Lent 2 | Conflict in Galilee | Matthew 12:22-32

*Preached at Grace North Church March 16, 2003.*

When I was a teenager, I was very active in my church's youth group. Every Sunday morning anywhere from 30 to 60 teenagers would crowd into one of the cattle barns which served our church for classroom space to hear the first of three sermons we would be the recipients of that day.

Now, when I say "sermon" I am talking about an altogether different animal than the one I am delivering now. Our sermons are rarely longer than 20 minutes. Skippy used to sit in the third row with a little flag that said "15 minutes" so that Fr. Richard would know when to stop preaching. That would never have flown at my old church, where the sermons were routinely an hour and a half long.

Our first sermon of the day, which was supposed to be a Sunday school class, was delivered by our pastor's son, Frankie, who was 21 years old, and working hard to be the spitting image of his father. He harangued us about purity, exhorted us to witness about the saving knowledge of Jesus to every person we met, and chastized us for not being half as holy as he was.

Frankie had an iron fist when it came to ruling the youth group. One of the most wonderful young couples in the youth group was Jose and Susan. One day Frankie asked them into his office and informed them that since Susan was white and Jose was Puerto Rican, it was an abomination before God for them to date or to marry, as they planned, as it was God's will to keep the races pure.

Did I mention that Frankie was from Texas? In any case, Susan and Jose obeyed, as did we all. After all, Frankie spoke for God, at least we thought he did, and we cowered in fear before his wrath.

Near the end of my association there-for my parents had put in a transfer to California in order to extract my sister and I from this church-I was fortunate enough to witness a bit of poetic justice-or was it divine justice? Hard to say. Anyway, the youth group endured endless sermons on the evils of the flesh, the dangers of sexual acitivity, and the peril of our immortal souls if we ever succumed to carnal temptation.

Then, one night, the pastor made a few phone calls. Frankie had not come home, and his parents were trying to find them. Frankie still lived at home with his folks, so this was not too surprising. Brother Frank Sr. called Frankie's girlfriend, but no one answered the phone. But one of our youth group members DID notice that Frankie's car was parked in front of his girlfriend's house VERY early in the morning.

The excretion hit the propeller, I can tell you. Like a foreshadowing of Oral Roberts, Frankie, once confronted with his "sin", confessed publicly, with tears and wailing and great gnashing of teeth. And like a modern-day Augustine, he only took responsibility up to a point-and then he blamed it on the woman. It was his girlfriend's fault, he told us! She is the infernal temptress that caused him to fall. She was the one who should be ostrocized and shunned, for woman is the root of all evil, after all. Yeeee-ah

I was a little wary of all this even back then. My take on it now is much different still. Today I see nothing improper about a 21-year-old red-blooded American young man with a healthy libido and fully-functional plumbing putting it to use in a responsible way, especially in the context of a loving and committed relationship, even if he IS a preacher.

The dark side of our Congregational heritage, however, is this very puritanism that seeks to separate our "animal" from our "spiritual" natures. The truth is, that this kind of thinking is bequethed to us by a very persistant Christian heresy known as Gnosticism, about which you have heard me preach before. Gnosticism says that spirit and matter are radically divorced, and that one has nothing to do with the other. In his first epistle, the apostle John in our reading today is repudiating these very heretics, who are insisting that Jesus could never have had an actual human body, because God's spirit would never mix with something so vile as matter.

Yet John's testimony was that Jesus was indeed a being of flesh and blood and that anyone who tells you different is a liar and not to be trusted. This is good advice, and I wish that Christian theologians, especially since the time of St. Augustine, had thought more deeply about the implications of this teaching, and had more aggressively acted to counter it. For indeed, the flesh and the spirit are not two entities at war with each other, as we have been led to believe, even by St. Paul.

The spirit is not the paragon of virtue, the pure entity that must be kept spotless, any more than the body a dirty, craven, and corrupt generator of lust, greed, and every profane passion. In fact, in my own experience, the Spirit may very well be the source of passion, because I'm usually so exhausted my body just isn't up to it!

