In the Wake of Self-Betrayal

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Luke 16:19-31

There are several things that need to be said about this Parable before we get to what the Parable says.  So, beware.  At the top of the list is that this parable is not about Heaven and Hell and one’s eternal security.  It has nothing more to do with that than the jokes we tell today about St. Peter at the pearly gates.  It is a parable about how we live life in the present.  Specifically, do we live in a way that reflects the image of our God who is unconditional and self-giving love so as to give hope to the world or do we betray that fundamental self-identity and live in a way based more on self-deception resulting in our using people for our own purposes which leads to a perpetual need to justify ourselves?

With respect to how we live life in the present, Jesus is here contrasting two ways of life.  The first is the Israelite way, the Kingdom of God way, which Jesus symbolized by Lazarus being at Abraham’s side.  Older translations call this “Abraham’s Bosom”.  “Abraham’s Bosom” was a catch phrase back in Jesus’ day for the faithful life.  If you were living in “Abraham’s Bosom” you were one of God’s people, a Jew, a descendent of Abraham who was expressing Abraham-like faithfulness through keeping the Law of Moses and the demands of justice that God commanded through the Prophets.  

The second way of life is the Greco-Roman way, the way of the world, the way of Money-Love and Power-Love.  Jesus symbolized this way of life using the Greek word for the Greek concept of the after-life, Hades (not Hell), to describe the tormented existence of Money-Love that Luke said tarnished the Pharisee’s faithfulness.  They were very outwardly faithful according to the letter of the Law, but in their hearts, they hadn’t quite accepted the spirit of the Law and the Prophets.  Instead of being truly generous people concerned with justice, they loved the power and image that having money provided them.

Another thing we need to say about this parable is that it resides in a section of Luke’s Gospel where Jesus is teaching his disciples about how the pursuit of wealth can complicate being faithful.  At 16:13 Jesus tells his disciples that they cannot be slaves to two masters, to both God and Mammon; Mammon means wealth.  Immediately after Jesus says this, next in verse 14, Luke says that the Pharisees, who were “lovers of money” – money lovers and that’s a derogatory term - they heard Jesus and ridiculed him.  So, Jesus shoots this Parable of a rich man tormented in a Greek “Hell” at them in an effort to shame them.  He is accusing them of acting shamefully, like Greek’s, rather than like true Israelites.

The Pharisees were Israel’s most devout people, experts in the Law of Moses and the writings of the Prophets.  They were expecting the Messiah to come at any moment and establish the Kingdom of God.  They ardently, passionately, zealously strove to be ready for this day by strictly observing the Law of Moses.  The Pharisees of all people should have been living lives exemplary of Abraham’s Bosom, of true Israelite faithfulness but they weren’t.  

A third thing to say about this parable is that there is more going on here than just some rich guy ignoring a poor guy who daily lay outside his door.  All we’ve got to do is walk a few blocks in downtown anywhere and we all become guilty of that.  The problem was that one child of Abraham ignoring the real needs of another child of Abraham completely tars God’s revelation of himself that God wanted to give the world by calling the nation of Israel into existence beginning with Abraham and giving them the Law and the Prophets to live by.  Let me say a lot more about this because this is the heart of the parable.  Our acting in faithful compassion towards others is part of how God reveals himself in this world.

The way of faithfulness that God started with Abraham would be God’s way of saving humanity whom God created in his image from its Fall into trying to be God.  God called Abraham and told him to go to a land that God would show him because God was giving him that land and in that land God would make his descendants to be a great nation through which all nations would be blessed.  Abraham believed God and went and his children became a great tribe in the land of Palestine.  But in time, the “children” of Abraham found themselves enslaved in Egypt.  The promise seemed threatened. So then, God called Moses to lead the descendants of Abraham of slavery in Egypt and God delivered them with a mighty hand.  At Mt. Sinai, after all that God had done for them, these descendants of Abraham agreed that the God of Abraham was evidently their God and they were his people and they promised to live the way he wanted them to live.  So, God gave them the Ten Commandments.  Being faithful to God by following these commandments was to be the core of their community life.  Through the Prophets God kept this people accountable.  By living this way God’s promise to Abraham would be fulfilled.  They would be a great nation.  They would be blessed and they would be a blessing to all nations.

