Deuteronomy 30 & Luke 14
This week, the sermon is mostly a weaving together of four women preachers’ voices – Dr. Kathryn Schifferdecker (in blue), the Rev. Dr. Mitzi Smith (in purple), Angela Denker (in green) and Lee Ann Pomrenke (in orange). In addition to being pastors, they are two Bible professors, a journalist and a writer who is a member here at Christ – the intention here is to amplify their voices.
“This is one of those weeks when, after reading the Gospel lesson, you might feel like putting a question mark after the usual [response to the gospel]: “The Gospel of the Lord (?)”
After all, Jesus is advising “hate” for family members. "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
It seems like we shouldn’t even read a text like this, especially on a day when we are having “Rally Sunday,” beginning the program year—Sunday School, Confirmation, Bible study, and all those good thigs. What a day to talk about hating one’s family![1]
But be careful, dear preacher (Kathryn writes) not to soften too much the word of challenge in the text. While Jesus is not literally advising hate against one’s family members, he is warning his listeners about the risk inherent in becoming his disciple.”
“Becoming Jesus’ disciple is not for the faint of heart. It involves the possibility of alienating family and friends who cannot understand or support a commitment that seems foolish. Discipleship has a real cost to it, so count the cost, Jesus says, before making the commitment, just as a builder must count the cost of construction before beginning a project. Right now, we certainly know about that as we consider the plans for renovating the kitchen and wait, wait, wait for that final maximum price.
Commitment is not an alien concept to us, especially at this time of year. The school year is beginning or has recently begun. Many of us are getting back into the schedule of various commitments we’ve made—some of these commitments involve a good deal of sacrifice in terms of time and money
Still, the challenge in this text is real. Christian discipleship is not something that can be done only in our spare time, after all the other commitments have been met. Jesus isn’t asking for our leftovers. Jesus wants us—our love, our time, our resources, our work, our commitment—in order to live out what we pray: “Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And that kind of discipleship may very well put us in conflict, if not with family members, than certainly with the expectations of many of those around us.”
Mitzi Smith challenges that one must be willing:
- to champion the cause of the poor and dis-eased;
- to view one’s calling as more expansive than the confines of the church;
- to sometimes buck traditions—and those who view those traditions as infallible;
- to live a life of relative poverty, unwilling to take bribes and to amass wealth on the backs of the oppressed and unaware;
- to struggle for the alleviation of poverty and a living wage for all at the expense of one’s own privilege; and
- to expand one’s conception of “family” to include neighbors far and near.[2]
“Perhaps what Jesus means by hating family is to refuse to live by narrow, exclusive ideas of family when it comes to meeting human needs and contributing to the wholeness of all human beings.”
That is something people of Christ have been practicing for years… but still, even those who have been practicing find themselves challenged to live into the risks Jesus invites more deeply. Jesus often pushes farther than we want to go for the love of those we still are not fully seeing.
Compassion is not the absence of fear but the overwhelming, undeniable summons to engage in acts of love and justice. If [we have] a narrow view of family and values… we will not take risks for the most vulnerable…”
“Jesus started this teaching by asserting that his disciples must be willing to hate their family members and life itself, and he ends with telling the crowd that they must relinquish all their possessions…
Jesus’ [call] that the traveling crowds relinquish their possessions is a challenge to reject greed, hoarding, and overabundance… and in favor of sharing [to eliminate poverty].We are a society that encourages greed over giving, hoarding over sharing, and overabundance as a marker of social status... What humans have created, [what we have inherited & participate in], we can eliminate by daily recommitting ourselves to the God who loves compassion, mercy, and justice.”[3]
And I think this is what the words of Deuteronomy mean—choose life. Set in a context of religious nationalism and its “ever-present threat of idolatry, Moses is urging his people to commit, heart and soul and body, to a vibrant relationship with the God in whom they live and move and have their being.”[4]
We too struggle with competing loyalties… and our only way out is to look to God. Today, we’ll participate in God’s Work, Our Handsservice projects after worship in order to practice compassion and mercy together. Next week, we’ll have an Isaiah training that will give clear tools for practicing justice. In worship just after this message, we’ll look over the Autumn Menu of Opportunities together, fill them out & turn them in. The intention is not to make any of us more busy, not to add more duties to our ever-growing schedules, but the intention is to give some ways to stop our striving, to gather in Christian community, to serve and grow together, so that we can keep the main things the main things. So that we can daily recommit ourselves to the God who invites us to choose life.
