An Angel in the Pulpit (Lancelot Andrewes)

 

An Angel in the Pulpit (Lancelot Andrewes)

Homily Delivered 26 September 2019

12:00 noon Said Healing Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Very Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Isa 11:1-5; Ps 63:1-8; 1 Tim 2:1-7a; Luke 11:1-4

God, give us hearts to love and feel,

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

Today is the Feast day of one of my true heroes, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes.  Bishop Lancelot Andrewes was a biblical scholar and preacher during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.  He served as general editor of the 1610 King James translation of the Bible, and was principal author of the translation of Genesis-2 Kings.  Kurt Vonnegut in one of his novels suggested that Andrewes was “the greatest writer in the [history of the] English language,” citing the first few verses of the 23rd Psalm in Andrewes’ translation:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul:

he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

A deeply knowledgeable and skilled scholar of Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, as well as a profoundly devout man of humble prayer, Andrewes was one of the foremost Caroline Divines, the writers of theology and spirituality of the period of James I and Charles I.    His sermons were known for their scholarship and high degree of polished rhetoric; his scriptural arguments against Roman Catholic critics of the Elizabethan settlement on the one hand and against puritan fundamentalism on the other in large part created the "Middle Way" (Via Media) that is identified as the hallmark of Anglicanism.  

He was a man of his age, and member of the sophisticated English elite, suffering from many of their flaws.  Born at the peak of Queen Mary’s persecution of protestants, he became a churchman quickly after Elizabeth restored Protestantism.  She liked him as a preacher, but did not ease his rise in the ranks of clerics because he opposed her expelling bishops from court and reducing their incomes (he actually turned down two bishoprics offered him by Elizabeth because “they paid too little.”)    During one great outbreak of the Plague in London, while a friend in the priesthood stayed in his cure, caught the illness, and died, Andrewes, somewhat slight and sickly, fled to the countryside for months.  He had little time for Puritans and non-conforming sectarians—they wanted to undermine the authority of the Queen and the Church, and besides, were way too focused, he thought, on their personal salvation, and on their own private interpretation of scripture.  At times he could show an obtuse lack of empathy for his opponents:  when a Baptist-leaning preacher who had been put in solitary confinement in the Tower  for causing disturbances complained of severe depression due to isolation, all Andrewes could muster was a quiet, wistful “sounds like a dream to me—silence, solitude, and no one to interrupt my devotions.”   

But in general, Andrewes’ commitment to the catholic tradition and faith of the Church, to sacramental life in Christ and private prayer, and his service as King's Almoner (managing funds for the poor) and as a pastor and Bishop were all exemplary.   One of his students in a eulogy after his death said that Andrewes was “an angel in the pulpit.” 

This great craftsman of English and preacher, in one of his private notebooks entitled Devotions, he wrote as a reminder to himself: 

“Let the preacher labour to be heard intelligently, willingly, obediently.  And let him not doubt that he will accomplish this rather by the piety of his prayers than by the eloquence of his speech.  By praying for himself, and those whom he is to address, let him be their beadsman” that is, one who says the rosary for another, “before he becomes their teacher; and approaching God with devotions, let him first raise to him a thirsting heart before he speaks of him with his tongue; that he may speak what he hath been taught and pour out what hath been poured in.” 

His Preces Privatae ("Private Prayers") include the following words, in a prayer for grace: 

Open Thou mine eyes that I may see,
incline my heart that I may desire,
order my steps that I may follow,
the way of Thy commandments.

O Lord God, be Thou to me a God,
and beside Thee none else,
none else, nought else with Thee.

Vouchsafe to me, to worship Thee and
serve Thee in truth of spirit,
in reverence of body,
in blessing of lips,
in private and in public. 

Andrewes wrote the following prayer about old age not long before his death in 1626 at age 71: 

Evening Prayer

The day is gone, 

and I give Thee thanks, O Lord. 

Evening is at hand, 

make it bright unto us. 

As day has its evening so also has life;

the even of life is age, age has overtaken me,

make it bright unto us.

Cast me not away in the time of age; 

forsake me not when my strength faileth me. 

Even to my old age be Thou He,

and even to hoar [white] hairs carry me ; 

do Thou make, do Thou bear, do Thou carry and deliver me.

Abide with me, Lord, for it is toward evening, 

and the day is far spent of this fretful life. 