But, it goes deeper than that.  Through this faithful people God would demonstrate to the whole world that he is the only true God and that he is steadfastly loving and faithful and an abundant provider.  The nation that worshipped this God, the Lord God of Israel, would be abundantly provided for, always protected, and their community life would be just and beautifully rich in neighbourliness.  

And it goes even deeper than that.  In its communal life of faithfulness lived according to the Law and the Prophets Israel would bear God’s image, reflect God’s image into the world.  Humanity was created in the image of the Trinity, the loving communion of Father Son and Holy Spirit.  The nature of our relationships is to reflect the image of the Trinity’s loving communion into his creation.  But, due to Sin our attempts to be God mar our reflection of God’s image.  We make God look ugly, unbelievable, uncaring.  Communal life of faithfulness, compassionate and just faithfulness, lived according to the Law wouldn’t cure the problem of Sin. The incarnation of God the Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is God’s remedy for that.  But, until God finally brings about the New Creation and puts all things to rights, faithfulness, Abraham’s Bosom, is the way for now.

Looking at this parable, this rich man and Lazarus in this parable are both children of Abraham.  The rich man’s daily ignoring of Lazarus and his letting Lazarus persist in such a wretched existence while he himself grew richer and enjoyed greater comforts was an utter denial by this rich man of his own claim to be a child of Abraham and thus of being one of the people of God.  This is why there was an unbridgeable chasm between Hades and being in Abraham’s Bosom.  The rich man in his Money-Love cut himself off from being one of the children of Abraham.  As Jesus said, one cannot serve both God and Wealth.  

There’s a short little book called Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Arbinger Institute.  It describes the torment we go through when like this rich man we betray who we know ourselves to be by not doing what we know and feel we ought to do.  It explains that we have a predictable pattern of thought and behavioural self-deception that we go through when we don’t do what we know and feel we should do.  It goes like this.

I, a follower of Jesus, a child of Abraham, see someone in Lazarus’ condition.  Though knowing I should do something to help this person that goes beyond throwing money at them, something that would require me to change my lifestyle by making some sacrifices, something that would require me to regard this person as a real person and a child of God like me, instead I do nothing.  This doing nothing is an act of self-betrayal.  I am betraying who I am as a child of God who through my acts of faithful compassion God reveals himself to the world.  

In the wake of this decision to do nothing, of this self-betrayal, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal.  I inflate that person’s faults convincing myself they are worse than they are; a lazy, bad person.  Their faults become my justification for me not doing what I know I should.  Then I begin to look past my own faults and inflate my own virtues to justify my self-betrayal – I am a good, hardworking person getting what I work for.  I also begin to inflate the value of things that justify my self-betrayal meaning I find practical reasons for not doing what I know I should.  I’m too busy.  I have to get to work or I’ll be fired.  Finally, I will find a way to blame the person for my not doing what I know I should.  It is her fault that she is the way she is.  

When I see the world in self-justifying ways, my view of reality is distorted.  Like the rich man in Hades I cease to regard others as persons and focus only on my own needs.  I find my self closed up, isolated in a box of prejudices, of twisted perspectives of others, of self-justifying opinions.  I begin to treat others in ways to which they will respond that will reinforce my self-justifying but will also cause them to become self-justifying and to enter their own box against me.  The rich hate the poor.  The poor hate the rich.  Americans think themselves better than Canadians and Canadians think themselves better than Americans.  Whites hate Natives and Natives hate whites.  This is called collusion.  We collude in giving each other reason to not regard each other as beloved children of God. And so, we continue on in our boxed up and hateful little worlds of self-betrayal where we don’t do what Jesus commands us to do and what the Holy Spirit prompts and enables us to do – Love as Jesus has loved us, giving himself up for us.

