Saturday, September 03, 2016
Pentecost 16, Year C, Proper 18 September 4, 2016
Sermon for the Sixteenth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 18 ~ September
4, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
…as
you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength,
so you never forsake those who make their
boast of your mercy.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
I boast of what I am or what I have. Or rather, of what
I THINK I am or have, because in
reality I am nothing and I have nothing. Thus the Israelites are
warned not to imagine that they own the land they are going to possess.
Likewise, Philemon imagines that he owns Onesimus. But Paul tells Onesimus that
even his very life is not his own, much less that of his slave; and Jesus says
that his disciples renounce all such imaginings:
none of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions.
As advice specific to those who wanted to follow Jesus
around Palestine 2000 years ago, this statement simply recognizes practical reality:
disciples in that sense did have to give up everything. It comes at the end of
a series of startling pronouncements, beginning with the impossible declaration
that
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.
Well, we are not called to follow Him around Palestine,
so what does this have to do with us, if anything? It must have something to do
with us, because now and then we like to imagine that we are, in some sense, His
disciples. But hate our parents and
all the rest of our closest relatives? C’mon!
Honor of parents is the first of the Ten Commandments
after those about our relationship to God. So, hating them seems extreme. I suppose what He means is not emotion, but
attachment. In another place, Jesus says that anyone who loves parents more
than Him is not worthy of Him. But the only duty one has prior to parents is to
God. So in saying that, Jesus puts
Himself in the place of God, as we
acknowledge that He is right to do.
On the other hand, it is possible to honor Father and
Mother instead of God. How many there are whose highest value is
their own family or clan or tribe – an extension of their own sense of self! This
is the foundation of religious nationalism – the great enemy of the Church.
Looked at this way, it is obvious that those who do not
hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers
and sisters,
yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
A sense of tribal identity is one kind of possession. The
conclusion of the passage expands the notion to all possession:
None of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions.
That is surely true of everyone
who wishes to be a follower of Jesus or an adherent of Christianity. We encountered
this a few weeks ago. Some ancient fathers went so far as to identify the very notion
of possession with the Fall. Possession is an illusion. First, because we are
all going to die. Everyone is, literally, a follower of Jesus in that sense. We
shall die, as He died. And then we shall possess nothing. Our possessions are,
at best, temporary. Devoting one’s life to accumulation is silly.
Worse, it amounts to wasting one’s limited time in this
world. This doesn’t necessarily mean adopting a lifestyle of total
renunciation, but one must be very careful not to be seduced into thinking that
one can possess anything. To think
so is to wallow in sin, an illusion that rapidly develops into dangerous
separation from Reality. Like the Israelites before whom God set the choice of
life or death, as they were about to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land,
the temptation is to forget that possession of the land is conditional. To
think that one can actually possess anything is the way of the wicked, which is doomed.
Because at bottom, the uncomfortable observation that
everyone who would be Jesus’s disciples must give up all possession is
ultimately about inner life. What is ego
if not a collection of illusory notions about self? I clasp these illusions to
my breast and love them as myself, I keep them and inwardly cherish them as prized possessions, but what are they? Are they
really myself? No, of course not. In
spiritual terms, they are merely possessions
and the spiritual life involves renouncing them, giving them up, which is to
choose life.
What I think I possess actually possesses ME, whether
it be external objects that I have accumulated or my fond, inner thoughts about
myself – my illusory self. Most terribly, this includes my
imaginings about my relationship to God. So, Jesus says,
none of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions.
What seems like renunciation is really the path to
freedom, the Way of the Righteous, but
the way of the ungodly shall perish. All that I can ever really have is God’s mercy. All that I can ever
be is a recipient thereof. To boast
of anything else or to imagine anything else about God and my relationship to
God – even silently to myself – is death. From which, by the grace of the Holy
Spirit, may Christ our God deliver us and make us His disciples.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
