Package Deals (Mid-week Message)

Package Deals

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 28, 2016

Part of growing up, I think, is learning that certain things come with a cost, and that the choices we make in life have costs and consequences—not because of some overarching enforcer of rules in the universe, but simply because that’s the way things are.   

I saw an example in a recent Vestry Meeting.  Phyllis Reynolds made this observation about the problems entailed in any ministry to the homeless:  “Supporting the homeless means costs and commitments.  The issue is always how much cost are we willing to bear?” 

C.S. Lewis wrote that asking God to forgive our sins without any intention of making amends or reforming our lives is like asking God to heal us without healing us. 

I once counseled a man who wanted a happy family life, but was reluctant to be faithful to his wife.  All I could tell him was that he wanted two contradictory things, and he needed to decide what exactly he wanted more. 

In this political season, we often encounter candidates for office who say they want to balance the budget, increase services and projects, and yet cut taxes.  They have many fantasy ways of arguing that none of this is self-contradictory.  Regardless, both the left and the right tend to share in their own ways unrealistic and magical thinking here. 

I think this is what many of Jesus’ parables are about:  they often can be read as harsh critiques of the world and economy we live in.  But they also point to another way, what Jesus calls “the Reign of God.”  At their heart is the idea that you can’t have things both ways in a world where things are broken as badly as they are.  You have to trust God first, set priorities in line with that, and then accept the consequences. 

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+

Reading to God (Mid-week Message)

Reading to God

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

September 21, 2016

I think many of us have heard the witticism that describes Episcopalians and other Anglicans in the tradition of the Book of Common Prayer:  where many Christians talk and listen to God in prayer, we Episcopalians are people who like to read to God. 

I was raised in a tradition that did not use fixed prayers.  Prayer was supposed to be opening up our hearts to God, and that meant extemporaneous, on the spot, expression.  One of my Sunday School teachers explained this to me when I was 8 or so:  “Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount ‘[In prayer,] do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words’ (Matt. 6:7).  So don’t repeat things in prayer, and don’t use fixed or written prayers.”    I was an adult before I ever heard of a collect, or knew that the word was pronounced COLL-ect when it meant a prayer that summarizes or collects the themes of other prayers and scripture readings by taking one of the names or attributes of God and then meditating on it with a petition.   I was an adult before I learned about liturgical prayer, in common with others and using prepared formulas.  Prayers of the People, Intercessions, the Daily Office, Suffrages, and Preces and Responses—all were a complete mystery to me.  I had grown up thinking that prayer was all about focusing my attention and expressing my heart, not about using the thoughts and prayers of others as models and templates for my expression.    

But what I experienced in that tradition of fervent extemporaneous prayer was this:  often I would repeat myself, settling on a few phrases that seemed to work.  None of them were particularly elegant or theologically deep.  I was not challenged by them, since they all grew out of where I already was.  I got used to hearing prayers in church that, while sincere, were often poorly phrased or conceived, vapid, self-focused, and on occasion downright wrong-headed. 

Liturgical prayer has taught me the great truth expressed in an old Christian Latin phrase: lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi (the way we pray forms how we believe, and how we believe forms how we live).    In entering into the very ancient dialogue of all Christians at prayer, and using many of the same prayers those ancients used, we open ourselves to ways of thinking about God and the world that are otherwise inaccessible to us.  The discipline of regular recitation of prayers that are models and examples raises our ways of feeling and experiencing God. 

Our prayers need to be sincere, to be sure.  But for me, the intentionality of “reading to God” actually creates space in my heart for greater sincerity.   It is not the “vain repetition of hollow phrases” that the Sermon on the Mount counsels against.   Jesus himself regularly prayed the Psalter (Psalm 22 and 31 are what he says quietly while on the Cross).  And in giving us the “Our Father…” prayer, he not only gave a model, but also a text that we ourselves can pray. 

A corollary of “lex orandi, lex credendi” is that we learn from our prayer life and do not try consciously to force it to accommodate us.   The Prayer Book has enough optional and alternate liturgical usage to allow us to make these prayers our own.  Occasional adaptations and liturgical forays further afield help us keep our continuing prayer fresh, and using other pray books or authorized liturgies (with, for example, gender inclusive language) helps us keep our expression of faith authentic.   But a constant drive to shop for liturgies and  new prayers that speak to us in some special way is actually an act of self-flattery and pride:  we cannot say we let prayer inform our belief if at the first chance we always default to new or untried forms of prayer, or try to teach the Prayer Book what’s what, and seek to use strange fire in our worship (Lev. 1:10).

