Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

15^th Sunday after Pentecost, September 9, 2007

In the Name of the God of tender mercies: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

At the church’s Marriage Preparation Workshop, the priest invited Luigi, who was approaching his 50th wedding anniversary, to share some insight with young couples about how he managed to stay married to the same woman all those years. Luigi stood up and began, “Well, I’ve tried to treat her well, spend money on her, but the best thing I did was to take her to Italy for our 25th anniversary!” One of the young women in the group immediately commented, “Luigi, you are an amazing inspiration to all of us. Please tell what you are planning for your wife for your 50th anniversary.” Luigi proudly replied, “I’m gonna go back and get her.”

Somehow, I don’t think that is the solution Jesus had in mind when he told the crowds that day that they could not follow him unless they hated father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even life itself. I don’t hate my mother nor did I hate my father who long ago entered eternal life. And, although it has its moments, I am pretty attached to life itself. The idea of hating my life is not at all appealing.

Constrained by this morning’s heat and humidity to deliver the short version of what is really a long story, let me simply say that to take this Gospel literally is insane. So we wrestle here with this text guided by the fact that exaggeration was and still is a rhetorical device in the Middle East. We’re not a part of that culture so we don’t always get it and, quite frankly, taken at face value, the text might well evoke the response, “So why bother? Who wants to follow that kind of Jesus?”

The kernel of truth here is probably best unveiled in the very brief allegory about building a tower. Hey, that we can all relate to, no? For the first time in several months you came here and found no scaffolding surrounding the church. The extensive, expensive work of re-pointing the structure in which we worship has been completed.

But, before we ventured forward with that project, we sat down and estimated the cost, designed a plan to fund it, and only then proceeded. The wardens, the vestry, and the entire community needed to be clear about what was involved and how we were going to accomplish what was a huge endeavor.

Likewise, I think that this difficult passage in the fourteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel is primarily about clarity. It is not aimed at making us miserable or scaring us away from following Jesus. It is about getting our attention, raising our awareness about how we should value the kind of life Jesus wants us to live, challenging us to examine and, yes, re-order our priorities.

In a word, Jesus wants us to choose life. Jesus knows that families can nurture us, promote our growth, and foster our dreams. But, if family power and control has in some way imprisoned us or is stifling our growth or keeping us from experiencing the fullness of the life God calls us to, the words of this passage suggest that we need to break out of that oppression and recognize our family demons for what they are. Yes, we may need to lovingly, even regretfully, distance ourselves until time and grace have restored health and wholeness to those relationships.

On the other side of the coin, there is the reality that the present day culture advocates that parents chart the course of their children’s lives as soon as they are an embryo in the womb – planning where they will go to school (from daycare through university), identifying the best academic track for them, the athletic activities in which they MUST participate, calculating play dates, and micro-managing every aspect of a child’s life so that there is little or no room for spontaneity or the urgings of the elusive Holy Spirit. Sadly, much of this well-intentioned plot deprives our children and young people from the opportunity to choose life, and its countless possibilities, for themselves. So, apart from the radical nature of Luke’s text, there is some clarity to be gotten from it in a broader context.

Complementary to the Gospel is the lesson from Deuteronomy, which is a part of Moses’ farewell words to the people of Israel. He has been through a lot with them, not the least of which was their complaining that they were tired of Manna, the heavenly food God provided on their journey. Recall, too, that he returned from a long stay on Mount Sinai to find that they had become very creative and built the Golden Calf, a composite of their gold jewelry, and were worshiping it as their new found god.

Moses also admonishes them in this passage to choose life. What he is talking about, and what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel, is making life-giving choices – especially choices about who and what we will worship. My favorite preaching guru, Mother Barbara Brown Taylor, offers her own shocking rhetoric, not unlike what we find in the teaching of Jesus. She suggests that you and I are always “fooling around in our spiritual basements, cooking up alternative gods that promise to be more responsive to our needs.”

She suggests several golden calf detectors: Our checkbook, for one. What is it we invest in most heavily? What does our monthly statement teach us about what we worship? Or our calendar. “What gets the lion’s share of our time – which is actually more precious than our money?” When it comes time to rest, care for ourselves in healthy ways, pray, or be of service to others, what gets in the way?

What is our “golden calf?” A job that promises security? A house that promises comfort? A portfolio that promises protection? A position that promises power? A car that promises prestige? Barbara goes on to note that all of these things are not bad in themselves. In fact, like gold, they are good – until they are made into an ultimate thing – like God, which they are not. That’s where the trouble starts.

The sum of it all is that Jesus came to us to show us what the face of God looks like – to let us experience God’s love. He wants us to know a God who is most interested in producing life, not just biological life but abundant life, extravagant life, radical life – life that soars toward the kingdom of God because of the choices we make and the priorities we set. He taught us all about that by telling story upon story. We hear them every week. Eventually, we may realize that it is our story we are hearing.

This past Thursday, Madeleine L’Engle, for more than three decades librarian and writer in residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, died in Litchfield at the age of 88. She was an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time.”

“Why does anybody tell a story?” she once asked, even though she knew the answer. “It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

I think that is one concise and accurate way to sum up why Jesus told these stories – difficult as some may be to understand – and, through them, what the Spirit is saying to us today. And it’s very good news indeed.