Pentecost 13, Proper 18 (C)
4 Sept 2022
The lectionary readings for today left me feeling confused and baffled. I felt a great unease in my stomach; these were not words I wanted to hear. I want to say I follow Jesus, and mean it wholeheartedly, and then do the best I can. This reading from Luke, and the one from Philemon leave me ready to give up trying to understand Jesus. I am forced to ask questions I thought I had answered. What is a family? What happens when the interests of our family conflict with other things? What does love of God require of us? The Epistle and the Gospel deconstruct and reconstruct what it means to be family and what it means to love.
Jesus has told us we must love our enemies and now he tells us we must hate our family! Only those from families where there was no love will find comfort in these words. This is like a big billboard, designed to get our attention. And it does. You must weigh the cost of following Jesus. Consider the builder or the king weighing the costs and options. You must weigh the costs and decide. You must give up everything, including the love you have for your family. But why would following Jesus be worth giving up family and friends? Because the love that you find in Christ, in following the way of the cross, is the love of God, the love that passes all understanding and it elevates you to a greater love of and for your family. You give up one kind of love for an even better one. You must make a total commitment and love God with a priority greater than that we give to family, for in God is perfect love and gives us the ability to perfect our relationships. It does not matter how good your relationship is with your family; it must be given up for the more perfect union with God.
In our baptism we are in one sense made dead to the world and become a new creation; when we make the full commitment, the total commitment, in fact the only kind of commitment we can make to Jesus, we do just that. We die to the old and become the new in Christ. This is a new family, a more perfect one. The God we choose to follow loves us wholly and we must likewise love God fully and wholly. This frees us to love others with a new kind of love, a love that is perfected in Jesus and the model of the kind of love we are to have. We do not in the end hate our families; we forge new families, and we learn to love with a new love. God is love!
The Letter to Philemon is the story of how that love works itself out in the real world; it is, if you will, a case study.
Paul beseeches Philemon to take back a runaway slave and not only take him back but forgive him and receive him as an equal. Slavery was rampant in the time and places where Jesus and Paul live; it was an institution taken for granted, and yet this letter (which has been cited as a justification for slavery) deconstructs the entire structure and shows what a God-world would be like.
The story is that Paul is in prison in Ephesus and a runaway slave named Onesimus comes to him, likely with goods stolen from his master, Philemon. Paul knows Philemon, in whose home a church meets, and they are apparently friends. Onesimus helps Paul and is baptized and becomes a Christian. Now Paul wants him to return, but not as a runaway slave. He wants him to return as a brother and fellow Christian, as an equal to Philemon. This is what it means to give up your family to embrace the Way that Jesus taught. Paul is trying to say what the Christian family, this new family, is like and it is nothing like the society and family systems of the day. He puts love and reconciliation and a radical equality as the cornerstones of this new community, this new family.
Did I say this was going to be easy? It was not easy for Paul to ask; it surely was not easy for Philemon to comply. We do not, in fact, know what happened. We do know Paul wants to come back to Colossae and see them all and hope that the new family in Christ has been formed. This letter, by the way, was addressed to the church meeting a Philemon’s house; he would not be the only one to see the words.
This was not easy, was it? How often are our own families in a mess; we often then talk around and behind each other rather than addressing each other with the kind of love that Jesus demanded. Yet Jesus tells us this is the only way.
Even Jeremiah had something to say about this: God may be the potter, but even the clay has a mind of its own. For the Hebrew people, the exhortation to return to God and practice justice were the things that would allow the clay to be molded into a thing of beauty. For Christians, the call is the same and yet different. I keep thinking of the hymn that begins with Jesus calling us over the tumult; yet it is the tumult we often choose.
The Gospel has caused me to pause and think about what I have gotten myself into and what I have not gotten into! I still think I have a long road before I reach the full measure of giving up that which I need to give up. For me it is comfort in the know fighting with fear of the new and the unknown.
You all have your own ways of being. But I do hope and pray that each day you sing:
I have decided to follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back. That is all it takes.