January 27, 2008 | 8:00 a.m.

Negotiating Loyalties

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 12:1–4a
Matthew 4:12–23

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the story of God telling Abraham to leave his homeland, his family, and his father’s house in order to go to some other land that God would show him. More than any other biblical story, this story from Genesis was woven into my upbringing. Although the comparison was never explicitly made, I am certain that the story of God calling Abraham to leave all that was familiar to him very much informed how my father, who had immigrated from Korea to the United States, came to make sense of his life.

As the eldest son in a Confucian-ordered household, there were clear expectations about his familial responsibilities, and from early on he was raised to fulfill his filial responsibilities to his parents and grandparents. And of course, beyond this, the love that a boy has for his family would have been enough to keep him home. Due to circumstances beyond his control—a war that separated him from his family, followed by the division drawn at the 38th parallel between North and South Korea—he had to look elsewhere for his future.

I suspect that this story resonates with other immigrants too. It identifies, I think, a problem that is known intimately by many of them: that to go to a new land, whether or not because they heard God calling them, entails leaving not just familiarity but also family. In the case of Abraham, being faithful to God entailed leaving behind his family, to whom he had undoubtedly formed lifelong ties of loyalty and trust.

In his commentary on Genesis, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann explains that this story is the first in the Bible where we find an important theme that will appear again and again in both the Old and New Testaments. The theme is this: to stay in safety is to remain lifeless; to leave in risk is to have hope (Genesis, p. 118). It is a theme of renunciation for the sake of life.

You have heard this theme elsewhere in the Bible. It is echoed in Jesus’ invitation to a crowd and his disciples to follow him: “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “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 the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:34–35). The theme of renunciation and departure governs much of the tradition of discipleship and the call to follow Jesus.

This morning I read Matthew’s account of the first disciples receiving and accepting Jesus’ call to follow him. Simon, who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew put down and left their fishing nets to follow Jesus. Then Jesus called two other brothers, James and John, to follow him. Matthew tells us that they immediately left their boat and their father to follow him. All four men left their nets and their fishing trade, their means of livelihood. That was not all that they must have left behind. As in the case of Abraham, who left his family, James and John left their father.

I struggle with the theme of renunciation, as I am sure you do. It’s not, however, just the part about renouncing security and sense of familiarity that I find difficult. Stories about pilgrims who, for the sake of religious freedom, made the long and treacherous journey across the ocean to the New World, lessons in our history books about the different waves of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island, news stories about people risking their lives to cross our southern border—all these stories create the rich backdrop against which we know that human beings can and will renounce security and familiarity for the sake of a better life.

More than the call to renounce our security and sense of familiarity, I find difficult the renunciation of familial ties that often accompanies the demands of discipleship. Having to deal with a new environment, an unfamiliar culture, does not seem to be the biggest hurdle people have to overcome when they leave their homeland. Movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Spanglish poignantly and humorously explore the trickiness of having to navigate between two cultures, not because the cultures are so different from one another but rather because people have profound emotional ties of loyalty, trust, and love that they do not want to betray. Underlying each deliberation of what to appropriate from a foreign culture or tradition is a more difficult deliberation involving anticipations of loved ones feeling betrayed.

I have a hard time conceiving that being faithful to God requires being unfaithful to those people who have loved and cared for you. And this is, unfortunately, how some people understand what faithful discipleship to God entails.

To be sure, being faithful to God entails reevaluating and rearranging the constellation of our loyalties, our commitments. Each one of us has many commitments in life, and furthermore we are not always sure how they fit together. Can you list the persons, causes, and things to which you are loyal? Is your faith one among them? American theological ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr addressed this question. He called the state of affairs in which people have multiple separate loyalties polytheism. Neibuhr thought that in order to be truly faithful to God, our faithfulness to God can’t be one among many loyalties, but rather it must be capable of integrating all our many other loyalties. He called such faith a radical monotheism, by which he meant a belief in one God who creates and loves all things and radically calls his creatures to respond faithfully by loving the whole of creation. What does this mean for us, when we can list so many separate commitments that fill our lives?

In his book The Call of Stories, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and renowned author Robert Coles writes about how people commonly make distinctions between their work life and their private life, which might include family, volunteer work, intellectual interests, and hobbies. Coles notices that people commonly say about themselves, “I have several loves.” In particular he writes about a student named Harold, who struggled to fit together all the things he was passionate about in life. Coles writes that like many students he has taught, “Harold wondered how to straddle different worlds, and, too, how to make sense of his own behavior—the different responses his mind made to a private life and to the so-called professional life” (p. 136). Coles relays something that Harold said about himself: “I’m no saint, and I’m not trying to be a saint. But I am worried about becoming something worse than a sinner—a guy who has lost his integrity” (Coles, pp. 136–137).

At stake in how we negotiate our multiple loyalties, our many commitments in life, is our integrity. As Harold recognized, integrity does not simply mean being honest. Integrity is about wholeness. To have integrity means that you can’t draw lines cleanly dividing your loyalties.

I was introduced to Robert Coles’ book by way of another book that I have been reading. The book is Acts of Faith, and it is written by sociologist of religion Eboo Patel. Eboo Patel is the founder and executive director of the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core. About himself he writes

I am an American Muslim from India. My adolescence was a series of rejections, one after another, of the various dimensions of my heritage, in the belief that America, India, and Islam could not coexist within the same being. My struggle to understand the traditions I belong to as mutually enriching rather than mutually exclusive is the story of a generation of young people standing at the crossroads . . . , trying to look both ways at once. There is a strong connection between finding a sense of inner coherence and developing a commitment to pluralism. And that has everything to do with who meets you at the crossroads. (p. xvii).

In his book, Patel makes it clear that he didn’t achieve a sense of inner coherence, or integrity, on his own. To the contrary, his stories are about the lessons he learned from people he met at different crossroads in his life—people who were devout in their religious faith and whose religious faiths, while different from his own, were lived out in loving and kind ways. Patel credits the personal relationships in which he experienced this love for making him hopeful that our diverse loyalties can be integrated. Our best hope, he thinks, lies precisely in cultivating, not renouncing, the ties of loyalty and trust we have to people who love and care about us.

There is a new wall-hanging in the gallery that runs from the doors of this sanctuary to the church’s reception desk. Fifty women of this congregation gathered over the weekend for a retreat on pilgrimage, and together we created a collage with ribbons forming patterns that represent the different paths we understand our lives to have taken. In a society as mobile as ours is, the ribbons begin from all different orientations—north, south, east, and west—and make their way into all different directions. At various points, the ribbons, you’ll find, intersect with, overlap, and encircle each other. As we noticed how the paths we were pinning related to each other, we commented on the fact that our lives have crossed paths, some for the first time over the weekend and others repeatedly over the years.

Our paths reflect our loyalties. In the process of pinning our paths onto this collage, we would periodically stand back and look at it. Like an artist who, in the process of painting, takes a step back from the canvas and looks at the composition of colors, lines, and relationships, who evaluates the coherence and integrity of the composition, we too created something to behold, to evaluate, and to keep working on.

Making something together that we can hang on a wall reminds us that what we do together in this church is something to behold. Only when we see our relationships with each other in light of our faith in God will we have integrity in our lives.

When the fishermen were asked by Jesus to join him in his ministry and when Abraham was called by God to leave his homeland, each was asked to make great sacrifices and to change their lives forever. They were called to integrate God’s work into the collection of loyalties that made them whole.