9-8-19 Readings & Sermons

A reading from Jeremiah.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord Go down to the prop potter's house, and there will I let you hear my words.

So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel.

The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel as seemed good to him.

And then the word of the Lord came to me.

Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?

Says the Lord, just like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it.

But if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it.

And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it.

But if it does not, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.

Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Thus says the Lord, look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you.

Turn now from all your evil way, and append amend your ways and your doings.

The word of the Lord.

Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ, and Timothy, our brother, the Philimon, our dear friend and co-worker to Aphia, our sister to Archipus, our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house.

Grace to you and your peace from God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God because I hear of the love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.

I pray that sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ.

I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother, for the reason, though I am bold enough to in Christ to command you to do your duty.

Yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love, and I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Jesus Christ.

I am appealing to you for my child, Animas, whose father I have for become during my imprisonment.

Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful, both to you and to me.

I am sending him that is my own heart back to you.

I wanted to keep him with me so that he might be of service to me in your place during my imprisonment for the gospel.

But I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced.

Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me.

If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that to my account.

I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand.

I will repay it.

I say nothing about your owing me, even your own self.

Yes, brother, let me have this benefit from you in the Lord.

Refresh from my heart in Christ, confident of your obedience, I am writing it to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say the word of the Lord.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Luke.

Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and said to them, 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.

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

For which of you intending to build a tower does not first sit down and estimate the cost to see whether they have enough to complete it?

Otherwise, when they've laid the foundation and not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule you, saying, This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.

Or what king going out to wage war against another king will not sit down first and consider whether they are able with 10,000 to oppose the other who comes against them with twenty thousand.

If that king cannot then, while the other is still far away, they send a delegation and ask for terms of peace.

So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Okay, so let me see if I have this straight.

Jesus pretty much wants us to hate everyone, walk around naked, without a home, or any worldly possessions.

That pretty much sums up today's gospel reading, right?

I hope not.

See, this is a struggle of reading a single passage isolated from the rest of Scripture.

By itself, these words can often sound a bit crazy.

And haven't we all experienced at some points in our lives people misusing scripture when it is taken out of context?

And then on top of that, if we're honest, most of us have probably probably have experienced times when we've come across parts of Scripture that are just incredibly challenging, offering us things we're not sure make us comfortable.

And if we're honest with ourselves, we just want to walk away from it all instead of trying to make sense of it.

I think this passage of gospel today fits that category too.

But I think these words remind us of the truth that discipleship is indeed costly.

Following Jesus is not always easy, and if you ever find yourself too comfortable in your faith, well, be prepared and be cautious, because God might be ready to shake things up for you.

And above all else, remember that the simple truth that Jesus' teachings got him killed.

These verses from Luke speak of being a disciple of Jesus.

But what is discipleship?

Is it a series of disciplines that grant us access to God or practices that help us grow into who God designed us to be?

I suggest it's the latter of the two.

Jeremiah uses the image of the potter.

And maybe discipleship is the making use of practices that shape us into being beautiful pieces and beautiful clay pots, growing us into fuller creations as God intended.

The behaviors of discipleship or the disciplines guard us against those mishaps, those things that might otherwise cause us to get a bit wonky, to lose our shape, or to ultimately crumple and fold.

But just as throwing a clay pot is not always easy, but requires much skill.

Neither is discipleship always easy, but requires much practice.

In today's gospel, Jesus highlights two areas where discipleship may get costly the area of possessions and of family.

These are two areas that, when not disciplined, can cause us, the clay pots, to get misshapen.

These are two areas of life that can get in the way of following Jesus.

I do not believe that God is calling everyone here today to give away everything they own.

But I do wonder if God is calling each of us to cut away something from our own lives so that new life can spring forth.

Have you ever tried to throw a clay pot on a wheel?

It's much harder than Debbie Moore tries and makes it look.

I spent a summer once trying to learn how to throw pots, and I never did get the handle of it.

I only ever successfully threw two very small, tiny pieces.

When pinching and pulling upwards, throwing a clay pot requires a very, very careful touch.

Any jerk or sudden movement, even the slightest movement, will throw the whole thing off and it becomes uneven.

