15. Sunday after Pentecost, 09/05/2010

Sermon on Luke 14:25-33, by David Zersen

Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, “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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

DIFFERING KINDS OF LOVE

Wow! Tough talk. This is the kind of religious language that turns people off. At first glance, such extreme language thwarts the very things that we think valuable: kinship, family, loyalty, mutual support. It’s one thing to acknowledge that things and possessions can have a control over us, and are dangerous. But it is a bit much to suggest that people who have nurtured and supported us are also dangerous to finding life’s meaning. “Jesus, where are you going with this tough talk?”

Monks down through the centuries took all this literally. There’s a part of us that respects the focus and the discipline that religious professionals chose. They gave up family and possessions and lived in caves and huts (at least the earliest ones did). They renounced earthly values to pursue heavenly ones. In principle, this is what Jesus was talking about, but some of us, at least, believe that the monkish problem lay in taking these words too literally.

I would suggest that Jesus is talking about two different kinds of love, and that to make his point he is using a form of hyperbole, a term that refers to using extreme language to make a point. Hyperbole requires sophisticated hearers, and today’s media would go crazy if our politicians chose to speak in hyperbole. Jesus also expects a lot from us in using this language.

At one level, he’s practicing a kind of crowd control. Regularly we are told that crowds were following Jesus. He seemed, however, to prefer the intimacy of smaller groups. This kind of hyperbolic language might cause some to return home and quit following him.

On the other hand, after some of the crowds have left, we have stayed with him and are here today to try to learn what these words can mean for us.

I would suggest that Jesus is deconstructing language and social meaning for us. He is asking us to revisit our focus, our intentionality, especially in terms of our use of the word “love.”

Loving things to death

On the one hand, loving people and things can lead us to relationships that are unhealthy. Let me confess to one of these with respect to something important to me. I love books, hopefully for their content, not for their bindings and paper pages. However, I know people who love to read and borrow books from friends and libraries, but always give them back when they’ve finished reading them. For me that doesn’t seem to be meaningful. I like to own the books. Once I’ve finished reading them, I like to know they’re on my shelves. I may never read them again, but these books are now mine. I possess them—and they possess me. When it came time to downsize my library, because we were moving, I had severe problems. Finally, I threw 500 away and gave another 500 to local libraries. I didn’t make these decisions lightly. I held each book as I considered its value to me and what should become of it. This is a kind of contemporary control and power that Jesus is talking about. When love for a thing is so consuming that it controls my view of the containers of meaning, the books themselves, rather than their contents, I have a problem. If I multiply this problem to involve other things, then you can see how my things can control me. When this happens, my life is not free, but enslaved in a kind of way. We all know how this happens with respect to cars, houses, hobbies, collections.

It can also happen with respect to passions and interests like sports, politics, sex or ideologies.

Most troublesome of all, it can happen with respect to people. We can love a person so much that we come to believe that we should have some say over the feelings they have, the decisions they make or the activities in which they participate. The closer we are in terms of family ties, the more intense such control can become. Parents control their children, children, when their parents become dependent, seek to control them. Brothers and sisters who love one another can also seek to take responsibility for one another. When all this happens, our love for a loved one denies freedom and choice to the other in such a way that our relationship is no longer healthy. What masquerades as love is really power, and this may mean the end of the relationship. What can be done about this?

I have traveled enough in the world to know that although I am not a rich person in contrast to many wealthy Americans, I have far more than many people have in this world. My possessions can possess me and my controlling relationships over others can control me. For example, we have this concern which goes something like this: What would happen to those other people if I were not involved in keeping them on the straight and narrow? Do you know anybody who thinks like that? Or what would life look like if I separated myself from all the toys and trinkets and treasures that have come to define me? Would people begin to think of me in other ways instead of their using the words by which they currently define me: the guy with all the books, the lady with all the Precious Moments figurines, the man with all the sports memorabilia? And if they were to come to think of us differently, would this be an advantage? And in what way?

Some years ago, I chose to place a wicker container in the center of our living room as a kind of coffee table. It was the luggage used by my great-grandfather when he came to this country.
Everything he possessed was in that wicker basket. Clearly he had a lot less to possess him than I have to possess me. He was freer than I am to live openly and lovingly in the midst of my possessions.

Perhaps there is something you might find to help you think about this? It might be interesting to place a symbol in a prominent location that speaks to you about the dangers of controlling others or being possessed by things, all in the name of love. What might that be for you and where would you place it?

It’s worth thinking about because sometimes the things we love so much exert a kind of control over us and in a very real way we are loving them to death, as the expression goes. I think that in Jesus’ hyperbolic language he is warning us about this. He is saying that a focus on and passion for the wrong things can lead us to a dead end.

For this reason, he wants to show us how life can be freeing and empowering.

Being loved into life

I said earlier that Jesus is interested in deconstructing our lives. He seeks to take apart the very human way in which we have put together our families, our relationships and our societies. This can be very threatening to people who assume that everything we have established should remain just as it is. I find it interesting that media people, many of whom know nothing about Christian theology, challenge the statements of people who call into question the things that Americans have come to value. Jesus is not worried about this.

In fact, the essence of Jesus teaching and action is to take apart our understandings of what is appropriate, what is right and wrong.

You remember how he does it in the Parable of the Prodigal Son? The son (that’s us in the story) finds it appropriate to focus on things (money, and finally, anything to sustain him). The prodigal, however, returns to the father’s house, rejecting the false promises of the world, and discovers, much to his surprise, that he is welcome. Welcome in the father’s house!

Even more powerfully, let’s remember what Jesus does at the cross. Rejection, or in this case, unjust execution is offensive to us, especially when it involves someone whom we regard as a moral leader. Yet Jesus breaks that value to show us a love which exceeds our own, a love which does not seek to control, but to give. This is ultimately the only kind of love which is real love, a love which frees others to be themselves and to love again in a God-like kind of way.

We carry out this theme in the Eucharist. The bread is not there to be claimed by any of us, but to be broken and shared. In that generous sharing, we become one body with each other, the very incarnate Body of Christ. In the Eucharist, we affirm, that where love is present, the broken can be made whole.

This is the good news for today, that we who at times try to construct real life by possessing things and controlling others have been loved into a new understanding. It is the understanding that Jesus himself put to death our need to think humanly and opens to us a way of life that places giving and sharing at its center. The good news is that Jesus empowers us by his death and resurrection to be the inheritors and communicators of a love and life that lasts.

In today’s Old Testament lesson, we hear a similar message. God’s people are called to love the Lord their God and to realize that in this love they have the freedom to know the difference between life and prosperity, death and destruction (Deut. 30: 15-20). The remarkable thing is that in that topsy-turvy Gospel of Jesus, these words take on new meaning. Life and prosperity are not the humanly created values of affluence and control. Those lead to dead ends, to death and destruction. Jesus himself, however, having undergone death and destruction himself, frees us to define life and prosperity in new ways.

We are free to focus on the kinds of love which don’t seek accumulation and control, but giving and sharing.

Prof. Dr. Dr., President Emeritus David Zersen
Concordia University Texas
Austin, Texas
E-Mail: djzersen@aol.com

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