Readings: Jeremiah 18:1-11 and Luke 14:25-35
Jeremiah was a prophet to the people of Israel
during a very hard time in their history.
The kingdom was falling apart.
Greed, affluence and corruption at the top; suffering, oppression and
powerlessness at the bottom; and an ever-widening gap between the two, weakened
the kingdom beyond repair. Its overthrow
by foreign powers was imminent and inevitable.
At first the people thought God would save them, no
matter how bad they were. When that
didn’t happen they began to wonder if God had maybe decided just to bring an
end to them, because of how bad they had become. Saviour or Destroyer were the only roles they could
imagine God having. But Jeremiah sees
God in another light, working in a different and more creative way than either
of those roles allows.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus is
beginning to attract a lot of attention for his healing, his teaching, and for
the new kind of community he is establishing wherever he goes. His opponents are making more and more serious
plans to stop him. And more and more
people are flocking to him, expressing a desire to follow him, and to have for
themselves what he and his disciples are having. In this passage, Jesus invites them
to understand what they are asking, and what following him will mean for them.
To the large
crowds that are starting to follow him, Jesus turns and says, “Whoever comes to
me and does not hate his 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.”
What on earth
does he mean by that?
Last week I
received a batch of cartoons by email from Cam Cocks, and one of them seems to
say something like this.
It’s a picture of
Noah and his wife and two of a bunch of different animals on the deck of an ark. Rain is starting to fall. Mrs. Noah is inside the little hut built for her
and her husband on deck, p0king her head out the window to remind her husband,
“Noah, keep an eye out for mother! She’s
coming with us.” And what we see behind
her is Mr. Noah calmly and firmly kicking a ladder away from the side of the
boat, with her mother – his mother-in-law, still standing on it just a few
rungs from the top, her eyes wide open in shocked and mute surprise as, holding
her suitcase in one hand and gripping the ladder with the other, she begins to
fall backward away from the ark and into the rain.
What a vibrant
image of life on earth as it’s lived out among us a lot of the time. We look for, or we build an ark to get us
through the deluge and save us. And we
draw lines between who is and who is not allowed on board, is and is not included
in the family vessel.
We’re pretty sure,
though, this is not what Jesus means when he says what he does.
For one thing –
and it’s a pretty big thing, God in God-self gave up this way of doing things
after the Flood. In fact, that’s the
point of the story the way it’s told in the Bible – that after the Flood, once
it was over, and because of the Flood and how near it came to wiping out absolutely
everything that God made, God repented of acting that way and vowed never to do
that again. Put away that kind of weapon
forever – hung it up for all to see, promising that from that point on both God
and the world would live together under the rainbow covenant of continuing, connected
life. Never again would God bring that
kind of destruction; never again try to solve the problem of evil that way
again. Because that way of trying to
solve the problem of evil was a greater threat to the life of the whole world
than the evil within the world ever was.
So God gives up
being the bringer of rain – the master of shock and awe, and God decides to
become, among other more creative things, a potter.
Like the potter imaged by
Jeremiah the prophet. In Jeremiah’s time
the people are afraid. Things are
falling apart. The goodness of Israelite society is suspect. Corruption and greed are rampant among the
rich. Suffering and powerlessness are
the plight of the poor. The kingdom they
all want to love is coming apart at the seams and collapsing, and the people
fear this must be the end. The apocalypse. The deluge.
They are now among those who are falling back into chaos, to be lost
forever.
To which Jeremiah
says, “No. That’s not what God does
anymore. What God is right now, is a
potter needing to remake what has been made.
The vessel we were, that God was shaping and turning to some good and
beautiful end, took a bad turn.
Somewhere along the way we got tragically mis-shapen. So what God is doing is breaking us down,
returning us to a starting-point again, and reworking us, turning us,
re-forming us into some new good thing, some new good shape and way of
being. Because that’s how God works. God works with what is, and works patiently,
lovingly, creatively, redemptively with all of what is.”
To which Jeremiah
says, “No. That’s not what God does
anymore. What God is right now, is a
potter needing to remake what has been made.
The vessel we were, that God was shaping and turning to some good and
beautiful end, took a bad turn.
Somewhere along the way we got tragically mis-shapen. So what God is doing is breaking us down,
returning us to a starting-point again, and reworking us, turning us,
re-forming us into some new good thing, some new good shape and way of
being. Because that’s how God works. God works with what is, and works patiently,
lovingly, creatively, redemptively with all of what is.”
It’s hard for us
to grasp this, and even harder for us to live this. Because for a lot of our history and even
now, the whole of what is – even just the whole of what we know, is often too big
and too scary for us to feel secure in.
And that’s where home comes in, and your own little corner of the world
and your own ark come in. That’s where
family comes in, and tribe, and the line between family-and-tribe and the rest
of the world.
