Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Wisdom 9:13-18b | Philemon 9-10, 12-17 | Luke 14:25-33

Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. 

Every Sunday we go back to stories, most especially the story in the gospel, and try to find in it wisdom, understanding, some kind of direction for how we should be living our life.  I don't know what it would be like if we didn’t have these eyewitness accounts of this God/man Jesus, and every time I go back to them, I’m always amazed at how I can find something in it I’ve never seen before.  One of the things I’d like to point out is that these were stories that were not written just like news events, like this is written down right after the talk he gave, and people said, “This is what he said.” No, they were stories written down after his death and resurrection, after he became who he fully wanted to reveal himself to be in the eyes of those who were with him, and it obviously added a tremendous amount of importance to his teaching.  

So I think about what they would have remembered in his teaching.  It would have been essential stuff, really essential, really important, and here we have this speech, this talk he gave to a great crowd of people.  And he makes basically three fundamental teachings. He presents three fundamental teachings, and in that I see some things that are really crucial, really important for you and for me to work on, to reflect upon, to question ourselves about what we believe.  So much has influenced you and me in terms of our way of seeing the world, mostly our family of origin, mostly our culture, the religion we belong to, and then there’s this one source, this one pure, beautiful source, which is the in-dwelling presence of a God who wants to speak to you and to me.  That’s what it seems he’s interested in most, a relationship with us, union with God.  

So the first thing this set of readings offers us is a reminder that there is something about this work we have with God that is not something we can sit down and say, “I’ve figured it out.  I know how it works.  I know what to do, or someone else can tell me always what to do.”  No, it’s a work that demands this mysterious, indescribable thing called the Holy Spirit, Spirit, truth, and so the opening reading is really powerful, because it’s saying, “We have a hard time figuring things out, who I am, what I’m supposed to be doing, what’s the problem in my relationship.”  We’re trying to figure all that out, or we’re trying to figure out just logical things. Look at the way the world has evolved in terms of understanding and things that we now take for granted. “Well, everybody knows that.” Well, maybe they didn’t know that 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.  Of course they didn’t.  So we’ve grown a lot in our understanding of how the world works, but even that is hard for us to figure out, and we’re probably just scratching the surface.  So we’re just reminded that we have this wonderful, wonderful thing in our head, this brain, and it’s logical, and it understands, and it’s creative, and it’s interested in how things work, and it searches for answers.  It’s wonderful, but at the same time, it’s absolutely — I don’t want to say worthless, but it’s absolutely ineffective in enabling you and me to open ourselves to what it is that God is doing in your life and in mine.  Logic is a liability when it comes to the spiritual world. The heart is what it needs to work with, and the heart is a different thing than the brain.  It has a way of surrendering to things that we can’t fully grasp logically, but they feel right.  They seem right.  They sound right.  

So we start with the image that we need if we’re going to have a relationship with God, if we’re going to be his disciple.  If we’re going to live the life that he’s calling us to, we have to be radically open to a source of wisdom.  That is the key to you and I doing something in the world, and the thing that I know we’re intended to do in this world is to participate in the process.  The process, what are we here for?  It’s always been the issue.  What are we here for?  Well, one of the ways to imagine that is we’re here to get to heaven.  That’s sort of true, but in the first chapter that we’ve just been listening to in Luke, he talks so much about the gratuitous grace of God that’s going to save us, and salvation is not something you earn by what you do.  So this may sound strange, but let’s just say that that’s not the most effective way of thinking about what we’re here to do, to achieve salvation.  It’s a gift, yet we know there’s something here that we’re responsible for accomplishing.  We’re not just here to wait until the promise comes, that we can do anything that we want. No, let’s just say he promises that he’s going to take care of us.  He’s going to get us to the place we need to be.  That’s wisdom.  I don't know how he’s going to do it.  We have a thing called purgatory after death.  We can still grow after death.   Maybe that’s part of it.  Maybe the part we’re playing is more integrated into a whole bunch of other people’s struggle, and maybe whatever part we work with, even though we may not come to a clear decision, is partly something that benefits everybody else so that our work is effective in ways that we don’t even understand, even if it doesn’t effectively work for us.  

So just imagine that we’re in this mysterious thing called my life — my life.  If there’s anything that we can see clearly in the ministry of Jesus is the way this particular gospel begins in saying, “There is one single thing that’s most important.”  By far the most essential thing that Jesus came to establish within you and me is something that I haven’t paid enough attention to in my life, because I keep going back to the idea of winning salvation by living a good life, and then that puts me in the role of checking what I’m doing.  Be sure I’m loving.  Be sure I’m forgiving.  Do this. Do that and control my passions. Be nice.  Be good, and then I’ll be saved.  But what if what really matters to God is not our performance while we’re here but our ability to connect with him, to be intimate with God? If there’s anything you can say about the ministry of Jesus is it has one dominant theme.  By just looking at it, without even knowing anything about it, it’s about a God who becomes a man and lives in a man and has such powerful influence in the effectiveness of that man that it’s like, “Hello, this is what we’re here to do.  We’re here to be filled with divinity in order for divinity to use the unique thing that we are to be able to accomplish things in the world that he couldn’t accomplish without me as a unique instrument.”  Amazing.  So if there’s anything you want to spend time on, if you want to say, “What am I really here to do?  What’s the most important thing?”  Spend time with God.  Listen to him.  Worship him. Find a way of connecting with him. Religion promises connection with God, yet religion has a shadow, like everything does, where it seems to come into your life and maybe take over and control all of your decisions.  The church is there to do the best it can to give us direction and advice, but that advice and direction is ultimately up to us to choose.  If you do it because you’re told to do it, if you act in a way because you’re told to do it and you’re afraid of being punished, that’s really not what God would be longing for from a human being.  He wants us to surrender, to suffer, which means to accept. 