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+

Betting on Love (Proper 20C)

Betting on Love
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
18 September 2016--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

You know the phrase we hear in hierarchies: “Just make it so, I don’t care how.”  “You take care of it, I don’t personally want to get too far down in the weeds on this.” “Just do it. I really don’t want to know the details.”   The underling is expected to meet certain goals by whatever means necessary, however messy, and at the same time maintain an appearance of tidiness, order, and calm.  The boss’s unstated assumption is: “If there is ever an investigation, I want to be able to say honestly I didn’t know.”

Today’s Gospel is a parable often called “the Dishonest Manager.”  I think it should be called, “the Crooked Accountant,” or, “Street Smarts.”  

It almost certainly comes from the historical Jesus—no church leader in his right mind would have made this up and put on Jesus’ lips what appears to be praise for dishonesty.   Preachers have been trying to explain it away ever since, including Luke in today’s Gospel.  Those three sayings (vv. 9-12) he tacks on the end of the parable read, in the words of C.H. Dodd, like notes for three separate sermons to preach the parable.  

For the original audience, the parable was probably less shocking than the parable of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son’s Loving Father.  Both of these stories went against social norms and expectations: Samaritans were not expected to be “good,” and fathers were expected to be stricter disciplinarians of wayward children.  But the scene in “the Crooked Accountant” would have been familiar to Jesus’ listeners.

The economic system of the day clashed with stated Jewish religious values. Torah said, do not oppress the poor, do not charge interest, do not practice usury.  Torah said, let land remain in families, re-establishing original ownership at least once a generation, in the Jubilee Year. 

But in Palestine under the Romans, the vast majority of small landowners were dispossessed without hope of restoration.  Many became tenant farmers: they had to pay for the right to remain on the land by signing notes promising hefty amounts of the anticipated produce.  Farmers failing to pay for whatever reason were forced off the land and fell into the anonymous and miserable mass of day laborers, whose hard manual work did not pay enough to feed a single person, let alone a family.  The large estates grew as more and more small farms defaulted on loans and were sold.

The rich landowner here has a manager running his operations.  It’s his job to ensure that the landowner gets richer.  He puts a hefty interest charge on the principal of the loan and imbeds it in the sum to be paid.   He works on a kind of commission and must pad the bills and rates he charges to include a “service fee” for himself.    The rich man doesn’t want to know the details—that would implicate him in breaking Torah—he just wants to see a positive balance in the books at the end of the year. 

Like most hatchet men, the manager is the one who attracts the wrath of those who suffer from the system he enforces; the landowner is left free and unstained above the fray, honored by all.

Then, as now, the weak had few weapons to defend themselves against the powerful: passive non-compliance, subtle sabotage, evasion, and deception.    It is probably some disgruntled debtors, angry at the manager’s lack of pity, who float the rumors of corruption against him.   

The landowner could try and punish the manager as a thief. But that might expose his own role in the extortion.  Better not let the sordid details be known.  So he decides to quietly sack the manager.  He asks for a final accounting so he can pass on this dirty job to some other hatchet man who can be more discreet.

The manager is clever.    He admits to himself his own abilities and limitations.  He does not want to fall immediately into the hopeless mass of day laborers: “I am too weak to dig, and I am too proud to beg.”  So he himself uses a weapon of the weak to defend himself. 

In order to feather his own retirement bed, he curries favor with the very tenant farmers he has been gouging.  He rewrites the promissory notes, and gives the debtors all huge reductions, removing his own service charge and the usurious interest charges.

The strategy is so successful that when the landowner finds out how about it, he can only shake his head in admiration and say, “I wish we could all be that shrewd!” 

Jesus was no prude, and was not bothered religious scruples.  He was a craftsman from Galilee, a backward and religiously dubious province.  He lived closely with dispossessed peasants and day laborers.  He addressed his ministry primarily to them.  His parable here is an inside joke for such people—the great and the mighty are so rich that they can afford on occasion to forgo the rapacious squeeze their underlings apply to the poor.

