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.

 

Leave It!

Luke 14:25-33

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At my house on Friday nights we frequently have pizza and watch a movie.  Everybody gets a couple slices and goes to the living room and takes a place on a couch.  And poor Nellie, she just goes this glassy-eyed, bury-my-face-in-your-plate stare and she starts to walk up to your plate only to be rudely awakened by “Nellie!  Leave it!”  She will snap to for a moment but you can see in her eyes that she’s about to return to the zone.  That’s when we say, “Nellie!  Go!”  She gives a look reflecting just how unfair it all is and so we say “Hurry up!”  That’s when she comes out of the zone and walks around the coffee table only to come back and do it again.  The pattern repeats itself until we finally get frustrated and put her special collar on her, the shock collar. She suddenly becomes the best puppy in the world and goes and lies down.  We don’t even have to turn it on.  When she wears the collar, she knows her place.

The thing is, if it were not for the commands and the collar she would not be able to stop herself from thieving some pizza.  She gets obsessed with what she wants and believe me, when Nellie’s nose kicks in, the very order of the cosmic universe of our home is utterly disrupted until she is redirected.  To get her to leave behind the things that her baser instincts draws her to and obsesses her with is like trying to get a Zombie off brains.  So, Nellie must learn that if she wants to live peacefully in the company of her family, she must “Leave it!”

Nellie’s inability to get control of herself in certain situations where her basic instincts are involved may seem a petty illustration for what’s involved in being a disciple of Jesus but maybe it rings true.  Jesus says that we cannot be his disciples unless we leave behind everything we have.  Other translations use the word “possessions” in place of “everything you have” so that it reads, “So therefore, none of you can become my disciples if you do not leave behind all your possessions”.  The word in Greek that we’re working with literally means “the ruled-over things”, the things that we think we have rule over and yet they rule over us.  I like the word possessions here because of the latent wordplays there such as “Our possessions will soon enough possess us” or “Our possessions become our obsessions”.

Thinking about Nellie, when there’s food around her instincts kick in telling her she’s entitled to it and she loses herself in the pursuit of them.  Let’s say there’s a steak on the counter.  Her scavenger instincts kick in telling her it would be such pleasure and joy to have that steak.  Everything about her is saying to that steak, “oh baby, you are mine”, but it’s not hers to have.  It belongs to her humans.  Nellie cannot possess the steak apart from it being a grave wrong, but it certainly possesses everything about her to want it.

So I ask, how is this any different from us when it comes to possessions?  As a species on this planet we have long sought to curb our baser instincts with religion, morality, civil law, the protection of human rights, education, science, and so on and guess what, contrary to what the evening news thinks is news, humanity’s efforts to curb its baser instincts have resulted thus far in a world that is better to live in than it has ever been.  Even with the looming threats of WMD’s and environmental crisis, as a species we are safer, healthier, better educated, and more prosperous than we were even just fifty years ago. 

As a species we’ve done well, but when it comes to the individual of the species—to me, myself, and I—there is a problem.  As individuals, we will too often put “me” before my family and yours.  We will put “my” family before yours.  We will put “people like me” before people different than me.  We will make “my” nation great to the detriment of others.  When it comes to us as individuals, we have a baser instinct towards being self-serving that is detrimental to the species.

This is why Jesus told the crowd of people following him that they could not become his disciples unless they leave behind their possessions, the way he said it was more like “All of y’all cannot become my disciples unless each one leaves behind his own possessions.”  Just as there is no peace at pizza time at our house until Nellie complies to the “Leave it” command and goes and lies down, so also there will not be true peace on earth until all are disciples of Jesus and that won’t happen unless we each are willing to leave behind the things we think we rule over but really rule over us…our possessions.

Jesus has difficult things here to say about what we must leave behind if we want to be his disciple.  He begins with our family loyalties.  He says unless we hate our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, spouses, and children, we cannot be his disciples.  Hate is a much stronger word to our ears than what Jesus means here.  He was not saying we must loathe our families and seek their harm, which is what hate means to us.  Rather, he means we must not let family members prevent us from being faithful to him.  Commitment to him must come first.

Jesus also says we must hate even our own lives.  We must not let our egos or dreams of success or pride or any of that self-motivation stuff come before him.  We must leave our self-identities behind and instead find our identity in him as his disciples.

Jesus says we must take up our crosses and follow him.  The cross Jesus is talking about here is not those personal challenges that we all have to bear.  The cross was the Rome’s preferred form of execution for those they saw as enemies of the empire.  Being Jesus’ disciples will involve walking a different walk than simply being good people who are good citizens.  As Jesus stood prophetically against the corrupted political and religious institutions of his day, so also must those who wish to be his disciples.  We can’t just vote for the candidates that we think are best for me and my family and think we’re being good disciples.  Good disciples look after the needs of the “least of these”.

