That We All May Be One

Joseph wrenched himself from his fitful sleep, drenched in sweat. He hadn’t slept much that night because today was the day he was going to have to tell Mary and her family that the wedding was off. It was a terrible decision to have to make…and one that he really didn’t want…but what else was he to do?

He was a respected member of the community, a craftsman of some skill. People looked up to him even though a few had raised their eyebrows when he fell in love with a much younger woman, not much more than a girl really, and had asked her to marry him. She had shyly said “yes” and filled his heart with joy. But then…

Then…she had told him that she was pregnant. She said that she didn’t really understand how it had all happened, but assured him that she had not been unfaithful. She was so young and had been so sheltered growing up that Joseph could well believe she didn’t understand all that had happened to her. But, happen it had…and she was already beginning to show.

He was sure of one thing: he was not about to humiliate her further. This had to be done as quickly and as quietly as possible. The rabbis would work with him in seeing that it was all done according to the Law. But it was still not going to be easy!

So, he asked to meet with Mary and her family the very next day and tried to get at least a little sleep before what might be the most painful and difficult thing he had ever had to do. But sleep didn’t come easily that night! In one of those “half awake, half asleep’ moments he found himself reliving that last awful conversation he had had with Mary.

She had tried to explain a troubling and confusing night of her own some months ago. Confronted by a messenger from God, like an “angel” she said, who pronounced her blest and said that she was going to conceive and give birth to a son, whom she was to name “Jesus.”  The language used to describe this child sounded an awful lot like what they had all been waiting for! He would be “great and be called the Son of the Most High.”

He was even, according to this messenger, to be “given the throne of David and would reign over the house of Jacob for ever.” There would be “no end to his kingdom.” Well, wasn’t that what they all wanted? Liberation from their Roman oppressors? A restoration of the “glory days” of King David when they were free…

“Free to worship (God) without fear, holy and righteous in his sight all the days of their lives? Hadn’t they all prayed that “the dawn from on high would break upon them…guiding their feet into the way of peace?” Now the angel promised that she would be blest…that the Almighty was to do great things for her.” That, in her, “God had remembered his promise of mercy, the promise he had made to the fathers, to Abraham and his children for ever!” (see Luke 1:46 and following for the above).

Well, Joseph had made her stop right there! It didn’t really make any sense to him and he didn’t want her to humiliate herself even further by lying to him, or making up some fantastic story. He loved her too much for that. Yet, he hadn’t seen her since that conversation.

But he was dreaming about it now. Or living it over again in his mind in those tortured moments when he woke up.  Suddenly he began to think, “But what if it’s all true?”

And he too found himself confronted with this “messenger of light.” “Joseph,” the voice seemed to say, “you are a descendent of David. You know the prophecies…don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife! The child within her is a gift from God! She’ll bear the child, name him Jesus, and he will be the salvation of his people. Remember the prophecy, “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.”

“Emmanuel,” Joseph said out loud as he sat up straight on his mat, dripping with sweat, “That means, God is with us!”  And maybe…just maybe…he really is!

So…the day worked out considerably better than Joseph had feared. He splashed water on his face, got dressed, and paced back and forth in his room until dawn arrived and then tried to wait until the time of his appointment with Mary and her parents. He couldn’t wait, of course, but they really didn’t seem to mind when he arrived some two hours early.

Didn’t mind because, they would never even know what he had thought about doing on this particular day. For, instead of breaking the terrible news about a dissolution of their relationship, Joseph was all about making plans for their wedding day. About the joy and celebration of their upcoming marriage. And…about preparation for the birth of their son.

Yes, Mary remembered later, that’s what he called him…”their son!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a television commercial you may have seen which absolutely makes me smile every time I catch a glimpse of it. I can’t say that very often about TV ads, but I really can about this one. It’s for an insurance company and shows a variety of African animals at a watering hole.

Instead of what might really happen at such a site, little mammals ride on the top of crocodiles and one little prairie –dog like creature does a perfect dive off the head of a giraffe, barely making a splash as he plunges into the pond! Elephants give all of them a shower with water from their trunks! And all this is accompanied by a song from the Scottish band, Aberfeldy, with the recurrent line, “Well, we get along; yeah, we really do!/ And there’s nothing wrong, with what I feel for you.”

