Whose values?

Thanks this week to the writing of Marilyn Salmon, who pointed out the values clash in this week's Gospel reading. The closing prayer is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. 

You know, Christianity is meant to be the solution. Too often, I think, we've made ourselves the problem. Either this needs to change... or we need to change our name.

Audio of the sermon:



Check this out on Chirbit

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.”

God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

Romans 4:13-25

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) — the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

Mark 8:31-38

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

This is the World of the Lord.

Simon Peter’s head was reeling. There they were, traveling as usual, right now between villages in the region of Caesarea Phillipi when, out of the blue, Jesus had asked them what folks were saying about him. “Who do people say I am?”

They had covered the usual stuff, John the Baptist or Elijah or one of the prophets. They heard it all the time. But Peter’s heart began to race when Jesus asked them, “But what about you? Who do you say I am?”

He knew the answer. They all did; the word had been whispered between them countless times. They’d all heard his words, seen his miracles… Peter took a deep breath and dove in: “You are the Messiah.”

And when Jesus didn’t deny it, didn’t correct Peter’s statement, but told them all to keep quiet about it, Peter knew that the cat was out of the bag. At last, it was time to get things moving! Surely now, they’d start making plans for the overthrow of the Roman government, the purging of the idolaters from the Promised Land, setting the priesthood back where it should be, out of the hands of the collaborators and the power-hungry, and get Jesus where he was supposed to be, on the eternal Throne of David.

The amount of work ahead of them was staggering. With Jubilee already declared, there was the business of getting landholdings back into the right families, cancelling debts, maybe some program to bring back Jewish folks who were living in other parts of the Empire…

Instead, Jesus started talking about suffering and rejection. Instead of planning to set the elders, priests and scribes right, Jesus instead said these priests and elders and scribes would refuse him, kill him, and as far as Peter was concerned, the fact that he’d rise from the dead three days later was frankly beside the point!

Nobody had ever accused Peter of being the smartest man they’d ever met, but it didn’t take King Solomon to see that defeat and death was the way kingdoms were destroyed, not established. The crowds knew it too, Peter thought. They were getting understandably restless; no one liked all this negative talk. People wanted to side with winners, not losers, especially when losing meant getting nailed to a cross!

Well, since Peter had been the one to say the word “Messiah,” he guessed it was up to him to take Jesus aside and give him a quick lesson in marketing. I imagine it sounded something like this:

“Hey, Jesus, got a minute? Can I talk to you for a minute over here? Thanks. Hey, listen, um, me and the boys been talking, you know, and what with you being the Messiah and all, well, you know, you’ve got a reputation you gotta live up to, see, and, um, like, an image thing, right? And anyway, all this getting rejected and killed stuff, man, it’s, like, never going to work. How are we going to get enough people behind us to do this thing if all you ever talk about is defeat, man? We need to be planning our victory, you know? Just, you know, lighten up some, anyway, OK?”

It all made perfect sense to Peter, and from the relief he could see in the other disciples’ faces, he could tell it was the right move.

But Jesus had other ideas.

When we hear Jesus saying things like “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” and “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it,” I wonder – how easily do we miss the naked, crushing gravity of what’s being said? It’s a spiritual truth played out in a spoken paradox, yes, but can we see, in this day and age, the utter outrageousness of what Jesus is saying?

I know we Christians talk a lot about “dying to self.” Lofty words, and it’s a phrase that gets preached on a lot, but as Inigo Montoya said in “The Princess Bride,” “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Often, for today’s Christians, at least here in the West, the idea of “dying to self” means choosing not to listen to a particular kind of music or watch a particular television show. It means making moral choices in who we vote for, and perhaps in the kinds of friends we have. Perhaps it means giving up M&Ms for Lent. We often will say, of any hardship, real or imagined, that “it’s our cross to bear,” which isn’t what Jesus was talking about at all. But then, the cross itself has lost the meaning it had for Jesus and his contemporaries, hasn’t it? In our culture, crosses are jewelry, wall decorations. Crucifixes have become artistic expressions.

But in the first-century Roman province of Judea, the cross meant something quite different.

The cross was a reminder that whatever measure of freedom you felt you possessed was a lie. The cross symbolized the absolute power of foreign men in togas over your every thought, your every action. The cross meant that what you owned was not yours if the foreign men in the togas decided it was not. The cross was the ultimate terror, and the idea of “taking up your cross” made even the strongest quake in fear.