And once it's uneven, it's impossible to get it back into that symmetric shape.

Only a real senior artesian can remove that wonky top off of a misshapen pot while it's still on the wheel and continue to work with what is left behind.

For most potters, once it becomes misshapen, nothing we can do can correct it.

And the best thing is to let the whole pot collapse in and on itself, remove it from the wheel, and start again from the beginning.

First beaning it against a hard surface multiple times until all those air bubbles are removed, preparing that clay once more to be attempted to be shaped into a clay pot.

I wonder if this is why Jesus at times challenges listeners to give everything away.

Because sometimes it may be easier to start from scratch than it is to try to reshape our lives while those temptations, those pressures, and obsessions with our possessions are still present.

Greed, envy, addiction, obsession, fear, insecurity are all attitudes that can accompany our possessions at times.

And these can cause a clay pot to become misshapen.

Meanwhile, generosity, trust, and love of neighbor are areas that can help to make a pot beautiful.

Jesus also warns against family in this passage, saying we should hate our family members.

Again, this seems, well, a bit much to me, a bit extreme, even for Jesus, considering Jesus elsewhere tells us to love even our enemies.

Hate just doesn't seem to be Jesus' style.

I think it's harder to understand Jesus' words today than they were when they were originally uttered, at least in part, because on the surface, our family systems are rather different today.

We live in a more independent society than communal, where there is, at least generally speaking, more perceived freedom to individually believe what we want and to follow our own personal value system as we deem best.

Whereas becoming a follower of Jesus 2,000 years ago might have required one to leave their family to maybe be disowned.

And if not disowned, one would at least find those family dynamics shifting a lot.

Think of James and John, two of the original disciples, when they were first called by Jesus.

Jesus called them and they dropped their nets, leaving their father Zebedee and the family business in the dust.

I'm pretty sure that did some initial damage to those family relations.

The cost of following Jesus can be high.

But I believe it is less about hating family members than it is about not letting family get in the way of following Jesus and hating those elements of family that hold us back, but not hating the individuals themselves.

A story from my time in India might be helpful here to make that connection.

Raj, a Jesus follower, and his wife Puja have been married for about nine years now.

They have two children and are part of a Christian nonprofit which provides job opportunities for women from the local poor community.

They find their work to be so fulfilling and love the life that they've built together.

But it was not always that easy for Raj.

See, when Raj was about 20 years old, he was living with his Hindu family of three generations in one room.

At the same time, his favorite hobby was playing soccer, and he would do that just about every day.

And there was a couple from South America who had moved to India to start a young men's soccer club.

They believed that this team sport could teach youth valuable life skills and keep them away from certain destructive behaviors like drug use.

Raj played in this club for years, and slowly, slowly, he was inspired by this couple, and he learned about their faith in Jesus.

He eventually felt led to also become a follower of Jesus, and he started going to a local Bengali church, and the pastor there continued to teach him and eventually invited him to be baptized one day.

The days leading up to the baptism were filled with joy and excitement and anticipation for Raj.

He believed that this was going to be a change in his life, even though he couldn't quite understand how or what or why yet.

But just before Raj was to leave his home for the baptism that day, his grandfather learned of what he was about to do and locked him inside the bedroom and prohibited Raj from being baptized.

Raj was eventually baptized, but it wasn't until after he moved out from his family's house.

Later on, he married Puja, but his family again did not support this because Puja was from a Christian family.

But even still, Raj and Puja were able to start a new life and a new family together.

Being a disciple of Jesus was extremely costly for Raj.

Yet he discovered many new blessings along the way.

And the journey of discipleship has shaped Raj into being a courageous Christian leader for his community.

Being a disciple of Jesus may not literally cost us our families, at least not in such obvious ways as we hear in Raj's story.

But I think we fool ourselves if we don't acknowledge that following Jesus and participating in the inbreaking of the kingdom is not going to be costly.

If not for any other reason that it is truly counter-cultural.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

And then Jesus responds to this reading with his own words Today the Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

And then just a few weeks ago, we here read in Luke the challenging question of who is in fact our neighbor in the story of the Good Samaritan.

