Deciding and choosing

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

Years ago, my preschool aged son got really mad at me. I don’t remember what the fight was about, but as I sent him into his room to cool off, he shouted, “I hate you!” Pretty soon, though, I heard him pacing around in his room, engaged in conversation with himself. He was saying something like, “I am so mad.  I want to [whatever it was] and she won’t let me. I hate her.” Then I he said, “But she’s my mom.  You can’t hate your mom.”  He argued with himself for several minutes. “I’m angry and I hate her.” “But she’s my mom. You can’t hate your mom.” At last, he appeared in the doorway of my room and announced, “I don’t hate you.” And then he went back into his room. 

It’s not just because I am a mom that I want to assure you that Jesus does not want you to hate your mom. It’s also as a student of the Bible, the book I spend more time with than any other, that I assure you that  Jesus does not want you to hate your mom. 

The word “hate” gets thrown around pretty loosely these days. We say, “I hate it when that happens” over something entirely trivial, like when the shampoo bottle leaks into the suitcase, or when you play the grocery store scratch off game and you don’t even win a dollar.  My children sometimes tell me not to be a hater, or not to be hatin’ on their music or clothes, and as we see daily, people constantly argue about who hates freedom or America, at home and abroad. 

 

Jesus uses hate here in opposition to love, and in the Bible these words DO NOT describe emotions. Loving one’s neighbor has nothing to do with feelings, and hating one’s family does not, either. These are words about decisions. Decisions about how to act toward God and neighbor and yes family, too; decisions about how to follow Jesus.  

So today’s words go with the other things Jesus has been saying about discipleship. Don’t be so entangled with your family that you neglect your spiritual calling. This is also why he says we must give away all our possessions. The more stuff we have, the more we will need to serve that stuff. And then we are not free to serve God and neighbor. 

This is hard stuff and if you just read today’s reading by itself, it’s not hard to see how some people wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff, why some followers deserted him, and wonder why you would even want to be Jesus’s disciple. But this is a continuing narrative, and Jesus’s words today are commentary on the parable that was narrated just before this reading, which we didn’t hear, in which a certain man gave a great feast and invited many people to come, but the people he invited all had excuses for why they couldn’t.  

One said he’d just bought a field and had to inspect it.  Another said he just bought some oxen and needed to test drive them. A third said he just got married. All of these people refused the invitation to the banquet because they were focused on other things - work (fields), possessions (oxen), and family (new wife). 

So the larger message is this:  Jesus invites everyone to the divine banquet - into the very life of God - and most of us are too busy and distracted by other things to truly accept the invitation. 

Jesus is not saying, I won’t let you be my disciple if you don’t do these things. He is saying that we will not be able to be disciples if we are busy doing other things. We will not be able to serve God and neighbor if we are focused on serving stuff, money, or even family, as hard as that sounds.

And how do we serve God? By carrying the cross. This is another troublesome phrase. We have managed to mangle these words so that we think of them as meaning some kind of terrible thing we have to drag around with us - something that’s “our cross to bear” like a nagging relative or a painful physical condition.  

But what Jesus means is that we must be his standard bearers out into the world. We must carry the cross of Jesus as our standard, as our flag, as we live out our lives in the world. Carrying our own cross means showing how we ourselves live out the Christian faith, even if it means sacrificing things the world says we need to hold on to.

We are to bear the cross of Jesus in the world as we go about our normal, every day work and play, as we go to our offices or schools, as we volunteer not only at church but also at the library or the animal shelter, and shop at the grocery store. We are Christian disciples not because of what we do here on Sunday, but because of what we do out there to live out the Gospel Monday through Saturday.

That means we have to think about what it’s going to cost us to live a life worthy of discipleship amid strong pulls from many directions. We just have to know going into this that our jobs, property, children, parents, society at large are all going to make claims on our attention, our time, our very souls. We have to know going in that we will be mightily pressured to attend to the needs of the powerful rather than the powerless. We have to know going in that we will have to make sacrifices and risk loss and ridicule if we are going to truly follow Jesus.  Sometimes we can’t go along with the crowd or even our families if we mean to carry the cross.  

And sometimes we don’t even know that we are being held captive by our attachments. We’re just moving through life, perhaps with a vague feeling that our energies are misplaced. But it has always been true that distractions are always threatening to pull us away from God. 

So let us heed the great prophet Moses and decide to choose real, meaningful, focused life. Choose to love God and love neighbor, choose to live out your calling daily, knowing that even the everyday things you do are holy and sacred. Carry the banner of the Savior, and let go of whatever entanglements are pulling you away from following the one in whom we live and move and have our very being.