Now as the Pharisees were gathering, Jesus asked them, 42 “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?”
“David’s son,” they replied. 43 He said, “Then how is it that David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, called him Lord when he said, 44 The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right side until I turn your enemies into your footstool’? 45 If David calls him Lord, how can he be David’s son?”
46 Nobody was able to answer him. And from that day forward nobody dared to ask him anything.
“The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers: Jesus Teaches at the Temple,” Week Five
Something fairly profound happened recently in the world of soccer, and it had nothing to do with the World Cup.
One of its players in Major League Soccer, Minnesota United’s midfielder Collin Martin, came out as gay for the team’s Pride Night, making him the only out gay male athlete in one of the United States’ “Big Five” men’s leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLS).
The (mostly positive) response was instantaneous—the support for Martin publicly, but also recognition that soccer can and should have room for more out gay players eight years after the German international striker Mario Gomez responded to his German national team teammates the encouraging gay players to remain closeted by disagreeing and saying, “They would play as if they had been liberated. Being gay should no longer be a taboo topic.”
One of the ways I think we know now that being a gay athlete is not so taboo a topic is that after coming out, Martin gave a fantastic interview to The Athletic, which was inspiring at a number of points, but especially revealing (I thought) when Martin talked about his religious life:
There’s these certain things that you put inside your head that you need to get over certain barriers, but it doesn’t happen like that. I grew up in a pretty religious household—both of my parents are Episcopalian. I had a welcoming experience in the church, but you hear stories and feel a certain way about it. Before I came out to my parents, I’d always assumed I’d have some kind of big religious awakening to know my place in the church. It never happened. I never sat down with a priest to talk about my sexuality; I just didn’t think that was important.
That is a remarkable revelation to me. Martin didn’t think it was important to meet with a pastor to talk about his sexuality despite being raised in the church—and a welcoming church at that!
And as a pro-Open and Affirming pastor, I have to say…if that’s what he needs, then good for him. We cannot tell ourselves that there is only one thing that we can be, and sadly, the church has in many ways set itself up push away LGBTQ people, and demanded that their queer identity be mutually exclusive with their Christian identity.
We have spent these past four weeks talking together about the nature of authority, but we cannot do so without also talking about identity, for those two go hand-in-hand. A parent’s identity as a parent lends them certain authority over their children. A pastor may claim certain moral authority, or another leader might. And so that is how I want to close out this sermon series, “The Passion Asks, and Christ Answers.” Jesus teaching at the temple is a scene that happens twice in the chronology of His life—once when He is an adolescent, in the Gospel of Luke, and again during Holy Week when He is an adult.
The back-and-forth debate between the adult Jesus and the temple authorities as depicted in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is, at a glance, the sort of stuff that evangelical dreams are made of: a chance to publicly debate your theological opponents in the grandest square ever, and for all the marbles! It’s the entire basis of the God’s Not Dead franchise, and the premise behind so many other Christian stories, books, even radio adventures.
Naturally, there is quite a bit more to the picture than that, and the aim of this sermon series is, and has been, to try to paint a much more accurate portrait of what was being said, and why, when Jesus was teaching at the temple as an adult.
We arrive at the end of Matthew 22, and this particular teaching of Jesus, with a discussion of King David, and the relationship between David and the promised Messiah. As we dig into this, it is important to once again remember that ancient Judaism—and therefore, by extension, Jesus’s questioners—was not a monolith, but rather a complex and rich religion. One of the internal disagreements of Roman-era Judaism was the identity of the eventual Messiah, with Herodians (whom Matthew mentioned as a separate group earlier in the chapter) favoring the claim of the Herods (hence the name) and the Pharisees favoring the claim of the House of David.
Even though Jesus uses the opening of Psalm 110 to the basis for that claim on its head here, the favoring of David’s lineage is precisely why both Matthew and Luke lay out Jesus’s family tree in their Gospels, to trace Jesus’s lineage back to the historical David (Matthew) or even the Adam of Genesis (Luke). So the next time you're tempted to use "Pharisee" derogatorily, remember that our own Gospels are Pharisaic on this particular point!