For all of their faults, you see, the Roman Empire was very good at many things, among them making war and (for a while, at least) keeping the conquered, conquered. One of their tools for accomplishing the latter was to instill mortal fear in the populace by developing, over the centuries, the single most inhuman, barbaric, monstrous, sadistic, vulgar form of torture and death ever conceived: the cross.

It is to this – the utter surrender, the conscious abdication and active destruction of human values in favor of God’s values – that Jesus was called, and that Jesus in turned called the crowd, the disciples, and each of us.

Think of it. In that light, when Jesus talks about losing your life to find it, he’s not talking about an allegorical death.

As much as I make light of how we view taking up your cross, dying to self, and wearing crucifixes as jewelry these days, we have an advantage that those first-century crowds, those faithful disciples did not have.

Because of Jesus Christ, we see the cross not as the end of the story, not as the death of hope and the destruction of freedom and the symbol of the absolute power of earthly kings over their subjects, but as the ultimate symbol of the triumph of hope, of the power of life, of the pervasiveness true freedom, of God’s bountiful and boundless love, of the eternal truth of the resurrection.

In the cross we know, we know that God is for us.

The Gospels make a point to tell us that, even though Jesus spoke about his death and resurrection repeatedly, the disciples never understood. They never got it. And from this side of the cross, it’s easy for us to smirk at them for being thick-headed, for not seeing the obvious outcome, for not comprehending everything that their Lord was telling them.

I want to suggest to you this morning that we should not laugh at those “poor, dumb” disciples. Rather, we should be in awe of them. Imagine listening to Jesus that day, and not knowing that in him the cross would become a symbol of ultimate, eternal victory. Imagine hearing those words and feeling your guts burn in fear at the thought of such a lingering, torturous death. Imagine listening to Jesus and seeing only the ultimate triumph of those brutish foreigners with their togas and their legions.

And imagine continuing to follow Jesus anyway.

Despite their lack of understanding, in direct opposition to their continuing need to know what was in it for them, and the continuous assurance that their return on investment for giving up everything they had and knew to follow Christ would be persecution, torture and death, these disciples, almost to a man, continued to follow Jesus.

Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” In the Epistle to the Colossians, Paul wrote, “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Do we really believe that today?

Christians today are identified more by the people and the things they hate than by the thing that Jesus himself said we would be known by: our love. More and more people who follow the risen Savior of all creation have to say, “I’m a Christian, but I’m not like that,” because Christianity has come to be identified not as a group of individuals united by a common belief in an eternal and loving Savior, but as a political party with certain intransigent standards, often angrily – and sometimes violently – promoted within the status quo, the existing cultural structure. Far too many Christians practice, consciously or unconsciously, Dominionism, seeking influence or control over secular civil government through political action, with the express goal of either a nation governed by Christians, or a nation governed exclusively by a particular interpretation of Biblical law.

The clear problem with such a view is that it is founded on human values – who has the power, who wields ultimate authority, who is in control.

By contrast, Jesus repeatedly rejected the idea of establishing any kind of earthly empire, in favor of an eternal Kingdom of God. This Kingdom flies in the face of what we are used to. Rather than power being the reward for aggression or consensus-building, the most powerful in the Kingdom of God are the least. The mark of citizenship in God’s Kingdom is first, foremost, and exclusively love. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Jesus represents God's values, best summed up by the willingness to risk one's own life for the sake of others. Jesus does not encourage suffering for the sake of suffering, nor does he recommend acceptance of forced servitude. When Jesus talks about saving your life by losing it, he specifies losing it for the cause of Christ and “for the sake of the gospel” and in this Jesus is the exemplary model. Jesus invites his disciples, and us, to follow his example, to be willing to risk our lives for the sake of others.

With all of this in mind, the challenge facing Christianity today is this: can we take back our name? Can Christians become known not for who and what we hate, who we oppress and marginalize, what political team we root for… but for our unconditional, Christlike, ebullient and egregious love? Can we shift the paradigm from a quest for dominion to a quest for relationship? Can we lay down our lives to the point that what we own and where we live, what we drive and who our friends are, are less important than who and how we help, the ways we strive to offer support, the lengths we will go to in order to provide encouragement, how quickly we bring relief, how deeply we personify love?

In the earliest days of the Church, believers earned the name “Christian” from those outside the faith, who intended to make fun of them for running around, acting like “little Christs.” That’s what that word, “Christian,” means. “Little Christ.”

My prayer is that we who follow Christ find a way to earn that name again.

