We are tribal creatures, hive creatures. Our brains are wired that way, and we need that for our communities to function. We are wired to think that our side is right and our people are trustworthy. Even gangs think this way. We see only the facts that match our team’s bias. We can’t see our team’s bad behavior. We are wired to think that the other side is wrong and their people are ignorant if not immoral.
This team spirit can serve religion. We need to belong to something, to support one another in living together. But team spirit does not always serve the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Good News is not that we who follow Jesus are right and moral and chosen by God. We mess up as individuals, and as a church, and as a community. The Good News is that God loves us anyway, and continues to invite us to enter into the divine, into loving and respectful relationship with the Spirit that in and through all. How? Well, we could practice on our neighbor. The one on the other team. Or the one calling our team to account, as Jesus did to his home team. Love and respect the troublemaker. Because Jesus was a troublemaker.
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ
February 3, 2019
Troublemaker
Luke 4:2-30Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” 23 He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” 24 And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. 25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27 There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Is there a football game happening today? I didn’t remember until somebody was surprised that the small group Scott and I host monthly is scheduled to meet this evening. I wonder who’s playing. Well, not really, I looked it up. I am severely sports-challenged.
Sports tap our instinct for belonging. Jonathan Haidt describes this in his book The Righteous Mind (2012).
Every Saturday in the fall, at colleges across the United States, millions of people pack themselves into stadiums to participate in a ritual that can only be described as tribal. At the University of Virginia [where Haidt taught for many years] the ritual begins in the morning as students dress in special costumes. Some students paint the logo of… the Cavaliers (a V crossed with two swords) on their faces or other body parts.
He goes on to describe pregame brunches with alcohol, tailgate parties where friends, relatives, or unknown alumni gather together with more food, more alcohol, and more face painting. The alcohol helps the 50,000 fans overcome self-consciousness and participate fully in the chants, cheers and fist pump rituals that fill the three hours of the game. Strangers all lock arms and sing. Why? Here’s what Haidt says.
From a naïve perspective…college football is an extravagant, costly, wasteful institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally while leaving a long trail of victims (including the players themselves, plus the many fans who suffer alcohol-related injuries.) But…it flips a hive switch [because people are animals that cooperate on an immense scale, like bees in hives], and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are “simply part of a whole.” It augments the school spirit for which UVA is renowned, which in turn attracts better students and more alumni donations, which in turn improves the experience for the whole community, including [people] who have no interest in sports.
Haidt is telling us about UVA football to show the human need to belong, to be in community. The fruit of that belonging is loyalty, identity and trust and commitment. Wonderful values that help UVA to be a first-rate university.
Belonging is not a conscious, rational decision. It is a powerful, primal need. As individuals, we crave belonging, identity and trust and commitment. Our society needs these things so that people can work together to survive and thrive. But when our team is threatened, what do we do? The same tribal instinct that builds human community circles the wagons of “us” and lashes out at “them.” Those good values of belonging and loyalty can turn into something ugly. When a football game is at stake, otherwise civil people may find themselves screaming and cussing out the referee. When the perceived safety of “us” is at stake, that tribal instinct can turn violent.
Which brings us to this bizarre reading we heard from the gospel of Luke. It is the follow-up of last week’s lovely harmonious reading. Jesus has just declared himself the messiah, the Christ, God’s chosen. And his homies say, “Yay Rah! Go Team Jesus! Go Team Nazareth! Go Team Israel! The synagogue gets into that tribal ecstasy without even drinking or face painting; chanting the ritual prayers and familiar bible verses is enough. As visions of victories and honors and possibly even hotel franchises begin to swirl in their heads, Jesus says, “Whoa, wait a minute. I don’t think you were tracking on the details. I am not here for your team. I’m here for God. If I’m doing my job, I will disappoint your team. The God whose Spirit fills me is not on your team. Our God is for everyone. The power God gives me is for everyone. Remember when “our” God, acting with our greatest prophets, chose “them”, non-Israelites, to heal and feed and bless instead of us?” That Jesus! What a troublemaker!
So, with true team spirit, the people Jesus grew up get pushy. They push him right to the edge of a cliff. He does not fight them. He doesn’t try to convince them. He know that in the tribal mindset, nobody can think rationally. Jesus merely slips away. We can presume that some of his “pushy” friends and neighbors regretted this episode. Some of them eventually welcomed the Good News he brought. But it may have taken years. We can also be sure that some of them never did hear his message.
