Proper 18 / 16th
after Pentecost — 8 September 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar
Falls – 9:15 a.m.
[Track 2]
Deuteronomy 30:15-20 | Psalm 1
| Philemon 1-21 | Luke
14:25-33
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be
my disciple.…So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions.” [Luke 14:26,33]
Okay, what do we do with that?
Well, one possibility is to find some way to explain it
away. This has traditionally been what
we’ve done with this text. “This is hyperbole! Jesus doesn’t really mean that literally!” Well, yeah, maybe so. But that leaves me squirming
uncomfortably. I don’t know about you.
Another possibility is to see what else we’re reading in
the lessons this morning. Oh, look! Here’s the little letter of Paul to his
friend Philemon, a member of the Christian community at Colossae
in Asia Minor !
We only get that once every three years, let’s go there!
Paul is sending back to Philemon his runaway slave
Onesimus, and he asks Philemon to forgive Onesimus and to receive him as a
brother; and Paul hints not too subtly that Philemon should emancipate
Onesimus, give him his freedom.
There’s no big doctrinal or disciplinary issue in this
little note, as there is in most of St
Paul ’s letters that the Church has preserved. It’s a very domestic, pastoral piece of
correspondence. But we can see in it
some important assumptions about the way Christians are expected to order their
lives and their relationships with other people.
Under Roman law, Philemon would have been quite entitled to
be very harsh with young Onesimus—all the more so since there’s at least a hint
in Paul’s letter that when he ran away Onesimus had absconded with some
money. Philemon has every legal right to pack Onesimus off to the
salt mines—or worse.
But Paul not only asks Philemon not to be harsh, but he assumes that Philemon will not be. For the relationship between Christians is not
one governed by right or obligation,
but one characterized by love, respect, cooperation, forbearance, patience, and
forgiveness. It would be some time
before the Church would be in a position in the world to mount a frontal
assault on the social institution of slavery, and very much longer before it would actually do so, but right from the
very beginning the Gospel of Christ transformed
the lives and the relationships of people even within the unjust structures of
secular society.
And we deceive ourselves if we think that we can claim to
be followers of Jesus Christ and yet not allow our lives and our relationships
to be transformed to the core. And this is the point Jesus is making in the
Gospel today.
We have to be very careful about dismissing too lightly Jesus’
words. Now in this case, Jesus is using
an extravagant figure of speech typical of Hebrew and Aramaic rhetoric, yes — but
let’s not think that he’s not quite serious about the point he’s making. No merely human right or obligation or tie, no
matter how close or pressing, has priority over Jesus’ summons to us to enter
into the life of the Kingdom
of God Kingdom of God
Jesus talks a little about the cost accounting that his
disciples must do. Don’t start building
a tower you can’t finish; don’t try to fight a war you can’t win. (President Obama, please copy. But I’m not going there today.) And, Jesus goes on, don’t think you can be my
disciples on the cheap. Life in the Kingdom of God
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that
I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants
may live.” Marvelous words from the Book
of Deuteronomy that we heard in the first lesson this morning. We have to make a choice, we have to set
priorities. The fact that saying Yes to
one thing means saying No to some others is a necessary lesson as we come to
maturity. If we want to live under God’s
Reign, then we have to say no to the things which are contrary to life under
God’s Reign. Philemon could have
exercised his earthly rights over his wayward slave Onesimus, but presumably he
said No to that option for the sake of saying Yes to the richer and fuller life
of receiving home a brother in the Lord.
(This may be the same Onesimus
who later became Bishop of Ephesus.) Many
claims, obligations, ties, rights, reach out to hold us—often things which in
themselves may be good. But they are not
ultimate; and whenever we give our ultimate allegiance to that which is less
than ultimate, we ensnare ourselves in death.
We are no longer able to be Jesus’ disciples, for we have laden
ourselves too heavily and we can no longer keep up with our Lord as he leads us
into the Kingdom. It’s a choice — it’s a
choice we have to make. It’s a choice we
are making, every day of our lives,
in every decision, in every determination of a priority, conscious or
unconscious. Do we really want the real
thing—life in the Kingdom
of God