The difference between honest and dishonest is no simple matter:  in a corrupt system of oppression, the ‘honorable’ may actually be dishonorable.  The dishonest steward has to honestly assess himself and how he has gouged people before he can find a way out of his dilemma.  He becomes honest only when he realizes the lie at the heart of how he has earned his livelihood and the wealth of his master. When he cuts the rates and stops gouging, even though this may be crooked by the standards of the system, he is actually recognizing the true way of the Reign of God.   And when the Reign of God breaks in, grace happens.  If only we could all be that shrewd! 

Luke clearly believes the parable is about how we use wealth, and how we need to be smart in using our current resources to insure a better future in God’s kingdom.  But I think that the Historical Jesus had something else in mind. 

 

Jesus elsewhere says “Even bad parents know to give their children good things: bread and not a stone, an egg, and not a snake.  God is a lot better than that, so just imagine what he has in store for us!”    “If a guy who wants to stay in bed at midnight will get up and help a noisy friend at the door simply to get some peace and quiet, God will surely give you us things when we make some noise in prayer!”   Jesus likes using edgy images to get at truths about God.

Just before this story in Luke, Jesus gives several parables about God:  a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep out in the wilderness to seek out one who has gotten itself lost, a crazy woman who throws a big expensive party in joy when she finds some lost petty change, a somewhat ineffectual father of a dysfunctional family who won’t adequately discipline a wayward son, shamelessly runs out to meet him when he returns from his debauches, throws a big party for him, and then has to deal with the sullen wrath of the older son who feels slighted in the whole affair.  All of these stories stress the fact that God’s love is crazy love.   Jesus is saying God is wild about you!  God loves you without shame or reason.  Loving you is in the nature of God. 

The parable of Crooked Accountant tells us to be smart and lay our bets on God’s crazy love, because that’s God’s nature.  If a crook can be smart and play his cards right because he understands his own failings and his boss’s quirks, maybe we need to fess up and be honest about ourselves, and really let ourselves wake up to the truth of God’s love.   Be street-smart like that crooked accountant!  God is crazy about you.  Put your bets on that.  

There are many ways we don’t place our bets on God’s love.  We feel guilt and shame even though we have been assured of forgiveness.  We doubt that maybe God’s love will one day overcome everything and win, and that all will come into its embrace.  We are slow to forgive others, and to show them love. We think that people cannot change. 

Trusting God’s love is a liberating thing.  It is what lies behind Martin Luther’s famous line, “Sin boldly!”   He is not telling us to sin, but to lose our silly scruples, and our fear of offending God.

Jesus is not telling us here to be dishonest.  He wants us to be truly honest, and to let the disreputable and unrespectable side of the Reign of God win us over, work in us. 

Truly betting on the reality of God’s love means we do not need to have fear.  It means we do not need to have regrets. It means we can love, and give, and sacrifice, and enjoy life and friends and family without shame. 

Thanks be to God. 

Eggs, not Scorpions; Fish, not Snakes; Bread, not stones

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Eggs, not Scorpions; Fish, not Snakes; Bread, not Stones

September 14, 2016

I heard recently a witticism that caricatures Calvinism, with its double predestination by God (one for a few to salvation and one for the many to damnation), in this way:  Calvinism is the doctrine that Satan wants everyone, God, not so much.”   This coming Sunday has a reading that puts to the lie the idea that God wants to damn most of humanity:  “God our Savior … who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:2). 

People have wanted for a long time for God to be picky and choosy.  Most of the people around Jesus taught that God was very stingy with grace and salvation.  But Jesus replies to such a stingy image of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45).   He points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13). 

We Episcopalians/Anglicans have been accused over the centuries by Calvinists of being “semi-Pelagians” because we teach that it matters whether we accept God’s grace or reject it by turning aside.  Others accuse us of being too works-oriented.  But the heart of the matter is this: we believe that God does not willingly afflict any of the children of men and women, and that God hopes and wishes for salvation and good for all his creatures.  We believe that God is a loving parent, who sends us: bread, not stones; eggs, not scorpions; fish, not snakes.  We believe that our choices matter.  As Saint Augustine taught, God cannot give a gift to someone whose hands are closed or already full. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+    

Stories of Love (Proper 19C; 9/11 commemoration)

 

 

Stories of Love
Homily delivered the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 19; Year C RCL)
11 September 2016

 8 a.m. Said Eucharist; 10:00 a.m. Sung Children’s Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Readings: Exodus 32:7-14; Psalm 51:1-11; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

If you wanted to tell a story about how God loves us, what story would you tell?  How would you tell it?