Let Thy strength be made perfect in my weakness.

Day is fled and gone, life too is going, this lifeless life. 

Night cometh, and cometh death, the deathless death. 

Near as is the end of day, so too the end of life. 

We then, also remembering it,

beseech of Thee for the close of our life,

that Thou wouldest direct it in peace, 

Christian, acceptable, sinless, shameless, 

and, if it please Thee, painless, Lord, O Lord, 

gathering us together under the feet of Thine Elect, 

when Thou wilt, and as Thou wilt, only without shame and sins. 

Remember we the days of darkness, for they shall be many,

lest we be cast into outer darkness. 

Remember we to outstrip the night doing some good thing.

Near is judgment;

a good and acceptable answer

at the dreadful and fearful judgment-seat of Jesus Christ

vouchsafe to us, O Lord. 

By night I lift up my hands in the sanctuary, and praise the Lord. 

The Lord hath granted His loving-kindness in the day time; 

and in the night season did I sing of Him, 

and made my prayer unto the God of my life. 

As long as I live will I magnify Thee on this manner, 

and lift up my hands in Thy Name.

Let my prayer be set forth in Thy sight as the incense, 

and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice. 

Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, the God of our fathers, 

who hast created the changes of days and nights, 

who givest songs in the night, 

who hast delivered us from the evil of this day

who hast not cut off like a weaver my life,   

nor from day even to night made an end of me.

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Blessed Light (midweek message)

 

 

Blessed Light

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 25, 2019

“God is light and in God there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

“Even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is as bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light to you”  (Psalm 139:12).

Johann Kepler, the great astronomer and mathematician who corrected Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system by  showing that the orbits of the planets were ellipses and not circles, was a faithful Christian.  Here is a prayer he wrote: 

“O You who through the light of nature have aroused in us a longing for the light of grace, so that we may be raised in the light of Your majesty, to You I give thanks, O Creator and Lord, that You allow me to rejoice in your works.  Praise the Lord you heavenly harmonies, and you who know the revealed harmonies.  For from God, through God, and in God exists all there is, both perceptible and spiritual; that which we know, and that which we do not know, for there is still so much to learn.” 

Kepler’s reference to the “harmony of the spheres,” that is, the apparent order and beauty of the movements of celestial bodies that he helped us understand, takes light and the luminaries as signs of God’s creative presence, and pointers to grace.

Such humility and awe are found in most Christian spiritual traditions, where nature itself is seen as evidence of God at work in the universe about us.  It can be expressed in mystic and poetic terms, like in this Gaelic prayer:

“As the rain hides the stars, as the autumn mist hides the hills, as the clouds veil the blue of the sky, so the dark happenings of my lot in life hide the shining of Your face from me.  Yet, if I may hold your hand in the darkness, it is enough.  Since I know that, though I may stumble in my going, You do not fall.” 

We see the hand of God even the diurnal cycle of sunrise, day, sunset, night, and sunrise once again, as expressed in this simple but beautiful nighttime prayer of a Ghanaian farmer: 

“The sun has disappeared,

I have switched off the light,

And my wife and children are asleep. 

The animals of the forest are full of fear,

And so are the people on their mats.

They prefer the day with your sun to the night. 

But I still know that you moon is there,

And your eyes and also your hands. 

Thus I am not afraid. 

This day again

You led us wonderfully. 

Everyone went to their sleeping mat

Satisfied and full. 

Renew us during our sleep,

That in the morning,

We may come afresh to our daily jobs.

Be with our brothers and sisters far away in Asia

Who may be getting up now.  Amen.” 

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

Street Smart Jesus (proper 20c)

Street Smart Jesus
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
22 September 2019--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Very 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.

I remember the first time I heard it working for the Federal Government, that word from a boss that tells you to get something done without involving the boss: “Just make it so, I don’t care how. You take care of it, I don’t want to get too far down in the weeds on this.  Just do it. I really don’t want to know the details.”   I understood as a junior State Department Officer that I, the underling, was expected to meet certain goals by whatever means necessary, however messy, and at the same time maintain an appearance of tidiness, order, and calm.  It was only years later that it dawned on me what the boss’s unstated assumption was: “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 Golden Parachute,” or “the Street Smart Manager.”  

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 Street Smart Manager” 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 physically hard 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 operations charged with ensuring 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 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.   