Then, in the verses just before our gospel reading today, Jesus tells the story of the host of the banquet, who in the end invites the poor, the wayward, and the homeless to the great meal, after others were too busy with their own possessions and family, too busy to be bothered to come to this party.

To be a disciple means living a life that is often counter-cultural, and it may require life changes that are hard, challenging, and feel nearly impossible.

You may find it isolates you from others at times, and you may find that you are led to make changes to your lifestyle.

Discipleship is costly, and the truth is, if we were required to do these things by our own strength, then we would simply fail over and over again.

But God is the one who gives us the ability to take on these life-changing disciplines, and in the end we will find this way of discipleship will in fact aid us to become shaped into beautiful clay pots of gods.

In one of my past lives, I was a contractor in the state of Georgia and I laid tile.

I started out doing this uh for$7 an hour, and boy, I was grateful for that high wage.

And I learned at the time the cost of remodeling as opposed to the cost of building a brand new home.

Anybody wager to guess if there's a variance between building a new home and remodeling?

At the time, and this is 15 years ago, it was a hundred more dollars a square foot to remodel your home than to build a new.

Now I've got to tell you that makes a little bit of sense because while I'm not an electrician, when the power's off and there are no uh sheets of drywall on the wall, I feel very comfortable running electrical cables.

There's nothing to shock me, there's nothing in the way.

It is frankly really hard to work around old structures.

Sometimes it would be a whole lot easier to just start over.

In fact, I used to take uh high school groups to Appalachia to remodel homes, and we were really clear.

You're gonna think that this work is about making their home like yours, and in fact, this whole week is giving you an excuse to meet somebody you otherwise would never meet, and to make a relationship you would otherwise never make, and to give the gift of dignity more than it is to give the gift of your own standard of living, and that was why we did it, because quite honestly, we were often given a bucket of tools from the depot, and more than once the person said, Here's all you need, and it was a book of matches.

Um they said, No, really, you can't do that, and here's your toolkit.

And I want to suggest to you that we get to hear this in the beginning in the prophet Jeremiah that clay isn't much different.

You see, uh, when clay starts to dry out, it becomes really hard to work with.

So hard that you can't just get it wet again.

Only a master potter is able to work with inflexible clay.

It's sort of like The difference between building a new house and rewiring an old one.

And here we get to hear that this is the work that God does with patience and perseverance.

We're assured that God is not going to scrap the pot that is recalcitrant.

And then I suggest that we're also asked to consider working with one another in such a way.

The truth is, we all come here, we all come to our jobs, we all come to our families with structures that are already in place, which is why I think discipleship is so difficult.

I used to live in a house that was owned by an electrician.

He was very proud of his own wiring.

He had a panel that if you shot a nail gun through one of the wires, it wouldn't flip a breaker, which is, by the way, the point of the breaker is that it will flip a breaker so you don't burn your house down.

He was very proud of his own wiring.

There was in the kitchen this little built-in blender.

This was a high-end home in the 60s.

And because he was an electrician, he had masterfully run the current through the conduit itself.

So after getting shocked about five times, and the breaker not throwing, I mean, this was sort of the deal.

And you know, if you've ever had to work with people around repentance, it's sort of like that.

Shocking.

And sometimes you wonder, can't you just turn your breaker off a little bit?

And Jeremiah poses, I think, that question to us.

Will we be hard to work with, or can we try, frankly, to remember who God is, graceful, and that the point of the container we've given is to hold something like larger life and joy.

And when we're hard, we hold less.

And when we're inflexible, we leak it out.

And the point is not to hold it because God wants you to.

The point is to hold it because God thinks we might enjoy it.

And Jesus says this really interesting thing to us today.

I mean, I'm glad we didn't hear these words on Mother's Day or Father's Day, right?

It's a little bit gloomy.

If you want to follow me, then you need to be opposed to your own family and take up your cross and follow me.

Sometimes we think what that means is that Jesus is saying by take up his, take up our cross, hey, we're just supposed to suffer and be miserable because the way we make God happy is by being miserable.

This is part of our pilgrim foundation, by the way.

The way we please God is by being sad, because that shows we really care.

