Sunday, September 8 - Hate Those we Love?

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Luke 14:25-33

Wow. Okay. Saying, “Thanks be to God,” was a bit hard on that one, eh?

Well, right off the bat, it’s important to note that the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke can sometimes tend to hyperbole. He exaggerates in order to get people’s attention. We know this because in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says it a bot more reasonably, “whoever loves mother or father, or son or daughter, more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37) Jesus’ point is not about hating our family members, but about loving and following him more than we love our family. We can still love our family, and we should, just not more than we love God.

Which is not to say we have an easy out. What Jesus is saying is still hard, because what he’s saying is, essentially, that putting God first will get in the way of some of our relationships. Following Jesus and carrying our cross will get in the way of some of our close, meaningful relationships––with family or with people as close to us as family. Jesus is warning us that there is a cost to being his disciple.

But what does that mean––following Jesus and carrying the cross? We like to use this phrase a lot in church, especially when we want to sound like serious, committed Christians, along with words like discipleship, but what does it actually mean? What is this “thing” that gets on the way of our close relationships?

Well, it is as simple, and as challenging, as living in our baptism, every single day. If you were baptized in the Lutheran church, the pastor asked you or your parents something similar to, “Do you renounce the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises?” And you, or an adult on your behalf, said, “I do.” In other words, you were asked if you would refuse to follow the devil, turn away from the promises of success and wealth and glory that will never be realized, and actively reject participating in any scheme of evil or hatred that might come before you.

This is what it is. Living in our baptism, following Jesus, carrying our cross means saying no to any action that would compromise the integrity of God’s goodness. It means saying no to any decision that would lead to the suffering of others, it means actively refusing to participate in the abuse of power, it means living as if we really are children of God, made so through God’s gracious act in baptism, because we are.

But wow, is this hard. There is a cost to this way of living. There’s a cost to ourselves, personally, because sometimes it means giving up opportunities for profit, or advancement, or success. If getting ahead involves climbing on someone else’s back, or pushing someone out of the way, or cutting in front, then we have to say no. If our gain means someone else’s loss, we have to say no. If us having more of something means someone else has less, and they need it more than we do, then we have to say no. When we are brought up onto the highest peak and are offered an entire kingdom in exchange for a few words of obedience to evil, then, like Jesus, we have to say no, and give up any hopes of being the one to rule the world. We have to go back to our small corner of the house, and say no to glory and success and admiration. There is a cost to living with integrity and to making the well-being of others a priority, day after day after day, not just in church, and not just at home, but in the classroom, in the office, on the streets, in the online forum. There is absolutely a personal cost to following Jesus, and you should know that up front. You will not become famous following Jesus.

There is also a relational cost. And this is really what Jesus is talking about. You see, when we choose to live in our baptism, when we choose to follow Jesus in our daily living, in every decision we make and every action we take, there is a good chance we will disrupt the relationships we have with others. Because the sad reality is that there are people who want out of their relationships what they can get for themselves. These people rely on us to put their interests first, to follow them, to love them above all else. And these people might be family members––mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. They might be close friends, or co-workers or business partners, or spiritual leaders. They might be classmates, or on the same sports team or in the same clubs as us. And they may tell you they love you, and need you, but what they will mean is that they love you and need you for what you can do for them. And so, when we choose to follow Jesus, to put God first, rather than our relationships with others, then often those other relationships fall apart. Jesus says it earlier, you cannot serve two masters. Sometimes, saying yes to God means saying no to someone else. No to their hatred, no to their pettiness, no to their desire to use us for their glory. And then we are accused of not loving them, not caring about them, of abandoning them, of hating them. And the relationship falls apart. All because we made the choice to follow Jesus in our daily decisions. So, yes, there is a cost to being a disciple.

But here’s what God does as we make that choice, day after day after day. This is from the Gospel of Luke, only a little bit after the reading we just heard, “Then Peter said, ‘Look, we have left our homes and followed you.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.’” You see, Jesus does actually call us to love our neighbour, not to hate them. We are called to serve others. It’s just that we serve them best by following Christ first. Through you, God gives life to others and to the world whenever you act with integrity, whenever you renounce the forces of evil, the devil and all his empty promises, whenever you choose to serve rather than to rule, whenever you live in the baptismal promise that you are children of God, inheritors of light and love.