Money-Love, the pursuit of wealth, makes it very easy for us to shut ourselves up in this living Hades of self-betrayal, self-justification, and collusion.  The way out is to see every person as a real person, a beloved child of God and act compassionately as the Holy Spirit who dwells in us each prompts us to do.  Even if it means we must give up a few or quite a bit of things, we must do the compassion we know we should otherwise we make God look really ugly and that’s not good because it eclipses any hope this world might have.  Amen.

Faithful with Dishonest Wealth

  

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Luke 16:1-14

My uncle Carl in the course of his working life was a farm manager for a couple of big family farm operations in Augusta and Rockbridge Counties, VA.  As my grandfather on my mother’s side had rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t work, Carl, for a time was the chief provider for my mother’s family.  He was and remains a generous man.  

Being the farm manager could mean a lot of things depending on the size of the farm.  Uncle Carl likely didn’t handle the money.  I’m sure the people who actually owned the farms looked after that.  Mostly, he was responsible to make sure all the work got done, which meant looking after the other workers and/or doing it all himself.  He was the farmer tied to the farm while the actual farm owner was free to do something else.

It was customary where I come from for farm managers to be compensated with a stipend and a place to live.  Back in the day, it was not unheard of that if a farm manager worked faithfully for a family for years and years and got too old to work anymore, the family would let him and his family either continue to live on the farm or make sure he had a nice place to live out his days.  If you were faithful in the day-to-day things of running someone else’s farm, that someone else in the end would be faithful to you; and faithful my uncle was.  Now in his 80’s, he and my aunt have a nice home just off the estate of the farm where he worked many years and retired from and they want for nothing.  

Uncle Carl demonstrated the flip side of the coin with respect to the rhetorical question Jesus put to his disciples.  Jesus asked, “And if you are unfaithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?”  Uncle Carl was faithful with what belonged to another and so now he has his own.  That’s how it is supposed to be in the world of honest work.  My uncle was not “in it for the money” so to speak.  He wasn’t serving Mammon.  He wasn’t one of those bent on pinching a nickel off of whomever however he could just so he could have a bunch of nickels.  He just loved to work, and loved to farm.  He and my aunt raised an outstanding family and the only word I can think to describe them is blessed.

Looking at this parable of the dishonest manager, I can definitely say, “My uncle, he was not.”  This guy was dishonest, greedy, and only in it for himself.  He wasn’t a worker.  He was the business manager for a wealthy landowner who had a lot of sharecroppers.  Agriculture was not fair business back then.  It mostly amounted to a rich landowner growing richer and richer, while the family farmer like my uncle grew poorer.  Sound familiar?

Here’s how it worked back then.  Agricultural land existed as massive tracts owned by a handful of wealthy people who rented out small plots for people to farm.  The agreement was usually that the landowner would let a set amount of land for a sizeable percentage of the yield.  It was also likely that the sharecropper would have to borrow money from the landowner to live on until the harvest came using the harvest as collateral.  Let’s just say that it was a situation where the landowner wasn’t going to lose any money on you.  It amounted to the farmer simply getting a place to live and barely enough to eat and always being in debt.  Sound familiar?  Substitute “the bank” for “the landowner” and we can say it ain’t changed much for middle income earners on down no matter the profession…and it is worse for people in the Third World.  That’s the way Mammon works. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer unless someone intervenes. 

This dishonest manager in our parable was the one who collected the rent and the yield percentages and settled the debts…and he was dishonest.  We don’t know exactly what he was doing, but for sure he was sweetening his own coffee at the expense of the sharecroppers and using the authority of the landowner to do it.  Accusations were brought against him and so the landowner called him in and told him to turn over the ledgers because he was fired.  Knowing he was about to lose everything, he rather ingeniously cooked up a scheme: he would get the tenant farmers to “owe him one” by reducing the amount of debt they owed the landowner, which he likely had inflated so that he could skim it.  

