What Matters

 Several hundred destroyers were mass-produced during World War II and sent quickly into service.  Pictures of the crew of the Laffey showed surprisingly young faces.  The captain was barely in his thirties.  Most of the crew was in their twenties.  Seeing the sickbay was especially moving, since my dad had spent much of his time in World War II as a Pharmacist’s Mate in one of the Laffey’s sister destroyers.  He was only 25 years old when he left his home and boarded the USS Ordronaux leaving the east coast for duty in the Mediterranean.

 On the decks of that destroyer, I thought about all that my dad and thousands of young men like him had left behind. He left his work delivering Coca-Colas. He left his family, the small town where he had grown up and continued to live.  He left father and mother, not knowing that his dad would die before his return.  He left his friends, his six brothers, and there must have been a girl in the picture, though shortly after his return home, he met my mother, and so we never heard about previous girlfriends.  War focused the lives of that generation; each soldier or sailor left behind a lot.

 I guess sacrifice has always been part of the cost of war.  This weekend’s celebration recalls, if only vaguely, the signing of one of our nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence. You may remember that after proclaiming the justice of their proposed independence as the now former colonies of England, the signers of the declaration ended its rhetoric with a sobering personal commitment to the cost of their independence:  “…we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”  In Philadelphia that July, the signers of that famous document, all of them wealthy, and with much to lose, gave their word knowing that they would likely give much more.

 I suppose that kind of sacrifice for our country’s birth, and the continuing sacrifices that generations afterward have made, come to mind when I read how David is made king of all Israel after he and others have made similar sacrifices in the war that established their claim to a land formerly controlled by the Philistines and their army.  The leaders of the tribes of Israel call on David to become king.  Though he is only thirty, he has made the sacrifices that wall calls for:  he has left home and family, and now knows a larger family, the people who call on his leadership.  He goes to Jerusalem, the highest point in the land, the strongest city, and makes it his own.  Though it is called, to this day, Jerusalem, it is also known by its preferred nickname, “The city of David.”  David is king, but becoming so has not been easy or cheap.  He has paid a price; he has made sacrifices along the way.  Soldiers – and sailors, too – know the personal costs of warfare.  No nation is built without many people paying a price.

 And not just nations.  Movements, too, call for a commitment that carries a price.  Even the movement of the heart offered by Jesus, the traveling rabbi, demand some sacrifice.  At the beginning of the lesson from Mark that we hear today, Jesus leaves his own home.  They see him as a boy, not as a leader.  The lesson says that his own people derided him.  Speaking of the people of his hometown, Mark tells us that Jesus “was amazed at their unbelief.”  So he, too, pays a cost.

 No wonder, then, that Jesus immediately warns his followers that they will have power, but that they must not be distracted by possessions.  “He ordered them… [strong language, don’t you think?] …  He ordered them to take nothing for their journey [of sharing the faith] except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts….” “Leave them behind,” Jesus seems to be saying.  “You won’t need these things, they will be a distraction.”

 The fireworks we enjoy every year about this time call us to remember the roar and the fire of cannon and rifle.  Implicit in these explosions is the cost of freedom itself:  the heart of our country is worth more than accumulated wealth, what the signers called “our fortunes,” and worth even more than life itself. 

 The life of faith, says Jesus, is far more worthy, yet every bit as costly.  He has already left him and family.  His disciples will do the same.  And he tells them to leave bread, and bag, and money.  Just leave them behind.  They are a distraction.

 What else, I wonder, does the gospel of Jesus invite us to leave behind – old hierarchies of class, or race, or nationality, perhaps?  Or even a better understanding of financial stewardship? A friend of mine told me of the family that gave up their Friday-night pizzas so that they could contribute to his church’s capital campaign, and when the youngest child in the family brought a pizza box to worship and told the congregation about their plan, others saw that our gospel sometimes demands sacrifices on their part, too.

 Describing a similar turning moment in a different church, Bishop Will Willimon notes the transformative power of our message on all of us:  “Sometimes,” Willimon says, “Christians underestimate what a radical challenge they are to the world in their ‘theology of relinquishment.’  In a success-oriented, acquisitive society, for a [person] to stand up and testify to the ability to let go, to launch out to give up, well, it’s downright subversive.”  (“Take Nothing,” William H. Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Volume 37, Number 3, page 6.)

 I agree.  Yes, there’s “subversive” power in the gospel of Christ.  For Christ calls us to the same kind of deep-down, life-on-the line commitment like that commitment to freedom to which the founders gave themselves, and the whole new country:  “our lives, our fortunes, and … our honor.”

 As we make our witness for Christ, from this moment on, what does the living Jesus Christ in our midst invite us to leave behind?  Old ways of looking at ourselves, of course.  We’re no longer powerless, but gifted, redeemed, and purposeful. We’re invited to see ourselves differently.  And we’re invited to see others differently, too.  Look around as you come forward to receive this holy meal today. This is a radical understanding of a whole new notion of community, one described by the apostle Paul as wholly egalitarian.  Here none are better than another, neither male nor female, slave nor free, citizen nor immigrant, wealthy nor poor, cultured nor crude, well dressed nor shabby, black nor white.  No, this table we share is a radical statement of all those distinctions left behind, with bread and bag and money.  None of that matters.  Hear how one scholar describes the radically unusual table of our Lord.  In that early New Testament time when the church was born, says John Dominic Crossan, “A feast could be and often was a ritual of social discrimination and overt humiliation.” Thus he described the world that Jesus found. Gladly, that hierarchy was discarded.  Crossan describes the difference in the early Christian meals.  The “… earliest Eucharistic [meal was] a true meal, called the Lord’s Supper because it was the style of share-meal created by Jesus as a meal-symbol of equality within a community that believed in God’s ownership of food as the material basis of life itself.”  (Crossan, God and Empire:  Jesus Against Rome, Then and now, pages 169 and 170.)

 Come to the table, then.  It will cost something.  You will be asked to leave behind all the various “…isms” that separate us from each other, because they separate us from God, too.  And you will be asked to give yourself to a costly, but worthy journey, the life of faith.

 I promise you this: the life of faith is worth the cost.  Every penny of it, every day, including today. 

 Amen.