Counting the Cost (Proper 18C)

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Counting the Cost

(Proper 18C)

Homily Delivered 8 September 2013

8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33

God, give us hearts to love and feel,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Today’s scriptures aren’t easy.  The first reading says if you follow God’s commands, he’ll bless you and your life will be wonderful.  If you don’t, he’ll curse you and your life will be miserable.   Most of us, I think, know from our lives that bad things often happen to good people, and the wicked prosper.  This Deuteronomistic faith thus seems more like a wish than a description of reality.  In the Epistle, Paul sends back a run-away slave, Onesimus (“Mr. Useful”) to his owner, Philemon.  Both of them are Christians.  Most of us today probably wish that Paul had told Philemon “Slavery is bad; set Onesimus free.”  But no—all he can manage is “Take him back, be gentle, he’s a good kid.”  And the Gospel—well, it is one of the hardest of the hard sayings of Jesus:  “Hate your families and your lives.” 

On days like today I am glad we Episcopalians read so much of the Bible in our liturgy.  If you come to Morning Prayer and Sunday Eucharist, in the course of year you will have read almost the whole bible.  And it is hard to believe in Biblical Inerrancy if you actually read the Bible and don’t just quote it.  Your faith in Biblical Truth becomes nuanced, and you realize that sometimes the authors are arguing with each other.  You see that the unity and harmony of Holy Scripture lies deep beneath the surface, and not in the shallows of doctrines or morals.  Holding the Bible to be God’s word means being true to what that diverse dialogue revealed, and in continuing the dialogue even today.

Luke here does not show us a loving, kind Jesus.  He shows us a fierce Jesus, a scary Jesus.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, is incapable of being my disciple!” 

Can this be the same Jesus who said, “Love your enemies?”   Or “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself?”

There are ways of softening what Jesus says here, and pretending he was not really being fierce.  But such rationalizations tend to miss the starkness of the language and its emotional freight.

In the world where Jesus lived, there were plenty of ideas about whom to love and whom to hate. “You shall love the Lord your God will all your might, mind, and strength” (Deuteronomy).  The Psalms and Proverbs include many statements like “I hate all those who cling to worthless idols, the unjust, and the evildoer” and see these as a model.  “Love your neighbor” (Leviticus).   The Dead Seas Scrolls’ Community Rule teaches, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”   

What is Jesus saying when he turns this on its head and says, “love your enemies” and, “hate your friends and family?” 

Context is key. Note how the story starts: “Now huge crowds had started following Jesus around.”  The problem here is an overabundance of popularity and unwelcomed celebrity.   People flocked to Jesus in curiosity, to see whether he might satisfy their hopes. Jesus’s hard saying is to these groupies. 

Luke adds, by way of commentary, two parables of Jesus that probably had circulated separately: the tower builder and the king going to war.

A similar parable did not make it into the canon: Gospel of Thomas Logion 98 is one of the few I believe may go back to the historical Jesus,  It is the even fiercer parable of the assassin:  “The kingdom … is like a certain man who wanted to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall in order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man." 

All three parables are about focus and commitment, and the need to be realistic about what a task may require.   Two are violent: a king going to war and an assassin preparing to murder a prominent person.   I am a pacifist, and reject wholeheartedly the myth of redemptive violence.  I wish Jesus had not chosen such violent images.  But Jesus’s fierce images, war, assassination, hatred of family and life, are about a fierce subject—commitment. 

Human endeavors, whatever they are, demand commitment.  Sometimes this means that a certain amount of force is required.   

When a potter begins to throw a pot on the wheel, she must first knead or wedge the clay to get it to the proper consistency and uniformity.  Then she must attach it to the wheel.  If it is not first properly affixed and centered, it will go unstable and spin off the wheel, unraveling into a chaotic mess.  To properly affix the clay you must slam it hard, with force, onto the wheel.  Anything less than that risks a failed pot.

When you get nibbles on your fishing line, you must firmly, with force, pull the line to set the hook.  Too violent, and you pull the hook out of the fish’s mouth, not firmly enough, it will get loose.  Either way, you lose the fish. 