The commercial is really an animated version of Edward Hicks’ early 19^th century painting, “The Peaceable Kingdom.” You are surely familiar with that rendering of our passage from Isaiah this morning “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them.  The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand in the adder’s den. They shall not hurt of destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters covcr the sea.” (Isaiah 11: 6-9)

Although many people think that painting impossibly sweet and naïve, they probably don’t realize that Edward Hicks was a dedicated Quaker activist whose heart was broken “to see his fellow Quakers becoming worldly with excessive material goods, inflated pride, and thinking of themselves as some kind of spiritual elite…”

“His own education included ancient concepts of animal symbolism with references to aspects of the human personality. These symbols came into his paintings. The lion was quick-tempered and willful. The wolf was full of melancholy and reserved. The bear was sluggish and greedy…the leopard buoyant. In his paintings, these were both animal qualities with potential violence” (Friends’ Journal, Feb. 2000) and were destructive human qualities as well – rage and selfishness and greed and all the rest of it.

The little child in his earlier paintings had actually appeared representing, not Jesus or the Messiah, but liberty and freedom from oppression. Politically, that meant kings and princes who had often oppressed the Quakers.  But spiritual freedom had to be obtained as well. Hicks sought that in the Quaker concept of the ‘Inner Light” of the Spirit, even when that might be at odds with the established Church or the accepted views of his time.

Well, that vision of “the peaceable Kingdom” certainly was in the mind of the Prophet Isaiah in our First Lesson today – the hope that someday, when the Messiah came, the “shoot from the stump of Jesse,” everything would be set right again – with righteousness he would judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. (Isaiah 11:4)

Centuries later, John the Baptist was still looking forward to that same future. But it was his sense that the time had almost come. “Repent,” he tells the people of Judea, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” (Matthew 3:1-2) Like the Quaker, Edward Hicks, John knew that repentance would be necessary if the Kingdom is ever to be realized in its fullness here on earth.

Hicks criticized his fellow Quakers for materialism and pride and elitism. And John the Baptist says the same thing to his people, “You brood of vipers, “ he roars at the Pharisees and Sadducees, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our ancestor; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

In other words, don’t rely on your ancestry or your pedigree to save you. God is absolutely uninterested in any of that! God is interested in precisely what Isaiah said he was interested in, for the poor to be treated righteously and for the meek of the earth to be treated with equity. That, for John the Baptist, would be “fruit worthy of repentance.” It is that “fruit worthy of repentance” that we need to be meditating on this Advent. How are we living our lives?

Skeptics will sometimes point out that nothing really seems to have changed as a result of the birth of Jesus, the coming of our Anointed One. Wolves do not lie down with lambs or calves with the lion. No matter how loudly we sing Glory to God in the highest, peace and goodwill has not yet come to the peoples of the earth.

And, while it is true, that the “earth will not be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” until that last Great Day when the Kingdom dawns in its fullness and God sees to it that the poor are treated with justice and the meek with equity, that does not absolve us of our responsibility to cooperate with God in the building up of that Kingdom. We know how God wants us to live. We have known it since the Psalmist sang these words:

Give the King your justice, O God/ and your righteousness to the King’s Son;

That he may rule your people righteously/ and the poor with justice;

That the mountains may bring prosperity to the people/ and the little hills bring righteousness.

He shall defend the needy…rescue the poor and crush the oppressor/

…there shall be abundance of peace till the moon shall be no more

We are to create governments and societies ruled by righteousness…where prosperity is enjoyed by all the people…where the needy are defended and the poor rescued. We are to work for that peace which is the fruit of justice, not peace simply enforced by domination or power.

No, that Kingdom has not yet come. It is for that state of affairs that we wait, and pray for, during Advent. But…while we wait…let us heed John the Baptist’s warning…and in our lives “bear fruit worthy of (our) repentance.

 

 

 

 

 

We celebrate today the Feast of All the Saints!  As most of you know, November 1^st was All Saints’ Day which has traditionally been dedicated to those saints we might write with a “capital S,” women and men who have made special, even unique, contributions to the Church and the cause of Christ down through the centuries and may even be enshrined in our church Kalendar as one of our special “holy days.”

November 2^nd is sometimes called “All Souls’ Day” and on that day we commemorate those “lesser saints,” our ancestors and grandparents, parents and other mentors who have gone before us into the nearer presence of God and who may not have made such dramatic contributions to the life of faith, but who were certainly loved and cherished by us and to whom we are still united by water and the Holy Spirit in what the Creed calls “the communion of saints.” Some of their names appear in our bulletin insert today and you will be invited to name them, or any others, silently or aloud, during the Prayers of the People this morning. This Eucharist will then be offered for the repose of their souls and in thanksgiving for their lives.

