Community not Consumption (Paw Prints article)

 

Community, Not Consumption

Fr. Tony’s Paw-Prints Article

The e-zine of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Medford, OR

September 30, 2022

 

The letter of James says that praying for evidence of God’s love and blessing to us is wrong because it involves corrupt intention: “you ask only that you might consume it upon your lusts” (James 4:3).  Consumption in its very nature involves inordinate desire, lust. 

 

Having a robust demand for market goods is key in building a healthy economy, and having a good base of consumers is needed for this.  Our modern advertising industry is all about building consumer demand:  you won’t attract the right lover if you don’t smell right, and you won’t smell right without our product; you cannot achieve happiness without our product because you are too ugly to go out without using it to cover up your blemishes; you will not be part of the “in” crowd if you do not wear our brand of tennis shoes or underwear; etc.    The basic message is: YOU ARE INADEQUATE WITHOUT WHAT WE HAVE TO SELL.  SO BUY, BUY, BUY. 

 

Our scriptures don’t seem to be extremely keen on the idea of consuming or being a consumer for consumption’s sake.    They are much more affirming on the idea of community, and of relationship.  There is a lot of talk in the Bible about covenants and relationships:  God is the husband, Israel his wife; Christ is the bridegroom, the Church his bride; God is our father, we his children; Christ is no longer our master, but our friend.

 

I hear sometimes about one or another person who got fed up with something at their Church, and then left.  They supposedly now are shopping for a Church or a pastor that fits their needs better.  Here in the Rogue Valley, I often hear “spiritual but not religious” people talking about religious ideas and spiritual practices as if they were market commodities that they can pick and choose as they see fit.   

 

This way of seeing things captures an important truth about our freedom to choose in this free society, in this marketplace of ideas and personal association.  But if this is our only way of seeing life, religious ideas, and faith, it can be deadly for real growth, healthy relationships, and life in God.

 

In the Gospel of John, there is a story where Jesus says something that really annoys his followers, and many of them leave him.  At this point Jesus turns to his close disciples and asks, “Are you going to leave too?”  Peter answers, “And just where else would we go?  You have the words of Eternal Life” (John 6:68).   

 

Spiritual growth and life in God is not about consumption, not about finding what pleases us.  It is about relationship and commitment.    This is a subtext in many of the Sunday scriptures we have been reading during these last few weeks of Ordinary Time:  use “unrighteous Mammon” to help the poor  so that we may be welcomed, like poor Lazarus, into the realms of joy by those with whom we have created such bonds.  

 

In the burial office, we see the prayer, “For we consume away in your displeasure, and are afraid at your wrathful indignation” (BCP 472, Psalm 90:7).  This means, of course, “We are being consumed in your displeasure.”  But the Elizabethan words “consume away” are happy reminders that when we begin to treat all things, including faith and relationships, as commodities, we each are left as nothing but disposable commodities ourselves.    When we are nothing but consumers, we begin to suffer what feels like God’s wrath.  How could it be otherwise, given the unbridled and unquenchable desire that the consumer economy and it ad agencies must stimulate in our hearts?  Having a boutique approach to faith or relations destroys our own humanity.   

 

Being human, merely human, demands that we sink our roots deep into our faith tradition, and into our relationships, and persevere in them, despite occasional frustrations.  It also means the freedom to change traditions or end relations that are simply too painful or abusive to continue.  But let us not confuse this blessed freedom with unbridled and monomanic consumerism, with “consuming things upon our lusts,” or with, as Oscar Wilde wittily observed, “knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  In order to grow and prosper, we must live in community and covenant, not in mere consumption.  It means living not with hearts of cold stone, but with warm living hearts of flesh.

 

Peace and Grace,

 

Fr. Tony+

 

Betting on Love (Proper 20C)

 

Betting on Love
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
18 September 2022--8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Said Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (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 “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 by 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, a fish not a snake, an egg not a scorpion.  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 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 Reign of God win us over, even the parts of it seen as disreputable and shameful by those who still caught in the world’s rat race. 

 

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. 

 

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

 

Stories of Love
Homily delivered the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 19; Year C RCL)
11 September 2022

 9 a.m. Said Eucharist
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford
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.

 

I think all of us have had the experience—telling a story to children of grandchildren, and getting interrupted by a totally extraneous question:  So why were there three bears?  Couldn’t Rapunzel have gone out through a secret door to escape the tower?  And all of us, I think, have answered with:  well, that’s not in the story, so why don’t we just stick to it as it’s told, not to as it isn’t told? 

 

So it is with the stories of God’s love in today’s scriptures. 

 

We shouldn’t ask “so what happened to 99 sheep after the shepherd left them?  Did a wolf come to eat them?  So why did the shepherd love the one and hate the 99?  So to with the crazy old woman who gets so excited over finding a lost coin that she throws a party to celebrate.  How much did the party cost?  Didn’t that lady know not to spend too much?  And with Saint Paul’s blinding experience on the Road to Damascus:  why didn’t God do the same things for all those other people who hated Christians?   The Hebrew scripture:  why did Moses have to talk God out of destroying the wicked Israelites?  Is God really that rotten?  To all of these, “that’s not in the story, so let’s stick with what actually is in the story.” 

 

On that last one, there is an additional problem:  the storyteller knows very well that God is patient and steadfast, and not peevish, a deity with anger management issues.  He 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. 

 

But this is just a literary device to make it very dramatically clear that God is, in the end, love itself.  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. 

 

It important that we focus on the point of the story, not some random mariginalia. 

I want to tell you today a story when me and my family felt God’s love, felt that God was caring for us. But note that without sticking to a Sgt. Joe Friday-like “just the facts ma’am” attitude, there is always a risk of saying truly hurtful things about others.  My story took place 21 years ago today, when terrorists used airplanes as bombs to attack U.S., killing about 3,000 people and injuring more than 6,000.  

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. I wanted to avoid Narita at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an 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 with one starting the next year, and it was a sore topic. The argument was so heated that Elena stopped talking to me. 

 

Knowing 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 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.  The morning of my flight,we got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast together.  We started to talk again and were ready for me to go off for 3 weeks. 

 

I had a cab pick me up at 9:15 a.m for the 12 noon flight from Reagan.  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 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 20 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 the love of my life, 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 high school, a father who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing.  His remains were never found. 

 

So what is my take-away from this story?  How does it relate to the love of God? 

 

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 and still feels 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 random victims of terrorism or even 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. 

Remember: Jesus ended up on a cross.  This does not prove 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. 

 

I feel that each day in my life in the last 21 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 them.  Shortly after that, came the blessing of 10 years of helping Elena as her principal caregiver as she faced the Parkinson's disease that eventually killed her, and of 10 years of my calling as a full time parish priest 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. They are gifts from a loving God.  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. And we should not worry too much about questions that are not part of that story.   

 
Thanks be to God. 

 

Shock Therapy (Proper 18C)

 

Shock Therapy

(Proper 18C)

Homily Delivered 4 September 2022

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

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (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.  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.