Jesus tells a couple of parables about counting the cost of following him.  The first one involves building a tower for protecting one’s assets.  No one builds a tower without making sure they have enough resources to finish it.  It is foolish to spend everything you have on trying to protect your possessions.  In the end, there’s nothing left.  But, how many people sell off their dignity and enslave themselves to have life the way our materialistic and consumeristic culture says it should be and in the end really have no life at all.

The next parable involves a king counting the cost of a war.  If your army is outnumbered two-to-one, then there is no point going to war.  You will lose everything and there will be a lot of needless loss of life.  It is best for everybody involved for the king to seek the terms of peace and avoid the war.  Interestingly, the terms of peace will most likely involve loosing all of one’s possessions anyway, but you will still have life. 

Hidden in this parable is the message that if we want to have peace, God’s peace which he has given to the world in Christ, then we cannot also have a lifestyle that is obsessed with and possessed by possessions.  If we want to be Jesus’ disciples, the terms for peace are to walk away from our glassy-eyed, zombetic, Nellie-esc pursuits of possessing the good life, which is at heart driven by greed and covetousness, and fall in behind Jesus and take up his simpler, prophetic, cross-shaped way of life based in denying our selfish sense of self.  Put simply, we must “Leave it!”  Can we?  Amen.

Counting the Cost

Text: Luke 14:25-33

          People often remark how freeing it is to simplify your life by getting rid of the stuff you don’t need and even the stuff you do need. I did such a thing when I moved to Canada from West Virginia. I gave away everything I had except for kitchen stuff, some personal stuff, my books, and my computer. I came to Canada with only three carloads of stuff. It truly was freeing to be rid of that stuff. I could have had a great big yard sale, but I still would have had a few things to give away and the couple of hundred made, to me, would not have been worth the effort. I did experience getting rid of the stuff as freeing. I knew that there were some things I would have to reacquire eventually up here in Canada and when it came time to get some basic furniture and stuff when I moved into the manse, somebody not associated with this church gave me the essentials. Our Lord does look after his own, and I truly believe that when you are at bare minimum, having nothing to count on but the Lord, he comes through. This should point us in the direction of simplifying our lives of possessions in order to know what it is to have the Trinity truly provide for us. Otherwise, we can naively believe that the Lord provided for us when actually we did it ourselves.

Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is costly and I’ve come to understand that the cost is learning how to give and in order to do that we most count the cost of what our possessions mean to us. Simplifying our lives of possessions so that we have to rely on the gracious provision of the Triune God of grace and the communion of saints is a big step towards learning to live in the Kingdom of God. You see, when we all have the means to acquire as well as actual possession of everything we could possibly want, we totally take for granted the things that we actually need and I would go as far as to say we forget what our true needs are. In this age of Materialism and Consumerism, the experience of having to rely on the Trinity and the communion of saints is grossly supplanted by a false sense of security which we call self-reliance. Bother me if I’m wrong, but I think self-reliance is one of if not the most detrimental, indeed idolatrous, characteristics of our culture affecting us each. Our way of life, our economy, is built on the principle that everybody should be able to provide for themselves, but…if you look at the collective debt of every household in North America and beyond, something is terribly wrong. Most of us are not self-reliant. It’s an illusion. In fact, most of us are simply burying ourselves in the slavery of debt while some very sick corporations and individuals profit from it. But, then we have to ask what the alternative is because if everybody decided to simplify their lives of possessions, the consequence to the global economy would be utter disaster.

           One alternative, would be a more communal style of living in our neighbourhoods. Farley Mowat’s first novel, People of the Deer describes his involvement with an inland Inuit people known as the Ihalmiut. They numbered about 7,000 in the 1880’s and only 30 by 1950. They were starving to death because White’s were killing the Caribou they relied on en mass. One thing that struck me about Mowat’s description of the Ihalmiut way of life was the utter lack of a concept of private ownership. If there was a shovel, it belonged to everybody in the clan and if you needed to use it, you asked around until you found it. If we applied this way of life to our neighbourhoods, can you imagine how much closer we would all become with all the visiting that goes on while we try to locate a shovel, or a lawnmower, or a ladder? I think that sort of a neighbourhood vision is as counter-culture as we could possibly get in our culture, but I think its very Christian and would prove to be very evangelistic. But anyway, we’re not supposed to be talking about being counter-culture. We need to talk more about the spiritual problem of attachment to possessions and secondly, intentionally trying to simplify our lives of them. The reason is that it is truly freeing and does open up space in our lives inwardly and outwardly for Jesus to display his Lordship.