Our Lessons from Scripture this morning tell us something about the saints we are honoring today. The strange little reading from Daniel is his apocalyptic vision of the end times and tells us only that “the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever – for ever and ever!” (Daniel 7:18) Blessed assurance indeed for us with respect to our loved ones who have gone before!

The author of the Letter to the Ephesians writes, “I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints…” (Ephesians1). It’s interesting that the Bible never refers to “a” saint, to an individual as a saint – but always speaks of “the saints” as a community, an assembly of God’s people. This same passage to the church at Ephesus refers to them as ones who “had believed in (Christ, and) were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people…”

That’s what we say to everyone we baptize when we anoint them with oil and say, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” By Baptism we are sealed with the Holy Spirit and made members of Christ’s body, the Church.

Then, of course, in the Gospel, in the so-called “Beatitudes,” Jesus tells us something about “the lives of the saints.” How do saints live? Well, apparently, they are ones who identify with the poor, with the hungry, with those who are sorrowing. They are people who may be excluded, reviled and defamed because of their faith. But they are blessed now…they are hungry no more…they are laughing instead of crying. They have received their consolation.

He goes on to caution us not to trust so much in our own wealth or prosperity or popularity, but instead try to love even our enemies, to do good even to those who hate us, to bless those who curse us and pray for those who abuse us. He sums it all up with what has been called “the Golden Rule,” a commandment which appears in virtually every one of the world’s great religions, and has been called by the Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, a “global ethic” – do to others as you would have them do to you.

As I cast my eyes over the list of those faithful departed in our bulletin today, and the many lists like it I have seen over the years, I marvel at how many of them lived by that global ethic. They did so in many ways and in many contexts. But a good number of them gave a generous amount of themselves and their resources so that you and I could be here worshipping in Trinity Cathedral today.

They taught Sunday school and served on Vestries and the Altar Guild, and in so many, many other ways. They gave of their time…their talent…and, yes, their treasure…because they believed in this church. They believed in its past…they believed in its present witness when they were alive…and they believed in its future.

Well, dear friends, the future…is us…the future…is here. It is no longer possible (nor has it ever been, really) for us to continue to live on their legacy. We can build on it…but we cannot rest on it. Endowments were NEVER intended to be used for operating income in a church budget. Endowments are for rainy days…endowments are for vast capital improvements on old buildings (which we are facing at this very hour), endowments – at their best – are for missionary outreach, at home and abroad.

Church budgets are intended to be supported wholly and completely by the pledged offerings of the members. That cannot be done by year-end gifts, however generous; that cannot be done by the so-called loose offering. It needs to be done by pledges made, recorded, and those promises faithfully kept – week by week and month by month, throughout the year. That is our challenge and that is our goal.

This church didn’t even have an endowment when many of the names on our prayer list worshipped here. They supported it with their tithes and offerings, and so must we. But please hear me that this is not just about bricks and mortar. Even if we did not have this stunning building in which to worship Almighty God, I would still be asking you to give.

Why? Because giving is one of the marks of being a Christian! Giving to the poor, giving back to the community, giving to the church (not only for the building, but for clergy and lay staff, for educational programs and youth, for the outreach which can be done through a  parish that is vital and alive). Giving is part of what it means to be a Christian; giving is what it means to be part of the Body of Christ; giving is part of what it means to be a member of the Communion of Saints!

Let me thank you in advance for hearing these words and taking them seriously. And let me do so in the words of our Epistle today, the prayer of an early Christian leader for his beloved community. He writes,

“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers.  I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe…”

The immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe. For us who are part of the Communion of Saints. All the Saints. Saints past…saints present…and the saints yet to come!  Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, there’s no question but that the theme for our Liturgy today is “persistence!” Jesus commends the widow for continually crying out to the unjust judge “day and night” until she is given justice. (Luke 18:1-8) The author of the Second Letter to Timothy (3:14-4:5) tells the young pastor to “continue in what you have learned…to proclaim the message (and to) be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable…and (to do so) with the utmost patience…”

Even our Collect, or prayer for today, asks God for help so that the “Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith…” Persistence and perseverance is the name of the game apparently! It’s sometimes hard for new converts or people who have just had a dramatic renewal of their faith to understand this!