And I want to suggest to you that I think Jesus has really a different idea.

Sometimes what we forget is that the cross was not a penalty one earned for stealing bread or for embezzling funds.

In fact, the cross was a punishment only given to people who committed treason against the Empire.

We don't even really have an equivalent like this today.

You can earn the death penalty for a number of different crimes.

But at the time of Jesus, if you stole, you had your hand chocked off or your thumb.

You weren't crucified.

The cross is for people who said there's something wrong with the world today, and we intend to do something about it, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of everybody else.

So then consider why it is they chose to give the cross to Jesus.

Most of the time he goes around saying, There's something wrong in the world as we have accepted it, and I'd like us to do something about it.

Sometimes we fixate on these things and we think, well, I'm teaching Sunday school.

I hate it, but it makes God really happy, so I'll do it.

I want to suggest to you that that mentality is not building anybody's container up, especially your own.

There will be no larger life.

You know, this is one of those mistakes we do that God, I don't think, is interested in our suffering just to suffer.

No, I think, and this is what I think becomes so important for us to think about in the context of family counting the cost and baptism, quite honestly.

I didn't really get this until I had my own.

I'm going to be honest with you, but as a parent, what I've realized is that the worst thing I could do for the sake of my kids is not be there anymore.

In fact, I really need to be there.

But I will tell you there are moments of parenting that feel a whole lot like suffering.

Not because it's miserable, because I am actively giving my life so that they can have more.

Now that started out with the worst amount of sleep I've ever had or imagined.

I sort of felt like I was being tortured in a high security prison.

You never knew when the alarm was going to go off.

Get up and feed me now, and of course, we suffered for their life.

No, really, that's right.

Oh, that wasn't suffering, that was parenting.

It was life sharing so that someone else could have more.

I think that's exactly what Jesus has in mind.

Oh man.

The other day I got to hear the same tune about for three and a half hours.

It had two measures to it.

I don't know that I built a whole lot of life up, but I was so glad to hear her sing for two hours, the same two measures.

There was, of course, something joyful about hearing that tune over and over and over again because I saw her container growing.

I think that's what Jesus has in mind.

So I want to tell you today: if you find yourself on a cross and no one's getting any life out of it, get off.

I mean it.

The world has got enough suffering for its own sake.

Jesus, though, I think, is asking us to consider how is it, how is it that we raise up one another to be adept and to hold more life.

And to make that investment.

Yeah, it's suffering, but it's joyful because it's going somewhere.

And this is this interesting piece that I think we get to consider anew.

We're going to do a baptism this morning wherein we're going to say, yes, we believe God has completely claimed Benjamin.

In fact, I didn't think Ben is picking to be baptized today, and that's part of the point.

We don't pick whether God infiltrates every aspect of our life.

It happens.

Hopefully, we choose to say, thanks for doing that, God, bidden or unbidden, thank you for being present in my life and help me to be aware of your presence.

We're going to say, as a congregation, we're going to do everything in our power to support Ben and his life in Christ.

You may not even know him.

You may not see him again.

And of course, that vow is still all the more meaningful because our task is to create a world more in line with God's imagination than the one we settled for.

It will take work.

And it'll take different work than we usually think.

It doesn't just take political letters and writing our congressperson and putting in hours and hours and hours.

It takes, I think, the most difficult kind of work of all.

And again, I didn't learn this until I was a parent.

There's this parable in it.

Has anybody read the book Freconomics?

You know, what freeconomics did really well is that we often make this confusion between correlations and causations.

And sometimes we think the way that we parent our kids as we give them all of these opportunities, we take them to do these cultural, wonderful things that we ourselves hate because look at what we're giving them.

And of course, what freconomics says is that the way you guarantee what kind of adult you're going to raise is that you be that adult.

So if we want our girls to grow up without body shame, we better not have any ourselves.

That's probably the hardest thing about parenting there is.

I don't get to just do it to set an example for them.

If I don't, if I'm not present in my own body because I believe I'm worth it, I teach my kids they're not worth it either.

If I don't practice generosity because I believe it for myself, my kids will not practice it because they believe it for themselves.