The landowner could try to 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 sometimes tricky:  in a corrupt system, the ‘honorable’ landowner 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 Street Smart Manager tells us to be smart too.  Where he honestly assessed his own and his master’s nature, acted accordingly, and got off the hook his corruption had led him to, we must honestly assess our own failings and God’s crazy love for us.  And we must act in accordance with the truth that we are beloved, despite it all.   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.  Act like you know it.

There are many ways we act as if we don’t trust 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 loathe 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 trusting 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. 

Rules of Comforting

 

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Rules of Comforting

Sometimes when we are trying to help and comfort those in distress, we find that we say something that isn’t quite right.  A few years ago, the L.A. Times ran an op-ed entitled “How Not to Say the Wrong Thing.”  It gives a helpful way of looking at what we are doing in giving comfort to those in distress, whether the distress is “medical, legal, romantic, or existential.”  It is called ring theory, and provides a good rule of thumb to keep us from making things worse: 

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. … Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma… [perhaps a spouse.]  Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. …

Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, "Life is unfair" and "Why me?" That's the one payoff for being in the center ring.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.

When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.” …

[The basic rule is:] COMFORT IN, DUMP OUT. 

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407,0,2074046.story

We thankfully have lots of opportunity within our parish to help and comfort each other.  It is important to remember “Comfort IN, Dump OUT,” as is not saying everything we think.  Keeping confidences, not gossiping, and always trying to act with love and integrity are all essential in ensuring that our comfort and assistance is indeed helpful and grace-filled. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

My 9-11 Story (Midweek Message)

My 9-11 Story

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 11, 2019

In 2001, I was working at the Department of State in the Public Diplomacy regional office of the East Asian and Pacific Bureau, living in North Chevy Chase, Maryland.  

 I needed to go to Seoul Korea for three weeks to prepare for and carry out a program.  At that time, Narita Airport in Tokyo was a grim, unpleasant place to spend more than 1 hour on transit.  (This has since changed—I now LOVE going through Narita on 12-14 hour trans-Pacific flights, if only for the shower/shave/nap in the hour-rate hotel in the terminal and the great sushi opposite Gate 33 in the International Terminal).  At any rate, I wanted to avoid Narita at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an early, early morning flight on September 11 out of Dulles airport through Los Angeles, on direct to Seoul. 

About a week before my departure, I had a very pointed argument with my dear wife Elena about—what  else?—money and family finances.  We had two kids in college and one just about to start and it was a sore topic.  We both emotionally kind of shut down, and Elena stopped talking much to me. 

Knowing I was about to leave for three weeks, and that my schedule required me to get up at three a.m. to meet an airport shuttle, I knew that I was going to leave that morning unable to have a breakfast or chat of any kind with my wife.  And I did not want to go off for three weeks on opposite sides of the world not on speaking terms. 

 So I asked my secretary to change the booking for later in the morning, so Elena and I could wake up and have breakfast together before I left.   

The booking that came up was a noon flight out of Reagan National through San Francisco, then Narita, then Seoul.  Not good, but I wanted that time at home.

The morning of my flight, I got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast with Elena.  We had started to talk again.  Both of us knew it was important to connect before a separation of three weeks. 

I had a cab pick me up at 9:15 a.m for the 12 noon flight from Reagan/ National.  We headed down Rock Creek Parkway, that gem of an urban park that looks like the wild woods down the middle of metropolitan Washington D.C. 

Twenty or thirty minutes later, as we emerged from the Park onto the broad bottom-lands of the Potomac near the Kennedy Center and Georgetown, my Pakistani driver and I noticed a lot of smoke coming from across the river, in Arlington.  It looked like the Pentagon was on fire, but that couldn’t be.   There were lots of sirens too. 

Just as we took the turn onto the 14^th Street Bridge across the Potomac, a Park Police car cut in front of us and stopped us, the first car stopped as they shut down all traffic across the bridges. 

“Please officer, can you let us get over?  One last car?   Otherwise I’ll be late for my flight at Reagan.” 

“You won’t be flying anywhere today.  The FAA just shut down all air traffic in the continental U.S.  Haven’t you been listening the radio?” he added, suspiciously eyeing my distinctly Middle-Eastern-looking cabbie, “the nation’s under attack.  The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon just minutes ago.” 

