Disrupted into Love

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

text: Luke 14:25-33, Philemon 1-21

I want you to know, right out of the gate, that I have no plans to give away my stuff. These shoes I am wearing? They belong to me and I plan to keep them. The car I drive? It’s mine. And the house I live in? Well, that belongs to the bank but maybe someday I’ll own it and when I do, I plan to keep it. Likewise, I have no plans to start hating my family. So I want to start there – I do not think that the point of our gospel today is to get us to hate people we love or even necessarily to give away all our things. We know this on some level, right? What Jesus gives us here isn’t a command, it’s hyperbole. Hyperbole – a style of speaking that deliberately exaggerates in order to make a point. This is a style of speaking and teaching that was common to Jesus’ time and is equally common now. I do it – usually when I am upset or want attention, and you probably do it, too. “I have told you this a million times!” we say to our partners or children when we are exasperated. “If I don’t eat soon I will die!” we say when dinner is fifteen minutes late. “That kid never stops talking.” Which is something my family, who I love, used to say about me.

So Jesus starts this passage, speaking to the large crowds who are following him around, with hyperbole – a shocking statement meant to disrupt and disturb listeners while simultaneously drawing attention to something real and important. He tells us to hate our families and our lives, he tells us to prepare to carry a symbol of execution and suffering. Jesus tells us that we cannot belong to him unless we give up everything we own and we should be shocked, disturbed, and put out by this. And we should immediately wonder what real and important thing Jesus is disturbing us into. The parable that follows is a clue – what king, going to war, does not count the cost? It is a kingdom that Jesus is attempting to describe to us, and this kingdom is one where everything our world tells us we are supposed to do, and have, and love is disturbed and upended, and changed.

What do our spouses and parents and children and the things we own, do for us that gets in the way of God’s kingdom? I think this is the difficult and disruptive question at the heart of this morning’s gospel. Is there something about the way people do family and ownership that works against God's kingdom? After all the roles we take on as part of families, the roles we take on as spouses, and the way we are taught to interact with possessions – all of these things are areas of human life that in Jesus' time were controlled and regulated by a different kingdom, the Roman Empire. And, all of these them are areas of human life that our culture and society now also has a vested interest in controlling.

When Andrew and I were preparing to become parents through adoption, we attended several trainings designed to get us ready for the odd and often difficult journey ahead. I remember being at one of these trainings, in a drab conference room in Renton, WA, where a kindly social worker tried to explain how being a parent through adoption is a little different than parenting a biological child. “If you are parenting your biological child,” she said, “It’s like you are an oak tree and you at least know that your child will also be an oak tree. Whatever else happens, all the other variables at play, you at least know that much. But when you are parenting your adopted child all you know is that your child will be a tree – not an oak tree. You could get a shrub, or a cherry tree, or any kind of tree.” The social worker went on to talk about her four adopted children and how only one of them loved to read – something this woman and her husband both loved to do. The others developed natural interests that were really outside their adoptive parents’ experience – sports and cheer-leading and computers. At the time, I thought this was a silly analogy. Of course kids like what they like. But now that I am a mom, I understand it differently. What the social worker was trying to tell us through her story about the trees was that in order to really love our future children we would need to be willing to look outside our own interests, and give up our own family lore about what children “should” be like. We would need to give up our allegiances to parenting a particular way, to looking for familiar behaviors in our children, in order to love kids who came from different family trees.

This has turned out to be some of the best parenting advice I have ever heard, for any kind of parent, adoptive or not. It is hard work, to sometimes question what feels basic, and natural about how to parent. And if I am honest, at times it has felt painful and oddly disloyal, to reject something I thought I knew about how to be a mom, in order to meet the needs of my kids. But this advice – that it is okay to let go of what I think I know in order to see and love and respond to who God has put in front of me? It has also given me great freedom, and abundant choice.

We see another example of this in our reading from Philemon, this morning. Paul is writing to his friends and fellow Christians asking them to free a slave. He is, in a way, asking them to hate their culture -a culture that condoned and encouraged slave ownership - in order to love the human being in front of them. They could suffer, for this choice.

So this morning we are given a difficult task you and I, and all of us together. We are asked to look at our lives, and to make a choice about living in God's kingdom of love, and hope, and justice. We are asked to disturb what feels basic to us, to give up our allegiances to the cultures and societies that have raised us and they ways we have been taught to possess our relationships, our privileges, and our stuff. We are being asked to wonder where in our lives we might need to reject a role or give up an expectation, in order to love a person. We are asked to wonder where we need to give away or give up what we think we are entitled to – could be stuff, could be money, could be privileges or "rights" or something else that gets in the way of our ability to live fully into our identity as God's people of hope, justice and love. We are asked to take up a cross, to acknowledge a world where suffering is real, and we are a part of that suffering. We do not have permission as Christian people to escape the suffering around us or inside of us by losing ourselves in roles, relationships, or anything else that promises to numb the pain.

That is our task, and here is the promise that comes with it: working on this difficult task is God's work, but it is the work of God's kingdom. And God's kingdom is worth working toward – it is a kingdom where we are free to love people as they are, to be loved as we are, and no one is cold, or hungry or alone. As long as we are willing to do this work we will not be alone in it. After all we're invited into the work of this kingdom by a God who took up the cross, first, who sacrificed what God was entitled to, first, and who loved us, first – not for what we have, but for who we are, and for who we are becoming.