April 7, 2020 The Spring of our Discontent Scripture: Matthew 22: 15 – 22
Holy Week 2020 Tuesday
Years ago, I was heavily influenced by Will Campbell, a self-described “Baptist minister from the South,” a description he used to differentiate himself from Southern Baptist ministers who supported segregation and racial violence against African Americans. Campbell called himself a “country preacher,” but he wasn’t like any country preacher I’d ever met anywhere!
Over the years, Campbell developed some strange relationships. He was friends with Ku Klux Klansmen and radical Black activists (“Jesus said love people, he didn’t say check out their politics and morals first”). He asked a group of white ministers once, after a group of Klansmen had shot and killed some civil rights protestors, “Have you visited those guys in jail?” When none of the ministers answered, he said something to the effect of, “Jesus said ‘I was in prison and you visited me.’ Did you think that everyone in prison was going to look like Jesus?”
Campbell did weddings with one big difference. They went like this: he asked the bride and groom if they had the marriage license; next, he asked them who the legal witnesses were, and had them sign the license; finally, he folded the license and put it in his coat pocket, and said, “We have rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; let us render unto God the things that are God’s.” Then, the wedding proceeded.
I don’t always agree with Campbell; what I like about him is that he makes me think about faith in ways other than the ways I learned it. He challenges me to think outside the lines, sort of like Jesus does. Our problem is that we have read Jesus so many times and adopted a certain opinion about what he means that fits with what makes us comfortable. We forget that when Jesus said, “Give the emperor what is the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” everybody around him gasped and waited for the curtain to fall right then and there. You see, when Caesar is also God, then differentiating the two is a federal offense!
We walk this familiar road this Holy Week, bravely, because we’ve walked it before. We’re comfortable because the stories are etched into our lives, and we know how it ends: with a new beginning on the first Easter! It’s a challenge to us to try and take off our “Easter glasses” and see these stories as they unfolded for the first time. What does it mean to us to give to God what is God’s?
I think maybe Jesus is calling all of us to decide what, Who, we put first. That can make us awfully uncomfortable, as it did those who lived this story as it unfolded. It’s not all sweetness and light; there were reasons why Jesus had to die, and they weren’t all theological. But in times like these, remembering who is in charge gives us hope.
Prayer: Loving God, open our imaginations so that we can walk with the first followers of Jesus and observe in a new light the wideness of his teachings and the possibility that we can still be changed by him to be the people You want us to be, in his holy name we ask this, amen.
About jamiebrame
Greetings, fellow earthlings. I'm the retired Program Director at Christmount, the national retreat, camp, and conference center of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), in Black Mountain, NC. From September 2019 through October, 2020, I served Timberlake Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Lynchburg, VA, as interim minister. After taking more than a year off, First Christian Church (DoC), Wilson, NC, offered me the position of Interim Minister, beginning May 10, 2022.
Originally from Eden, NC, I graduated from John Motley Morehead High School, earned a BA in Religion and Philosophy at Atlantic Christian College (now Barton College), and eked out a Master of Divinity from the Divinity School at Duke University. I served, in various positions, churches (part time and full time) in North Carolina and Georgia, and have lived in Black Mountain, NC, since 1989. I married Renae in 1992 (she refers to these years as "looooooooooong" years.
I've spent the past 50 years or so trying to practice Christian contemplative prayer with some touches of Zen meditation to help the journey along. Married to a wife who is much holier than I am, I am fortunate to learn from her daily about how to do this thing called spirituality. Being an ordained minister doesn't make me holy (but occasionally, as you'll read, a little sanctimonious, so forgive me in advance!); but I hope that I put my education to good use.
I'd love to be considered a spiritual teacher, but I know myself too well to claim that. While I do a bit of teaching, I think the best teaching we do is when we remain silent (the old desert abba said something like, "if you won't learn from my silence, you won't learn from my talking"). But silence shouldn't turn into quietism, and we do have to speak out and act for justice and fairness and equality for all.
I frequently ask myself the question, "Does it matter?" about the major - and minor - issues of the day. What I think matters: love for God, equality, fairness, loving our neighbor, feeding hungry people, housing homeless ones, clothing naked ones, and especially caring for children; basically, caring for those who have some trouble caring for themselves. AND our relationship with God.
What doesn't matter: what you think of me. I'm not very Christ-like. You won't hear me talking about all the things I do for others, or all the things I do for God - I was taught that It's not about me, and using good works to get attention for myself isn't what Christian faith is about - look up "narcissism" on Google. I'm not sure Jesus thinks it matters much that I am like him or not, but I do. The old story from the rabbis is probably apropo: when I am hauled up before God at the end of time, God isn't going to ask me why I wasn't more like someone else: I will be asked why I wasn't more like me. The rabbis tell the story better.
I'm still a work in progress, as Renae will attest to.
Finally, I just hope that something you read here will make you think. Use what you can, ignore the rest. Go read some of the desert saints. Read the classics. Take care of people, never point to yourself, and don't follow me: I'm just hoping to be one more signpost to God.
And as one friend reminded me the week before I left Christmount, "It matters."
Oh, and my favorite color is probably blue, and I love cats, and I love my wife's music. I don't like beets.
Does It Matter 