Take Better Care of Your Teeth

Summary

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
Take Better Care of My Teeth
Scripture Reference: Matthew 8: 5-13

When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, appealing to him and saying, “Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, in terrible distress.” And he said to him, “I will come and cure him.” The centurion answered, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” When Jesus heard him, he was amazed and said to those who followed him, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.” And the servant was healed in that hour.

I had a lovely kindergarten teacher, Sandy Dempewolfe. She was the first love of my life, had quite a crush on her. Many years after Sandy and I had parted ways, my mother told me of her prediction. She told my mother that I would grow up to be either a politician or a preacher.
For the better part of my life, I have wanted to serve the church and yet for a good portion of that time my father hoped I would become a lawyer. There were a few times he expressed his disappointment that I chose the sanctuary instead of the courtroom. In those moments Kathy was quick to reassure me; she was glad I used my powers for good and not for evil.
Yet, the thought, perhaps a lingering doubt sown by my father, stuck with me. Did I go the right way?
A few years ago, during a retreat, I realized the depth of this. When asked what I would be if I were not a pastor I said, “I would want to be a tax attorney.” I said this to a group of pastors and do-gooders; there were about a dozen of us. After each person in the group was asked the same question (what would you be if you were not in your current profession?), after the question made its way around, a social worker on the other side of the room said, “Wait. We have to stop. I need to know something. How is it that of all things you could be other than a pastor why in the world would you choose to be a taxidermist?!?”
Everyone laughed and I said, “No. Not taxidermist; tax attorney.” The social worker thought for a moment and said, “equally as odd.”
To be a pastor or politician, a preacher or a lawyer, that dichotomy is in me. And while they have a sense of opposition, I am not sure they are all that different. Indeed, I always took my father’s desire to simply be a matter of income potential not professional preference.
Now and again there are moments when we come to a place of reflection, where our life is spread out before and behind us. If we are lucky, these moments will lack bitterness; if we are lucky there are yet possibilities and wonder.
A favorite scene from a movie speaks to this. The scene is an exchange of a granddaughter and a grandfather. The movie is Peggy Sue Got Married. Peggy Sue asks her grandfather, “if you could change anything in your life, if you could go back in time and do things over, what would you change?” The elderly grandfather thought for a moment and said, “I would have taken better care of my teeth.”
I love this scene for its truthfulness; I have heard this lament from many people. I also love the sparsity. I would have taken better care of my teeth suggests I have lived my life with the choices that came to me and I understand the consequences.
There are moments, not only when we find the measure of our life, but the measure of life itself. It as if we stand shoulder to shoulder with the ages that came before us.
Although there is no time machine or magic portal that casts us back to generations long ago, we do have ancient memories. We have a connection, not only to our own experiences, but also to the fabric of lives that have been lived before us. The writer of Hebrews suggests, there is a cloud of witness. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it this way, “the air is full of men.” The air is full of people. By this he means we live in the midst of a connectedness, a shared breath; we are all drawn from the same soil.
In the connected moments we feel the weight of truth, the challenge of living this day. These memories come to us; like the wind, they find us; we cannot chase them, let alone catch them.
Our reading today from Matthew is tricky in that it can take us to two very different places. If you read our story of the centurion and his dying slave as an act of mercy, then your heart should be led to remember moments of courage and devotion and self-determination. All of us have moments where we put our head down and kept going, where we risked even our very lives to help someone, even a stranger.
Yet, you can also read our story as a moment of confrontation. If you read the story as a terse exchange, then our heart should be led to hear and remember the moments where we stood up and protested, fought back, refused to yield. And all of us have these moments, the times where we said, “enough,” or “I can’t be silent here.”
Those are very different memories, very different places in us. How is it that this little story has such strange possibilities?
The possibilities are found in one word, an unnecessary word, “ego.” In Greek, there is no need to use pronouns like I, he or she, they. These words are built into the verb. When a writer uses a pronoun in Greek it is for a purpose. In our reading, the extra “ego” is found in the response of Jesus to the request of the centurion. If you read this story as a moment where Jesus offers a daring act of love, then Jesus is saying, “I will come and cure him.” This is a bold move for a Jewish rabbi to enter a Gentile’s home, to become impure.
