Making a Name For Ourselves

Luke 6:17-26

Rev. Dr. Stephen K. Nash

Tellico Village Community Church

“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. . . .”

It will come as a great surprise to some of you that I went to school back in the days when a principal could freely quote from the Book of Proverbs as a way of letting hormonally-enriched eighth-graders know that he not only ran the school, but he had God on his side. I’m confident that Max Calhoun, the principle of Grayson Prichard School during my years there was a religious man. I suspect that he read other portions of scripture on occasion, but the one that he had committed to memory was the Book of Proverbs. I assume he thought that book would be the most helpful to his task. And of all the Proverbs he shared with us over those years, none was heard more frequently than this: “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.”

It was a proverb for all occasions: talking in the lunchroom, laughing inappropriately at an all-school assembly, running down the hall after recess. Things that today’s principles would dearly love to have as their primary problems. And any and all of those things could bring great dishonor to the family name, and was the occasion of being reminded of what we all knew – that a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.

Is that true? Is reputation more important than wealth? Is what people think of you so significant that it shapes the way that you think about yourself and the way you behave in the world?

I have known people who have lived at both extremes of this question. I knew a man who was absolutely enslaved by what other people thought of him. If he was asked his opinion on a controversial matter, he would invariably say, “Well, what do you think?” And then would agree with whatever you responded. Every word, every action that he took was designed to impress, to affect the perception of someone around him favorably so that people would like him and respect him. He did nothing that did not seek someone else’s favor.

On the other hand I have known people, you have as well, who seem like they could not care less what other people thought of them—people who would go out of their way to offend or anger someone else. It was as if they couldn’t bear the thought that someone else might actually like them, respect them, want to be close to them, engage in some kind of intimate warm friendship with them. And so, they just push people away.

Most of us, I guess, want to be well thought of for the right reasons. Most of us, I suspect, would like others to see us as people of honor and integrity, people who can be trusted, people who are kind and compassionate and generous—not perfect people, but someone who a friend could turn to when the chips were down. A good name is important when it reflects things that really matter . . . things like genuineness, compassion, fairness, thoughtfulness, faithfulness.

Why, then, did Jesus say, “Woe to you when all speak well of you?” It comes at the very end of a list of blessings and woes. It is, from the outset a surprising list. Jesus blesses people who are the victims of things that we would think area curses: poverty, hunger, weeping, being scorned, hated, defamed, excluded. And in the same way, the things that we usually seek are the things that are possessed by those upon whom Jesus pronounces a woe: wealth, being full, laughter, and finally . . . “woe to you when all speak well of you. . . .”

Now, that doesn’t sound like conventional wisdom, the kind of wisdom that says, “A good name is to be chosen over great riches.” Does being a loyal, trustworthy person really matter? Shouldn’t we care what people think of us? Why would Jesus say, “Woe to you when all speak well of you. . . .”?

In the first place, we need to remember that Jesus was a teacher of alternative wisdom—a sage. He was much more than that, of course, but he was at least that. But there are two kinds of wisdom and two types of sages. The most common type of wisdom is conventional wisdom; its teachers are the conventional sages. This is the mainstream wisdom of a culture, “what everybody knows.” The second type is a subversive and alternative wisdom. This wisdom questions and undermines conventional wisdom and speaks of another way, another path (the notion of a way or path is common in wisdom teaching) and its teachers are the subversive sages. . . the challengers of the status quo, the pointers to the road less traveled.

In the Old Testament it was the classical prophets who were the subversive sages and challenged the conventional wisdom. Jesus came in the mode of the prophets--standing cultural values on their head. Reversing the way people thought about things.

You see, conventional wisdom embodies the central values of a culture—its understanding of what is worthwhile and its images of the good life. In Jesus’ day, as in ours, it was learned instinctively by growing up in the culture, absorbing the folk wisdom as embodied, for instance, in the book of Proverbs.

