Labels can also be limiting. I remember being told I could not use the computer in my high school classroom or play baseball with my neighborhood pals because I was a girl. I remember being told that I would never go to college because we were a working class family. I remember being told that I was just a dirty little Okie kid one time when I visited California.
Jesus draws our attention to labels in today’s gospel passage. First, John expects praise for shutting down someone who was doing the good work of healing people, but were doing it without the proper credentials, you might say. John claimed these do-gooders were not members of the "Jesus Club." Then Jesus addresses people within the community he is forming who act in ways that negate his call to guide and care for one another—who may be actually leading others astray, and doing that in Jesus’s name. Jesus’s name is in danger of becoming a label, not a way of living and doing good.
Funny how we still see these same questions about labels and identities today. In fact, arguments about identity are some of the most dangerous in our common life together. Labels and affiliations can be used as clubc against one another. But it shouldn't be that way.
The question of doing things in Jesus’s name is an interesting one to the original hearers of this gospel passage. Remember, the original followers of Jesus did NOT use the word “Christian.” When the movement finally got big enough to need an identifier, the term was simply “those who belonged to the Way,” according to Acts 9:2. Acts 11:26 states that the first time disciples of Jesus were called “Christians” was in Antioch in Syria, one of the most ancient churches outside the actual Holy Land.
The deeper meaning about the transition from the first term to the second is subtle, but telling. Notice that the phrase first used starts with the description of belonging—reminding us that Jesus formed a community of believers to help support each other, and to support each other specifically in ministering to the world around them. When the name began to collectively shift to “Christians,” the implication is that Jesus’s followers are now specifically bearing his Name and acting in his name. This placed a heavy responsibility upon them to bear that name with humility and with grace, keeping in mind that a life lives publicly as a Christian, then and now, is in itself a profound testimony about Jesus and his Good News.
The question, therefore, in the first section of the gospel is whether the kind of example Christians are called to set as followers and embodiers of Jesus’s teaching can be found outside the Christian community. Have we ever known people who, while not professing the name of Jesus, or even while professing no faith at all, have nonetheless embodied the kind of lovingkindness and humility that Jesus calls his followers to model? Of course. Think of it: without Mahatma Gandhi, there might have been no Martin Luther King, Jr., whose study of Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule in India informed his own passionate commitment to non-violent protest, what king called the use of “soul force.” It is here that we should note that Gandhi’s first name was not “Mahatma” but Mohandas. Mahatma is an honorific which means “great-souled.”
In our first reading, Queen Esther reveals that she is a Jew-- a label that could have gotten her killed under the scheme of her husband's advisor, Haman. She claims that label and is wmpowered by it.
Reflecting on our gospel story, the disciples are worried about someone doing God's work without having the official label of "follower of Jesus." And yet, haven't many of us known about the opposite, who do evil and hide it under the name of Christ?
I imagine we all have known people who do great harm to Christianity by loudly professing to be Christian yet whose lives reveal a shocking lack of compassion, empathy, loving-kindness and reconciliation. Some of the meanest people I have known in my life, angry, bitter, judgmental, grievance-filled prunes, have professed to be good, upstanding Christian people—and loudly proclaimed it too, all the while treating others, especially vulnerable people, with contempt and carelessness.
There’s a church sign I once saw on a marquee: “I’d rather be with a kind atheist than a hateful Christian.” That hurts that it can be true. Bbutwe'cve all known people like that, haven't we?
I wonder: is it the label that is so important, or is it the action?
Is it truly even possible to be a Christian and be hateful?
Can someone call themselves “Christian” if they refuse the inner transformation that accompanies truly giving one’s life over to the love of God as we experience it in the life and example of Jesus, who is God in human flesh? Why would God bother to take on a human life at all if it was not to show us how to live a God-centered life?
For much of the last many millennia, at least in the West since the removal of prohibitions on Christianity by the Emperor Constantine, the title “Christian” has been associated with power and influence. Funny how a once-ragtag group of some of the least influential people in their own backwater region of the Roman Empire suddenly shifted to being powerful and connected.
Even here in America, which was founded during the Enlightenment, and which, thanks to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, officially proclaimed the separation of church and state as a governing principle, persons seeking influence and elected office usually did not do well if they proclaimed themselves to not be Christians. Heck, it took this country until 1960 to elect a Roman Catholic to the presidency, and friends, that WAS an actual point of contention. During the Cold war, since refusal to believe in God was associated with communism, proclaiming oneself a Christian became an unspoken prerequisite to higher office. Churches were places not so much where people were formed as disciples but as places where people were seen, and where they networked and conducted business deals—kind of what the golf course is now for much of corporate America.
In too much of the world, attaching the label of “Christian” to someone or something went from being less about taking on a discipline of service and self-denial, and more about opening up the doors of the corridors of power. And so it has been and so it has remained—until very recently. Christianity, too often, has become a club—and remember that the second meaning of the word club is “a tool to beat someone with.”
I was recently told by a person online that if I didn’t believe that each and every word in the Bible should be interpreted as he did, that “I could not be a Christian.” He was pretty mean about it too. I gently reminded him that, fortunately for both of us, that wasn’t his decision to make. Tra- la- la! You are NOT the decider!
Labels DO matter—and undoubtedly they matter too much. Labels are, after all, a way of stereotyping—and that becomes a way to not see the human being bearing that label. We are now in the midst of one of the most bitter partisan contests in our lifetimes. And we are at a dangerous point in our country where labels have gotten to where they matter more than the belief systems they are supposed to represent. We look for a single letter after a candidate’s name, we talk about whether they are “red” or “blue,” and then we get blinded to what those letter and colors actually stand for. Worse, too many of us have now doubled down so that anyone on the other side is not just someone with whom we disagree, but someone who is immediately assumed to be “the enemy.”
And so what is Jesus saying to us right now? Maybe it’s to look beyond the labels that divide us. Look, there it is: right there: “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
Wow—what would it be like if we took that line right there to heart?
Jesus reinforces this viewpoint in the last sentence we heard today as well: Be at peace with one another.” Not a fake peace, where we refuse to discuss the things that matter. Not the false peace that avoids engaging with those different from us and closes us off from each other. But a real peace, in which we don’t worry about labels and dividing us one from another, but coming together in good will and open-heartedness, putting down our clubs, and instead working together for the common good. Looking for the way we can build each other up rather than oppress and cast out others.
Especially in the days and weeks and months ahead, may we all try to let our lives testify to the goodness of God, and welcome anyone who truly beings about healing and reconciliation, no matter what labels they do it under. Let’s be for each other, rather than against each other. And even though there are plenty of other things to do each Sunday, let’s recommit, as this new program year begins, to show up for each other, here and throughout the week, and for our own deepening of our faith in Jesus. Putting aside all that we use to divide us or to let ourselves off the hook for doing the work, as James has been reminding us this last month.
No labels. No clubs. Just community.
Amen.
Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church on September 28-29, 2024.
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