Well, something odd happens.  The landowner commends the dishonest manager for his creativity in this matter.  In the world of mammon where making money is all that matters, this dishonest manager had done a brilliant thing.  He secured his basic necessities of room and board by getting the people he had been cheating to feel obligated to him for doing them the favour of getting their debt reduced.  Incidentally, this was the same thing he would have received from the landowner if he had faithfully administered the business for years and years and retired.

This parable gets all the more confusing when Jesus then says to his disciples, “For the people of the world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of light. I tell you, use worldly wealth (or unrighteous mammon) to gain friends for yourself, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”  It seems Jesus is telling his disciples to play the game of mammon, but be like Robin Hood with the proceeds.  Admittedly this is probably the most difficult parable Jesus ever taught and it would be nice to have him here to explain himself because he’s either encouraging financial dishonesty from us or he’s just dripping with sarcasm because he knows the Pharisees, “who are lovers of money”, are standing in the wings eavesdropping and he’s trying to tell them that they have been dishonest managers of everything God had entrusted to them.  From their teaching of the Law right down to their love of money they were squandering what God had entrusted to them.  They themselves appeared faithful and blessedly wealthy but they gained their status by means of spiritually and economically abusing God’s people especially the poor.  They were in fact serving Mammon, the god of wealth and image, and using the authority of the one true God to do it.

In my humble opinion, this very troubling parable and its main point that we cannot serve both God and Mammon fits very nicely into Jesus’ broader teachings on how we, his disciples, should handle money.  If we look at this parable through the lens of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel the lesson is for us to not store up treasures of earth, but rather to be generous with the wealth of resources God has entrusted to us and by our generosity store up treasures for ourselves in heaven.  

We are to switch sides in the game of wealth; switch from serving Mammon to actually serving God.  The Pharisees were using the things of God as a means to grow in worldly status, wealth, and power.  They were in it for themselves even though they dishonestly said they served God.  Like the dishonest manager appeared to switch loyalties by reducing the debt of the poor in the land, so Jesus invites us, his disciples, to really switch our loyalties from simply growing our own financial security to actually helping others.

Though the dishonest manager was dishonest and self-serving in all his motives when it came to money (and if we’re honest so are we), a glimpse of Kingdom of God values and its powerful reality of justice remarkably shone through when he, like Zacchaeus, gave wealth back to those he had cheated.  So also, Jesus calls us to keep our service to Mammon in check by disciplining ourselves to honest work for an honest wage and practising generosity.  If we find ourselves in the game of trying to grow our wealth on earth rather than in heaven, it is likely we have left the Kingdom of God to serve Mammon.  Amen.

 

Grace Celebrates

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Luke 15:1-10

When I was in seminary, I was given the opportunity to preach at a federal corrections facility.  It was the most incredible worship experience I have ever had.  Those men were a light to the world. They worshipped. They all knew they were beloved children of God in Christ.  They all had felt new life given to them by the Holy Spirit; forgiven, accepted and so they lifted up their hands, jumped for joy, sang with tears in their eyes.  They celebrated.  I had been to charismatic services before, but their worship was beyond that.  That worship service was their freedom.  For those prisoners, that worship service was their freedom. 

Preaching there was incredible.  They were awake, leaning forward in their seats, and listening carefully wanting to learn and grow in Christ, wanting to hear a Word from or even just about their Lord who had shown them so much love and not withheld his presence them.  The preaching experience was very much like it is in an African-American church.  When I spoke, they responded.  I literally had to pause at the end of every sentence for someone to say “Amen”, “Preach it, brother.” or “That’s right”.  The sermon that I wrote to last for 12 minutes took over 30 and it never felt long.

