The Cohort of Impious Galileans

The Cohort of Impious Galileans--February 26, 2018

[Jesus said:] "Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." [Matthew 5:42]

I know.  I know.  I can hear it already.

Scarcely have the words come out of Jesus' mouth and we are looking for exceptions, hedges, and qualifiers.  Scarcely have we read Jesus' words here from the Sermon on the Mount and we are already protesting, "What about giving money to addicts--won't they just buy more drugs and booze with it?  What about the people who could be working and just lack the motivation to, you know, go get a job?  What about the people who should be spending their time providing for their kids instead of playing video games?  What about the people who will take advantage of people's generosity, or game the system?"

I know those questions arise like a reflex to Jesus' words here, because I have heard them plenty of times... and I have asked them, too.  They are not wrong questions, necessarily, to be asking. And certainly Jesus' point here isn't to just help us manage our middle-class guilt by instructing us to throw a few dollars at a panhandler once in a while so that we can sleep at night and tell ourselves we are "good, nice, respectable" people for having done so.  So, yeah, it's fair to raise the question, "How does Jesus' teaching here apply to situations where my willingness to give could be enabling someone in a pattern of addiction or feeding someone's habit?"  

But I guess here's my question about all of those gut-impulse response to Jesus' words:  are we really concerned about not enabling the opioid addicts and alcoholics... or are we really just looking for something to shield ourselves from having to listen to Jesus?  If my first impulse when I hear Jesus instruct his followers to "give to everyone who asks," is to put up defenses about why Jesus is being unreasonable or why Jesus "surely doesn't mean me" or why Jesus must only be referring to "nice, clean-cut, well-behaved people... like me" as recipients of my giving, well, then I suppose, in the words of the Bard, methinks we doth protest too much.  If our gut instinct upon hearing Jesus' words is to run from them or water them down, it may be more of a sign that we don't really want to listen to Jesus--only to wear his name and cross-logo as a badge of honor. 

And even though I know that I am prone, too, not to want to listen to Jesus when it pinches me, or when he says something that unsettles and disturbs me, if I am honest, there is yet deeper still a piece of me that knows I need to hear what Jesus says both when I like it and when I don't.  Like the old prayer of Teresa of Avila put it so beautifully and honestly, "Lord, I don't love you.  I don't even want to love you.  But I want to want to love you."  There are times, just saying, when we are afraid of actually taking Jesus' words seriously, because we know that if we take him at full strength, we will have our routines and values and priorities upended... and we will no longer be allowed to be so damned selfish (and yes, I mean damned literally--it is our own damnable bent-in-on-self-ness that is at the root of what we call sin).  To take Jesus at his word will mean following Jesus in his way of being in the world, and that will mean, among other things, abandoning the Me-and-My-Group-First thinking with which we are all so innately comfortable.

So let me dare to offer a next step in this conversation.  Having heard and seen Jesus' rather direct teaching for his followers to "give to everyone who begs from you," and to lend without expectation, let's assume we have all taken a moment now to voice our own inner hang-ups about it. Let's all take a second to say out loud all the things we say, almost by default, to deflect the impact of Jesus' words--let's grant that there are wise ways and foolish ways to give, that there are indeed plenty of scammers and schemers out there, that no one is advocating blindly enabling anybody's drug addiction or alcoholism, and that Jesus is not advocating laziness on anybody's part as a lifestyle. 

Ok, have we gotten that out of our system long enough to actually listen to Jesus?  Because maybe, instead of trying to overrule Jesus by raising tough cases (like giving to someone when you can't be sure how they will use what you give them) or complicated situations (like whether or not throwing money at a situation will actually make things better) or extenuating circumstances (like whether or not I am getting by with resources enough to feed my family before we get around to giving to a panhandler), maybe we could let Jesus' words become for us a sort of home-base--a new "default position" or "posture of readiness" for us, like a Tae Kwan Do student standing with hands ready to receive whatever punches or kicks the opponent will throw next.  Rather than hearing Jesus as giving ironclad absolute rules, which we could then overturn if we found a case where it didn't make sense or didn't apply, what if instead we heard Jesus as sketching out a way of life for us, giving us a course to keep on.  When you listen to your GPS or your smart phone giving you directions somewhere, and it says "Turn at Exit 13," but all of a sudden a traffic accident has blocked Exit 13 and that information hasn't been uploaded to the network that tells your phone how to navigate, you don't say that the directions are wrong--after all, Exit 13 is in fact the correct way to get to your destination.  But you say, "In this moment, Exit 13 is not possible, so what do I do that is still consistent with the direction that Exit 13 was going to take me, and how then will I get back to being on course for arriving where I'm supposed to go."  What if we allowed Jesus to be the voice that orients us and shows us the way go, rather than looking for loopholes or asterisks or fine print in his words to let ourselves off the hook in terms of doing what he says?