But conventional wisdom, cross-culturally, is intrinsically based upon the dynamic of rewards and punishments. You reap what you sow; follow this way and all will go well; you get what you deserve; the righteous will prosper—these are the constant messages of conventional wisdom. This dynamic is the basis of popular Western notions of a last judgment in which we are rewarded or condemned according to our behavior or belief, as well as the basis of popular Eastern notions of karma. It is also found in secular form: work hard and you will succeed . . . an axiom that most of us would affirm as bearing, on the surface of it, an important value and truth. But it carries with it a hard-edged corollary, of course: if you don’t succeed, or are not blessed, or do not prosper, it is because you have not followed the right path. Life becomes a matter of requirement and reward, failure and punishment, with all of its effects socially and psychologically, and religiously.

Practically all of Jesus teaching was focused on undermining the world of conventional wisdom and pointing to an alternative wisdom. His parables were not nice little moral lessons—earthly stories with sweet heavenly meanings. They were words of paradox and reversal that, if people could come to grips with their absurdity, pointed to the inbreaking of God’s kingdom—a new way of envisioning the world—something radically different. Nice little moral stories that taught conventional wisdom couldn’t have gotten Jesus killed. They might have bored other people to death, but they weren’t enough to bring down the wrath of the authorities upon Jesus.

It isn’t surprising then, since Jesus mission was in large measure about calling into question his culture’s way of defining religious holiness and the good life and the conventional wisdom that went along with that, that we discover this kind of provocative statement in today’s text coming from him.

Beyond pointing out that this text is an example of subversive wisdom, it also may be worth noting, that these blessings and woes are addressed in the plural not the singular. Do you remember Marty’s “Y’all” sermon of a few weeks back. Where as the English language doesn’t distinguish between the second person singular and plural (both are “you”), the Greek language of the New Testament has two different ways of expressing “you” in the singular and plural. And the “you” in this text is “y’all”! Now the fact that they are addressed in the plural doesn’t mean that they don’t have some significance for us as individual Christian people who are trying our best to live faithfully in this world. But it may mean that their greater significance, their greater value may come when we hear them together as a church.

What if the words of Jesus were addressed, not to individual Christians, but to the early Christian movement . . . and by extension, to all communities of faith? What if these were the words of Jesus to Tellico Village Community Church? “Woe to you when all speak well of you . . .” That would still seem strange—strange to me at least. I think we want people to respect the church. We want people to be attracted to us. We believe that the church is important, that it is important for people to be in a relationship with a community of faith. We know that we have a lot to offer. People encounter God in this community. We offer food for heart and mind and soul. People can grow here. People can find healing and hope and enlightenment here. People can find relationships that really are deep and really matter. In this community people can develop in faith, they can serve others, they can care for those who are on the margins of life and in so doing find meaning in their own lives. Of course, we want people to speak well of us.

We want people to speak well of us because that’s the only way the church grows. Every church in every community tries to figure out how to become better known, how to present itself in a way that stirs the curiosity of those who don’t have a church home, perhaps even of those who have no faith home. A lot of churches actively market themselves on radio and television, in print ads and on the internet and in other creative ways. We want to publicize our good name. And we know that most people who visit a church come because someone invites them. 80% of people in most churches (ours may be an exception to this rule, because of our unique situation) . . . but in most churches 80% of the membership is there because of friends. They come because someone speaks well of the church.

I want people to speak well of us. Why, then, would Jesus say, “Woe to you when all speak well of you . . .”

I have known churches of whom some did not speak well. Churches who knew what it was like to be slandered and teed-off on and criticized. I know a church who called a woman to be a pastor on its staff. She was the first woman ever to serve that church. She was warm, compassionate, gifted, well-trained, educated at a fine seminary. The city in which the church was located was populated with very conservative congregations—congregations that believed that the Bible is the timeless, inerrant words of God, congregations which claim to pattern their very life on a literal interpretation of Scripture. It was unheard of in that community for a woman to be serving a congregation as a minister, so that when she came to that church the local newspaper did a feature article on her. Her picture was in the paper.