 

In the first blush of conversion or renewal, it all seems so simple! God seems close at hand, prayers get answered, and the need for perseverance and persistence just doesn’t seem necessary!  But the Christian faith is not intended to be a “sprint.” It’s a “marathon!” We’re in this for the long haul and sometimes God doesn’t seem so close. Sometimes those prayers don’t seem to get answered. And it’s at those times that we need persistence and perseverance in our faith that only comes through that dreaded word: “discipline!”

I don’t know when “discipline” became such a bad word. Maybe we associate it with being punished, “disciplined” as a child. But the word “discipline” comes from the same root word as “disciple” and it simply has to do with being a “learner” or one being “taught.” We speak of the “academic disciplines” as areas of learning, as a body of knowledge. So, to be “disciplined” is simply the only way to “learn” or to be “formed.” Just as Jesus’ disciples were formed by him as they spent time with him, day by day and week by week.

We live in a culture of “instant gratification,” of course, and that does not make our task any easier. We click our “remotes” through scores of TV channels from the comfort of our easy chairs.  We send off an e-mail halfway around the world and expect a response within minutes, or at least hours! And we can “google” an answer to almost any question within the space of a few seconds! So, it’s easy to think that life is really like that! That things really come that easily! And that the deep things of life should be just as readily available as our Facebook page! But, my friends, it just…”ain’t”…so!

Psalm 119 (from which we had a portion appointed for today) is the longest psalm in the Bible, and it’s all about meditating on, and internalizing, God’s Word…often called in the psalm God’s “law.” Today we read, “Oh, how I love your law/ all the day long it is in my mind.  Your commandment has made me wiser than my enemies/ and it is always with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers/ for your decrees are my study…”

This is a classic reference to what the Jewish people call “Torah study.”  Today, it often takes on a kind of ritualized role very much in the context of prayer. A specific place – the beit midrash, or “house of study” – is a designated room set aside in many Jewish communal buildings where set times during the day or week are dedicated to “Torah study.” Prayers are said and then portions of the first five books of the Bible (the Torah) are not just read, but dialogue and discussion and even argument takes place about the meaning of the texts and how they apply to our lives today. It can be very lively! This is what the Psalmist means by singing “Oh, how I love your law! All the day long it is in my mind.”

And this leads to what Jeremiah means this morning by quoting God as saying “…this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jeremiah 31)  This is the kind of prayerful discipline that true “disciples” are called to engage in!

Susanne and I spent last weekend with the Sisters of the Transfiguration in Cincinnati who I serve as Bishop Visitor (or “Advisor”). Like most religious communities the Sisters gather four times each day for prayer: Morning Prayers and the Eucharist begin at 6:30 a.m.; Noonday Prayers precede lunch; Evening Prayer before dinner; and Compline before retiring for the night. It’s a similar pattern to what Brother Michael-Benedict follows here in the Cathedral each day.

For most of us, of course, that is the kind of discipline far beyond our ability…or even our desire! But, if we are to develop the kind of consistent and persistent prayer symbolized by the widow in today’s Gospel…or the kind of perseverance Timothy was being challenged to demonstrate in the Epistle…or that wonderful, dialogical “Torah study” of the Jews, we need some kind of commitment to a spiritual discipline.

Historically, for Anglicans like us, that means two things – the Bible and the Liturgy! Word and Sacrament. Daily Bible study and weekly Eucharist. We need to read some portion of the Bible each day in the context of prayer. And we need to receive Holy Communion every week…on Sunday, the Lord’s Day…the day of the Resurrection.

There is a daily lectionary beginning on about page 936 in the back of your Prayer Book which would take you through almost the whole Bible in a year if you read those texts every day. In fact, there’s a link on our parish web site called “the Daily Office” which brings up those daily texts on the screen if you click on it! Now THERE’S a creative use of technology! I like to do my daily Bible reading early in the morning, but you may come up with a better time for you.

And then, there is the Eucharist. If reading the Bible feeds the mind, I believe that it is Holy Communion which feeds the heart. We call it “spiritual food” and believe that, when we receive the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist, we are receiving into ourselves the very Being and the Life of Christ which feeds our spirits and strengthens that Holy Spirit within us. How could anyone willingly stay away from that experience which we offer here every Sunday?

