Today is Father’s Day, a greeting card holiday which never gets quite the attention in our church or culture that we give to Mother’s Day. A parish I served some years ago was very big on Mother’s Day. Year after year on this Sunday the ushers used to hand a rose to every woman who entered the church. Every time I would rather facetiously ask what we were going to give the men on Father’s Day. I never received an answer, and so one year I took matters into my own hands: I drove to Costco, bought several cases of those small spray cans of WD-40, and instructed the ushers to present one can to each man as cheerfully and lovingly as they had the roses to the women. While the ushers were a bit grumpy about this practice, the guys actually liked it. I left that parish before I could follow up the next year distributing gift rolls of duct tape.
In our family we don’t make a big deal about greeting card holidays, but we do observe them. So I want personally to thank the people who put our lectionary together for giving me these inspiring Gospel words to work with on Father’s Day:
For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
Thank you, Jesus, for those heartwarming words. And watch your back at the family cookout.
Luckily, there are some other sayings to work with today, so I don’t have to spend all my time up here telling you to beware of your relatives. Today’s Gospel (Matthew 10:24-39) is a collection of sayings loosely following from last week’s passage in which Jesus commissioned the twelve disciples and sent them into the world preaching the good news. Although one of our verses today has Jesus telling us that we are worth more than many sparrows the core of this passage seems to lie in its final words: “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
Precious sparrows and heavy crosses. I’d like to spend the next few minutes thinking with you about what taking up the cross entails for us Christians and what being worth more than many sparrows might mean.
Some of you might be old enough to remember my late friend George Barrett, former Bishop of Rochester, New York and a Southern California native who returned here to Santa Barbara on retirement in the 1970s. George used to tell the story of being on TV in Rochester back in the days of lavaliere mics. During a break a technician came over to him to see if they could rearrange the microphone which was banging up against his large pectoral cross. “What’s the problem?” George asked. The technician responded, “It’s the cross. It’s causing interference.” To which George replied, “It always does”.
It is easy to think of the cross and the suffering it represents as the ants at the picnic of faith. We Episcopalians like to talk about God as the author of nice, beautiful things: sunsets, flowers, puppies, and the like. The church I mentioned with the Mother’s Day roses changed the name of its Sunday School to “Department of Sunshine and Rainbows” after I left. That’s greeting card religion in a nutshell.
The cross causes interference. It gets in the way of our comfortable notions of God and how God might love and care for us. Except for Good Friday, we tend to push the Passion narrative and all biblical references to suffering into the background. Those prosperity gospel preachers (and many theologically progressive clergy) won’t go anywhere near the cross. It is unseemly and irrational. So when Jesus tells his disciples, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell,” he is alluding not only to his own date with the cross but also to what German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer aptly called “the cost of discipleship”.
Not many of us will be called to go to the cross with Jesus or the gallows with Bonhoeffer. But many of us will be asked, sooner or later, which side we are on. There are two kinds of suffering: one we take on for a principle, the other just comes with being human. Jesus knew that God was with him even at the cross. All of us will experience suffering we have neither expected nor deserved. Suffering is built into being human. Everyone experiences it, and all the world’s religions seek to address it. If the cross has not yet come into your life, just wait. It will. God’s promise is not that suffering will pass us by. God’s promise is that we will know God’s love and presence even in whatever trial may come our way. Good Friday and Easter are built in to the human experience.
First the cross and now the sparrows. Here again is this saying in the middle of our passage:
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.
Jesus is saying two things here: the first is that you and I undervalue these tiny birds. If you can get two of them for a penny (the price charged to poor people who couldn’t afford more expensive animals to sacrifice in Temple worship), they must not be worth very much. Yet, says Jesus, “not one of them will fall to the ground” apart from God. Translation: Even these tiny, seemingly worthless, birds are precious to God.
And then Jesus dares to tell us that we “are of more value than many sparrows”. That sounds like an insult, but it is merely a quirk of translation. The word Matthew uses here is πολλῶν, a Greek adjective meaning “many, much, numerous, a great amount”. πολλῶν is the same word that gives us “hoi polloi”, meaning “the masses”. Jesus is telling us that we are worth a gigantic number of sparrows, too numerous to count. What this saying adds up to is something like this: “Each one of these two-bit birds is indescribably precious to God. And you are worth an infinite number of these cheap but precious creatures.”
If the first point reminds us that suffering is a part of life and the consequent struggles we encounter are inevitable, the second point pretty much overwhelms the first. Yes, you will suffer, and yes, even in the midst of and face of that suffering you will be in the loving sustaining care of a God who will not even let a sparrow fall to the ground. Those tiny birds are worth everything, and you are infinitely more precious than all of them put together.
I don’t have any WD-40 or duct tape to distribute this morning. Handing each of you a sparrow would be both inconvenient and messy. So on this fourth Sunday of Pentecost, let’s leave it at this: human life will always be a mixed bag, but as Emerson said, “The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overrun the merit ever since.” Precious as we are in God’s estimation, the cross will continue to cause interference for each of us. But we have no option other than to take it up and follow the Jesus who went there himself, who knows we are precious, and who promises that he will be with us even when it seems as if no one else seems to care. Amen.
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