The week after that article appeared the phone calls and the anonymous letters (of course anonymous—like the KKK wearing white hoods over their faces)--the anonymous letters began to arrive, often quoting scripture about how women should keep silent in assemblies, always promising that she and the congregation that she served were going straight to hell without passing go and without collecting $200 dollars. Not everyone spoke well of that church.

I know a church that hosted a city-wide conference on teenage pregnancy. Now this was not a conference for social workers and teachers and other adults who were concerned about the problem of teenage pregnancy. This conference was for teenagers—for young women who were at risk of becoming pregnant or contracting a sexually transmitted disease. The conference was widely publicized. Hundreds of kids showed up. It was a remarkable event—an event that may have made the difference in the life of one of the young women who was present.

The media covered that event and made mention of the fact that it was sponsored by a national organization which supports a woman’s right to have an abortion. Now I know that is a sensitive subject over which Christians can have honest differing ethical interpretations. But the point here is that abortion was never mentioned in this conference, not once. No literature was distributed to these young women suggesting that abortion was a viable alternative. The conference was about pregnancy prevention and it told these young women that abstinence was the safest and most effective and best way of not becoming pregnant. Period.

But the next Sunday morning, during the morning services of worship while the preacher was preaching, protesters in the congregation began to stand and to shout and to condemn that congregation for hosting a conference sponsored by that organization. The harassment went on for months . . . pickets outside the church every Sunday morning, disruption in the sanctuary during the worship. Not everyone spoke well of that church.

I mentioned last week that there was a lot of publicity regarding the President’s wide-ranging interview with Bill Hybel’s, pastor of the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago. Hybels was one of four pastors who have served as a spiritual accountability group for the president over the last two years. In front of several thousand pastors and church leaders, the president spoke openly about his moral flaws and personal weakness, and spiritual struggles. Richard Mouw, an evangelical church leader and social commentator reported in an online news article this past week how his gut reaction to hearing that the president was going to be there was very negative. He had already given up on Bill Clinton, although he had at one time been impressed with his grasp of the Bible and theological and spiritual issues from conversations that they had had. He went on to describe how the experience of being there for that 90-minute session changed his perceptions. This isn’t a paid political announcement; the point is to report how Reverend Hybels told the conference prior to the president’s arrival, that the church had received hundreds of mostly hostile faxes, e-mail messages, and phone calls since word got out that the president had accepted his invitation to a no-holds-barred interview. Members threatened to either pull their financial support of the church or their membership, saying that having the president there would tarnish the good name of the church. One person, who had signed his name with the title “Reverend,” had said he hated the president so much he hoped Clinton would rot in hell. Not everyone spoke well of that church

I heard a story not too long ago about a church in Florida from the denomination out of which I come—the Disciples of Christ. This congregation is located on a main highway in one of the larger cities in Florida. That highway was undergoing a great deal of construction. It made access to the church difficult at times, disrupted traffic, which often backed up for lengthy periods of time. But through it all the workers did their best to accommodate the church-goers, to make life as easy as they could for that congregation. And so the church decided to have a dinner for the construction workers who had been working on the road in front of their property. They invited them all. And they all came. So impressed were some of them by the church’s kindness that they began to come to church on Sunday morning and some of them joined.

Many of the construction workers were people of color—Hispanics, African-Americans. When the local paper heard about the dinner they sent a reporter and a photographer and did a wonderful feature story about this congregation’s hospitality. After the story ran, the calls began to come, anonymous phone calls—abusive, filled with racial slurs. Not everyone spoke well of that church.

“Woe to you when all speak well of you. . .”

There is something more important than reputation. There is something more important than having the approval of all. The church must do what is good and redemptive and right and just.

Amen.