15 Pentecost 2007 Zion, Washington

Ah well. Once again, we bump into one of those passages of the Gospel where Jesus isn't particularly meek, mild, gentle, or loving. Jesus said, "If anyone comes to me and doesn't hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple. Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple."

And no, Jesus' list isn't selective. I mean, you can't choose who, in your family that you want to hate, in order to be Jesus' disciple, while you still love someone else in your family. And by "cross", Jesus doesn't mean Christian jewelry, but rather the very instrument of our death - whatever it may be. As He concluded, our renunciation has to be a total renunciation of everything that we have, if we intend to be Jesus' disciple. No loopholes.

Naturally, all the commentaries point out that Jesus was exaggerating here and didn't really mean what he was saying; like the time He said to pluck out your eye or cut off your hand or foot if they caused you to sin. Ah well. Once again, we bump into one of those passages of the Gospel

where Jesus isn't supposed to be taken literally. Whew! That makes it so much easier. Besides, as Episcopalians, we don't rely on the Bible only, but also on Sacred Tradition and on Reason. It has not been the Tradition of the Church, over the past two millennia, to require hatred any more than it has required sinners to self-mutilate; nor is it Reasonable to do so.

(The two stories, about the man who was going to build a tower and the king who was going to war, are simply stories of counting "the cost of discipleship". What Jesus was saying is, if you can't pay the price, don't bother following me.)

It's harsh. It's diametrically opposed to the current American trends in church growth for local congregations. Current wisdom says that, for a church to grow, things like demographics have to be analyzed and the needs of the target market need to be met, in terms of social services and idiom of worship, and convenience of access. And above all else, it has to be recognized that the very last thing that a visitor must feel is any sense of the need for commitment or sacrifice or expectations. After all, they're just there to "kick the tires and slam the doors".

There is no talk about interpersonal relationships as a compelling "entre" for bringing people to church. There's no mention of worship being an encounter with God, "in the beauty of holiness". There is no mention of what happens on Sunday having connection with what's done on Monday, or on the week-end.

To say the very least, this sort of passage from the Gospel would never be given any serious attention, if it would be read at all. At best, it would be watered down and explained away. But Episcopalians have a bit of a reputation of wrestling with "the hard stuff" and striding in "where angels fear to tread". We are not quick to slide past what's called "the hard sayings of Jesus".

So what do we make of this daunting admonition from our Lord and Savior, our God, our - to use my newly discovered Washington Daily News title for Jesus, our Dictator? He has said clearly, if St. Luke is anything to go by, that we have to renounce everything whatsoever, if we are to follow Him and be Jesus' disciples.

It is, in point of fact, what Jesus said, Moses is reputed to have written in the Old Testament and we heard it once again last Sunday, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind." The starting point is a total and uncompromised, pure love for God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus said, "This is the first and great commandment."

Once that has been truly done, only then does everything else follow; which is to say, only then can we truly "love our neighbor as our self". Only then can we see clearly that, "on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets", as Jesus said.

Consider it this way: What, years ago, did you renounce that you have now re-embraced? (I have friends, all across this nation, who thought they would live an unbearable existence and die an ugly death, if they had to stay in their hometown one more day. And so they left. And some time later, they were drawn back to that same home town. And now, they couldn't imagine living anywhere else.)

For me, this was epitomized in Mac Davis' country-western song, "Happiness is Lubbock in the Rear View Mirror". I graduated from high school 56 miles south of Lubbock, Texas. Out there, that's close. People used to go to Lubbock for Sunday lunch from Brownfield. West Texas is the reason why God invented cruise control.

But in the last verse of Mac Davis' song, he says that happiness is seeing Lubbock drawing "nearer and nearer" and he goes on to sing that when he dies, bury him "in Lubbock, Texas, in his jeans."

What he had hated, he had come to cherish, to love perfectly, to embrace completely. But, in order to love Lubbock, Texas, he had to go very far away, without any thought whatsoever of returning, or wanting to return, or even thinking about returning. Only then could he go back home because he wanted to, rather then because he had to.

