Loading...Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me,
Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me.
Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me.
Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me.[1]
How many of you stopped listening when Deacon Mary read the words: “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?”
[1] https://hymnary.org/text/spirit_of_the_living_god_fall_iverson#google_vignette
Yeah, that’s not what anyone expects to hear coming out of Jesus’s mouth, is it? This prophet, this teacher, this “love one another” preacher couldn’t have just told the people around him that hating the people we are closest to will define our loyalty to God, could he?
Take a deep breath and let it out slowly because yes, he could, and he did, at least according to this Gospel writer.
But it might not mean what we think it means.
Jesus is getting closer, and closer to dying on a cross for trying to show the world all the ways to live lives that show their deep affection, their love, for God. The clock is ticking, and sometimes, when time is short, the message has got to be big enough to get a reaction that will cause people to stop, think, reevaluate—and act.
This might be one of those times. Binary words, words that express complete opposite responses, can sometimes be just the key needed to open a locked understanding. So, are love and hate binary to one another, are they opposites?
Some say that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather indifference.
You may be familiar with the quote from Holocaust survivor and Nobel prize-winning peace activist, Elie Wiesel, who wrote:
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.[1]
If that’s the case, what of the word “hate?” According to a couple different web searches, “hate,” as a verb, describes an aversion to something or someone. As a noun, that aversion could lead to intense hostility, usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.[2]
I really don’t think “hate,” at least by those definitions, is what Jesus is getting at here. I think the bishop of Western Louisiana, Jake Owensby has a good alternative to the word, “hate.” On his Substack called The Woodlands, he wrote this about today’s gospel:
“…let’s substitute hate for something else. Let’s try let go:
Whoever comes to me and does not let go of [let go of, not hate] father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)
I admit [he wrote], this is not a translation from the Greek original. Still, it strikes me as consistent with the spirit of what Jesus is getting at.
In Jesus, God is giving himself utterly to us. It’s up to us to give ourselves back — or not. And God is not asking for this, that, or the other sliver of our lives. God wants our whole being.[3]
In other words, think of it more as how you prioritize. What are those things that grab your attention, that hold your gaze, that distract you? What, really, are your priorities? What, or who is at the top of your list?
Here, Jesus is presenting one of the biggest challenges to anyone’s priority list. Aren’t our families, our loved ones, supposed to rank at the top? Aren’t we supposed to strive to want more for them than life itself?
Jesus says, “maybe not.” At least not if your focus is there and not on God. He says that to truly be one of the few true, capital “D” disciples, you must re-prioritize, re-focus, re-align your loyalty to God, to Jesus, to the message of love.
Another way to think about it, according to biblical scholar, Diane Chen, is like this, “To become [a] Jesus’ follower, one’s preference—loyalty, love, and priority—must reside with Jesus over all people and things one holds dear.”[4] [2x]
The reality is that there are very few people throughout history who can make that kind of complete commitment to God. We believe that if we are to live in families, in communities, and to follow the whole of the commandments from Jesus, including the “love your neighbor as you love yourself” part, we really do need to find a balance in our priorities. How do we love God AND love one another without prioritizing one over the other? Is it even possible?
I think it has to do with how we define the two commandments: Love God. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
I really believe that to give our love to God, to show our love to God most fully, we express that love by loving ourselves and by loving others.
And, let’s be honest, love is messy, complicated, and challenging just as much as it’s mushy, consuming, and comfortable.
We know that -- because we hear it in wedding vows: “Will you love this person, comfort them, honor and keep them, in sickness and in health …” (BCP 424, adapted). Love is not supposed to be easy or without pain or complexities, especially with the ones who are the nearest and dearest in our lives.
But loving others is bigger than our nearest and dearest. The love Jesus speaks about includes loving more broadly. As Episcopal Christians, we commit to loving more broadly in our baptismal covenant when we promise, with God’s help, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as we do ourselves, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.
Discipleship, small “d,” is doing just that. When we are doing these things in the knowledge and love of God, recognizing that all people are from God and every person we see is beloved by God, we live into our discipleship.
It’s when we forget that we are doing this with God’s help, when we forget to include prayer, praise, worship, study, and discernment in our lives, to guide our hearts and minds to fulfill our purpose in God’s creation, when we become more focused on self, or when we become indifferent or apathetic to the plight of others, it is then that we might need to hear these words from Jesus. We might need to have a jolt that comes with the word “hate” to remind us that our priorities just might need rearranging.
While that seems harsh, there is hope in it. We can find that hope in today’s lesson from Jeremiah. The hope is in the Potter’s hands—in God’s hands. God made each of us pliable, like clay. When the potter in this lesson cannot create the shape or the vessel he is trying to design, he starts over, but not with different clay. He reforms the clay he started with, creating and re-creating.
We are the clay, the starting point. And we are pliable, flexible, changeable. God will form us throughout our lives into whatever it is God has planned for us. Like a caterpillar into a butterfly, we start with the same substance and have the potential to be transformed throughout these single lives we have been given.
That’s hope. It means that we can learn and grow to understand what we prioritize throughout our lives. We can focus on our loves, our families, our friends, all the while we commit to being followers of Jesus. Our scales can tip when the responsibilities or desires weigh *more or less, * but the scales still hold what is dear to us. God will sometimes be heavier and other times be lighter, but God does not leave, God does not throw away the clay. God is there to remake us, to redeem us, to transform us.
Because our priorities are mixed, we cannot be capital “D” “Disciples.” But we can be Jesus Followers. And I don’t think Jesus is disputing that in this Gospel. We know this because we hear the stories that tell us there are many ways to follow Jesus: He sends 70 workers out to spread the Good News. He sends people out to tell the story of their healing. He strives to help those who think they are ready to follow him, that they are not, because they do not realize what it means to let go of all they have, to give it all up, to be Jesus’s Disciple. They may not be able to let go of all that is important to them, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be or are not a Jesus Follower.
While I may think that today’s Gospel message is a hard message to receive, I recognize in myself that while God is my strength and my salvation and that Jesus is my guide, teacher and healer, I do not have the capacity or ability to give up other parts of my life, my family, my friends, my stuff, to be a capital “D” disciple.
But I can be, and I am, a Jesus Follower. I am willing to experience transformation so I can be closer to God. I am open to having the clay of my being crushed back into a ball, to be re-formed, redeemed, remade[5], even when I know it will hurt, and I will be misunderstood for a time by people who have come to expect certain things that were a part of my old form. I am open to being made new if it means I can be a better follower of Jesus, a better servant of God.
That, to me, is hope. Knowing that God will always be with me, teaching me, transforming me, to better love God and all of creation.
Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me,
Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me.
Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me.
Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me.[6]
May all our lives be molded into vessels that both are filled with and will pour out God’s love. Amen.
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1049.Elie_Wiesel
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hate
[4] https://jakeowensby.substack.com/p/letting-go
[5] Diane G. Chen, Luke: A New Covenant Commentary (Cascade, 2017), 210. As found at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-23-3/commentary-on-luke-1425-33-6
[6] Each of us is still on the potter’s wheel, still in God’s hands — and as Jeremiah insists, what and whom we become is ultimately up to God. Will we find ourselves reshaped into something new? This week’s passage from the prophet can be understood as a call to repentance — and at the same time, it’s powerful testimony that even when we go astray, God doesn’t throw away the clay, but rather redeems and remakes us. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/9/3/giving-up-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-thirteenth-week-after-pentecost
[7] https://hymnary.org/text/spirit_of_the_living_god_fall_iverson#google_vignette