So after Jesus, in this lecture in this series of themes he’s talking about, he starts with the idea that, “The most important thing is union with God, union with me, union with your Father.”  It’s everything for him, and the gift is wisdom.  So you can deal with things differently, because you’re not using logic, but you’re open to mystery.  So then he says, “Unless you are willing to turn away from mother, father, brother, sister, all the relationships you’ve had, unless you can hate those people,” which is really an interesting word — it’s really to be separate from them.  Unless you’re willing to separate yourself from all those who have given you something that isn’t really wise, isn’t really true, unless you’re willing to say no to that, when you see the truth, you can’t be his disciple.  You can’t be a student of his.  You can’t grow.  So it means shedding whatever has been told to you, whatever you picked up from watching the people around you acting in a way that you think, “Oh, this is normal,” and it’s not.  It’s rather destructive rather than the way things should be.  That’s a major step.  Open yourself to wisdom and then question when wisdom comes in conflict with those who have taught you, and the obvious thing you need to do is be free of those who have taught you, even though there’s such an intimate relationship with them.  But you have to be free of everything they’ve given you that’s not truth.  So you have to hate them.  That’s a strong word, but it’s dramatic, and it’s pretty effective, because it was such a responsibility to honor your father and your mother and honor all these people.  So he’s saying, “Be careful.  You’re not honoring them when you believe what they teach you when it’s not true.” 

And then he goes on to say, “You have to carry your cross.” Well, the cross is such an interesting thing.  It’s really hard to fathom its essence, but I’m saying mostly to you that it’s the one thing that is most essential in life, that you accept whatever the plan of your life is.  That’s what Jesus did.  You don’t have to be found out at the end of your life to be somebody that is being attacked by everyone, and you lose all your reputation, and you die this horrible death.  No, that’s too literal, but you do have to accept the life that God has given you. Embrace it.  Suffer it, and the last point is really, really fascinating, because what he’s saying is, “I want you to be careful,” because renounce your possessions is a key theme that he keeps going back to.  What does it mean to renounce possessions?  There’s nothing you can really take from the gospel that implies that having money is a negative, horrible thing, that owning something is wrong.  It’s interesting.  St. Francis of Assisi just said, “I think I’ve figured it out.  Holiness demands that you have no possessions.  Therefore you cannot own anything.”  That was such an integral part of his plan, his way of holiness, and the church rejected it, and it was so painful to him at the end of his life, because he thought nobody can really become holy if they’re owning anything.  But that’s not the teaching of Jesus, and the teaching of Jesus is possessions are not things you own but things you do or things you have that give you a sense of value in the eyes of others.  I’ll say that again.  It’s real important.  Possessions are those things that you can have, that you can do that, when you do them, you look really important.  That’s the only thing that makes sense with what he says about the two examples before. Don’t start a project if you don’t have enough money.  If you’re a person that has enough money and you do these major projects and they’re so successful and everybody says, “He’s the greatest real estate mogul in the world,” or whatever, it’s — we do so much so that we look important to ourselves and others.  He said, “Be careful, because if you start something like that and you don’t have enough — think about it.  If you don’t have enough to finish it, you look like a stupid fool.”  But what about when you have this desire to go to battle and win and be the conqueror, whether it’s the best in your field or whatever, this battle you’re against?  What he’s saying is, “What if you go into those things thinking, ‘I’ve got to win. I’ve got to win,’ well, be careful. Use a little wisdom here, because you’re going to set yourself up, perhaps, to receive the opposite of what you’re striving for, which is some kind of affirmation.”  So if you want to be a great builder, be careful.  Don’t take on more than you can.  If you want to be the winner, be sure you have a chance to win.  It’s really interesting.  It’s sort of like when he said, “Don’t take seats at the front tables lest they embarrass you by putting you to a lower table, but go to the lower table, and maybe they’ll bring you to the higher table.”  It’s like Jesus is so sensitive to people’s longing for approval from the people around them, and it’s true.  I have it. You have it.  We all have it.  So he’s saying, “Just be careful, because your possessions, whatever you do, whatever you accomplish, whatever great thing you’ve done is not what makes you great.” 

In fact, it’s really interesting.  There’s some theory or some sense that people who become the best at something have a really hard time in their life, and a lot of them commit suicide.  It’s weird, like maybe we’re not supposed to be walking around thinking, “I’m the best,” at anything, and it makes sense, because if you’re working to be the best, if you’re working to have approval from others, you’re going to make some decisions that are very short-sighted.  What makes you great is your relationship with God, his willingness to communicate with you, talk with you, work with you, show you things subtly and sometimes dramatically.  And then also surrender to the plan of your life.  You’re going to be a person, in the eyes of others, that are — you want to be loved of course, but do you want to be the greatest at anything?  If you have that in you, like I have it in me, be careful.  There’s nothing great about being the greatest.  There’s something great about being who you are, living the life you’ve been called to live, forgiving people, loving people, not judging people.  It doesn’t sound that dramatic, but wow, if that’s what we’re here for, then that’s the thing we should focus on, not greatness, but I just call it authenticity.  Be real.  Be yourself. Accept your limits, and if you shine in some way, let it be.  If that’s what God wants, it’ll be fun, but don’t think that makes you better, because we are exactly all instruments of the same goal, God moving in the world through us to bring life to everyone, not just to me. 

Father, our heart’s longing, our soul’s longing is for union with you, and through union with you, we know we will find this most amazing gift called the Spirit, truth, life, joy, peace. Bless us with this gift, but most especially, awaken us to those choices we make that do not produce what they promise. Free us from those things that rob us of the joy of being alive and being in you and being there with each other. Amen.