September 8, 2019 Luke 14:25-33 Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Philemon 1-21
I thought I got off scott-free this year since I
started the Sunday after the Gospel reading where Jesus says he comes not to
bring peace, but a sword and divide mother-in-law from daughter in law, etc. But here we are on God’s Work, Our Hands
Sunday with the word “hate” in the Gospel.
Hate is a bad word in many households. It is such an angry, bitter word! But it does come up in the scriptures, with
mixed views of whether or when hate is appropriate. Ecclesiastes says there is a time to love and
a time to hate. God says he loves Jacob
and hates Esau. Jacob says he loves
Rachel and hates Leah. And in 1 John, we
are told that if we hate, we do not have God’s light and love within us.
A lot of the words we read in scripture have other meanings
or nuances because they have been translated from other languages and cultures,
but sadly, this word means “abhor.” There’s
no getting around it. It’s pretty
straight-forward, so how do we handle, interpret, apply this Gospel reading?
First we can ask where this story came from. The Gospel writer Luke, used the book of Mark
as one of his sources. A very similar
passage appears in Mark 10. Jesus says,
“Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or
mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the
good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age, and in the age
to come eternal life.” It is a little
more palatable in Mark, but still hard to stomach, encouraging people to leave
their children or parents for any reason.
Still, leave is a little better than hate.
What was going on when Luke was writing this? I imagine he was reflecting on all that his
community had endured. Christianity was
just beginning. They were brand new
Christians many of whom had been disowned by their families, hated by their
families, and lost everything because of their new faith. They had encountered the teachings of Jesus,
the love and forgiveness and grace, and their experience had caused them to
chose a path that would break their families.
Their families would not have understood, at all. Becoming Christian meant sacrificing
everything, giving everything up, to follow Jesus. It is hard for us to imagine, today, although
we all make small sacrifices to be Christian—we devote a portion of our time to
church and prayer and volunteering. We
give a portion of our income. We may
have lost a friend here or there and some of us have been mocked by family that
didn’t understand. Very few of us lost
everything because of our faith. It
makes me wonder, if I had to give up everything, like these early Christians,
would I have the strength, would I have the faith to do it?
How does this scripture relate to others in the
Bible? It’s a contradiction when we read
in our Old Testament reading this morning that we should follow the
commandments and we read in the Gospel that anyone who doesn’t hate their
family can’t be Jesus’ disciple. Isn’t
one of the commandments to honor your father and mother? How do we follow both
of these teachings? Some have compared
this Gospel reading to the one that says, “If your hand sins against you, cut
it off.” None of us is going to do that,
are we? Please don’t! It’s a statement about the seriousness of
sin. It’s hyperbole. This, too, is hyperbole. Yes, our relatives drive us nuts sometimes
and there are things we might even hate about them, but Jesus isn’t saying to
cut them off or spend time seething about them.
But Jesus is pointing out that often our family takes absolutely first
priority. Sometimes we worship family
and give them absolute allegiance.
Sometimes we get into unhealthy patterns with our family that need to be
broken.
The kingdom of God requires us to give our commitment
and priority to God. Where our family
and God differ, we need to follow God’s way.
Where our family is unhealthy or harmful, God gives us alternative
models and communities. God is
reorganizing family. Those who gave up their
families in the early Christian church and in parts of the world even today
because of their faith, another kind of family is offered. Christians are invited to share their
possessions, be grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles for kids who don’t have
any, share God’s work as we will do after church today, share food and
community, and the kinds of things families need from each other.
Although this isn’t one of my favorite of Jesus’
sayings, I do appreciate how direct he is and how honest. He doesn’t tell the crowds what they want to
hear. And I think it shows the extent to
which they were ready for someone to give them the truth, full-force. They were tired of people lying to them and
they could see through those lies.
“Worship this or that god and you’ll become rich and successful. Stay in your place and do what’s expected of
you.” They weren’t buying any of that
nonsense anymore. They wanted something
more, something to give their life meaning and purpose, that made sense in
their experience and challenged them to think in new ways, that gave them
experiences of love and grace.
What Jesus wanted them and us to understand is that
there is a cost, a consequence to every decision we make. We can choose the easy path, please our
family, follow the path people expect us to, not look for anything deeper or
challenging, and we will probably be mostly ok.
But is that really life? Is that
really living? Jesus calls us to another
level, to give something up, to sacrifice, to suffer for our belief that God is
love. God is asking us to go beyond what
our family has taught us and take on the values of a new family, values that
ask us to go places we never would have, literally and figuratively, to meet
people we never would have, learn new stories of suffering and pain and joy, be
with people who need us more than our families we were born into. It’s hard, but it’s rewarding. It’s really life!
In the short, 1 chapter book of Philemon, Paul is
asking a friend to reorient his view of family and possessions. He’s sending his slave, his property,
Onesimus, back to him, challenging him to see him as a brother, fully equal to
him. Paul is very convincing, he even
calls Philemon his partner, makes him fully equal with Paul. And Paul lowers himself to that of prisoner,
the same as Onesimus was. Paul is
breaking down all the barriers between them to show that they are one family,
all brothers and sisters. Who is God
asking us to release from bondage? What
possessions is God asking us to let go of that have a hold on us?
That is what it means to be in the body of Christ,
children of God. Even when we are
family, in baptism we become brothers and sisters, equals, with God as our
Father. So when my son was baptized, he
became my brother in Christ, so now I have a different relationship with him
than just being his mother. I come here,
and I ask you to accept me as your sister in Christ. I’ve had some seminary education and some
experience, but you have experience, too, so we teach each other, help each
other. You are welcoming me and my son
into this family. Visitors come and they
become brothers and sisters. You affect
them by your welcome and your history in this place and they affect you by
bringing their gifts, their talents, their ideas, their perspectives. The Little Doves families and Food Bank
friends become people who enrich this community and we form a new community
that more resembles the Kingdom of God.
It is a new picture of what family can be.
I heard someone say this week that if you put 2nd
things in 1st place, you lose everything. But if you put 1st things in 1st
place you gain everything. If we put
family in first place, we risk going the wrong direction. God knows that our families go wrong
sometimes, they are less than perfect.
But if we put God in 1st place, we gain a family that also
has many flaws, but also shares the values of love and grace that God is
teaching us, and we can often still find love for the family we were born into
or that we birthed, without carrying on all the damaging patterns into another
generation
Let us find in our faith the truth that challenges us
beyond our comforts and usual patterns and leads us to new life in Christ.
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