Let us pray.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

The Canaanite Conquers the Israelite...

I made abundant use of many sources of information in the writing of this sermon. Foremost was the work of Paul J. Nuechterlein, Grant LeMarquand, and "Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary." You will notice that I also blatantly borrowed ideas from Rev. Dr. Delmer L. Chilton and Marilyn Salmon, and picked the closing prayer whole from Rev. Gene Anderson's excellent blog.

Genesis 45:1-15
Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, “Send everyone away from me.” So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.
Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. I will provide for you there: since there are five more years of famine to come — so that you and your household, and all that you have, will not come to poverty.’ And now your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my own mouth that speaks to you. You must tell my father how greatly I am honored in Egypt, and all that you have seen. Hurry and bring my father down here.” Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, while Benjamin wept upon his neck. And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.
... for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

Matthew 15:10-28
Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: 11it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”
Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

This is the Word of the Lord.

And it is the Word of the Lord, even when that Word makes us uncomfortable. And I have to confess to you, few passages of Scripture make me more uncomfortable than this account of Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman. It’s as if someone has stolen my Bible and replaced it with one where the part of Jesus is played by Archie Bunker! Honestly, calling someone a dog? To their face? This would be a good week to preach on the Old Testament reading instead, wouldn’t it?

I’m not alone in my discomfort, it seems. Over the centuries, commentators and preachers have come up with a lot of explanations about the way that Jesus acts here.

Some say that this is all an acted out parable. That Jesus was just saying what he knew his followers thought and he wanted them to see how bad it sounded so he could then correct it. We can call this the “He didn't really mean it” explanation.

Some say that this is an inauthentic saying, words put into his mouth by the early church and the Gospel writer. For these folks, the key to understanding this passage is to decide why the early church would tell such a story of Jesus. This would be the “He didn't really say it” explanation.

Still others say Jesus was not referring to her as a dog but was simply using an old saying or a village proverb, like saying “The early bird gets the worm.” No one gets their feelings hurt over metaphor or clichés, right? This is the “We don't really get it” explanation.

So… what’s really going on?

I don’t know. I’m sorry, I know I should be able to package this whole thing up in a neat, digestible package for you, say the prayer, take the offering, don’t forget to dance, see you next Sunday, but I cannot simply hide behind an easy explanation for a difficult passage.

One of the most difficult readings I have heard was the suggestion that Jesus was absolutely serious when he said “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” There was no twinkle in his eye, no softening of his voice, nothing to suggest he was playing around, bringing out the depth of this woman’s faith.

This reading of the passage suggests that, in his interaction with the Canaanite woman, it is Jesus who is changed, Jesus who is, in a manner of speaking, converted, Jesus who goes from seeing himself as the Savior of the Jewish people only to truly the Savior of the world.

That is a tough pill to swallow. There is a principle of Biblical translation and interpretation that says the most difficult reading is usually the correct one. And this idea of Jesus being changed by his interaction with the Canaanite woman has a lot of merit. After all, as we too often forget, Jesus, though completely divine, utterly God, was completely human as well. We can comfortably assume that Jesus had to learn how to walk, had to be potty trained, had to learn to talk, had to learn how to feed himself, had to learn how to read, had to learn how to dress himself, and on and on and on.

Is it too great a logical leap to say that Jesus may have discovered the scope and direction of God’s plan for him, the breadth and depth of his earthly mission, in part while he was in the midst of his earthly mission?

The Canaanite woman certainly comes out of this account as the one with the upper hand. It is she, and not Jesus, who models the most admirable human behavior. She shows willingness to be vulnerable by seeking help from a longstanding foe whom she knows despises her because of national and racial divisions. She asks for help for her daughter, not for herself. She is persistent in the face of insults and rejection, for her daughter's sake. The Canaanite woman has the best lines in the story, especially her last one. "Call me dog," she says, "but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table." She is the clear underdog (pun intended) who wins the prize of highest value for any mother, Jew or despised Canaanite – her child's health and well-being.

And Jesus appears to go from, frankly, acting like a jerk – a staunch nationalist, a good Jew who won’t have anything to do with unclean Gentiles – to one who is amazed at the faithfulness of someone from outside the Jewish faith, and convinced that God is indeed actively pursuing, constantly calling every human being, no matter their nationality or original belief system, into relationship and into the Kingdom of God.

Or… could there be something else at work here?

Why on earth is Matthew insisting on calling this woman a Canaanite? No one in the first century used that word to describe anyone. It would be like calling New York “New Amsterdam,” or describing a trip to Haleyville as a visit to the “Free State of Winston.”