The Bible and the Liturgy. Word and Sacrament. Daily Bible study and weekly Eucharist.

Two ways for God to put his Law within us, and to write the New Covenant on our hearts.  Two ways to say with the Psalmist “How sweet are your words to my taste/ they are sweeter than honey to my mouth.” Two ways to be persistent…so that God may grant even us…Justice!

 

When I was a parish priest in the 1980s, I did a second theological degree at the General Seminary in New York. It took four summers and a lot of reading and paper writing in between. In those days, General Seminary, which is located just north of Greenwich Village in an area called Chelsea, was in a pretty tough neighborhood.

It’s now all become quite “gentrified” and the apartments are all co-ops or condos that sell for an incredible amount of money. But in those days one regularly came across homeless people and folks asking for money on the street. One of our Church History professors used to carry a pocket full of one-dollar bills so that, when he ventured out in his clerical collar and black suit, he would have something to give when he would be asked for assistance…as clergy invariably are.

I used to wonder what kind of response my friend would have gotten with his one dollar bills when the needs before him were so obviously much greater than that!

But clearly he wanted to avoid turning people down and appearing to be like the rich man in today’s Gospel “who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day” but who apparently had walked right by the “poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.” (Luke 16:19)

Those very tables get turned in the afterlife when the poor man was rewarded and the rich man punished for his neglect of the poor. I was reminded of Judith’s quote in last Sunday’s sermon that it may be the responsibility of the rich to take care of the poor in this life, so that the poor may take care of the rich in the next! Although in this story a great “chasm has been fixed” forever dividing the poor man from the rich one!  It’s too late in this case. The rich man had “missed his wake up call!”

Certainly it’s clear from the pages of the New Testament that Christians have a responsibility to minister to the poor. In Matthew 25 Jesus makes the point that we will be judged, at least in part, on the principle of “ inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me.” And there are least two ways that we can respond to that calling.

One is by direct services to the poor (a “ramped up” version of my old seminary professor passing out one-dollar bills to people on the street). In some ways that’s what our PUNCH churches and Churches United try to do through CareLink, food pantries, and other such programs here in the Quad Cities. Another method is to “get upstream” of the problem…to try to figure out why there are so many poor and hungry people around the world (and even in this rich and prosperous nation) and to try and do something about the causes!

Our church tries to name both of those approaches in something called The Five Marks of Mission” set out in the Anglican Communion’s MISSIO Report of 1999, affirmed by the Lambeth Conference of Bishops, and our own General Convention. It identifies  five challenges in our mission as Christians:

“to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom of God” ;

“to teach, baptize and nurture new believers”,

“to respond to human need by loving service”,

“to seek to transform unjust structures of society”;

“to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and to sustain and renew   the life of the earth”

So, both approaches are found here: “to respond to human need by loving service” and “to seek to transform the unjust structure of society.” Anglicans in Africa and other parts of the “Two-Thirds World” expend a lot of prayer, time and energy on those two aspects of poverty reduction and they challenge us regularly to do the same thing!

Two years ago at the Lambeth Conference I joined 670 Archbishops and Bishops from across the worldwide Anglican Communion in marching through the streets of London passing out copies of something called the “Poverty and Justice Bible.” This is an edition of the Holy Bible which has more than 2,000 passages that speak of God’s attitude to poverty and justice highlighted in bright colors. You literally “cannot miss” the many references!

That was a pretty dramatic gesture and the color-coded Bibles may have been helpful to those who may rarely – or never – open the pages of our Sacred Book.

But we really shouldn’t need such reminders, dear friends. We have Matthew 25. We have today’s story of the rich man and Lazarus. And we have our Epistle today from I Timothy:

“There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these…But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.  For the LOVE of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains…

As for those who in the present age ARE rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainly of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.  They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really IS life.” (I Timothy 32 passim)

That’s a “wake up call” for all of us! And I don’t think we even need a “color coded Bible” to know what God is asking of us today!

When Susanne and I returned from vacation so that I could officiate at the funeral of our beloved Ann Gardner last week, one kind parishioner asked me at the reception, “Did you know what you were getting into when you agreed to be interim Dean here at Trinity Cathedral?” I think she meant that we have had more than our share of funerals in this parish over the last eight months or so…but, of course, I did ‘know what I was getting into.’

