"Faith and Feasibility"

First Presbyterian Church
Peter S. Buehler
September 9, 2007
Luke 14:25-33

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself,
cannot be my disciple.

In the opening pages of his book, The Ponds of Kalambayi, author Mike Tidwell writes about the training he underwent for his Peace Corps experience in east Africa, in Zaire, where he served as a Third World fish culture extension agent in the mid-1980s. While "fish culture extension agent" sounds straight-forward enough, Tidwell's experience teaching villagers to build fish ponds and grow tilapia as a dependable source of food and income, was anything but straight-forward. What he had to learn was to be prepared for what he couldn't ever be prepared for.

His opening sentence sets the tone for his story. He speaks of the person who trained him and his fellow Peace Corps workers. It's one of my favorite opening sentences: "I'm still not sure I'm glad I ever met Rayleen McGarity." I read that and I was hooked!

Tidwell goes on: "I do know one thing, however. I'll never be as impressed again when my father or an uncle tells of tests of manhood performed for soldier-eating boot-camp sergeants. I won't be as impressed because I butted heads with Rayleen McGarity for ten weeks and I was tough enough. I made it. Many of the problems I faced in Africa were admittedly more formidable. But Rayleen came first. She was my baptism. She was proof of what terrible, dark forces the world could create. After her I was ready to go to the Third World."

I suspect many of us have experienced a Rayleen McGarity during our lives. It would be fun to share our experiences of these women and men -- perhaps a teacher, a coach, a mentor, a commanding officer, a boss. No doubt we could write our own version of Mike Tidwell's opening line, I'm still not sure I'm glad I ever met… (insert the name of the person without whom we would not be who we are today).

And while we may not ever have thought of him in this way, might we possibly consider inserting Jesus' name in this sentence? This may sound like heresy -- or at least a strange way to welcome folks back to church from summer vacation -- but the Gospel is clear that there are times when Jesus makes huge demands on his followers.
We get it between the eyes, Jesus' first words in our passage from Luke's Gospel: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

Ouch. More than ouch -- confusion! Lord, whatever do you mean? This is unreasonable, this is impossible; why should we "hate" those who love us the most, those we love the most? Why so extreme? At least in Matthew's Gospel your words are easier to swallow: Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me (10:37). We can see putting you first in our lives, though we want to be sincere when we say that. But "hating" our family -- "even life itself," as you say -- what sense are we to make of that?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I would like to say that I myself am still finding out and figuring out what Jesus means. In this spirit, I would say to you, Have a conversation with the Lord about this. Think about this. Argue with the Lord about this. Just don't dismiss these words of the gospel, as difficult as they are. Especially don't dismiss the hard words of Jesus, because very likely they are the ones we need to hear.

So what does Jesus mean when he says Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple?

I would like to suggest first what he does not mean. Jesus is not speaking about "hate" as an emotion; he is not telling us it is wrong to feel warmly toward, or be grateful for, or be devoted to, or take pride and pleasure in our families. He is not telling us to drain the delight of family out of our lives, to turn a cold shoulder toward our parents, our siblings, our spouse and children. Jesus doesn't make us less human, that is not his calling for us.

Granted there are times when we have conflicts in our families. Sometimes we get very angry and our relations are more than strained; family relations, after all, are complex, just as we, members of families, are complex.

Some of us came to age in the 1960s when the term "the generation gap" was coined, and we remember times when that gap was painful. I think back on those years and cringe when I recall how prideful I was, and stubborn. My folks could be difficult, but I could be headstrong, opinionated, rebellious and, most importantly, clueless about myself -- what I was saying to them, how I was behaving. (Fortunately, I have long since evolved into a state of perfect enlightenment.)

I was blessed with generous, loving parents. I shudder to think how a person who grew up in an abusive household, where her/his parents were unwilling to love or incapable of love, a home where there was no comfort, or security, or affection -- how does such a person read Jesus' words in Luke's Gospel? The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35, And Jesus wept. Surely that verse describes our Lord's heart toward those who grow up in such tragic homes where love is absent.

Jesus' words in the Gospel are more than demanding, but he is not telling us to turn our backs on those we cherish, nor is he saying that loving him more means lessening the feeling we have for our family. He is not saying we need to scale back our affection and devotion toward them if we are to be his followers. Having love and showing love -- toward Jesus and our family and our neighbors -- is not a zero-sum situation. Any parent, any true friend, any committed follower of Jesus knows that the more you love, the more love you have.

Perhaps not always the emotion of love, that is less reliable, but love as trust, love as steadfastness, love as strength beyond our strength -- that we can depend upon God to supply. Not always as an immediate answer, but as a sure promise.

The words of the Psalm express our heart as well as our trust: I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope. My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning (130:4-5).

It is this stubborn kind of hoping and waiting and believing that is behind Jesus' words to those who would follow him. So what does he mean by "hating" those we love the most?

