Pr 18C Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Luke 14:25-33

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1 Pr 18C Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Luke 14:25-33 If you are still recovering from whiplash after hearing the gospel lesson for today, I am sure that you are not alone! Some of you must have been silently muttering, Say what? or something similar as the gospel from Luke was read. So, let s take care of something here right at the top. Hyperbole seems to have been the default literary devise for Jesus, and here he is again, firing shots in all directions like a loose cannon. What was Jesus up to here? In the first part of the 14 th chapter Luke has just completed a series of stories and sayings by Jesus which emphasize the unconditional, open invitation for any and all to be welcomed into God s reign of love and justice. A man with dropsy is healed. A new kind of radical humility and hospitality between host and guest is spelled out. The parable of the great dinner has been told, where the lowliest in society are invited in as the upper crust make excuses. And all of these things Jesus has been saying announce that there is something radically different in what God is doing at the center of life. So it does make sense that by now the crowd following Jesus has become very large, as Luke reports, and Jesus turns to address them. And address them he does, and in spades. 1

2 This does not match the Jesus we find elsewhere, but before we try to tame the sayings, we do well to reel a little more in shock. It is shocking and doubtless intended to be shocking. His message is stark. 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 disciple. Now, hate should be understood in the context of the first-century middleeastern world based on honor and shame. To hate was to disgrace. Life was family centered, and honor of the family was very highly valued. The word hate is laden with emotion in our cultural context. It suggests repulsion at a visceral level. In the first century context it is not about emotions, but about actions. In the context of first century middle-eastern culture, to hate one s family, one s self, life itself, means that the person disconnects from everything that has previously defined that person. To put it another way, one s past no longer defines who one is. But Jesus, why the dynamite? What is in need of such a blast? Well, clearly the assumption is that whatever is to be dislodged will take some forceful moving! And it turns out that the large object needing more than a nudge is family power and possessions, and they probably are well attached to each other. 2

3 We are being asked to abandon, or even despise, the cultural value placed on family, a value that reaches almost to the point of idolatry in some quarters. Family power and control can keep one in the womb, becoming a cage, a kind of prison; but can more often become a comfortable and secure place in which to turn aside from one s potential and the world s challenge. Domestication confines religious life to the home and family, and Jesus teaching often challenges such so-called family values. To read Jesus as suggesting, demanding, hatred of one s family is to miss the point and mishear the hyperbole. But family power and control is a big object to dislodge. Families can constrict growth, become oppressive, and actually become death-dealing rather than life-giving. Apparently Jesus thought that shocking rhetoric was appropriate! Certainly there are contemporary expressions of family life and values that merit such shocking. Sometimes it is blatant abuse in family or marriage. Other times it is more innocent, like peace and goodness that suppresses self-exploration and self worth, becoming internalized and imprisoning. Sometimes it results in closed minds, eyes trained not to see, ears not to hear, lives self-preoccupied with private goodness but no heart for compassion and justice in the world. 3

4 Sometime family power imprints a gender script that must later be torn up, dethroned, often with great trauma for all concerned. At those times it is actually like giving up what has been one s own life to find oneself and others. Jesus did not use our social psychological concepts, but he must have understood what a large barrier to the freedom of discipleship family power and control could be. The call to discipleship in this gospel lesson is radical, implying that those who follow Jesus are not going to be making decisions based on what s best for me, or even what s best for our marriage, family, children. Not that these concerns cannot be a good to be sought. But the critical engagement Jesus is talking about can stand in stark contrast to the typical depiction of the happy Christian home where one s faith is demonstrated by how committed one is to providing every possible advantage to one s own. That would be to domesticate the gospel and make it a matter of enhancing our families and ourselves. That is, until we hear this extreme language of Jesus and are blasted into a costly life re-orientation which affirms life and hope and love! But we are not finished with the word of the morning. There is more. 4

5 Luke provides two analogies unique to his gospel. We might call them strategic planning. What happens if you build a structure without estimating the cost to see whether you have enough to complete it? Or, what military leader wages war without first trying to determine whether he has adequate resources? In other words, the call of the gospel invites us to think hard, really hard, about what we are doing, using as much common sense as a builder or a king preparing for battle. The point here is that in such situations people are simply better to know what they are doing. And then this: None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions. So here we arrive at the real bind! Decision time! Crisis time! Some of you may have noted this week the death of William Glasser, an eminent psychiatrist who influenced many and various practitioners. Glasser wrote and taught that by avoiding the urge to blame others, or to relive past hurts, people can exercise their privileged ability to choose, to choose behaviors that would improve their relationships and increase their chances for happiness. We choose everything we do, including the misery we feel, he wrote his 1998 book Choice Theory, teaching that we are much more in control of our lives than we realize. 5

6 Jesus seems to be in agreement, as he challenges us with our own opportunity for choice. We have a choice. I wonder if what stares us in the face cuts both ways: both letting go of possessions and letting go of being possessed by them? What are the possessions that can also possess us? It may be just my stuff, but it can include more intangible things to which I cling: ideas, prejudices, opinions, the filters through which I see the world. Does my family possess me? My job or profession? My reputation? My social economic identity? Is my life my possession, my world s possession, or God s possession? None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. Jesus sounds as uncompromising as Moses in today s first lesson. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live! Love God and live. Choose life! See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. Deut 30:19 Sit down and count the cost. It could cost everything. It did cost Jesus his crucifixion. He chose life in the face of the life-denying forces of his world. 6

7 For us, the cost is no less. The dominant powers of our crazy war- making, child-exploiting, self-absorbed worlds are so often life-denying and so seldom life-affirming. For any one of us to choose life, really and consciously to choose life as Jesus followers, will mean taking up a cross, incurring a cost of some kind, as we press back at death and adversity wherever they are expressed. For the sake of Life itself! This morning we are all aware of the awful decision before the Congress and President concerning whether to rain death and destruction on Syrian targets. For me the cross in all this, one hard to avoid, is the terrible ambiguity I experience as a person of faith who wants to affirm Life, to choose Life in the midst of the fog of impending war. If that was not my primary value and intention the burden of the dilemma might be a bit less. So, on a lighter note: Have you heard about the Buddhist vacuum cleaner? It comes with no attachments! It is about detachment, relinquishment. However, it is not merely to detach. Jesus calls his followers to choose Life. To choose the more, something more. 7

8 The things we cling to make us as dead as our possessions, and can be a kind of life-threatening drug, occupying the one who possesses, and contradicting Life. Even the things that make daily life and work easier can press us into the mentality of the possessors and an existence shaped by having. The great religious traditions call it avarice. Freedom from possessing may be the release from the ways we see ourselves, from all those personal pronouns, I, me, mine, that we sustain through unexamined habit, grasping and clinging to what is not fundamental while missing or forgetting what is. Choose life, Jesus is saying here, not without cost, but with the something more for which you were born, for which you are alive and breathing in this world. Take up Life and follow me, is the invitation of our gospel for today. It is as if Jesus is saying, don t let my hyperbole put you off. Every parable I told contains something scandalous. But the intent is not to merely to incite shock and disorientation. No. It is to dislocate you from the unimportant. It is to dislodge you from whatever accommodations and choices you have made over the years that squeeze the juice of life out of you. 8

9 I believe at the heart of it is an invitation to Life, to engagement in radical inclusive Love, to living from the heart of the God of love and to living in solidarity with all who are being newly created in that Love. And that is to live in the something more. 9