Pentecost 14

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Pentecost 14
PROPER: C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: September 6,1998

TEXT: Luke 14:25-33 - Jesus said, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciples. . . . . So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."

ISSUE: Each of the lessons today are about making decisions. The Gospel reading is particularly startling in the call to hate family, take up the cross, and give up everything. It calls for a radical decision and transformation to accept the ways of Christ first. Embracing the Lord, we are then able to serve and love our family, friends, the world in a whole new way that is meaningful and gives hope to the world.
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Each of the readings this morning deal with making important decisions. Moses in a farewell speech tells his people just prior to their entrance into the Promised Land, that if they remain faithful to God they shall be choosing life and a long term inhabitance in in the Land. If, however, they choose other gods and ways contrary to what god has offered them, they will be on their own and have to suffer the consequences.
In Paul's personal Epistle to Philemon, which incidentally is the only personal letter left existing written by Paul, He urges Philemon to take back his run away slave, Onesimus. Paul had encountered the slave Onesimus in prison, and Onesimus under Paul's tutelage had accepted Christ as Lord. While neither Paul, nor the early church confronted the issue of slavery, Paul does urge Philemon to takes his slave back as a brother in Christ, and as one useful to their ministries in the church. For Philemon to set aside the punishments bestowed on runaway slaves and to accept Onesimus as a brother in Christ would have been a significant decision to make.
The really attentiion getting passage comes from Luke's account of the Gospel, when he says that there comes a time of decision when you must hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, take up a cross and give away all you possess. This passage sure flies in the face of all the talk we hear these days about recoving family values. It comes across as another one of those dramatic great reversals: "The last shall be first and the first last, . . . the one who exalts himself will be humbled and the one who humbles himself will be exalted . . . and now, hate rather than love your mother, father, wife, children, brother sister!
In Jesus time families were your life line. All of your existence was dependent upon family. Family determined your wife, your education, you economic stability. Family was first and foremost. Without a family you were in big trouble. What's more families were very exclusive. The person you married was often one of your first cousins. Sons remained with their fathers. There was a great deal of control by the father. They were very tight knit, and perhaps even very stifling, controlling, and suffocating. There was not much room for creativity and freedom in the 1st century family. Jesus dare to challenge that cultural institution in his words calling for hatred of this kind of family. His words were most daring.
There is the belief that when Jesus uses the word to hate that it was a Jewish idiomatic expression which meant actually to prefer less. To hate meant to prefer something over another. To hate did not have the emotional meaning that we give to the word. Hatred was also thought to be a detachment. Thus, the call of Jesus to hate your family could have meant to prefer Jesus and his teaching first over family. But, mind you, that in this time, even the idea of embracing Jesus' life and ministry over family was still a revolutionary concept.
To become detached from family and its controls and the security that they offered was extremtly dramatic change. To make that kind of decision was and awesome decision. To take up the cross was, of course, another way of saying be ready to fac e death. The cross in Jesus' time was a common symbol of death. The Romans crucified people without much thought. To leave one's family behind, to be detached from family could mean your death. Remember the prodigal son who abandons his family and ends up starving in the pig sty.
Jesus uses two parables related to counting the cost of making this dramatic decision. The man who plans to build a tower in the vineyard had better be sure he counts the cost. If he begins and can't finish he'll look like a fool and be shamed. The king who with ten thousand men plans a battle against another king who has twenty thousand men, had better think twice, and send for terms of peace. Otherwise, he'll be defeated, remembered as a fool and shamed. You see to give up family was a tremendous cost. It was to take up the the cross, to risk death. It was to give up all of your possessions. To have no family in this period was to have nothing.
What's going on here. Well, there were large crowds traveling with Jesus. These crowds were defined as curious as opposed to committed. Their understanding and focus was effected by divided allegiances. They were still steeped in their cultural traditions. Jesus real impact was the challenge and the exhilaration and freedom to leave the old behind and to face the uncertainties to be in a new kingdom, or a new family of God. It was what we might call today a surrogate family. It was still a momentous demand however you interpret it. It was a real cost. Just to be curios about Jesus, to enjoy his stories and parables, to relish his healings was not the issue. To be a real follower meant a genuine and real sacrifice that effected your whole life. It was to search for new identity and to be transformed, and to take on new attitudes. To be with Christ, to walk with him was no mere curiousity. To be a disciples was to transcend birth, class, race, gender, education, wealth and power. You became totally removed from exclusive elitism.
When St. Paul tells Philemon to take back his slave Onesimus back as a beloved brother, it was as a brother in the new family of God. It was the new family of servanthood and unity with Christ, and oneness with God. Paul with Christ is calling the people of God to being totally culturally changed into a servanthood family of God. Onesimus ( name which means "useful one" shall be useful to the family of God.