These men were from all walks of life.  In a way, they looked very much like a first century church.  There were no lines of division. They were African-American, White, Hispanic, young, old, rich, poor, educated, dropouts; but no women.  It was a men’s prison.  These men all had two things in common: a conviction for a crime and Jesus.  They were drug dealers, domestic abusers, sex offenders, thieves, murderers; you name it, they done it.  They all had accepted responsibility for what they had done.  They also accepted that even though God loved and had forgiven them, there was still time to do.  Living in prison is hard.  There are both hardened criminals and hardened guards and they don’t care that you’re a follower of Jesus.  Yet, these men still walked the walk.  They did unto others as they would have had done to themselves, forgave as they had been forgiven, and loved as they had been loved, prayed together, studied the Bible together, and on Sunday…they rejoiced.

There was such joy there.  That worship service is my image of what Jesus meant when he said, “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” and “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents”.  Such joy!  Tyin in to what we read here in Luke about lost sheep and lost coins, each one of those men knew what it was to be “lost”.  And more so, they knew that Jesus—that God—is the type of God who leaves the fold behind to come and find them; who frantically searches all night by lamp light and sweeps the house clean to find them.  Such joy!

What about us?  What about you?  Have you ever been lost?  It is likely we all have memories of panicky experiences from childhood of being separated from our parents. I can remember one such experience in a Woolworth’s department store in Staunton, VA.  I was probably four and I somehow got separated from my mother.  Fortunately, one of the employees found this weeping little boy, picked me up, and took me to the customer service desk where they immediately paged my mother who immediately showed up.  Love in action.  I’m sure we’ve all had that bewildered, panicky feeling of being geographically turned around in a city or out in the country when you think your heading north only to be going further south.  I’ve been twisted around on the backroads of middle of nowhere West Virginia without a map.  So, also in downtown Toronto.  It’s scary to be lost.

But there’s another kind of lost that I think Jesus is pointing to here:   being spiritually lost, lost from God.  Stuff happens – a diagnosis, an accident, a job ends, an addiction befalls you or someone you love, separation, or the death of someone you love – and your life is suddenly no longer your life.  Nothing is familiar anymore.  You spiral out of control into a dark place where the range of emotions is just absolutely brutal.  You feel utterly alone, like you don’t know where “you” are, or which way to go.  You’re lost.

We have a cultural default belief when it comes to God and how or why we got lost.  It goes something like, “If I’m lost, then I took a wrong turn (sinned) and God (the Judge) is holding me accountable for it.”  It’s pretty black and white if you’re in prison and convicted of a crime.  You took a wrong turn and the God who punishes wrong doers is punishing you.  But – and hear me on this – if you spend some time talking with prisoners and hear their stories, in time you discover they suffered emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in the course of their formative years and patterns repeat themselves over generations.  Compassion, unconditional love, is needed to break those cycles, not punishment.

But then there’s being lost and where your wrong turn was is not so black and white.  You desperately preoccupy yourself with the question – the very heartfelt prayer – “What have I done to deserve this?” and honestly the answer is “Well, not anything that deserves this”.  Or, what if you’re lost-ness is due to the wrong turns of others or there really was no wrong turn at all?  You were just dropped out in the middle of nowhere by those you thought you could trust.  When that is the case, you have to then find some way to reconcile how it is that God, who is supposed to be all-loving and just, is treating you like you’ve been wicked.  How can God in his great love be so unfair?  This is the crisis of Job.  You’ve done your best to do everything faithfully, but…here you are lost and it seems the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost took the last train for the coast and the music has indeed died.  Many people stop believing in God at this point.  This belief system where God is simply and only a Judge of moral character who is supposed to reward the faithful and punish the wicked falls apart when the faithful suffer what the wicked deserve.

I think Jesus here in these two parables presents us with a more helpful way of understanding God.  Instead of God being the Judge and we being the Sinners, God is the God who in love finds the lost and restores them because God is the God who in love brings order out of chaos.  Afterall, that’s what God did at the Creation.  God in love brought order out of Chaos and when Chaos breaks forth into our lives as it sometimes does, God is still the God who in love brings order into Chaos.  Look at the parables, God doesn’t ask or accuse the sheep or the coin about what its wrong turn was or punish them once he found them.  In love, God puts everything at risk to go and find the sheep and when he does, in love, he puts it on his shoulders and rejoices and celebrates.  In love, God frantically searches all night and sweeps by lamplight until he finds the coin and he rejoices and celebrates.

