Dealing with Our Inheritances - Matthew 10:24-39
Recently my niece, finishing up her freshman year of college, called my wife to ask her a series of questions. “How did you pay for college?” “Have you ever inherited money?” “Do you own your home?” “If so, why did you choose where you live?” The aim of the questions, created in a class about social justice, were obviously meant to address privilege. Yes, both my wife and I have inherited money. Not a lot, but enough to make a down payment on our house possible. Yes, both my wife and I didn’t have to pay for college. We started our working lives with little debt and that has made it easier to reap the benefits of education without being saddled with the burden of its cost. We started the game, as I recently heard it said, on third base, while so many others aren’t even in the parking lot.
My niece’s questions came at a time when I’d been giving a lot of thought to my inheritances, individual and collective. We all have them. We have inherited genes, of course, and with them problems and proclivities and gifts with which we must come to terms. We have all inherited habits and patterns of life, ways of being in the world that have been passed down to us by our elders. We have also inherited social realities that we did not create but which have very much created us, whether it is the burning of fossil fuels or the idea of “whiteness.” Each inheritance creates possible patterns for our life, and we must learn what to do with them. For some this might mean an annual cancer screening, for others it might mean giving up the family fortune because it is based in exploitation and counted in human bodies.
This was the situation of Sarah Grimke, a South Carolina woman born to a devout Episcopal family, who made their living from the labor of enslaved people. When she was five years old Grimke saw an enslaved man being brutally beaten and it made her sick, but when she questioned it she was told that that was just the way the world works. She didn’t accept that answer or her inheritance, though, and she went on to teach an enslaved woman to read and write, an act that was a crime in South Carolina. Eventually at age 36 she fled for Philadelphia where she became a Quaker and an abolitionist. She went on to write a scathing letter to Southern clergy where she said that “slavery has…trampled the image of God in the dust.”
It would have been easy for Grimke to act as most people do when they recognize the part they are playing in an injustice—rationalize it. That is what most white Southern Christians did, my own ancestors included. They went so far as to rationalize their enslavement of people as an act of charity to Africans who they claimed would have been worse off without a regular meal and a house to live in. These white Christian slaveholders even considered their enslavement of people a kind of stewardship.
But Grimke understood that such a narrative was all a lie, a perversion of the Gospel. She knew that Jesus was not so much concerned about saving souls for an afterlife as bringing the reality of God’s kingdom here—a reality that directly challenges the economy, systems, and powers of this world that is built and maintained through injustice. So it was that she made the choice to disinherit all of the wealth her family possessed in the form of human lives and joined in solidarity with the disinherited peoples of the world.
This question of inheritances and what to do with them is the best way I know for us to understand the difficult Gospel reading we just heard. It is a Gospel that must be understood from the side of a society where family was everything and yet, then as now, inheritances were filled with injustices that are counter to the kingdom of love and truth Jesus is ushering into the world.
Jesus is speaking to his disciples—those who have already decided to follow him. But they are still entangled in their families, the extensive systems of kin and obligations that made up Jewish life. Elsewhere Jesus has made it clear that he affirms the best of the Jewish tradition’s call to care for one’s poor and vulnerable relatives. What he wants to challenge here are the more mundane ways that families can work against the coming of the kingdom. It could be the questions a mother has about her daughter throwing away her betrothal so that she can care for lepers, or a father being upset when he finds his son has sold his right to the family’s tenant lands in order to support the poor. If we are really seeking to live into God’s way and kingdom, Jesus warns, we will often find ourselves in direct conflict with those close to us.
Many of Jesus’s disciples likely came to him with because they were hoping for something like the first century equivalent of a Joel Osteen message—a path to living your best life now with a nice donkey, good morals, and respectful kids who get into Ivy League yeshivas. So, Jesus offers a fair warning to all who may be mistaken in thinking that following the prince of peace will mean a peaceful life. The Kingdom of God has come into the world to be in direct opposition to the standing order of things. And while Jesus acts and preaches peaceful non-violence, his unwavering commitment to the truth and love put him in direct conflict with the world around him. It is a reality that we can see in the lives of every person who has followed Jesus’ path of peace in confronting the evils of the world from St. Francis to Gandhi, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King, Jr.—all of these peace seeking people lived lives full of conflict because the world refused the justice required by peace and instead violently enforced stasis.
The sword Jesus brings is not the one he wields, but the one that comes for him when the police arrive to bring Jesus to the cross. Jesus knows his disciples will meet the same end, as will all faithful people down through the generations. I am more and more convinced that if you are free from conflict in your life then you aren’t following Jesus closely enough. I say that with a cringe because I’m included in that “you.” My life is pretty free of conflict and while it is never good to pursue it for its own sake, if we are really pursuing a life lived in God’s kingdom, then conflict will come for us, more often than not from those close to us.
What are we to do? If we want to live into the way of Jesus and see if his word is true, then a good place to begin is to address our inheritances. That can take many forms, but for those of us in the Episcopal Church a good place to begin is addressing our wealth and money.
In a lecture I once heard by the writer Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove he remarked that the “American economy has never learned to exist without slavery.” Most of us haven’t inherited a plantation, but we all benefit from the continued exploitation of the poor for their labor. Many of us also have our retirement accounts and other investments in companies that routinely rely on the exploitation of labor in other countries, who destroy the Earth by perpetual consumerism and petroleum, and that invite inequality through exploitative financial markets. Money and time are said to be the best measures of value and so we need to ask, is our money and time in line with the life of God’s kingdom? Knowing all the facts, can we recite our Baptismal covenant with a straight face when we look at our investments and bank accounts and shopping carts? Are we willing to even let our institutions and sense of security die if they cannot live into the life of justice and love?
This may all seem too hard, but what lies on the other side of enduring conflict for Christ’s sake, even if that conflict is within us, is abundant life. This life that is full of love and goodness and freedom will leave us satisfied in ways that an extractive economy never will. “So do not be afraid,” Jesus tells his disciples, reminding them that they are the beloved children of God, “those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” May we lose the life we’ve inherited from all the exploitations of our ancestors and find new life in the family of God, who is our good and loving Father. Amen.