Matthew 4:12-23
Choosing the Right Arc
James Sledge January
22, 2017
I
did not get down there for Martin Luther King Day last week, but his memorial
is one of my favorite spots. I especially like walking along and rereading his
quotes carved into the granite walls that arc along the memorial. One of my
favorites is, “We shall overcome because the
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Dr.
King was a pastor, but his status as civil rights icon means that many don’t
appreciate how much Christian faith drove his civil rights work. It was about
much more than people of color gaining the same fundamental right enjoyed by whites.
It was also a deeply Christian activity that sought to embody God’s kingdom,
God’s new day.
For
Dr. King, the hope that all people would someday be one was not rooted solely
in what is possible if human beings strive
hard enough. It was also rooted in the certainty of his faith that glimpsed a
day when all divisions were ended, when what the Apostle Paul wrote came fully to
pass. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
My
fondness for Dr. King, and for his quote on “the arc of the moral universe,”
caused me to do a double take when I happened upon an online column in The Washington Post with this quote. “The arc of the political universe is long,
and it doesn't have to bend toward progress or justice or anything else good.
It can point backwards if that's where we aim it.”[1]
The
column had the rather clunky title, “The United States might be the next Argentina,”
and it talked about how both countries were among the top ten richest a century
ago and thus attractive destinations for immigrants from Europe. But from there
the two diverged sharply. There never was an “Argentinian Dream” anything like
the American one, largely because of basic inequality. A few hundred families
controlled an agricultural economy and the government. “Argentina is ‘what America
might have looked’ like ‘if the South had won the Civil War and gone on to
dominate the North.’ Which is to say that it was a semi-feudal aristocracy
dependent on a steady supply of cheap labor.”[2]
The
columnist worries that growing inequality in America could help us trace an arc
more like the Argentinian one than the progress that has been a fixture in
American history. In economics or politics, he writes, progress is not
inevitable. It can bend the other way.
But
what of Dr. King’s arc, that faith grounded arc that trusts in God as ultimate author
of the future and seeks to live in ways that embody that future? I’m not at all
sure the two arcs are incompatible. The fact that God will ultimately bend
history to God’s desired end in no way means that human societies are not
capable of taking their culture in the opposite direction for years, decades, or
centuries. And in our gospel reading for this morning, Jesus says that getting
in sync with God’s arc will require a change of mind, heart, and direction.
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” says Jesus.
Unfortunately, centuries of use by the church have given the word “repent” an
overly negative sense. It’s often heard moralistically. “Stop being bad, and be
good.” And while it can mean that, its
more basic meaning is to change your mind. Jesus’ call is not a plea to stop
misbehaving and be good little boys and girls. Rather it is a call to changed
thinking and priorities and living that are in tune with God’s coming future.
I
think that’s why the gospel writers link Jesus’ call to repent with his calling
the first disciples. They go together. Getting in sync with the arc that bends
towards God’s future means following Jesus and learning an entirely new way of
living, one that is typically at odds with the ways of the world. That was true
in Jesus’ day and still is in ours.
The
story of Jesus calling those first disciples is familiar to many. Jesus walks
along the shore and sees a couple of fishermen using casting nets. Presumably
Simon and Andrew are men of little means and have no boat. Jesus calls them to
come with him and learn a new vocation of catching people. And they immediately
drop their nets and go with him. They just threw the nets away apparently.
Perhaps because they didn’t have that much invested in their fishing careers,
it was easier to drop everything. And as we learn the story of Jesus, it does turn
out that the more you have the harder it is to become his disciple.
The
next two disciples are better off. There is a boat, a family business that someday
will be theirs – Zebedee’s Seafood. But when Jesus calls, they drop everything
and follow.
There is some really big-time repenting
going on here. Not because Jesus is a vegan or has moral objections to fishing
as a career but because Jesus’ ways, the ways of God’s future, are strange and
different from the ways that these fishermen know. It will take months and
months of intensive training and internship for them to learn and change enough
to teach others. There will simply be no time for fishing.
______________________________________________________________________________
By
now, many of you who signed up for them have attended the first meeting of your
Renew Group. There are a number of hopes and purposes for these groups, but a big
one is to help one another listen for where God, where Jesus, is calling us as
a congregation. And if the gospel model holds true – and I’m convinced that it
does – that call will inevitably involve repenting, a change of mind, heart, direction.
And it will involve letting go, leaving some things behind. Not because they’re
bad or wrong, but because they get in the way of going with Jesus.
_______________________________________________________________________________
At this moment in history, I and many
others have a strong sense that there are forces at work in our world driving us
in a direction counter to the arc that bends toward justice, towards God’s
future. The growth of income disparity and inequality, fear and anger at racial,
religious, or sexual diversity, nostalgia for the white, Christian hegemony of
the 1950s, and the rise of tribalism and fear of the other are not compatible
with the arc Dr. King saw. Nor are they compatible with the call to follow
Jesus.
I
know that for some of you, this situation is cause for despair, but I wonder if
it is not an opportunity to witness. Right now, perhaps more than any time in
recent decades, the world needs people of faith to trace that arc that bends
toward justice, towards God’s future. And if we will turn, let go, and follow
Jesus, listening to his teachings and obeying them, he will show us the way.
And we will be the light to the world that we are meant to be.
[1]
Matt O’Brian in Wonkblog, “The United States might be the next Argentina,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/22/the-united-states-might-be-the-next-argentina/?utm_term=.f68da16c8c0b,
December 22, 2016.
[2]
Ibid., quoting Alan Beattie in The
Financial Times.
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