I’ve been ordained for nearly forty years and I know well that parish ministry is not only preparing sermons and presiding at the Eucharist season by season throughout the Church year, but an ongoing cycle of baptisms and weddings and hospital and nursing home calls and, yes, funerals as well for those of our parish family whose earthly sojourn has ended.

On the other hand,  I have sometimes in my life made a commitment to an organization or a committee without first finding out all that would be expected of me, or how much time and energy would need to be expended. Haven’t you ever done that? Well, in today’s Gospel (Luke 14:25-33) Jesus is warning his followers not to make that same mistake if they plan to be committed to him and to his way of life! He’s talking today about what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once called “the cost of discipleship.” The cost of being a follower of Jesus.

To illustrate his point, he uses some practical examples: a construction project which might get launched before anyone got around to estimating the cost of materials and labor. Or the folly of declaring war without estimating the troop strength and fire power necessary to assure victory for the home team. Those would be pretty obvious mistakes (even if we know that they actually do happen in life!) but Jesus does not want his would-be disciples to make one like that as they
consider following him!

And, in today’s Gospel, he talks about putting our faith above even family if necessary; about carrying our crosses; and about prioritizing our relationship with him over material possessions. I think the way Jesus speaks of these things may be, to some extent, examples of what scholars call “Middle Eastern hyperbole.” It’s a sort of style in Arabic languages and in Hebrew to use strong and dramatic language in order to make a point.

You remember Saddam Hussein talking about the “mother of all battles” or some Iranian dictator talking about “destroying the United States” as if either of things were possible or within their reach. Or, more to the point, Jesus himself talking about it being easier for a “camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”  I think it must be that sort of exaggeration Jesus is using when he talks about ‘hating’ one’s “father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself.”

He’s clearly making the point that our relationship with God is more important even than family relationships, but surely one who was committed to the Commandment about ‘honoring father and mother’ and once described his mission as bringing “life abundant” to all, cannot literally mean that we should hate our families or our lives.

Similarly, not many of us will be carrying literal crosses to our death as he did (even though Peter and Andrew and perhaps some of the other apostles were indeed crucified for their faithfulness!). And not everyone is called to “give up ALL our possessions” like monks and nuns and missionaries sometimes do. But we are asked to value God above money and to be generous in our giving and our sharing with those who have less than we do.

Now, none of us can know for sure whether we will be equal to the task or whether we will indeed be able to fulfill our commitment to being a disciple. Jesus is not asking for a guarantee of complete faithfulness in advance. If that were the case, perhaps none of us would qualify to be a disciple. But, through these parables and teachings, Jesus is asking us to consider in advance what real commitment to him requires.

If you listen to some televangelists or some mega-church preachers today, you might think they were trying to sell you a car or a kitchen appliance rather than the Christian gospel! In some parts of Africa this is called the “Prosperity Gospel” – just come to Jesus and you’ll be rich and famous! We certainly have our own versions of that in our own country (in fact, we actually exported it!) These charlatans make the gospel sound as easy as possible, as though no real commitment was required. Jesus’ call is far different. He was not looking, and is still not looking, for superficial commitment or a crowd of tagalongs. Instead he asks for our total commitment if we are to become his followers.

I tried to be pretty clear about that in the class of confirmands I prepared earlier in the year. I shared with them The Episcopal Church’s catechism including the part which defines “the duty of all Christians (which) is to follow Christ; to come together week by week for corporate worship; and to work, pray and give for the spread of the kingdom of God.” (BCP, 856)

We require all our baptismal candidates and confirmands to commit to the Baptismal Covenant which not only invites belief in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; but continuing in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and in prayer. To resist evil and confess our sins when we fall into them. To proclaim by our words and the examples of our lives the love of God we’ve experienced in Christ. To look for that Christ in all people, so that we can love our
neighbors as ourselves. And to strive for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being. (BCP, 304-305)

Those are lofty goals and we may not attain them perfectly. But we need to be clear about what Jesus asks of us from the get-go. That’s why I tried to emphasize that with our confirmands. That’s why we have over sixty young people in our parish this weekend participating in a Happening weekend where they are learning some of these things.

That’s why we will be launching our new Sunday School program – for children and adults – next Sunday and why I PLEAD with you as parents and godparents and grandparents to make sure that you and your young people are here every Sunday you possibly can be throughout the year!

This is not a casual commitment we are asking you to make, dear friends. We are asking you to be prepared to pay “the cost of discipleship.” There is really nothing more important!