We see a similar discussion with Jesus in John 8, though concerning the Abrahamic lineage rather than the Davidic lineage, with Jesus saying, “Truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” That sentiment functions in much the same way here in Matthew 22, with Jesus strongly implying that if the Christ were to arrive after David, there would be no grounds for David to call the Christ his Lord. So…whose son is the Messiah?
This, then, is a part of Jesus’s reinterpretation of ancient Judaism as it had existed up until that point. The Messiah did not have to be a literal biological son of David, but neither did they have to be a Herod, either. The Messiah could be—and to Christians, is—someone completely different, someone whose public ministry at every turn confounded expectations and broke down preconceptions.
Reimagining our roles in the church, in our country, and in our world, then, is eminently Christ-like. We do not have to accept the roles we have been given, and we do not have to accept the roles that are dictated to us.
May we instead move into roles to which we are called, roles that match what God has placed upon our hearts and in our souls with the sorts of gifts and identities that are fundamental to who we are.
Imagine the generations of preaching and teaching we could have learned from, and still be learning from, if women and blacks and LGBTQ people had been able to be ordained in the church from the go, instead of the church being the church of white patriarchal supremacy instead of the church of Jesus Christ. Imagine how much better off the world and church alike would be of those were the voices we had been listening to all along, instead of defining the role of preacher and teacher not on the basis of a calling, but on the basis of whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality.
We can be the church that recognizes the call, and creates a role to match, or we can be the church that recognizes the role and ignores the call because we think we already know what that role must look like.
What will Jesus look like to you when He returns? Do you already have some ideas, assumptions, or preconceptions of what He must be like, or look like, or talk like?
Now consider His sexual orientation, His gender identity, His race, language, country of origin, occupation, familial history…I promise there is something that either you (or I, for that matter) have not considered, or have simply filled in with what best reflects us. It is a way of making Jesus into our own image rather than the other way around, and by extension it makes God into our own image rather than the other way around.
Now expand that to the church, as the Body of Christ, writ large. Before Jesus returns, the church is the closest we have to a corporeal Jesus. Can this incarnation of Jesus be set free from patriarchal and supremacist notions of what it must look like? Can we be the ones to bring about that freeing? And can we be secure enough in our own faith journeys to hand that task off to the next, increasingly diverse, generations to lead the way forward on?
For it is impossible to do justice to the question of “which came first, David or Jesus?” without considering its generational implications. As long as the church continues to expect deference from the current church towards the church of the past—not as it historically was, but as it has been mythologized in our collective nostalgia—it will be increasingly difficult to foster the life of this version of the Body of Christ. And sometimes, the best thing we can do to foster life is to affirm those who, like Collin Martin, may no longer see the need to turn to us for what their identity is. May we recognize the vanity that such a demand of ours would be rooted in. That may be a tough pill to take, but it should humble us, and disabuse us of the vanity that we have somehow retained the prerogative to dictate all aspects of another person’s life, especially a young LGBTQ person. We can pray for them and cheer them on as they strive to be true to who they are, and we can advocate for them in the public square, but perhaps we are being called to relinquish something as well, at least until the Body of Christ becomes fully healthy for *all* of us.
So as I close out my run here like a moderately successful Broadway play, I of course want to thank you for coming here and hearing what I have to say, and I especially want to thank Kate Ayers and Mary Wolfskill Ybarra for the additional work they did in helping me acclimatize here. But I also want to gently but firmly encourage you as you begin a new season in your ministry with Pastor Amy when she returns from sabbatical. She will surely have been impacted by her experience away, and will be eager to share that impact and experience with all of you. I would encourage you to remain open, as I know you have, to the unexpected Christ, the uncommon and unusual Jesus who not only confounds expectations, but eclipses and transcends them.
May you continue to be made in *that* Christ’s image, an image that holds the promise of goodness so great we can honestly scarcely imagine its dimensions. Far be it for us to even try to put that goodness and greatness into dimensions, into boxes, or into forced roles.
For it is a good and great unbounded God whom we serve.
Thanks be to that good and great unbounded God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Olympia, Washington
July 29, 2018