Let’s consider the parable of the lost sheep and do it from what God’s perspective.  I’ve had brief moments where in the midst of a crowd of people I’ve lost track of one of my children.  That is freakin’ scary, particularly in this day and age when kids don’t just get lost in the department store but often get taken.  I know how panicked and powerless I felt as I searched for my child.  Could it be that in like manner, God in his love is desperately and personally and really searching for us in the midst of our lost-ness.  Could it be that God isn’t a Judge who gets angry at us for getting lost?  Could it be that God rather sees us as little lost sheep who are quite vulnerable in a world full of danger and wants us safe in the fold?

Consider this parable of the lost coin.  Please note here, the coin did not lose itself.  If anything, it was lost because of the woman’s carelessness.  And also note, this lost coin valuable.  It wasn’t like a penny or nickel.  It was silver and worth about ten days worth of work.  Even if you were just earning minimum wage in Ontario, that coin would be worth over $1,100.  If I lost a coin worth that much, I would be quite anxious and I would certainly turn my house inside out and upside down looking for it.  

This lost coin makes us ponder the difficult reality that sometimes we are lost not because we took the wrong turn but because God lost us.  In the great scheme of God being God and doing what God does, he loses us.  The only reason we can give to this painful reality is that we have to go through this time of being lost because the experience of it and the coming out the other side of lostness is what we need.  It heals things deeper down than what we are immediately aware of.  Though it is God who lost us, God still desperately and personally and really searches for us and what joy it is when he finds us.  Sometimes, the only way some people in their lost-ness can be found is that God profoundly gives them the sense that the reason they are lost is his doings and not their own and the just compensation that he gives us is a healthy dose of his healing presence just as he did for Job.  God finds those whom he has lost and when he does he celebrates.  Notice the invitation there: “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.”  There is joy out the other side of lostness.

Jesus talks about repentance here.  To repent is to have a change of mind.  The word in Greek literally means “to become with-minded”.  To repent is to become “with-minded” with God in his plans and purposes and in the way God regards people.  It is to see the world and the people there in with the same faithful love and patience and kindness and seriousness that God does and to act accordingly with compassion.  

Sometimes, in order to become “with-minded” with God requires changing what we believe about God.  You know how sometimes the things we mistakenly believe about a person can keep us from seeing that person for who they really are, so it is with our understanding of God and of repentance.  Unfortunately, we have a hangover from Medieval Catholicism in our tradition that defines repentance as turning away from one’s moral baseness and becoming a faithful church participant.  That understanding of repentance requires an image of God as being primarily the moral Judge who punishes the wicked and rewards the faithful.  Unfortunately, that image of God as Judge creates believers who look at others and say, “I’m thankful I’m not like you.”  It creates believers who sit and grumble in judgment of Jesus for his keeping company with “sinners”.  

We need to repent of that image of God and become with-minded with the God Jesus reveals to us.  What if we truly became “with-minded” with the God who is like a shepherd who risks everything to desperately search for his lost sheep that took a wrong turn and wandered off into a world of danger?  What if we truly became “with-minded” with the God who is like this woman who frantically searches for the dearly valued coin that she lost?  What if we became “with-minded” with the God who rejoices and celebrates when he finds us in our lost-ness.  Grace celebrates.  It does not judge and grumble.  I suspect that if we become “with-minded” with the God we see in Jesus, the God who welcomes sinners and eats with them, that we will rejoice like prisoners set free and that people we least expect will come out for the celebration.  Amen.

