16
Pentecost, Cp18, September 8, 2013
Deuteronomy
30:15-20 Psalm 1
Philemon
1-20 Luke 14:25-33
Let’s
see if I want to follow Jesus and be his disciple what do I have to do? Hate my father, hate my mother, hate my
children, hate my brother, hate my sister, hate my life itself, actively seek
capital punishment and sell all my possessions.
How do we continue to read this in church and
profess that the Gospels have family values? It seems that we prefer Jesus to be all love and sweetness; how is it
that word "hate" comes out of his mouth?
How can we hate our mother and father and still keep one of the 10
commandments to honor our father and mother?
How do we honor anyone by hating them?
Why do we not censor the reading of such within the church? We don’t like to read publicly some of the
most gruesome tidbits in the Hebrew Scripture but how is it that we can read
these words of Jesus? Should we censor
the reading of the words of Jesus if they seem literally problematic?
Many famous Christian saints have held that
the most favored reading of the Gospel is the “plain reading,” the reading
which is most literal. However there are
some words of the Bible that force us to read in different ways if we want to
maintain our own value systems at all.
With the enigmatic words of Jesus we scratch
our heads and say that something must be missing. These are words which are looking for a
particular context to give them intuitive meaning.
What we can say about the Jesus movement is
that it was eventually divisive. The
Jesus School of Judaism became a different and separate religion. And as we know from our own day, there is
very little passion hotter than religious passions. We are aware of lots of comments from
Bible-believing public figures which make us wonder often if we are not
threatened for a return to the dark ages of anti-intellectualism.
The church did become separate from the
synagogue for a variety of reasons. The
success of the Christian movement in the Gentile population and the adoption of
Christian practices for Gentiles meant that the traditions of Judaism were
threatened. As a response the Jewish
community began to excommunicate the followers of Jesus from the synagogue;
they did not want to lose their traditions. Jewish families were caught up in
this process of the separation of the Christian movement from the synagogue. Prominent Jews became proponents of the
mission to the Gentiles including both Paul and Peter. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the
year 70 and so if one’s religion made one a rebel against Roman rule and Emperor worship there was
even more at stake. The political and religious
times of the formative times of the Gospel writings were very unsettling. We need to understand that the writings came
from times of stress for the people who were seeking to understand their
experience of the risen Christ within some very difficult times.
Christ
as an oracle within particular communities in the post-resurrection church was
channeled by preachers who were presiding over people who had to make decision
about leaving the families of their birth because of their new commitment to
the risen Christ. It was not an easy
decision; their families probably thought that they were being traitors to the
Jewish traditions. They probably thought
that they were being misled by charlatan preaching. Followers of the teachings of Jesus probably were being threatened with
being shunned and disinherited. You can
see how the selling of possessions is juxtaposed with this incredible family
division. A person had to worry about his or her financial future if one was going to cut ties with one’s family. Having possessions and remaining loyal to one’s
family went hand in hand.
I wish I could tell you that the history of
families, religious movements, social movements and countries were all peaceful and
seamless. The evidence of life is
different. We may regard ourselves to be
religiously tolerant Americans and so we cannot understand the passion of
religious difference or can we? When
someone child’s converts to another religion, parent’s often want to snatch
their children to deprogram them and get them back into the “correct” religious
fold. We don’t like to hear the word “hate”
used; it is a word that should be used for things that are truly despicable. We are horrified by a certain church that
pickets funerals of soldiers with “God hates” signs of all sorts. Hate is a very strong word in our time.
So how are you and I going to read these hard
words attributed to Jesus? We can read
them as intended for one specific circumstance in history; some things do not
bear to be repeated. Some words never
need to be applicable again. All of the
Bible does not have to have future one to one exact application; many of the words can simply
remain the historical record of a single event in the history of a particular
group of people.
In another way of reading, I would like to think that the Gospels were
spiritual manuals and probably not meant originally for general reading. They were like enigmatic Zen koans or riddles;
they were to be read with a spiritual teacher to reveal the inner meanings that
arose when one’s character came to the time of insight.
The operative phrase for me in this Gospel
has to do with “hating life itself.”
Rather than being the unwitting promotion of suicide, this notion of
life is not physical life, it is psuche
or “soul-life” or psychological life. Psuche is the Greek word from which we
get the word psychology.
Education and repentance is based upon not
getting “stuck” in any version of life.
I live by Phil’s version of life at anytime. Phil’s version of life is my psuche life. Education is based upon being willing to let
go of any version of life to take on another version of life. So I am always in need of new versions of
life for everyone and everything, including God and Jesus. I need to hate or detest my yesterday’s
version in order to be open to new versions.
I need to sell everything; I need
to give up any final investment of anything as a permanent possession so that I
might take on new possessions. This Gospel
invites us to discontent with old versions so that we might be creative and
inventive and find new ways.
We need to die to old versions even of the
important people in our lives otherwise we may let them have a power over us to
determine our lives in ways in which we don’t want them to.
If the risen Christ is going to have any
significant meaning for you and me, it cannot be poetry with no evocative
relevant meaning in our lives today. Who
is the Risen Christ? What does it mean
to say that you and I are in Christ? Did
these phrases only have relevance for the early Christians? What do they mean for us now?
The risen Christ and being in Christ for me
now means the experience of the vision of myself surpassing myself in a future
state. And to get to that surpassing
person I am going to have to pass through many versions of how I see everyone
and everything, including myself. So
there’s a whole lot of living and dying through successive states or versions
of my life.
You and I are going to go through many
versions of our lives whether we want to or not. Our physical bodies and the constant changes
in life will force different versions.
By trying to keep a particular version will mean that sometimes we
assume we’re still looking through binoculars at the Grand Canyon when the
Grand Canyon is no longer in front of us.
So we cannot make the right judgments in our situation because we’re
still seeing through the favorite memory of a different view of life.
The radical words of Jesus today invite us to
this incredible life of repentance and education that we are involved in. It is not boring; it is life and death. We are dying to old versions of our lives
like a snake getting rid of its skin, so that we might love new life and always
answer the call to the beckoning surpassing life that is before us.
Our physical lives are constantly being
changed; let us accept that our soul life, our psuche life is also being changed.
The Gospels use death and life as metaphors to trace this constant
process of taking on new versions. I
hope you find new versions of your soul life today. But don’t hold onto them; let them go because
there are more versions to come. Amen.
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