When you grill or roast meat, you have to get your grill to a high temperature and sear the meat quickly on both sides, and then reduce the heat to cook to the desired point of doneness.   If you keep the high temperature throughout, the meat burns.  But if you do not aggressively sear at the outset, the moderate temperature of the cooking process will dry out and toughen the meat, making it unpalatable, if not inedible, regardless of the quality of the cut.  Proper roasting requires a controlled, but forceful use of excess heat at the outset to ensure success. 

Surfing requires you to really put an all-out effort at paddling when the wave begins to swell beneath you.  You have to give it your all or your board will be too slow, and the wave will pass it by.  To catch a wave, you have to have all-out commitment.  It is like this on a rugby pitch or football field:  you have to give it up, go all-out, leave everything on the field if you are to have any hope of winning, and that from the start. 

This need for commitment and even force in human effort can lead to abuse.  Basic training in military service—boot camp—seeks through aggressively applied physical and mental stress to break down the individual quirks and objections of individuals, and form them into effective members of a military command structure.   Ritual initiations, say to fraternities or sororities, similarly seek to build community through shared suffering.   Hazing is the ugly avatar of this apparent human need to use aggressive force to build community and strengthen commitment.

These parables and sayings should not be taken literally.  Jesus here is not telling us to go to war to be his disciples, to become assassins.  He is not telling us literally to hate our loved ones and despise life. 

He is saying that the cost of discipleship is high, far higher than any of the crowds following Jesus out of curiosity seem to have realized.  At the very minimum, it demands attentive openness to the teacher, rather than keeping a little running score on if the teacher measures up to our expectations. 

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, grace is free, but it is not cheap.  It demands an all-out commitment. Faith is an all-life matter, not an expression of consumer desire. Faith cannot run on auto-pilot.  If you follow Jesus merely to go along with mass crowds driven by curiosity, partisanship, and herd instinct, it is doomed to fail.

When I was in graduate school, I often regretted that I did not have more time.  Father of a young family, working nights to pay the bills, I sometimes was hard-pressed to find time to prepare for class.  One day, I made the mistake of trying to explain my lack of preparation for an advanced Aramaic course taught by Fr. Joseph Fitzmyer, a Jesuit priest and one of the world’s finest Aramaists.   I said that had not had the time that week to finish class preparation.   To this Fr. Fitzmyer innocently replied, with knowing eyes, “You know, Tony, you have all the time there is.  Literally—there is no more time than the time you already have.  It’s not that you have no time, but that choose to use your time differently.   I realized that he was right, as hard as this view seemed to be when I first heard it.   It’s all about priorities.   

Jesus tells parables in order to shock his listeners into a new understanding, a new relationship. The parables, with their unlikely points of comparison, their twist endings, their overturning of expectations, are a little like Zen Koans.  They seek to shock the hearer into a new reality.  

One Zen master famously said, “If you meet the Buddha walking down the street, kill him!”  Not a particularly gentle image.  The gut wrenching saying forces us to understand that any Buddha we contain in our understanding or mind is not really the Buddha.  So it is with “If you want to follow me, hate those you love.”  It’s precisely because families and our love for them matter so much for us that this saying shocks us to realize how important commitment to the Reign of God is. 

Jesus’ hard sayings all share this Koan-like character: highly charged language and images, without any effort at softening them or prettifying them, force us to shift gears:  “I bring a sword, not peace!  I divide families and loved ones, not unite them!  Cut off your limbs and put out your eyes if they cause you to sin!  Leave your families without even saying goodbye and let the dead bury themselves! Hate your families!”

Lord, have mercy! Merciful Jesus save us from Fierce Jesus!

Often with the choir before worship, I say the Royal School for Church Music’s Chorister’s Prayer: 

Bless, O Lord, us Thy servants,
who minister in Thy temple.
Grant that what we sing with our lips,
we may believe in our hearts,
and what we believe in our hearts,
we may show forth in our lives.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This week, let us look at how we spend our time, our emotional energy, our money, and ask ourselves, what am I committed to?  Is it service and kindness?  Is it alleviating suffering and reconciling alienation?  Am I committed to Jesus and God’s Reign?  Where do my true desires lie?  What makes my heart sing?  Do my actions reflect these desires? 

And then let us pray for the grace that what God is calling us to,  we believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth fiercely in our lives. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.