Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost: Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
What a group of readings! Three of them are scriptures I really like, and then there’s the Gospel. So I’ll start with where I’m comfortable. Jeremiah likens God to a potter, who having made a mistake, destroys their work and builds a new pot. If the people of Judah are the pot, God is promising to shape something new against them. BUT if they change their ways, God will leave them.
For about 15 years before I moved to Merced, I regularly took a pottery class. A good potter controls the clay, just as God will do. (I was never entirely in control of the clay, so I was adequate but not a great potter.) I came to think that what made a really good potter was the ability to recover from their mistakes. And God is wondering, watching the people of Judah and Jerusalem, whether he’s made a mistake. If the pot starts going in the right direction, great, but if not, that’s it.
Psalm 139 is one of my favorite psalms, where the psalmist ruminates on God ongoing presence with them: God has “searched me out and known me”, indeed “you knit me together in my mother’s womb”. This sense of the presence of God throughout the psalmists life, alongside them, is truly comforting. It is not surprising that this is a psalm often used at funerals.
Then we get Paul’s letter to Philemon. Paul is writing to Philemon, Apphia and Archippus, and the “church in your house”. Philemon is Paul’s “dear friend and co-worker”, Apphia his “sister”, and Archippus his fellow soldier. These are people he trusted. He is sending Onesimus back to them from his prison. Onesimus had become “a son” to Paul while Paul was in prison: serving Paul, but also converting to Christianity. This relationship with Paul should, Paul thinks, change his other relationships. Onesimus was evidently a slave of Philemon; it is not clear if he had run away, or was somehow a problem. Now Paul wants Philemon to take him back “no longer as a slave, but. . .a beloved brother.” “Welcome him as you would welcome me.” Paul asks Philemon to do this out of love. But what Paul is asking is to upend a set of social relations, making a slave equal to his master. And he is not sure of the result. Still, at the center is Paul’s conviction that being a Christian changes our relationships to each other.
Last week, Jesus told the parable of the wedding feast, and like Paul he challenged the worldly hierarchies in which he lived, and we continue to live. This week, Jesus goes further, in one of the more shocking gospels, where he tells us that to follow him, we have to hate our families, and even life. That the price of following him may be separation from the people and even life that we hold dear. To say this is a difficult instruction is an understatement.
This might be a good time to think about how the Gospels were written. While they are written as if they are a first person account, they were in fact written down late in the first century. In the case of Luke, it was probably forty or fifty years after Jesus’ death. Luke’s report of Jesus warning about the costs of discipleship is descriptive of what is, not prescriptive of what should be. In Luke’s time, you might well put yourself at odds with your family by following Jesus, and you might well lose your life. It might be reassuring in the first century to know that Jesus recognized the danger. The challenges of following Jesus in the 21st century US are not so dramatic.
The rest of the story is more useful than the opening. Jesus asks, who would start building without knowing the full cost? If you do, you get caught with a half finished house, and look like a fool. The costs we face are different from those faced by those to whom Luke wrote. In the Diocese of San Joaquin we know that our interpretations of Jesus’ gospel can lead to painful divisions. People lost friends, and a sense of a church home when the former diocese left the Episcopal church. The choices people made in 2008 were hard choices. The differences between what people think it means to follow Jesus are real; the costs of one’s position are not imaginary.
I am fortunate that I have not had to pay a high price for following Jesus. But I am always helped by the psalmist’s reminder that the Lord is with me at all times: “You press upon me behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” With that confidence, it is possible to follow Jesus.