I take this to be something of what Jesus is getting at, as a way of getting you and me to take seriously "The First and Great Commandment". Only if our first love is God, with all our heart, soul, and mind, can we love each other and can we love ourselves with a freedom that is at the center of that particular Christian love that the Greeks call "agape", and I tend to translate as "purely generous love".

Until we actually grasp that only in God do we "live and move and have our being", does anything else that we do or have or love have any value. Because only in first putting all we are and all we have and all we love into God's hands can we obtain that unique balanced tension that a Christian holds between possession and detachment within the context of our life in God.

What I mean is, consider our prayers. If we haven't truly loved God with all our heart, soul and mind, (or in Jesus' words, "renounce all that we have"), then we think that God has not answered our prayers if we don't get what we want. But if all our prayers begin with the understanding that everything we have comes from God (to use our Episcopal phrase, "All things come of thee, O Lord... and of thine own have we given thee"), then we have that balance of possession and detachment that allows us to accept that sometimes God says, "No". Sometimes God says, "Not yet." And sometimes God says, "Do it yourself. I have already given you everything you need. You don't need my help with this one."

By renouncing all that we have, in favor of totally loving God, and then being able to go back to what we have with a different, freer love, we can accept whatever God gives us with gratitude; regardless of how grim it is. But this is a big step and most people have a very hard time taking it. It's why God has given us saints - both the famous, canonized saints and also the saints we've bumped into in our own lives: people who really are inspiring in ways that change our lives for the better.

The determining factor is that they change our lives for the better. When I lost my knee-cap in a car accident and "got" to learn how to walk again, I had several people tell me that I was a "true inspiration", but what I came to realize was that they were really saying, "I'm glad it happened to you and not to me." I didn't change their lives, I just gave them yet another opportunity to take a deep breath, let it out and go on, knowing that I'd somehow taken a bullet that they'd dodged. Who has changed your life for the better? Who has made you live a holier life?

The college basketball coach came to address our Rally Day celebrations at a parish I served out West, and he mainly talked about going to Dallas and meeting the Cowboy's football coach Tom Landry and how truly inspiring that was. But when I asked him what it was about Coach Landry that was so inspiring, he stuttered enough that it was obvious that he was just impressed that he'd met Coach Landry. Golly, when I was in junior high school, I met Elvis Presley, but it certainly didn't make me more holy or change my life for the better. Neither did his meeting Coach Landry change his life and make it more holy.

Who are the saints whom has God placed in your path who have changed your life and reoriented you toward God? I've seen Mother Teresa of Calcutta and I've seen Archbishop Desmond Tutu in person. They were life-changing. Over the years, my various spiritual directors have been life-changing. My wife has continuously changed my life for the better since we were 13 years old.

All of these people, and a lot more, have equipped me and enabled me to take The Big Step of renouncing everything and everyone in favor of God in order to be able to go back to all those people and things and love them, and also love myself; with that balance of possession and detachment that acknowledges that all things are in God's hands, come what may.

As Saint Julian of Norwich discovered when she meditated on a hazelnut, "God made us. God loves us. God takes care of us." This is the other side of life that we discover after we have taken Jesus' radical words seriously and appropriately. This is the source of our deepest gratitude for our blessings, our God-given gifts and talents, the people and places and things that have been, and continue to be, gifts from God. This is the source of our deepest strength in the face of the challenges that confront us. God, and all of us together, can accomplish what each of us wants and prays for and works for, when they are in harmony with God's Will.

So many of our blessings are actually the very tools and the bonds of relationship that each of us need when our lives get complex; because they reveal our true physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength in meeting the days ahead, whatever different things that means for each of us.

So today's Gospel reading is not something to pass over lightly, but it is wisdom to probe and examine and realize that it is only God in Christ telling the Church that, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, you and I and all God's People, can attain "the Peace of God which passes understanding" by taking to heart what we call the Summary of the Law. It's just that this time, Jesus, like the actress Cher, in that great scene from the movie "Moonstruck", has slapped us in the face and said, "Snap out of it!" From time to time, God is not above using "tough love" to get us to be and to become who God has created us to be: objects of God's delight.