Because the true cost of carrying the cross and being a disciple of Jesus, the final cost when everything is done and calculated is this: new life. We can never forget that the cross ends in resurrection. The life that Jesus gave up was transformed into resurrection life, eternal life, life that cannot be conquered by death. The life and relationships we die to when we reject the devil and power and glory are hollow, not actually worth holding onto, and in baptism God makes us dead to them in order to give us new life, true life, life worth living. Even the relationships that we choose not to nurture, that wither because we will no longer compromise our baptismal calling, that fall apart and die, those relationships will receive new life, true life in Christ. It may take time. It may take a lifetime. But our relationships are shaped by the people in them, and when you are given new life through Christ, when you experience transformation through discipleship, through following Christ, through carrying the cross, your relationships will, too. The “hate” will be transformed into love.

Jesus’ words to hate those in our life and to follow him are both death and life for us and those we love. In a way, they are both a threat and a promise. They are a threat to ways of living and relating that rely on competition, one-up-manship, us-or-them ways of existing. And they are a promise of life-for-all, of love that wins, of meaningful ways of relating to others that truly bring joy and peace to everyone. They are a promise and guarantee of God’s life for you, the true cost of following Christ. And for this we can easily say, “Thanks be to God.” Amen.

Sunday, August 18th - This Sermon is Probably Wrong

Jeremiah 25:23-29; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-46

I figured that we needed the children’s message, and its simple proclamation of grace, before we could even begin to open our hearts and our minds to today’s texts. Because boy, are they difficult. Our text from Jeremiah warns us against false prophets without telling us how we’re supposed to tell the true prophets and the false ones apart. Kind of like being warned about fake news without any help as to how to tell if it is or isn’t. Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews warns us that you shouldn’t assume that people with uneventful lives are the most faithful Christians. Sometimes the most faithful people experience the most suffering, so you can’t tell by the events in someone’s life whether they are true Christians or not. And then there’s our Gospel reading, and Jesus’ words that he was bringing division to families and to the most basic social bonds. “I do not come to bring peace but division.” These are really hard Scripture readings, and so we need to start from a position of grace and God’s unconditional love and nearness in order to hear what God is saying to us today.

So, let’s get right to the question I asked the children, Have you ever disagreed with someone about God? And I don’t mean the kind of polite, oh that’s interesting, disagreement. I mean have you ever had a deep, fundamental, high-stakes disagreement with someone about God? Where each side believes they are absolutely right and the other is absolutely wrong? Maybe it was with someone in church. Maybe it was with a family member. You might not have had an actual argument with this person, maybe it was something you sensed and never brought up because you didn’t want to actually get into a fight. On the other hand, maybe what you believed was so important to you that you did speak up, and now there is a division between the two of you. If you’ve experienced that, you’ll know how painful it is. It’s awful––no one ever wants to go through that. And you’ll recognize the truth of what Jesus is saying, even if it seems contradictory––Jesus does not always bring peace to families. Just because a family is Christian doesn’t mean they are peaceful, doubly so for church families. Because our faith means so much to us, we can’t alway just let things go. We take a stand because we believe we’re right, and we live with the consequences.

But this is not new. We are constantly arguing about who is actually right about God and who is wrong, and we divide because of it. The Gospel of Luke was written in retrospect, during a time when the early Christians were experiencing divisions in their own families, between those Jews who believed it was right to follow Jesus and their family members who didn’t. The Gospel reading isn’t so much predicting the future as simply describing what was going on at the time. Jesus did indeed cause divisions. 

And it didn’t end there. Lutherans were born in division and the Protestant Reformation, asserting that we were right about grace and faith, taking a stand. We’ve also experienced division during the Holocaust, when some pastors gathered to preach against Hitler, and formed the Confessing Church, and were shunned by other pastors in Germany. We experienced division in the 70s over the issue of ordaining women as pastors. We’ve experienced division more recently over the issue of marrying LGBTQ couples in the church, and allowing them to be pastors. And just in these last two weeks, Lutherans in the States have experienced two fundamental disagreements. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod declared at their national convention that God created the world in six “natural,” 24-hour days, causing distress for those Missouri Synod Lutherans who don’t interpret Genesis that way. And the ELCA, our American equivalent, declared their entire denomination a “sanctuary church body” for refugees and immigrants at their national convention. This declaration was so ground-shaking that it has made the news on CNN, MSN, and has even provoked “Fox and Friends” to air a panel of experts, Christian and otherwise, to say that this move is unchristian and against the Bible and God’s Word, and flat out wrong. I think it’s the first time Lutherans have ever made national news. But, more to the point, even in the ELCA, there are Lutherans who are deeply distressed that the church has taken this stand, seeing it as a wrongful blurring of the separation of church and state. Within single congregations, there are divisions.