 

Realigning Our Loyalties

 Luke 13:25-33

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Well, let’s all pretend we are lexicologists for a moment.  You folks know what that is, right?  It’s someone who studies words and how they function in a language.  Let’s toil with the word possession for a minute.  Possession can mean a couple of things.  A possession can be something we possess, something we own.  Our possessions are our stuff.  Another meaning of possession is when something gets a hold of and takes control of us.  Demon possession would be an example of that.  So, there’s a double meaning that can come into play when we talk about possessions, we think we possess them, but in fact it just might be that our possessions possess us.  Keep that in mind.

Let’s play another word game now; not Wordle.  Let’s be etymologists for a moment.  Etymology is the study of the origin of words and it’s at this point that I’ll go Greek on you.  The word we have translated here as “Possessions” comes from the Greek verb “hyparcho” which is two words smushed together “hypo” which means “under” and “archo” which means “rule”; thus, “under rule”.  It also has that double meaning to it that our word “possession” has.  It can be either something that rules over us or something we ourselves have rule over.

Let’s go back to being lexicologists.  Don’t you just love how I’m playing with big words here?  Didn’t think so.  Oh well.  In order to understand which meaning of the word to go with, we have to examine the context it’s used in.  Is Jesus talking about the things we own, the things we rule over.  Or, is he talking about things that possess or rule over us.  If we look at the whole passage, Jesus never talks about stuff and that makes it kind of odd for a translation to have Jesus just up and sum up this teaching he’s just given by saying, “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”  So, maybe he’s not telling us that we have to give up all our stuff to become his disciple.  He does that elsewhere, but I don’t think he’s saying that here.

 I think it’s the other meaning he’s working with and he is saying that to be his disciples we have to give up those things that possess or have rule over us.  What he’s been talking about here isn’t stuff but rather relationships; father, mother, sister, brother, wife, children, even ourselves; life itself as it’s translated but its really our “soul” which is our “self”.  So, I don’t think he’s pushing us in the direction of giving up our stuff, our possessions as he does in other places.  I think he’s rather making us examine our loyalties.  The other things that compete for our faithfulness.  You know, if we were looking for a biblical definition of the word faith, loyalty is probably the best way to define it – a strong trust that leads to serving another. He’s asking us to prioritize our relationships around him.

He says a very difficult thing here: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters…cannot be my disciple.” (yes, I know I left out the life part, but I’ll get to that in a minute.)  Hate is a very strong word.  Is Jesus telling us that to be his disciple we have to loathe our families and seek their harm?  Afterall, that is what it is to hate, isn’t it?  That doesn’t sound like Jesus.  Another way to translate the word we translate here as hate is simply “to love less”.  “Whoever comes to me and does not love less father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even, life itself, cannot be my disciple.  I don’t know why translators persist on the word hate.  Well, I do know why, but it would take too much time and you probably don’t want to know.

Regardless, even to say love your family less than him can be a bitter pill.  Here’s how I wiggle around it.  It’s that we don’t let our loyalties to family supersede our loyalty to Jesus but rather let our loyalty to Jesus undergird how we love and serve our families. I’ll come back to this in a moment.  We need to look at this thing of loyalty to ourselves and what it means to take up the cross and follow Jesus as his disciple.

I know the translation here says “life itself” but just saying life doesn’t fully capture the meaning of the Greek word there.  The word is “psyche” and is usually translated as “soul”.  Jesus isn’t talking life as simply being life as in life or death.  He means the entirety of who we as persons who live with and before God and with and before others.  He’s talking about the totality of who we ourselves are and not just about life.  He is saying we must love our selves less than we do him.  Our loyalty to self must not come before our loyalty to him.  I could shout off a rant here about how selfish we are as a culture and about how we tend to think only of ourselves and do a lot of hurt to others and ourselves for doing that.  But that’s too easy a sermon.  We know he’s not asking us to hate ourselves.  I don’t know about you folks but I’m pretty good at that already.  He’s still asking us to love ourselves, but we must let loyalty to him define what it is to love ourselves.  

