who doesn't think this is subjection to another hasn't been on the receiving end of a toddler's demand.

 

  And this, I suggest, is the idea of the difficult reading. One that, after accounting for the first century cultural expectations, becomes a lot less hard. With our communities, neighbors, friends, partners, spouses and children, we are called to serve others, and give of ourselves out of love, sometimes at a personal cost. That kind of radical love makes us willing to yield our own desires to "love one another as Christ loved the Church." There are no relationship deal-breakers with Christ, if only because as Peter confessed, there is no other way. And as hard and challenging as it may be sometimes to put someone else's needs before our own, it is the way to eternal life.