Yet, the extra word, the ego, can also render what Jesus says a question and thus the story becomes a protest. Instead of a moment of compassion this becomes a moment of confrontation. I will come and cure him? In other words, how could ask such a thing knowing the consequence this brings me; how is it that I would throw my life away to heal a slave for you? Am I to heal the slave so the slavery will continue?
It would have been nice if the response of the centurion cleared up the different directions we could go. But his response is suited to both the act of love and the protest. His response is to offer a humble recognition of power.
If Jesus is saying, I will sacrifice for you, I will risk my station and my reputation as well as my heritage to heal a stranger, if ego means an emphatic yes to caring, then what the centurion recognizes in Jesus, his faith, is that love is a powerful act of humility of which we are not worthy.
Yet if the extra ego here forms a question and thus a terse rebuke, then the centurion is saying, I recognize what I am asking of you, and I understand the need for power to be humble. The response of the centurion fits with both.
To see the power of humility and the humility that must come with power are the two sides created by the extra word in the story.
There is one last moment where we might find an answer, a definite direction to follow. Jesus responds to the centurion. He praises him and then he makes a warning. The warning is ominous. Again, it would be nice if the warning of Jesus would allow us to say this is a story about radical mercy or this is a story about the courage to stand up to the abuse of power. Yet, like the centurion’s response, the warning of Jesus can work either way.
The warning Jesus gives could be about example: if you don’t abandon your fears of the stranger, if you seek to live in the blindness of segregation, then you will be cast into the outer darkness. You must be bold to love and ready to do so with humility.
And the warning cuts the other way, to have power, to hold onto power you must do so with all humility or you will be cast out of the kingdom of God.
Before we consider this warning, let us ask, are we not living in both of these places today? Every day we encounter people making sacrifices for others. We are ever mindful of people risking their life to bring healing. And we are surrounded with the struggle to hold power with humility. Or, perhaps even clearer, how much damage fear and falsity can do if power is not held in humility.
This is what Jesus calls the faith of the centurion. The centurion believes that power is a matter of stewardship and obedience and mostly, a trust in others. The centurion was a man who could have described his power in terms of violence. What a different story this would have been if he had forced Jesus to come with him. For the people of Capernaum, the centurion was not a subtle image or a “nice guy” in need of help. This was the living embodiment of empire and conquest and Roman rule. Hence, the people around Jesus must have been very confused when he spoke of the faith of the centurion being the greatest in Israel.
The faith of the centurion is perhaps our greatest need today. We need to have the centurion’s faith. And let me be very clear I do not believe the faith of the centurion was about Jesus as a messiah or the salvation of the world or some sort of cosmic vision of Jesus. His faith is not about God’s plan or order. The trust of the centurion was not theological, it was political. He believed the power we possess is to be kept in humility and trust in each other.
We have just lived through a long demonstration of what it means to not hold power in humility, to be unwilling to offer mercy to the stranger, to refuse to offer power when there is no personal gain. And we have just witnessed the fruit of fear, the culmination of arrogance refusing to trust. I pray we do not soon forget the events at the Capital on January 6th. We must always remember the freedom we enjoy is ever at the mercy of humility. We keep power in so far as we trust one another.
This is the centurion’s faith praised by Jesus. He trusted power as found in humility. This is what will heal our divisions. And I believe we can be healed. We can offer each other great acts of mercy as Jesus sought to offer to the centurion’s slave. Jesus was willing to cast aside tradition and status to serve the least. And he did this with the clarity of what he was getting into.
I believe we can be healed as we continue to question falsity and the abuse of power, our persistent blindness. We must restore our trust in truth. Not my truth; not your truth. Our truth. Not my power or your power, but our power lived out in humility where we confront arrogance and stand up to every form of hate seeking to rule over others.
We stand in a precarious place. The brokenness of our past is all too clear as is the vibrancy of our better angels. If we are blind to the brokenness then we are destined to repeat the wrongs; if we are blind to the vibrancy then our fate is to become less and less. Both lead to darkness and gnashing of teeth.
I believe we can be healed if we bring justice and mercy together. This is the ancient memory in each of us. We must act in love and question in love. This is our way forward. In this we take better care of our teeth. Amen.