I thought for a moment that I needed to have the driver take me to the State Department, but realizing that major federal buildings were being evacuated, told the driver to take me back to my home.   It took 30 minutes to come down from there, but five hours to get back.  Cell phones were not working.  The traffic of the city quickly slowed to full gridlock. 

Listening to the radio in the car now, I felt a terrible chill when the details started coming out.  I checked my travel papers in my briefcase, which still had the original booking listed, the one that my secretary had canceled to give me time for breakfast with my wife. 

It was AA 77, flying Dulles – Los Angeles, the plane that had been crashed into the Pentagon. 

Had I not wanted a few extra minutes to repair things with my wife, I would have been on that plane. 

When I finally got home, we hugged a long time, grateful to be together, to be alive.

Our son Charlie hugged us as well.  He already knew then that the father of one of his best friends at school, a father who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing.  His remains were never found or identified. 

---

I told this story to a friend in Beijing 10 years after 9-11, a Mennonite minister who coordinated relief work in East Asia and was strongly involved in aiding the hungry in North Korea.  He asked, “So what did you learn from this?  What is the take-away?” 

I had often thought about this in the ten years after the attacks.

I answered him this way:  I guess the easy meaning is that God looked after me and took a bad thing (our argument) and turned it into a good thing (keeping me from dying that day).  There are many, many examples in scripture where God turns bad things into good. 

But that is a little dissatisfying, especially since there were people who were not saved from taking that flight.  I think I heard once that the wife of Ted Olsen, George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, had been booked on AA77 at the last minute.  She died on the flight together with everyone else. 

A simple take-away is that I wanted just a few more minutes with my wife before I took off for three weeks, and the actual result was the blessing of many additional years of sweet, wonderful life.  God gives us way more than we deserve, and God’s blessings are ridiculously overabundant when they come.    But again, there remains the mystery of suffering, the puzzle of those not spared. 

I would be a pathetically ungrateful person if I did not thank God for intervening and keeping me from harm that day.  Because despite the apparent randomness of my changing that ticket booking, it really felt to me like God was looking out over me and my family that day.  

But I would be a pathetically selfish and obtuse person if I did not mourn deeply those not spared,  and wonder at the mystery of a loving almighty and all-good God in a world where true evil and seemingly random horror exists.  I would be a total jerk to feel that I somehow deserved saving and those who died didn’t deserve to be saved. 

I do not believe that randomness and horror—whether it is in the statistics of victims of terrorism, the random victims of natural disasters,  or in the great amount of waste found in natural selection and the evolution of species—is evidence that there is no loving, almighty, all-good God and Maker of us all.  I still believe in providence and in the loving God that Jesus called Father.

The fact that Jesus ended up on a cross is no proof that his faith and hope were empty wishes.  The very fact that he could continue to declare his trust in God while on the cross (read the rest of the psalm beginning “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” that he recited while hanging there, Psalm 22), the very fact that in the midst of all the randomness and horror that seem to be the norm of human life, our hearts simply will not accept this as right and normal, this to me is evidence that we are not created for this world alone, and that in fact we are children destined for another home which we have never yet seen.  This is what I told my friend in 2011, and they remain my feelings to this day.

I feel that each day in my life in the last 18 years has been a grace, an added plus, a blessing from God.  The most important work I did at State Department came after the attacks.  My calling as a priest came about 5 years after I was granted this extra time. And the blessing of helping Elena as her principal caregiver as she faced Parkinson's disease has come only in the last 8 years, as has my calling to serve the loving community at Trinity Ashland. 

And maybe that is the point:  all our times and all our days—of each and every one of us—are graces. We must be thankful for each day, and all the blessings we see, and know in our hearts that God loves us all, though we do not understand how the world's brokenness can continue in the presence of such love. 

 
Thanks be to God.   

Shock Therapy (proper 18c)

Shock Therapy

(Proper 18C)

Homily Delivered 8 September 2019

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

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Very 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.  Hold back, and you will most likely injure yourself. 

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 stun the hearer into a new reality.   They are Jesus’ shock therapy for souls lost in self-delusion.  The parables of the unfunded builder, the king unprepared for war, and the assassin’s training—these are his shock therapy for those who want to pick and choose their religion, who dabble in spirituality, and who are unwilling to go the distance with God.   

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.