The Gospel reading today has two stories Jesus told:  the shepherd who loves a lamb so much that he leaves 99 others to go and find the lost one, and a crazy old woman who gets so excited over finding a lost coin that she throws a party to celebrate.  The epistle reading has St. Paul tell us his personal story: about how mean and rotten he was, but then how Jesus came and set him right despite all the harm Paul had done.  

The Hebrew scripture tells such a story in a very different way.  The storyteller could have simply declared that God never abandons his people, and that no matter what, through thick or thin, God blesses and defends us.  But he knows that sometimes bad things happen to us, and that this feels sometimes like we’re being punished.  So he takes a very different path to tell his story about God’s love.

He tells a story where the children of Israel have committed a horrible thing and deserve to be punished.  They have shown how little they love God: they made a golden calf and worshiped it, saying that it, and not God, had blessed them.  They did this because they got tired of waiting on God when Moses was up on the mountain talking to him.  Instead of punishing them, God lets them be, and blesses them.  That’s how much God loves us. 

But the storyteller wants to show us how deep the love of God is, not just say that this is so.  So he weaves a tale where God gets angry and wants to destroy the people, since that is what they deserve, after all.  But then the prophet Moses talks God out of his anger and desire to wipe out the people. 

Now somewhere along the line, there may have been someone who heard this story or even repeated it who thought that God getting angry and murderous was a perfectly reasonable way of describing God.  After all, God is in charge of everything, right?  And bad things do happen to some people.  So maybe God is punishing them because of what they did.    And that’s how we sometimes treat each other, isn’t it?  We get angry and mean, and then hurt each other. 

But do you think that actually describes the heart of God?  Does it describe  someone who would go out in the desert to search for a single lamb, or who is so overjoyed at recovering a loss that she throws a party?   Do you really think that God is so mean and touchy that Moses had to talk him out of killing everybody?

No.  God’s anger here in this story is not a literal description of what happened.  It is a story-telling device to let us know how steady God is, how the heart of God is loving-kindness, no matter what.  The person who first told this story, and the person who put it in the Bible understood that God is love.  We are foolish if we take it as if it told the story just as it happened. 

If you wanted to tell a story about how God loves us, what story would you tell?

The story I want to tell today about God’s love comes from a horrible thing that happened fifteen years ago today: the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania that used airplanes as bombs, killing about 3,000 people and injuring more than 6,000.   Fred Rogers, beloved as Mr. Rogers to my children, when asked how to talk to children about such horror, said this “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” 

Welles Crowther and his mother Allison in 1999; 

photo: The Wells Remy Crowther Charitable Trust

I think God loves us like the people who helped others in the Twin Towers in New York: helpers like 24-year-old Welles Crowther, who was at work on the 104^th floor of the South Tower of World Trade Center when United Flight 175 crashed into floors 78-84.  Most people above the explosion never found a way out of the building other than leaping to their deaths: the fire and smoke blocked all exits.  But Welles Crowther found a single stairwell down.  Instead of fleeing for his life, he went back, again and again, to find other people and help them out.  Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal this week, tells the story: 

“As Welles went down the stairwell he saw what happened on the 78th floor…   It was carnage—fire, smoke, bodies everywhere. A woman named Ling Young …  sat on the floor, badly burned and in shock. From out of the murk she heard a man’s voice: ‘I found the stairs. Follow me.’   ‘There was something she heard in the voice, an authority, compelling her to follow’... Ms. Young stood, and followed. She saw that the man was carrying a woman. Eighteen floors down the air began to clear. He gently placed the woman down and told them both to continue walking down. Then he turned and went back upstairs to help others. Judy Wein … had also been in the 78th floor. She too was badly injured and she too heard the voice: ‘Everyone who can stand now, stand now. If you can help others, do so.’  He guided her and others to the stairwell.  Apparently Welles kept leading people down from the top floors to the lower ones, where they could make their way out. Then he’d go up to find more. No one knows how many” (Peggy Noonan, “Remembering a hero 15 years after 9/11,” WSJ, Sept. 9, 2016).  His body was found six months later in the rubble of the lobby area where the fire fighters had set up a command center.  He had made it down, but stayed behind helping the firefighters still get others out until the building collapsed.
      