There are many good things on that Autumn Menu… Dear Church, Global/Local Mission Event, Opportunities to support Shobi’s Table and Daily Work…
One thing that is not in the menu (that we missed) is our Books & Brunch group, just started this summer – this month, we’ll meet on Saturday morning, September 21st… new comers are welcome!
At Books & Brunch this September, we will talk about the book Red State Christiansby ELCA pastor Angela Denker. She interviewed people throughout the nation to understand what happened in the 2016 election and here is what Lee Ann Pomrenke, our host for this month’s conversation, wrote in her review of the book:
It is a terrible feeling, being blind-sided. Election Day 2016 left me staring down my own ignorance and resulting shock that so many of my fellow citizens voted for the candidate I thought had disqualified himself repeatedly. So many Christians… but then Lee Ann describes what she learned.
Yes, there are so many problems we need to confront as Christians with different views and priorities, truths and biases.
Lee Ann instructs, “What we can control most in that process though, is our own approach. We cannot risk continuing to talk past each other, or lobbing insults at one another… We have to talk about race without naming the other “deplorable,” to make ourselves vulnerable and humble while honestly trying to hear each other. We know how to do this since confession and forgiveness are the marks of our faith. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is for those who feel powerless, undervalued, or no longer seen. We declare that losing our power in Christ’s love is the goal of our faith. And we know how to host a funeral, where grieving the loss of those we hold dear and hope in resurrection are deeply intertwined.”[5]
Angela, the author of the book Red State Christians, writes this in Living Lutheranabout the process of interviewing people for the book: “In a fragmented America, I learned that hope is best found not in places where it’s easy to hope but in places (and in churches) where hope is seen against a backdrop of death. This kind of hope—the kind formed by Jesus and preached by [pastors] in central Pennsylvania and Appalachia [and so many other places]—is the kind of hope that endures.
In all my travels across America, telling stories of Christians and Christian leaders in red counties from New Hampshire to El Paso, it’s this one that gives me hope for the future of the Lutheran church—a future rooted in survival, humility and love against all odds.”[6]
Peter J. Gomes once wrote, “Jesus did not die in order to spare us the indignities of the wounded creation. He died that we might see those wounds as our own. Jesus died that we might live, and life fully and hopefully – [that’s] ‘full of hope” – not in some fantastic never-never-land not yet arrived, but in the ambiguous reality here and now. Look at the cross and the suffering bleeding Savior. Beyond tragedy is truth redeemed. Look and live!”[7]
There are many things we will have to let go of as we follow Jesus into the future, but the promise is that as we let go of all that possesses us and put our trust in God, as we practice confession and forgiveness, as we love mercy more than life (as we are risk-takers for justice), we will taste and see the gospel, God’s good news, at work, not just for us but for all.
[1]Workingpreacher.org, author: Kathryn Schifferdecker is Professor and Elva B. Lovell Chair of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, Dear Working Preachercolumn for 9/8/2019
[2]Workingpreacher.org, author: Rev. Dr. Mitzi J. Smith is the J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., Commentary on Luke 14: 25-33
[3]Workingpreacher.org, author: Rev. Dr. Mitzi J. Smith is the J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., Commentary on Luke 14: 25-33
[4]Workingpreacher.org, author: Carolyn J. Sharp is Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at Yale Divinity School, Commentary on Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
[5]Lee Ann Pomrenke, Nuance and Kinship: A Review of Red State Christians, Episcopal Café, August 3, 2019.
[6]Angela Denker, Lutherans Build Bridges in America: My journey to writing Red State Christians, Living Lutheran, August 15, 2019 Author’s note: As I researched Red State Christians, I was indebted, as well, to other Lutherans across the country who opened their homes and churches to me. In the book you’ll read about guns and Christianity from ELCA pastors in rural Iowa, Minnesota and New Hampshire. You’ll meet farm families in Missouri from the congregation of Stephen Zeller and his wife, pastor and writer Kimberly Knowle-Zeller. You’ll meet Rose Mary Sánchez-Guzmán, pastor of Iglesia Luterana Cristo Rey, who ministers to migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso and who took me with her family into Juarez, teaching me how to cross the divides that have broken the heart of America’s churches
[7]Peter J. Gomes, Sermons (New York: Morrow, 1998), 72.
No comments:
Post a Comment