Pentecost 15
Year C
September 5, 2010
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33
There is a set of commercials on TV from one of the credit card companies (I’m not going to say which one) which always ends with the tag line:
“What’s In Your Wallet?”
Have you seen it?
They’re kind of cute and the plot line of all of them is pretty much the same:
If you use another company’s card, disaster will ensue. But, if you use their credit card, everything will go well.
“What’s in your wallet?”
It’s a simple message, cleverly presented.
Today’s lesson from Deuteronomy has a similar message.
Except the tag line from Moses’ sermon wouldn’t have to do with your wallet… it would have to do with your heart.
Like the commercials, Moses’ message is simple:
If you are in relationship with the Lord, you will find life.
But, if you put anything else in place of that relationship, you will find nothing but destruction and death.
“What’s in your heart?”
Simple, yes.
But it’s a message which God’s People have struggled with again and again down through the ages.
I think it’s something we struggle with even today.
So, what’s in your heart?
Jesus is addressing the same issue in our Gospel Lesson this morning when he talks about hating our families.
I don’t know about you, but when Jesus says stuff like this it always makes me nervous.
What does he mean, hate my family?!
I mean, that’s pretty strong language!
If that were true, if hating our families was really a requirement for being a Christian, how many of you would stay in the church? I mean, really?
But, there it is.
So, what are we to make of it?
I suppose we could simply dismiss it. You know, Jesus wasn’t being serious. He was just exaggerating to make a point. He didn’t mean we should really hate our families!
And yet, that’s what he says.
Or, I suppose, we could try to just explain it away.
It is true that, in the early days of the Christian movement, many people had to break ties with their families to follow Jesus.
So, we could say, Jesus was just talking about those early days. It doesn’t apply to us in a day and age when most of us grow up in Christian homes.
But, I think simply dismissing Jesus’ statement as either hyperbole or irrelevant is to miss Jesus’ point.
Jesus wants those who would dare follow him to consider the cost of discipleship.
To consider carefully what truly is in their heart.
Both the First Lesson and the Gospel Lesson are really raising the question of our identity and where it comes from..
That’s why Jesus raises the issue of family.
Because both then and now, it is in and through our families that our identities are primarily shaped as human beings.
For good or for ill, our families define us. They name us. The families we grow up in shape our values and teach us a lot about what it means to be human. They impact our personalities and our preferences.
How many of us have caught ourselves mirroring the behavior of our mother or father?
What Jesus is suggesting here is that if we are Christians, if we are truly his disciples then we will be named -- by Christ. We will be shaped -- by Christ. We will be taught what it means to be human -- by Christ.
In other words, we will find our identity in and through Christ.
Not in our families... Nor in anything else the world deems important.
And that can be hard. Very hard. And it will always exact a cost.
But, there is also a blessing, a tremendous blessing in finding our identity primarily in Christ.
Why?
Because identifying ourselves through Christ will get us in touch with the very God in whom we live and move and have our being. The very Lord who Moses lifted up to the people of Israel on the banks of the Jordan.
Jesus wants us to take the identity we have in him absolutely serious – and that’s why he uses such strong language.
So, what’s in your heart?
Often we talk about all this as “putting God, or Christ, ‘first’ in our lives.” And I think that’s what both Moses and Jesus are getting at here.
The problem with that is that we often think of it in sort of a hierarchical way. You know, with God at the top, and then maybe our families, or our careers, or our country or our church and everything else down below somewhere.
The shortfall of that model is that it appears that we must think of our relationship with God as exclusive of everything else in our lives.
Jesus says we should hate our families and love God… right?
But that doesn’t square with what you read in the rest of the scriptures.
Instead, we need to think of these things more like a bicycle wheel with our relationship with God at the center reaching out like spokes into every facet of our lives.
Keeping our relationship with God at the center helps us to make our families a priority in the right way, helps us to see our jobs as ministry, connects us to one another in the life of faith, moves us to be the caretakers of the world as God intends and gives us the power to live in the forgiveness, grace and love God shows us in Jesus Christ.
That’s what it means to find our identity in Jesus Christ, in God.
And, if we understand that properly, then we will see that it is our relationship with God that makes all the other things in our lives true…
If we put anything else there, our lives will wobble horribly.
So… what’s in your heart?
What’s at the center?
May it always be the very God who created you, and loves you, and walks with you, today and always, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.