“… go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words” (Jer. 18).
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, 2C32
13 Pentecost (Proper 18C) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist
Sunday 4 September 2022
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33
We have a stained glass window with a larger than life image of the astronaut John Glenn in his spacesuit. Like him, this morning we will travel a great distance in a short time through three little sermons each based on a different reading.
1. The first sermon is called, “Hating Your Life.” The world’s Anglican bishops met together at this summer’s Lambeth Conference in England. A group of bishops issued a press release condemning same sex marriage. It demands, “repentance by the revisionist provinces,” and goes on to state that we cannot all be in communion if we have two different opinions about marriage and sexuality.
We experience this kind of Christianity frequently here in North America. All of us encounter Christians who seem to have absolute confidence in knowing precisely who God is and that they are doing exactly what God wants them to do. Often they seem to believe that God hates people whose faith is different than their own. Let me point out that lacking this kind of confidence is not the same thing as lacking faith.
In so many ways God will remain a mystery to us. The gospels do not contain simple instructions for us to follow, they do not mention abortion or homosexuality. Instead they offer an approach to living, an intervention in our lives that confronts us with hard questions.
Jesus in the Gospel of Luke says that his listeners need to calculate the cost of following him the way a builder needs to understand the expense of materials to construct a tower or a king needs to figure out the number of warriors required to win a war. Jesus talks about hating your parents, wife, children… “even life itself” (Lk. 14). The preacher Barbra Brown Taylor says that if we came here today thinking that we were disciples of Jesus Christ this reading clearly shows that we are not. We are more like friends of disciples than actual disciples ourselves.
We may feel a sense of despair, that we could never be capable of devotion like this, but at times we surprise ourselves. The truth is that Jesus does changes us. We do not always simply live for ourselves. On August 12 at the Chautauqua Institution a man rushed on the stage and began to stab the novelist Salman Rushdie.
Many years ago religious leaders in Iran encouraged their followers to kill Rushdie and this assassin would have succeeded if it had not been for Rushdie’s audience. Instead of running away, they leapt from their seats and saved the writer from being killed. When it came to the choice between witnessing this terrible injustice or in a sense, hating their own life, they chose to risk sacrificing themselves.
Rushdie once said that it is not just his right to speak that was damaged by this threat, but there are 138 million adult readers in the United States and our right to read is also endangered by tyrants. We know that writers in Russia, Ukraine, China, Turkey, Afghanistan and many other places are being tortured and killed. Their parents, spouses, children are being put at risk by their actions and yet they choose something higher than their own life. And sometimes we do too.
2. My second sermon is called, “Where reconciliation happens.” Cathy Stevens told me about her trepidation at the prospect of reading Paul’s Letter to Philemon at 11:00 a.m. service. She will be the only one to read an entire book of the Bible to us over the course of the next three years. Every year I discover so many new worlds in scripture. This may be the first time I realized the extent to which The Book of Philemon summarizes all of the Apostle Paul’s theology.
When people come to me seeking pastoral care, it might be a question of faith, or because something terrible has happened. But mostly it has to do with the greatest challenge of our lives – how can we be reconciled to the people in our life. This week for homework I want you to physically write a list of the five people, living or dead, who you most need to be reconciled to. Then spend the rest of the week carrying this paper with you and praying for them.
You may be surprised by a sense of how impossible the task of making amends is. You may be separated from people you are supposed to love because of issues having to do with substance abuse or mental illness. You may just inhabit fundamentally different thought-worlds or have mutually exclusive political viewpoints.
Onesimus a slave has run away from his owner Philemon and found refuge with Paul in the vast expanse of urban Rome. Every social and cultural force seems to ensure that these two people can never be in a relationship of truth with each other. And yet Paul reaches out to both of them. On the one hand he embraces Onesimus the slave and says, he is my child…
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