To Be Jesus's Disciple

We have quite the selection of readings this morning: first God says through Jeremiah that he is like a potter and we are like clay. When the clay, us, spoils - in other words, when we don’t do the will of God - God, being perfect goodness and perfect love, must remake us because we exist solely to reflect his image of that perfect goodness and love to other people. So if we kill, maim, hurt, destroy, get greedy, or tear down others, God will in turn, break us down, so that we can be remade as intended - like a potter with their clay. 

So what then, are we to make of God telling us to hate - a word we usually associate with evil - our mothers and fathers, our spouses, our children, our friends and neighbours? Jesus actually tells us that if we don’t hate these people that we cannot be his followers. But wait, you say, don’t the commandments give us the opposite demand: to love and respect our parents, or Jesus, saying to love not just our family and friends but our enemies too? Isn’t God contradicting himself here a bit?

But Jesus’s next words help make sense of this seeming contradiction: whoever does not reckon with the cost of following Jesus won’t be able to see or understand what prevents them from receiving Jesus into their lives and following him. Instead, they’ll continue to cling to and prioritize other people and other things: their parents, their partners, their children, their own vision of how things should work, or what they want, or what they think is most important, their achievements, their rights, their ways. The difficulty with clinging to these things is that they become the central way we interpret everything that happens to us and everything that we come to desire. They become idols that distract and prevent us from receiving, experiencing and acting on God’s grace. We end up settling for far less than we are actually entitled to: the perfect love and peace that God made us to receive and pay forward to others so that he might gather us, the principle, up with the interest, those for whom we become a friend, a relationship, wherein they can experience God for themselves.

Here’s the thing. It’s a bit of a sobering reality. Try as we might, we’re actually pretty terrible at being Christ-like. We fail multiple times a day - even the holiest of us. Why? For a whole variety of reasons: we’re finite. We get tired, old, sick, bored, busy, self-absorbed, and worst of all, we all think that we have all the time in the world to get it right sometime before we die. 

I remember talking to a young woman in my last parish who was diagnosed with cancer. After rounds and rounds of chemo, being incredibly sick, feeling death come and knock at her door more than once, she eventually recovered. After her annual check up where she was clear of cancer we sat down to talk. I asked her how things had changed for her. She said, “I no longer prioritize so many of the things that I did before: getting a promotion, resentment at not getting it, holding grudges against people, judging those who don’t see things like I do, buying the next big thing, etc.

So what do you prioritize, I asked? “Being alive,” she replied. “And what does prioritizing being alive mean to you,” I asked. “It means giving up my certainty that I am right, that I know everything, that my life is my own, so that I can make space for God to work through me to gather others.” “And what have you found in doing that,” I asked? “Peace,” she said. “I no longer feel the loneliness of longing for I have been filled up.” I had to bite my tongue hard to stop tears of hope and joy from pouring from my eyes. 

You see my friends: to give up the things that we cling to isn’t so that we can become ascetics or stoics, reserved from acting on our emotions or feelings. There is no value to God in that sacrifice. He doesn’t require it and that’s not why he commands sacrificing, letting go of, giving up. It isn’t because it will make us better people morally or ethically, although that might be a side effect. It isn’t because we will have fulfilled a checklist of things we must accomplish to earn something, as if God gives us a grocery list of moral rules to follow. And it isn’t because God is selfish and wants our obedience because he likes being a controlling jerk. Rather God commands that we give up what we cling to so that we can get a hold of him and allow his love and peace to pour out of us for others to see and be caught up in. AMEN