In that case, then, our calling on this day is to look for how we can practice Jesus' kind of radical generosity. Instead of immediately insisting that Jesus is being unreasonable or that he is daring to assail my unquestionable right to my own stuff, what if we started with, "Maybe Jesus knows what he is talking about... how could I dare to practice Jesus' kind of generosity and be ready to meet the needs, the faces, and the situations that will come my way on this day, in such a way that people will see Jesus' own kind of audacious graciousness in me?"

I don't mean at all to suggest that this is a brand-new kind of experiment--in fact, from the earliest centuries of Christian history, followers of Jesus got a reputation for being notably generous, and not just to their own people, but to all.  One of my favorite examples comes from an unlikely source--not a Christian tooting his or her own horn, but actually a pagan Roman emperor who wanted to restore the former "greatness" of the Empire by restoring its old worship of the pagan gods and goddesses.  The emperor was Julian (called by Christians "Julian the Apostate" because he turned the empire back toward the worship of Zeus, Jupiter, Mars, and the lot, as opposed to the growing grass-roots spread of Christianity).  And in a lot of senses, Julian was classic Rome--he wanted to bring back what he saw as Rome's old "greatness", which he claimed had been lost by the rise of these riff-raff Christians.  Julian liked to refer to Christians as "atheists," not because we believed in no God, but because we didn't believe in HIS gods--and he wanted to wipe out the movement of Christianity and to get back to the good ol' days when Rome's military might, political prestige, cultural achievements, and religious heritage were all seen as the "greatest" in the world.  Julian wanted to bring victory, glory, and the old Roman "values" back to Rome--even though arguably, Rome was still the lone superpower in the world at the time and was still the most powerful force to be reckoned with... but Julian was insecure and wanted to make Rome great so that he could be seen as great, too. 

Anyhow, the emperor also had to grudgingly admit that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth (he sometimes called us "the Galilean sect") were generous, more so even than the keepers of his own beloved "Roman values." He wrote to another official in the year 362 that "and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us."

That's what we were known for in those first centuries--generosity.  Not just generosity to "our own," to fellow Christians or other church members, or to people from our own local tribes, clans, and nationalities... but even to the Roman citizenry who were the occupying force and invading culture across the empire.  Christians were known--in fact, even when they didn't call us Christians!--for the kind of generosity that Jesus had been teaching all along.  And what amazes me is that the Christians didn't have to advertise or tell the world about how generous they were being:  the Emperor himself, a declared enemy of the church no less, said it out loud and called attention to it!

That's the thing about Jesus' way of generous living--I don't have to announce it to the world or wear a cross around my neck for it to be noticeable.  When the followers of Jesus quit deflecting Jesus' words while still proudly wearing the cross as a logo with Jesus as their malleable mascot--that is to say, when we actually practice the kind of generosity Jesus himself called us too--the watching world takes notice, even grudgingly.

So I'm going to try an experiment today--and if you like I'll invite you to come along on it.  What if, before we tried to show off to the world with public signs of our religious affiliation, we simply practiced the kind of generosity--of willingness to give our time, our resources, our labor, our tears, our energy--that Jesus has so clearly taught us?  What if we were less fussy about whether we are, or are not, allowed to be seen praying in public or treating the cross like a bit of flair among our accessories, and instead were simply willing to be known--like Julian called us all those centuries ago as an insult--as "impious Galileans"? What if people didn't first see a cross on our lapels and say, "Oh, more of those Christians...I have met them before, and they are stingy jerks who have a persecution complex!" but they first saw generosity--reckless, grace-filled generosity--and then approached us to find out what makes us able to give ourselves away?  What if we took back the title "impious Galileans" as our own--as a way of saying, "This is what it looks like when even the most hostile pompous blowhards of the Empire have to grudgingly admit that we are daring to cross lines with generosity, not just to "Me and My Group First," but to all?

I don't know what would come of that... but I feel like I want to try and find out.  Here's to belonging among the cohort of impious Galileans.

Lord Jesus, give us the insight, the courage, the love, and the grace to give ourselves away as recklessly and wonderfully as you... the original Impious Galilean....