So who is right? Are the Lutherans in the Missouri Synod right? Are the Lutherans in the ELCA right? How do you know? When we are involved in these divisive disagreements, where our faith and our relationships are on the line, how do we know who is right and who is wrong?

Well, here we come to the hard reality that our readings are trying to tell us. The hard part is that we don’t know whether or not we are right. We can’t know. We can’t actually know the mind of God. I don’t know that I’m right about women being pastors. 1 Corinthians 14:34 says explicitly, “it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” Clearly I’m not about to stop preaching from this pulpit, but at the same time, I don’t know that I’m right. I could be wrong. When I die and stand before God, God may point to that passage and say, “I really meant that one.” 

I don’t know that I’m right when I say that God created individuals with all ranges of sexual orientations and gender identities and blesses them with the Holy Spirit to live in the world the way they were made. I could be wrong about that. I know that my grandfather and I were deeply divided on that issue. He’s with God now, so I guess he knows the answer before I do. My point is, though, that we don’t know. We don’t know that what we believe about God––including the most fundamental beliefs that shape our daily lives, like that God is love, or that God is forgiving, or that God wants justice––are right. We believe they’re right. We find evidence in Scripture that we’re right. But Scripture says a lot of things, some of them contradictory, and so we don’t know.

Even our internal conviction of our beliefs isn’t enough to prove that we’re right. Sometimes what seemed like the right, God-filled decision at the time turns out to have been a terrible idea. Residential schools, for example, were established by Christians who really thought they were doing what God wanted them to do. Christian conversion therapy camps are another example. Both of those things turned out to be terrible ideas, leading to misery and torture and even suicides. But we didn’t know that at the time. We, Christians, thought we were doing what God wanted. We were convinced we were right. But I don’t think we were.

So then what do we do? How do we continue to stand in our faith, and act in our faith, while acknowledging that we might be wrong? Because I know that our faith means so much to us that we can’t sit back and do nothing. We have to act on what we believe to be right––how do we live in this paradox? Well, as Martin Luther famously wrote, “Sin boldly, but let your trust in Christ be stronger.” Luther didn’t mean be arrogant or proud in your sin. He meant acknowledge, accept, that we are sinners, through and through. We will make mistakes. We will get many things wrong, including our beliefs about God. That is a given. At the same time, though, let Christ’s relationship with you be stronger than what you believe. Our faith, our beliefs do not save us. Christ’s relationship with us saves us. You can be completely wrong about every single thing, but that does not stop Christ from claiming you and those who disagree with you as his own. Being wrong does not stop God from being near to you. 

This means living in humbleness. In humility, even. It never hurts to begin conversations with, “I’m probably wrong about this...” before we continue to say what we think about God or what we think God wants. It never hurts to say, “You could be right...” Imagine if every church disagreement started with, “I’m probably wrong and you could be right, but here’s what I think...” Just imagine if disagreements about kneeling at the Communion rail versus standing, or an artificial tree versus a natural one, or traditional hymns versus contemporary ones, or what kind of pastor God wants for Advent––imagine if these disagreements were all framed with “I’m probably wrong and you could be right, but here’s what I think...” We don’t need to step back from proclaiming what we believe, or from acting on those beliefs. We can still have convictions. It’s just something that we do humbly. With fear and trembling. With trepidation. With a trust in Christ’s relationship with us and with those who disagree with us, rather than in the rightness of our––or their––beliefs.

 

Now, I might be wrong about all this. I’m pretty sure I’m right, but I’m not 100% sure. There’s a 1% chance that I’m wrong. In the end, though, we don’t rely on our beliefs about God to save us, as it were. Instead, we rely solely on God, who comes to us in Jesus Christ. It is God who saves us, not we ourselves, and as Jeremiah tells us, God is near. As the children heard, God is near to you, God is near to those with whom you disagree, God is near to every single person in families divided by beliefs about Jesus. This is the power of God over our lives, a power and presence stronger even than ourselves, and that is why we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.