Texts: Psalm 77; Luke 9: 51-62
In the Louvre hangs a famous painting of one of the quintessential conflicts of loyalty. Following the suicide of Lucretia after she had been raped by the dictatorial king Tarquin the Proud, Lucius Junius Brutus and the dead Lucretia’s husband Collatinus overthrew Tarquin and established the Roman Republic in 508 BCE. However, Brutus’ two sons Titus and Tiberius were drawn into a royalist conspiracy to overthrow the Republic and Brutus sentenced them to death. Faced with a conflict of loyalty to his principles and to his family, Brutus chose the principle of republican rule.
His was not the first instance in which faced with conflicting loyalties, a person chose principle over family, nor has it been the last. Indeed, when Jesus tells his disciples to let the dead bury their dead and that anyone who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God, he is telling us to abandon what we might consider our most fundamental object of loyalty -- our families. Jesus never preached a soft gospel full of warm fuzzies. His call was never for the soft at heart.
During our lives, most of us have faced conflicting loyalties, though very few, I daresay, have faced one as terrible as did Brutus. Families have often found themselves divided over critical issues; sometimes, they have been issues that involve differences of opinion. Benjamin Franklin and his son William, the Royal Governor of New Jersey, split on the issue of American independence, leading to an irreparable break between the two.
Remember the line from 1776 when Ben asks, “How is the little bastard?” It referred not just to the circumstances of his son’s birth but to his disdain for his son’s choices. William, held prisoner during most of the war, left for England in exile with other loyalists; father and son saw each other only once afterwards.
Our conflicts, our divided loyalties, run deep within our Nation and within our own families although most of them have not led to such irreparable breaks. We don’t like those conflicts and often we try to gloss over them or actually deny their existence, but they exist. As Garth Brooks, the American country singer, sang, the deepest conflicts are not between people but lie deep within one’s soul. And these are the conflicts that can be the most destructive for they force us to question our ideals, our commitments, even, at times, our faith.
How do we -- how should we -- deal with the internal war that sometimes rages within us? How do we make our choices? That question determines what our choices actually end up being. In some areas, we can draw guidance from the Gospels but in some of the most fundamental areas, we are not given guidance but merely told to choose whether we will follow this itinerant preacher whom many considered mad, including members of his own family, or whether we will stay to bury our dead.
The Psalmist captures this conflict within. We cry out to God to still the raging that is within us. We mediate and search our spirits. There are times we feel so alone, even abandoned by God. This is certainly what the Psalmist sings ever so plaintively. But then, he tells us there is hope for relief from this sense of abandonment when we fix our gaze on God -- sometimes.
But what when we find no relief? Then we are told to remember the mighty deeds of God in the past. But, to be honest, we must ask if our memories of those deeds serve us in the present. Sometimes they do, but what when they fail? Memories of times past may not be the best way to help us resolve our conflicts.
Our conflicts can run really deep forcing us to make uncomfortable, even terrible, choices. Families and churches have been torn apart by such conflicts. In his study of over 2500 congregations, my Hartford Seminary professor David Roozen wrote that 75 percent of Christian churches face conflict over a variety of issues including vision, goals, scope of mission, in addition to basic personality conflicts within congregations.
About a third of these congregations categorized those conflicts as serious leading to the loss of members or a pastor. Old First has certainly faced those conflicts when it supported an outreach ministry to persons with AIDS and declaring itself an inclusive community for all. Unfortunately, his study only had the statistics. The question remains how churches develop after the outcomes of such conflicts.
Church conflicts reflect our internal ones, such as how we look at our own personal call to mission, to following the way that Jesus preached. I am the first to admit that I face a whole host of internal conflicts from the call I see in this morning’s reading. There are times I put my hand to the plow and look back; I have not left the dead to bury their dead. These internal struggles are part of what it means to be human, to be thinking sentient beings. It doesn’t make them any easier, though.
The early Christian communities of the first and second centuries faced many of these same issues. Working on the belief that the Parousia, or the return of the Christ to earth, was imminent, people sold their goods, held everything in common and abstained from marriage; however, when that did not happen, believers adjusted and began to live more normal lives. But we still face the internal conflict of living as if God’s kingdom was immediate and the demands of the world because we are still left with these hard sayings of Jesus. And we just cannot brush them aside.
So, coming back to our internal conflicts, we still have to search for guidance to help us live through them for, in reality, many of them are never really resolved. We balance, we struggle, we pray, we deliberate, and at some point we make choices. We can only hope that the choices we make are consonant and consistent with the essence of who we really are and that our essence is within the framework of God’s call to live loving all as our neighbors.
Let us pray: Holy Inspirer of our deepest and most heartfelt thoughts, help us to face our inner conflicts and to look at them in light of the life of Jesus the Christ who gave his all so bring your kingdom of peace and justice to fruition. Amen.