Let’s step back for a moment and talk about how our loyalties to family and to ourself interact.  We know that if our loyalty to family is greater than our loyalty to self, we ourselves suffer.  We feel trapped and unappreciated and so often in that kind of a family system shame is the whipping strap used to keep us from a full, and healthy sense of self love.  So also, if our loyalty to self is greater than our loyalty to family, the inevitable is that our families suffer.  Parents feel unappreciated for the sacrifices they’ve made.  Spouses feel taken advantage of and unloved.  Children feel neglected, unimportant, and like they can’t trust the two people they need to be able to trust the most to do what’s in their, the child’s, best interest.  

The way around this problem of superseding loyalties and the damage that is done by them is to let our loyalty to Jesus supersede and define our loyalties to family and self.  Jesus tells us to carry the cross to be his disciples.  Roughly, that’s loving our families and ourselves according to the way God has loved us in through and as Jesus – unconditionally, selflessly, and sacrificially.  

Winding on out of here, let’s look at this loyalty to Jesus component.  Returning to our reading, let’s imagine what’s happening there.  Jesus is walking up the road heading towards Jerusalem where he knows he’s going to die and large groupings of people are following him.  They are following him likely because they feel he is their only hope.  By all they have seen and heard that he has done, things only God can do, they have determined that he is the one through whom their God is acting to restore his people who are oppressed by Rome and their own corrupt political and religious leadership.  

To these people who are daring to hope in God, Jesus wants them to consider what loyalty to him is going to cost them.  He knows he’s likely to be crucified.  That’s what happens to those who appear treasonous, but also in this in this twisted, hurting, broken world that’s what happens to those who dare to love as God loves, who give their lives for the soul-healing of others and so that we all may know that we are beloved by God. He knows that in order for his death to happen he is going to be betrayed, deserted, and denied by those closest to him for that’s what we twisted, hurting, broken beloved children of God do to presence of God in our lives.  These crowds of people have left everything behind and put boots to the ground trusting that Jesus is the one to deliver them.  This act of hoping in God will soon seem like futile stupidity once he’s dead and nothing on the surface has changed.  They will be shamed and shunned by their families.  Their families will be shamed because of them.  If you’re into self-interest or even just respect yourself enough not to do something that appears blatantly foolish that will cost you everything, then following Jesus isn’t for you. It will cost you everything.  That is the cost of hoping in God.  Will they still follow him?

To summarize what Jesus is telling them, it is that they/we will be unable to be his disciples, unable to love as he loves and be for the saving and healing of this painfully broken world, unless we put behind us those other loyalties that have rule over us.  On the other side of that is that our loyalty to him, our discipleship will be lived out in the field of those other loyalties that once ruled over us but now for their healing or salvation.  

This unconditional, selfless, and sacrificial love that Jesus demands of us, his disciples, is costly but it has a purpose.  We put ourselves aside and serve these others to whom we have particular loyalty for the purpose of their soul-healing and that they might come to know they are God’s beloved.

In real life this looks like…well, you’re an adult and your parents are up in years and are not able to live safely on their own.  They don’t want to be a burden to you.  But they don’t want to go to a retirement community either.  To bring them to your own home would cost you some freedom.  Babysitting your parents wasn’t how you envisioned retirement.  But as a disciple of Jesus you must ask yourself which of your options would give your parents the soul-healing touch of knowing they are beloved?  How do we help our parents know they are still beloved by God in their last years?

The primary goal of parenthood for a disciple of Jesus should be raising your children to know they are beloved by God.  Ain’t easy.  Spouses, love each other as Christ has loved the church laying our lives down for each other.  What do we do to let our spouses know that they are not only beloved by us, but by God as well.  Any amount of selfishness in a marriage will constipate it.  

Anyway, in closing, we must live out our loyalty, our trust and service of Jesus, by loving our other loyalties according to the questions of how can I be a soul-healing presence in the lives of those I love and how can I help them to know that they are God’s beloved.  Hard stuff.  That’s why we must pray for the help and the indwelling of God’s presence, the Holy Spirit.  Amen.