A few years back, a Quaker theologian and writer, Richard J. Foster best known for his book The Celebration of Discipline, wrote The Freedom of Simplicity in which he rather nicely covers the spiritual problem we have with possessions and what to do about it. Firstly, attachment to possessions is a form of idolatry that affects us at the level of how willing we are to give in order to meet the needs of others. In the new humanity which is the Christian faith, the new humanity which is indwelt by the Holy Spirit and becoming more and more the image of Christ, Jesus is our model, Jesus of Nazareth who owned nothing and gave his very life for all. He had nothing, but God the Father saw to it that he had everything he needed. His life was all about being able to give.

We live our lives completely differently. We teach our children that if they want something, they must earn the means to buy it so that it is their possession. We adults do the very same thing. We sell our time for money to be able to buy and possess things we need or think we need or simply just want for whatever reason. Yet, what happens? Who here does not wish they had more time to do devotions, to spend with family, to be creative, to just sit and look around and breathe in the panorama and be thankful? How many of us find ourselves waking up in the middle of the night with minds racing about all the things that need to be done? How many of us simply no longer have the mental space to deal with one more thing? This is what attachment to possessions causes.

           In the second place, Foster gives an alternative for us and it is to simplify our lives by giving away what we don’t need and being intentional about living on the bare essentials from there on. This frees up our inner worlds. It makes us realize how much we truly have resource-wise that we could share with those who need. Moreover, it simply frees us up to be able to give. But, there is a catch. Foster says if we really want to address the heart of our problem, we must identify those things that are most meaningful to us and give them away and there is a profound reason for this: when we examine our attachments to our possessions particularly those that mean the most, we come to understand ourselves in a deeply profound way; our brokenness, our idolatry, even our deep need for the soul cleansing that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection provide.

           For a very simple example, two weeks ago I found an attachment that was very important to me, William’s little blue stuffed puppy that he has had maybe since day one. Saturday a week ago, William and I went to do some errands and Puppy came along. That night at bedtime, Puppy was nowhere to be found and I couldn’t recall if Puppy made it back into the house. So, William in his jammies and I got in the car and went searching and asking for Puppy. The next day either Dana or I did the same. I was deeply affected by the whole thing. I probably missed Puppy more than William did. I searched the Net to see if we could get a new one. They’re not made anymore. Monday came and Dana took William and Alice to get a new stuffy. William got a monkey because he is affectionately known as a silly monkey. Later that evening we had minister friends and their children over for dinner. The children went down in the basement to play. All of a sudden I heard William shouting, “I found Puppy. Mommy, Daddy I found Puppy!” Up the stairs he came to show us. I about cried.

           The point isn’t that I’m going to have to give Puppy away because he means too much to me. He’s William’s Puppy after all and one day he’ll/we’ll figure out what to do with it. Yet, realizing my over-attachment to Puppy made me look inside and ask why. Well, me being the youngest of four, my stuffies were often used by my siblings to be mean to me. Moreover, with my parents divorcing while I was a small child my stuffies meant more to me than they otherwise would have. And so, something I have to keep telling myself about William is that he’s a happy kid in a healthy home and he will not grow up with the same pains I did. To me, that is quite freeing.

            But, that’s an adult child pondering the meaning of stuffies. What happens when our most meaningful possessions are cottages, boats, or family heirlooms? Does this mean we are supposed to give them away? Well, that’s between God and our self’s and not a matter to be judged by others. The important thing is to examine the emotional roots of the attachment. What does it say when, for example, people know their cottage neighbours whom they see once or twice a year better than their home neighbours whom they see nearly everyday?

           Well, giving away what we don’t need is a good discipline. It shows us how and what we have invested our lives in. The end result truly is a less cluttered and more spacious interior life. Just ask any interior decorator how to make a room look bigger…remove one third of the stuff that’s in it. I don’t think we need to give away the most meaningful stuff, yet we should certainly ponder why these things are so meaningful that we couldn’t just part with them.

That leads us to intentional living: being intentional about keeping our lives free by trying to live on just the basics and when we do go beyond the basics, asking ourselves why we want what it is that we want. Substance abusers trying to go clean have to make a conscious effort to figure out why they want that substance. So, it is with our attachment to possessions. One key way for us to open up space in ourselves and in our lives for Jesus and for others is to simplify and intentionally live simply. As I hinted earlier, with Jesus as our model, the goal for us is to discipline ourselves to be more willing and able to give, to give sacrificially. That, my friends, is the cost of grace. Amen.