Here is what I think. here are times when the Lord asks us to separate ourselves from, to gain perspective on those forces, inside us and outside us, that would diminish or compromise our commitment to him.

For there are times when we are pulled in different directions and we need to make choices, even hard choices. here are times when our family tugs at us, when someone in our family wants something from us, and we are torn because we want to say yes and we don't want to say no, but inside ourselves we are aware that our faith also has a voice and we need to heed it.

There are times when our convictions rise to the surface -- perhaps during a family gathering when someone offers an opinion about all Christians, or all people in poverty, of all people of another race, or all people of a different sexual orientation -- and we feel pressure to just let the bigotry go by unchallenged. We ant to speak the truth in love, but others are glaring at us, hoping we'll keep quiet. hat do we do? What are we called to do?

There are times when the vocation we choose doesn't fit with what our family wants or expects, or has always hoped for, therefore our desire to follow a different path causes real controversy with those we love. Does Jesus want us to have anger in our hearts, bitterness, or resentment? Does he call us to cut our ties and shun our family for their lack of support? Hardly. But he does call us to make tough decisions, and in those decisions to choose him, his way.

In our tradition, that involves discernment -- careful, thoughtful, prayerful deciding. We do not need to be impulsive or headstrong, rather we are members of a church, so we have people we can talk to, people we can pray with, people who love us and want the best for us.

Sometimes the choice we need to make is not to pull away from family at all, but the opposite -- to love our family members and devote ourselves to them over other competing commitments. That is a discernment we may need to make.

I hope that when we face difficult decisions, especially those involving our family (as most all of our major decisions do), that we hear the voice of Jesus calling to us to set aside time, to stand apart from the pulls, and tugs, and attachments that would control us and not free us -- and in heeding Jesus that we seek out people whose wisdom and faith we trust, so that we make good decisions, decisions we can live with.

Are you facing such a choice, such a discernment? It may not seem like a big deal to someone else, but it is to you. Or have you made a difficult decision only to find that the path you chose is steeper and harder and longer than you thought?

Do you sometimes look back on your decision to be baptized, your decision to become a Christian, your decision to join the church, and wonder what it was you got yourself into?

Making reference to certain fortifications that landowners built to watch over their homes, property, and vineyards, Jesus says: For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?

Sounds like a feasibility study. Know what it is you're getting into before you start, Jesus says. We couldn't agree more, that's only logical.

He puts it in bold print with his second parable: Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If not, better send out a peace delegation fast!

Again, makes perfect sense. But then we say to Jesus, Lord, in the biggest decisions of our lives, we don't know how things will turn out! How can we always know what's feasible, especially when it comes to choices we make about such things as our education, whether or not to marry; choices regarding our work, having kids, joining a church, choosing a home, getting involved in our community. We regularly face such decisions, discernments such as which business decisions are right, whether or when we should retire, decisions about our health, what we should do about painful family problems. The list goes on.
How can we possibly count all the costs ahead of time?

Mother Teresa has been in the news a lot lately. Private letters of hers have been published that reveal her personal struggle with faith, with a decades-long sense of emptiness, a sense that Jesus was absent from her.

Many have been surprised and shocked that someone of such devotion and utter self-sacrifice, someone who radiated such joy in public life, should express such anguish in private. In light of Mother Teresa's struggle, the word "faith" is far bigger, far more complex.

To listen to her involves re-examining what faith means to us. Is faith something that always fills a person up? Why have faith if it does not guarantee contentment and fulfillment and joy? And if someone such as Mother Teresa, a person with nearly the status of saint, struggled so mightily as a follower of Jesus from the time of her vocational decision on September 10, 1946, to her death in 1997 -- what does that mean for us?

Did Mother Teresa know what she was getting into in 1948, when she finally received permission to start her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, and began caring for those the world left behind?

What she had, as we know, was a revelation from Jesus himself. His words to her, "Come. Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor. Come be My light" (as reported in Time magazine, September 3, 2007, page 39).

Is it not utterly amazing and wonderful that that is precisely what Mother Teresa did for nearly fifty years, and all the more remarkable considering her spiritual struggle? That the only assurance she had was her fierce faith, her love of the poor, her love of her sisters, and her absolute trust in the promises of God, even a God who is silent!

No, we do not know what we are getting into when we say Yes to the One who calls us out of darkness into light, the One who calls us to live lives of justice and compassion, the One who calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves, sharing faith in Christ by our words and our deeds, even when it is difficult to do so. We cannot know what we are getting into when we say Yes to this Lord -- and really we don't need to.

He asks us only to make a decision to follow him, and to stand by that decision.
So we stand by it one day at a time -- sometimes one hour at a time, sometimes one moment at a time. There have been and there will be times when our decision for Christ leads us into places that are difficult and we are faced with doubts. But then we realize that doubts are not the sign of weak faith, but of real faith, of stubborn faith.

Mother Teresa is the saint of stubborn faith. In that way, she is our saint too.