This cliff incident may or may not be historical. Nevertheless, it is true. All four gospels record some version of the saying, “A prophet is not accepted in his own home town.” Some Jewish leaders felt so threatened by Jesus that they helped the Romans to kill him. A generation after Jesus’ death, Team Israel and Team Jesus split. Some Christians have been bad-mouthing and scapegoating Jews ever since, imagining that God is on our team now, not theirs. Some Christians have claimed that everyone not on our team is going to burn in hell eternally. That’s awfully pushy. How God must grieve. These are the kinds of divisions of “us” and ‘them” that were in everyone’s mind when the New Testament was written. Our present-day divisions are mostly along political and cultural lines, but the bad behavior is the same.
We are tribal creatures, hive creatures. Our brains are wired that way, and we need that for our communities to function. We are wired to think that our side is right and our people are trustworthy. Even gangs think this way. We see only the facts that match our team’s bias. We can’t see our team’s bad behavior. We are wired to think that the other side is wrong and their people are ignorant if not immoral. You see how this works?
This team spirit can serve religion. We need to belong to something, to support one another in living together. But team spirit does not always serve the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Good News is not that we who follow Jesus are right and moral and chosen by God. We mess up as individuals, and as a church, and as a community. The Good News is that God loves us anyway, and continues to invite us to enter into the divine, into loving and respectful relationship with the Spirit that in and through all. How? Well, we could practice on our neighbor. The one on the other team. Or the one calling our team to account, as Jesus did to his home team. Love and respect the troublemaker. Because Jesus was a troublemaker.
Martin Luther King was a troublemaker. The Me Too movement and the Women’s marchers are troublemakers. Muckraking journalists are troublemakers. The Black Lives Matter movement are troublemakers. Would-be monument removers and school name changers are troublemakers too. They challenge our assumptions that our team is right, our people are good people who would never do that. But if they did, they were right in doing it, but they didn’t...
A few troublemakers resort to violence, and that’s not OK. But all troublemakers threaten us. They threaten our group identity as right and moral. It is a human instinct to defend ourselves against threat. Protect our identity and our belonging and our commitment and our story of being right. And to anyone who doesn’t belong to our team, that defense looks awfully pushy. It looks like attack. No, says the team, it’s the troublemakers who are attacking us. Attacking what? Our team’s identity of being right and good and moral all the time? Our stories that whitewash the ugly bits? Wouldn’t it be nice if all the troublemakers just went away and didn’t ask us hard questions? About pedophile priests or poisoned water or the sins of our forefathers or illegal campaign practices? It would be nice for the status quo, and it would be nice for the people in power, who make the rules of the game, if we pushed all the troublemakers off a cliff.
Are we loyal to our team, our institutions, to our country? Then let us listen to those troublemakers who point out where it might be failing to live up to its values, and let us grieve, and let us seek a better way. Are we loyal to our political agenda? Then let us remember that our team will lose political battles that grieve us sorely, and we can still keep our voices and our values and refrain from pushing anyone too hard. Because our national politics have been pushed to the edge by people using foul play.
I wonder, what does it mean to be on Jesus’ team? To be loyal to our faith? It means belonging in a church community (Thank you!) singing and praying and pot-lucking, but more than that. It might mean listening to the still-speaking God, staying humble, and admitting we do not know how best to live our values, and often we forget to even try. It might mean pondering the messages of troublemakers. If you are called to be a troublemaker like I am sometimes, it means doing a whole lot of praying, because it’s really easy for the troublemaking team to do that same kind of tribal defend-attack thing we are trying to undo. Nobody’s right all the time; troublemakers get it wrong too.
What if we trusted our identity as beloved children of God enough not to fear the challenge of the troublemakers? What if we trusted God enough to engage in the struggle, and not push too hard, not insist on winning at the cost of our souls? What if we trusted God enough not to have to be right, to face our own flaws and shortcomings and brokenness in the light of God’s love?
In the gospel of Luke, spiritual things have social and political and economic consequences. In the real world, social and political and economic things have spiritual consequences. We are God’s children all the time, not just on Sunday morning. In the stadium and at the march and when we’re venting to our friends what we really think. God help us remember and honor our first loyalty, to the Good News that cuts down the proud and lifts up the destitute, to that Presence that is beyond and around and inside every person, even the people we think are just wrong. To the God who laughs and cries with us and for us in our struggles, and loves every one of us no matter what, the troublemakers and the team players alike, let us be loyal. Amen.
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