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus refutes those who say he casts out demons in the name of Satan, since how could Satan cast himself out? A house divided against itself cannot stand, says Jesus, and these words open a kaliedescope of interpretations. For surely we see divided houses whereever we look in this story. The man plagued by a demon is certainly a divided house. He was probably not really inhabited by demons, but suffering from schizophrenia, or some other mental illness. In any case, this man has plagued by the warring factions of madness and sanity competing for dominance in his own head.

Those accusing Jesus were likewise living in divided houses, for Israel at the time was being pushed and pulled by the Sadduccees on the one hand, who held to the written Torah and a fixed tradition, and the Pharisees, who prized the oral Torah, and felt that tradition was a progressive and evolving entity.

St. Paul later went on to tell his churches that the flesh is at war with the spirit, setting up an entire tradition of houses divided against themselves, and almost insuring continuing dis-ease and conflict in his followers.

Jesus says that "he who does not gather with me scatters." The Sadduccees and Pharisees, the Paulines and the Puritans, in fact religious folk in general have done an awful lot of scattering. Perhaps it is time to call it like we see it, to say "enough" to the scattering and the division, and to begin the hard task of gathering.

I have come to discover in my own journey, that a large part of spiritual growth is making peace with my disparate parts. As Rilke writes, "We contain multitudes," but I do not believe that these multitudes necessarily need to be at each other's throats. Most aggression arises out of fear, and out of the inability to extend one's empathy to another. I suggest we begin by extending empathy to ourselves, calling a truce between our warring factions inside, and inviting all our disparate parts to sit down at the same table to talk things over.

It is not easy to make my inner world congruent with my outer reality. It's scary, for I am certain no one would like me if they REALLY knew what I was like. Likewise, we spend most of our spiritual lives sitting in the pews feeling like frauds. God can't really love us, because God knows who we REALLY are; although we can put one over on each other. So let's explode that myth right now. We're all fakes here, each and every one of us, if being a Christian means that we are somehow supposed to be paragons of virtue.

Fortunately, God does not foist upon us the same psychic violence we inflict on ourselves. God does not insist on purity, God does not ask us to divorce our animal from our spiritual natures. When Jesus said, "Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect," he was not speaking English, and "perfect" is entirely the wrong translation. The Greek renders this "teleios" which means not so much "perfect" as "complete," "whole"; in other words, embracing of all of our parts. "Be whole people, just as God is a whole being." God does not eschew any creature, but holds all in love, just as we should do.

For if we can succeed in holding all our inner multitudes in love, an amazing transformation will occur. Our inner advesaries will turn into inner allies. That temper you have always battled against will fight for you, not against you. That lust you struggle with can find appropriate erotic outlets rather than spurring you to act out in unhealthy and destructive ways.

What if you met those parts of yourself you despise with compassion and forgiveness? What if you made room for them at the table, and asked them what gifts they had to offer? My own experience tells me that if you can truly gather all of your disparate parts in love, there is nothing that can shake you. In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus promises us that if two make make peace under the same roof, they will say to the mountain, "move!" and it will move.

I'm afraid the church led by Br. Frank did not last long after our departure. Within two years it went from 500 in worship to less than a dozen. I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that the youth pastor could not keep his libidinous urges in check, but I think it had everything to do with preaching a religion that scattered and did not gather. Let us pray.

Jesus, when you walked among us in the flesh, you showed us how to be truly whole. You laughed and cried, you felt anger, and love, and as both God and human being you are the very image of disparate natures making peace in one house. Help us likewise to befreind our inner multitudes, to use their gifts for our good rather than spending them in inner turmoil. Help us to love all our disparate parts, even as you see all, and love us through and through. For you are God not of light only, but also of darkness, not of the spirit only, but also of matter, not of saints alone, but of every sinner, including each of us here. For we gather and serve you not to be made perfect, but to be made whole. Heal us, O great physician, and gather us in love. Amen.