Noonan interviewed his mother for her article, asking her how you raise a hero.  She replied that they taught him responsibility and honesty, but that courage seemed to be part of his nature from his earliest childhood.  Noonan continues, “It wasn’t us, she was saying, it was him. It was Welles.” Then she concludes, “The way I see it, courage comes from love. There’s a big unseen current of love that hums through the world, and some plug into it more than others, more deeply and surely, and they get more power from it. And it fills them with courage. It makes everything possible.  People see the fallen, beat-up world around them and ask: What can I do? Maybe: Be like Welles Crowther.”

If you wanted to tell a story about how God loves us, what story would you tell?

Brother of Jackals, Companion of Ostriches (mid-week)

Brother of Jackals, Companion of Ostriches

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 7, 2016

In today’s Daily Office reading from the Book of Job, we read one of the saddest and most eloquent laments of all scripture, the weeping to God of a righteous person who has been afflicted with tragic loss: 

I cry to you and you do not answer me;

I stand, and you merely look at me.

You have turned cruel to me;

with the might of your hand you persecute me.

You lift me up on the wind, you make me ride on it,

and you toss me about in the roar of the storm.

I know that you will bring me to death,

and to the house appointed for all living.

Surely one does not turn against the needy,

when in disaster they cry for help.

Did I not weep for those whose day was hard?

Was not my soul grieved for the poor?

But when I looked for good, evil came;

and when I waited for light, darkness came.

My inward parts are in turmoil, and are never still;

days of affliction come to meet me.

I go about in sunless gloom;

I stand up in the assembly and cry for help.

I am a brother of jackals,

and a companion of ostriches.

My skin turns black and falls from me,

and my bones burn with heat.

My lyre is turned to mourning,

and my pipe to the voice of those who weep. (Job 30:20-30).

The Book of Job is all about keeping faith and hope in God even in the face of absolute loss and degradation.  It teaches that such suffering is a mystery that cannot be explained away or reconciled with the goodness and power of God, because God in God’s self is mystery.   And embracing such mystery, trusting in God even in the midst of tragedy, is the way to get through such hardship.   

I received very sad news this week:  the sudden death of a beloved 26-year-old member of my old congregation in Beijing (and little brother to its current pastor).  I also visited a parishioner here who had fallen and was severely injured.  Both sad events reminded me of the shortness and uncertainty of our lives.  Such sorrows give resonance to Job’s sentiment that we seem to be “brothers of jackals and companions of ostriches,” i.e., wretched animals living in meanness and squalor.    

But here’s the thing:  also this week, I witnessed small and not-so-small moments of grace and joy.  An accident that could have resulted in real problems was turned slightly and ended up not a problem at all.    An inadvertent change in routine showed Elena and me how to get a good night’s sleep for several nights running—the first in about a year and a half.   Unexpected assistance from an acquaintance resolved a hardship that I had set aside an afternoon to manage, giving me a unexpected bonus of several hours for a Church project for which I had been finding it hard to find time.

The art of managing our lives graciously amid hardship (and even suffering) lies in large part in the ability to seize upon the good things that are there—and there are always good things—and make the most of them.  Enjoy what you are able to do, and do not regret loss and what you are no longer able to do. 

Regret at loss in large part is resentment at losing control over parts of our life, and a desire for control is one of the elements of pride, one of the seven deadly sins.  This week’s collect puts the spirituality of enjoying the good bits of our lives while trying to graciously deal with the nasty bits this way:  “Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+ 

The Examination of Hiob (Satan pours out plagues upon Job), William Blake

Counting the Cost (Proper 18C)

Counting the Cost

(Proper 18C)

Homily Delivered 4 September 2016

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

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

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 often prosper.  Thus the faith of Deuteronomy 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 are Christians.  Most of us 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. And it is hard to believe in Biblical Inerrancy if you actually read the Bible and don’t just quote selected parts of 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 shows us a fierce, scary Jesus.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate [his closest family members and] 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 Jesus’ message here. But these tend to miss the starkness of language and emotional freight of the saying.

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

So what is Jesus up to 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 here 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 potters begin to throw pots on the wheel, they must first knead or wedge the clay to get it to the proper consistency and uniformity.  Then they 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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Jesus tells parables in order to shock his listeners into a new understanding, a new relationship. The parables, with their unlikely comparisons, twist endings, and 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! Sweet Jesus save us from Fierce Jesus!

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 to follow fiercely, with utmost devotion, what God is calling us to.

In the name of Christ, Amen.