And besides, what in the world is Jesus doing in Tyre and Sidon anyway, if he’s “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” like he says? He’s in Gentile country, for cryin’ out loud! Guess what, Jesus, the house of Israel is back the way you came, bro!

Well, Canaan had a history with Israel, you see. Back in Joshua’s time, when they were crossing the Jordan to take the Promised Land, God specifically instructed the Israelites, in no uncertain terms, to utterly destroy the Canaanites – if you will, to commit genocide on the entire race. Here it is, from Deuteronomy, the seventh chapter, verses one through four:

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.”

The Canaanites were not just pagans. Not just Gentiles. They were the God-ordained enemies of Jewish people everywhere!

So why is Jesus there? Remember, a couple of weeks back, we read about Jesus’ Feeding of the Five Thousand. That was smack-dab in Jewish territory, and everyone who as fed was, presumably, of the Jewish faith. There were enough leftovers, you will remember, to fill twelve baskets. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the connection to the Twelve Tribes of Israel in that gathering, does it?

Immediately following our reading today, Jesus travels along the Sea of Galilee for a bit, climbs a mountain, heals everyone who is brought to him, and feeds four thousand people with seven loaves and some fishes. There is enough left over to fill seven baskets this time… and is it much of a stretch to connect those seven baskets to the seven nations that God commanded Joshua and the Children of Israel to annihilate roughly fourteen centuries before?

I want to suggest to you that we do not have to choose between a Jesus who is playing games with the Canaanite woman, or a Jesus who is taught a lesson by the Canaanite woman. There is a third way, one that does not force us to see Jesus as either the conqueror or the conquered!

The third option is to see him as both: Jesus is first and foremost a conqueror by purposefully letting himself be 'conquered'. By this way of thinking, Jesus does enter into the conversation foreknowing that this woman's faith is up to the test. But instead of flaunting this foreknowledge, or intuition, he lets himself look like an abuser. He lets the tables be turned so that, in an act of faith, the Israelite is conquered by the Canaanite.

The point is this: In Deuteronomy, God commands that the Canaanites, and the six other nations mentioned there, receive no mercy, be granted no covenant. What does the Canaanite woman ask for, on behalf of her daughter? Mercy. What, ultimately, does Jesus give the Canaanite woman? Mercy, and healing.

I do not believe it is an accident that the breaking of the bread there in the Gentile lands, like the breaking of the bread in the Jewish land, seems to foreshadow the breaking of the bread at the Lord’s Supper. If the bread and the cup symbolize for us the New Covenant in Christ’s blood, how much more does the breaking of the bread and the feeding of the four thousand symbolize a covenant with a people whom God had commanded, some fourteen hundred years before, there be no covenant made?

Instead of a God who shows no mercy through the first Joshua, we meet a God of mercy through a new Joshua (and, in fact, the name “Joshua” and the name “Jesus” are exactly the same in Hebrew!), who shows forth that mercy, first of all, through the willingness to suffer violence rather than inflict it, and then, second of all, as the true power of life itself, rather than of death -- namely, through the power to heal the sick and nourish a crowd.

Like the walls of Jericho, the wall between Jew and Gentile have fallen. And the walls are still fallen! Look around you in this place, and look around you, really look around you, when you leave this place today. Look around you everywhere, all week, all the time. We will not, at any point, in any context, in any place, find any person who is too different or too bad or too wrong or too anything to be out of reach of the love and mercy and forgiveness and reconciling grace of God!

Oh, this is not to say that we won’t see people that we are not comfortable imagining being loved by God. We have our own walls – walls of prejudice, walls of sexism, walls of class pride and class envy, walls of privilege and walls built by pain and injury. “For out of the heart,” Jesus said, “come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.” Out of the heart comes racism, out of the heart comes jealousy, out of the heart comes pride. “These are what defile a person…” and it is high time we call these things what they are, and begin the hard work of setting them aside.

We can choose to be like the disciples who complained about all the noise the needy Canaanite woman was making, or we can choose to be like the disciples who eagerly distributed the broken loaves and fishes to the hungry Gentile crowd. The difference is this: are we willing to see the walls come down?

Let us pray:

Lord, grant us the wisdom of the Canaanite woman,
To know our need,
To acknowledge your power,
And to share your love with others.
Open our ears and our hearts to the real needs
Of all your children
For Jesus’ sake…