We have to wrestly with what all this means for us today. We do not live in the 1st century. Furthermore, we do not take these writing literally, as they were probably not even ointended by their authors to be taken literally. What is at the heart of this passage is the need we all have to put God and God's call to us first in our lives, even above our families. You see, I'm not really sure a man can love his wife, or a wife love her husband without first knowing what real love is. We must first long to attach ourselve, to prefer first, our Lord, to gain a deep appreciation of what love of a family is. God so loved the world that he gave his son. His Son gives his life on a cross so that the world can vividly and dramatically see his servanthood even to death. The whole meaning of his life as it effects everyone, and as it is extended to everyone comes out of that sacrificial servanthood of love. Love in family is not merely a father and or a mother working, and doing things. It is an intimate self-giving and self-surrender that comes from Christ. It is a being there with family; it is the total life surrendered to the well being of the others. Appreciating what the love of Christ as first and foremost is all about puts a whole new dimension on honoring father and mother, and loving your wife or husband. Husbands and wives are often brought together through the romantic and erotic aspects of love. But unless there is a growth and appreciation of servanthood and sacrifice for and willingness to be changed for one another, we find ourselves in trouble and create a great deal of unhappiness. Godliness, Christ-likeness needs to be first in our lives and that must be our first genuine focus. Out of that focus on love comes forgiveness and compassion, because we are first loved, forgiven and receive the compassion of God through Christ.
What this passage means for today is that we need to be very cautious about our business and the demanding lifestyles that some of us lead. There are many people very busy, in very demanding jobs, and who are raking in the bucks, but who are miserable. Do not situations like these make us stop to take notice that there may have to make a dramatic change in our lives. Human beings, especially Americans, become so self-absorbed, so trapped in worldly demands, job demands that we miss other joys of humaness that give real quality to life like caring for others, like stopping to appreciate beauty in life in friends, in nature, in art, and poetry, in music, in the wonders of the universe that call us to focusing upon the joy and wonder of God. In failing to do this, we fail to pass on joy to our children and perpetuate the misery. To take up the cross in this context meant to risk a dramatic change, it meant dying to old traditions, ways, and demands to discover new life with quality to it.
One of the really great examples of this dramatic change was in the life of St. Francis. Francis is largely known among people as the great bird-feeder. What a terrible image and misinterpreation of this profound man. Francis was the child of a man who had great wealth. But touched by God and embracing Jesus Christ, Francis took on the life of a servant. He renounced, "hated" - preferred less his father's ways - he detached himself from his father's world. Befor his bishop and his father he stripped naked casting off his past, and dared to mingle and touch lepers and embrace the lost, the last, the least. Only then did his life take on great meaning, and he became renouned as one of the church's greatest and most beloved saints. Christ became first and foremost and he lived into that way of life.
Obviously we are not St. Francis. He indeed was a profound example of giving up all his possessions. But in that we are not Francis, and God does not call us to such a dramatic calling, we are still not excused from the calling of Christ to renounce worldliness and to enter into something new and challenging and life giving. What might that be for you and me, for this church? So many of us older churches become so traditional and set in our ways that it is hard for us to break away from what is comfortable and a casual curios acquaintance with Jesus Christ. We can have hoardes of people on the church roster, but without a defined and specific mission, with out taking up the cross of uncertainty and change, and giving up all the old possessions are we truly communicators and revealers of the one we claim to serve?
By now you all may be aware that we will inherit a yet undetermined amount of money from the estate of Paul David White. I wonder if you all and the Vestry have really begun to pray for a discernment of how we might serve Christ and be servants of Christ best with this gift. Will it be used in creative servant hood, or as a means to self-preservation of tradition and maintenance in the preservation of a musty old self-serving place?
It has been argued that we have to take care of ourselves. We have to have a place where we can teach and instruct our children in the faith, rather than being too giving beyond ourselves. But this kind of thinking is thinking as the world would have us think. What we teach in this case to our children is we must take good care of ourselves for prosperity. It seems to me that to embrace Christ is to be a generous serving community of people that teaches children that giving and sacrifice and servanthood is in fact what it means to be in Christ Jesus and to put him first.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. Life is full of them. There is no greater challenge to us as Christians than the challenge of Jesus Christ who dares us to let go the stuff and the demands we think are so important and to enter into a transformed life and way of thinking. Today is call to another great reversal. Is it goodnews or not? Is the good news a matter of maintaining things the way they are, and playing it safe. Perhaps goodnews is to keep things they way they are. Maybe musty and dusty, or doing and keeping things decently and in order, is what is comfortable and good. This plan may be the best for hoardes of curious observers. But then again, maybe the Good news is to be liberated from the past, its stifling aspects, and bekcome renewed alive and free in the inclusive servanthood of Christ.
This passage concludes (altho not read in the lectionary) that if Salt loses its zing it is worthless. Our lives without the zing of Christ in the first and foremost becomes useless and good for nothing, not even the manure pile.