In Jesus’ time,
and for most of human history, family was everything. People had no existence apart from their
family. Family was their identity, their
way of being known and of having a place in the world. Family was their security, their way of being
safe and cared for. Family was their
fate, their place on the social ladder, their rung and their role passed on and
accepted from father to son and mother to daughter in the hierarchy of their
society. Family was also their politics
and their world, with anyone who threatened any one in the family becoming the
enemy of all in the family, and if ever a family or a tribe came to hate
another family or tribe, that hatred was passed down and persisted a long, long
time.
And even today,
don’t we bemoan the way the world seems to be falling back – just when we began
to think that maybe we’d got beyond it, falling back into tribalism, becoming a
new real-life, high-stakes, all-or-nothing survival show version of “Family
Feud?”
Many people have
pointed out that “Make America Great Again” is at least in part about making
America great again for entitled white males, who in the way things were going felt
a loss of privilege, maybe felt demoted from being captain of the ark and
gatekeeper of the ladder. And here in
Canada in different places and ways across the country we have our own version
of tribal politics and worldview. Just
this week Hamilton City Council had to decide whether or not to give a public
platform in the Council chambers to Paul Fromm who proudly calls himself “a
white nationalist” committed to ensuring the “founding peoples” of Canada are
not washed away by “waves of mass immigration.”
And that kind of
keep-them-off-the-ark theology and politics is so easy to fall into. Like the new law in Quebec making it illegal
for persons in public service to wear religious symbols, which was okay as long
as it was symbols of white-European Catholicism, but all of a sudden not when
it came to include hijabs and turbans.
Or like all those
little posts that get shared around on Facebook lamenting what seems to be
over-generous social support for immigrants and refugees and less-than-adequate
support for veterans, as though one is the cause of the other, and we need to
choose between the two.
Or like most of
our election campaigns, where all the major parties appeal to whatever
class-based tribal identification their polls tell them is the winning demographic,
and then tell us how they will help us especially prosper, and the ones
forgotten, not appealed to, still on the ladder as it’s kicked out sight, are
usually the really poor, the perpetually powerless, and the voiceless – their
real needs still not really addressed.
The family, the
tribe can be pretty brutal when they feel afraid, or threatened. It can be hard to speak up against that. If you do, it can open you up to all kinds of
things. It can make you feel vulnerable
and alone. Open you up to the suspicion
of being somehow against the family and the tribe.
But Jesus says,
“Whoever does not carry the cross – the cross of detachment from these things,
the cross maybe of suspicion of being a betrayer of one’s own tribe, the cross
of standing up at times against and outside one’s own circle for the sake of
something bigger – whoever does not carry the cross that is theirs, and follow
me, cannot be my disciple.”
You see, Jesus is
gathering community and inviting hope and building a world on a different basis
than family and tribe. Like a good
builder or a good commander, he looks realistically at what is needed to get
the job done that needs to be done, and he knows the ways of family and tribe
won’t do it. Won’t be sufficient. Will fall short at some critical point.
He understands
the way of God the potter, and like his father he is committed to working with
what is, and with all of what is. No
longer building arks to save a select few and let the rest drown. Rather, sitting down at a wheel with the
whole lump of creation turning before him, being shaped and reshaped all together
in his hands, being broken down and given a new shape when needed and when the
old shape no longer works. Working and
turning, turning and re-shaping, re-shaping and re-forming and re-integrating
all that is, towards some constantly evolving and emerging and re-emerging good
thing.
So I wonder if
what he’s saying, when he tells the crowd, “Whoever comes to me and does not
hate his father and mother, wife and children, and so on … cannot be my
disciple” is maybe two things.
One is an
invitation to join him in building the world together on something more than,
bigger than, better than just family and tribe – letting us know there are
better, more appropriate and more helpful ways of resolving the problem of evil
in the world than just building an ark and kicking the ladder away when we
think it’s time.
And the other is
an encouragement; not a judgement that if we don’t live and think his way we
are lost, but instead a gentle reminder that when we honestly don’t, honestly
can’t yet follow him and live fully into his way of making the world work, can't at some point act and speak and live fully as a disciple, we
are not therefore thrown off the boat and thrown out of the lump of humanity that’s being
worked with. Rather, we’re still on the
wheel, still part of the whole, still being worked on, shaped and re-shaped by
life, by others, by God. Still in
process of potting and being potted.
Definitely still, along with everyone else, part of whatever God is
making of us all.
Because God no
longer sends floods and tells us to build arks to save just a few from the deluge. Rather, God sits down at the wheel and works with
the whole mess that’s called into being here together. Patiently, creatively, redemptively shaping, re-shaping and re-shaping again what
we need to be, to be good all together.
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