I don't think Jesus could have asked us anything harder to do than be authentic people.

I'm pretty sure that's what he's asking us today.

And boy, try counting the cost of that.

Did you know when you were parents, when that baby was born, what it was going to cost you?

I don't just mean in diapers.

I mean what it was going to cost to be the human being you wanted them to be.

And that's what Jesus asked us to do.

It's a ton of work.

The good news, I think, for us is Jesus doesn't ask us individually to count that cost as if we ever could.

We get asked today on behalf of Ben as a congregation to say, I know a little bit of what that's going to take.

And even though you may not know us, Alex and Sarah, not everybody in here, we're going to pledge that we're going to help count that cost for you, whether it's through high-quality scouting at St.

Thomas, lobbying our governor for different kinds of social justice, whether it is even just taking the time to listen, we're going to pledge in just a second in the baptismal covenant that we're going to estimate that cost just a little bit.

And that we're going to pay some of it too.

I hope we'll mean it when we say we will.

I do.

I hope we'll mean it.

And that when we do this investiture of our time and our work, and boy, this is major work.

Being the person you want your children to be, that is so much work.

Doesn't matter how old you are, by the way.

I tell my kids this and I believe it.

It's never too late.

It just gets harder.

It's never too late.

It just gets harder.

Whether you've got kids or not, this is what we do in a community.

We be the people that God has always beckoned us to be because we're worth it.

You are worth the time it takes to enjoy the life God has given you.

You are worth that.

And if we'll put that time in, if we'll carry our cross and resist messages that say you're not worth it, you can't do it, it's too late, you didn't make good enough grades, forget it, you're not making a difference.

If we'll carry our cross and defy those messages that are all around us, then we're doing exactly what Jesus did.

Being patient and raising up containers so that we can hold more of God's joy for us and for Benjamin and for the kids we're gonna baptize next year.

And there really isn't a bigger win-win than all of that.

And I've got to tell you, we read one of the stickiest parts of the Bible today.

I don't know if you noticed it.

It's the whole book of Philemon.

Paul is sending back a slave who ran away from his master and saying, Hey, I really want you to forgive this guy.

I really want you to treat him as your brother in the Lord.

You don't have to, but you're better because I said so.

But you don't exactly have to, but you owe me everything you are, so I wish you would.

And this is who God wants us to be.

I mean, he's like a southern mother here, Paul, right?

You don't have to, but you're better because I'm your mom.

And that's what he sort of says.

And people are really uncomfortable with this because Paul doesn't come out with a policy that says you should ban slavery and outright.

He didn't say that.

Instead, he says, you need to change your heart.

You need to change your heart.

I'm sending him back because I believe you can change your heart and accept this person as your brother.

We give him a hard time for this because we want him to be outraged.

For some reason, we've decided to worship outrage as if it made the world a better place.

Paul is actively trying to say, listen, have a relationship with this man.

If you can't have it naturally, have it through Jesus Christ.

And then you can't do that practice anymore.

Listen, I don't know if Paul is completely effective.

We don't know what, we don't know what Philemon does with an Estimus.

We don't know.

But what I do know is that Paul appeals that we treat these people who we easily think are beneath us like they are our siblings in the Lord.

And if we can actually consider them that way, we better treat them different.

Whether they work in fast food restaurants or have that terrible, terrible job of calling us with good news.

We've qualified for the AARP at the age of 39.

I rarely consider that person on the phone my brother in the Lord.

I usually consider them the child of the devil.

And what an easy difference.

What an easy thing to say, listen, friend, instead of quit calling me.

Small things.

For their sake, but also for my own.

Because quite honestly, when I'm impatient with somebody I don't even know who I believe to be created in God's image and likeness, I am missing out on the joy God would like to fill me with.

All of this work matters.

Sometimes it really hurts.

But we do it, I think, to invest in one another.

And what we know is that burning bridges and burning somebody's house down does not, in fact, make them our brother or sister in the Lord.

It just makes them twice the kids of hell that we are.

And so we're asked to say there is value in your house, and there is value in me offering life for you.

And we're going to do that right now.

So I'm going to ask you to come up as we do this for Benjamin.