The Rev. Kerith Harding, September 5, 2010, Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Luke 14:25-33

This morning we hear first from Moses on the pains of Moab, exhorting the Israelites to stay away from idol worship. And then from Jesus, who surprises his followers by telling them to hate the people who love them the most. On the surface, it appears these two readings are about proper religious behavior, and about manufacturing negative feelings for the people you may be sitting next to right now. Side by side, as the lectionary places them, however, these two speeches operate to do the same thing: liberate a people who have made gods of people and things that are not God, so that they may be free to love and follow the one God. There is no better definition of true discipleship: the freedom and the courage to follow God.

And if our closest relationships – the people whose love we most value – are likened to idols – to obstacles on the path to discipleship, surely Jesus is saying something vital about the God-human relationship. And yet, vital as it is, we often get it wrong.

The great theologian Karl Rahner summarizes the God-human relationship this way:
1. Human beings experience God and cannot not do so.
2. This basic feature of our humanity – that we experience God – can be suppressed, denied or rejected, but
none of those actions can ever negate it.
3. God offers Godself as the innermost constitutive element of humanity. We are wired this way – to be
animated by God, constantly in relationship. The fact of this is indisputable; what varies is how conscious
we are of it.
(Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations XVII, pp. 235-240)

Rahner’s theology is clever; he realizes that God interacts with the human person in ways many the many would never name as God.

In a sermon earlier this summer, some of you heard me tell the story of a friend of mine who was finishing up his medical residency at Yale when the university offered him a prestigious position. His parents were quite proud. After a practice interview with a clinic in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere, however, something funny happened. When he left that interview, he found himself feeling a joy and a hope and a compelling sense of purpose that he did not have at the idea of working at Yale. He was not a religious man, and never referred to the experience as a religious one. “I just fell in love with it,” was all he could say. But for Rahner, this experience was of God. My friend found himself stirred in love toward the openness of an unknown future, even though this openness collapsed his self-directed plans, and disappointed his parents who had higher hopes for their son. But my friend felt expansive and hopeful. There was more to his future than he had thought, and he felt compelled to respond to this drawing. And he took the job in the mall, running a clinic for people who have no insurance.

I am pretty certain my friend Jim does not actually hate his parents. But he must have been ok disappointing them for the sake of his true self. Had he not, he would have acquiesced to their wish for him to be a Yale professor. He may not even have let himself experience the joy that came when he interviewed at this small clinic. He made the professional decision that felt the truest to himself, and ultimately, truest to his fundamental identity as a creature of God.

So if this dynamic is at the heart of our experience of life, how do we begin to see it? How do we begin to make this dynamic more conscious? Three ways:

1. By standing back from our experience just enough so that we see the God-me dynamic in fuller dimensions. By giving some attention to our experience of our lives, not simply the events themselves. For instance, when you think back upon your summer, you will run through in your mind all the things you did and the places you went and the people you met. That’s natural. But also let your experience of these things and people rise to the surface. When did you feel moved, or troubled? When did you feel excited?...

When did you feel like giving up? Become a student of your own experience. Take it seriously. And as you feel compelled to act, slow down again and ask yourself, which response makes me feel more complete, like my whole self is being summoned into it? Where do you know you are part of something larger than yourself, more than the sum of your parts, but part of a bigger project? What feels most complete?

I should add that these are not easy or simple questions. What we are talking about here is “discernment” and as someone once told me, “Discernment is the project of a lifetime.” Discernment is about our relationship with God, which by definition we can never master or control. We practice, each and every day.

2. The second way to pay attention to the God-human dynamic, is by savoring the good stuff. St. Ignatius advises us to think of all the good we have received, and then to savor it. There is no point in not savoring the good in our lives simply because someone else does not have what we have. It is not fair that I have a bed and so many in the world do not, but at the end of the day, “You cannot pretend you don’t have the resources that you do.” Savoring the good things makes our hearts more generous, and seriously sharpens our sense of the injustice. It does not close a person in on herself. Quite the contrary. Which leads to number 3:

3. Gratitude. Saying “Thank you.” Where we begin is simply, “Thank you.” And then we fill that in with specifics, however small. Everybody comes up with something different. It’s just the way life is. Savor that. And even if it is not your habit, say out loud, “Thank you.” In my experience, doing so actually matters. It gives voice to my identity as God’s creature, wholly dependent on God, animated by God, moved by God. “Thank you” acknowledges all of it.

The great thing about the way God works with us is that nothing can interfere with God’s constant love for us, God’s embrace of our experience, God’s radical immediacy to all we are and say and feel and want. We can do nothing to negate who God is or God’s manifest presence in our lives. But reflecting on our experience of life, savoring the good stuff and saying “Thank you”—allows us to become conscience of our daily contact with God, and doing so reminds us, with joy, that we are God’s creatures and it is to God whom we first belong.

Jesus is not intending here in today’s Gospel to somehow speak counter to his great commandment to love one another as God loves us and our neighbors as ourselves. Rather, what he is saying is that to follow God is to do so wholeheartedly, and sometimes this means we disappoint the people in our lives who love us most. And at times, it may even feel like we are risking their relationships with us.

But discipleship begins with freedom, and that freedom is found when we remember that our life with God is not a relationship just like all the others, that it is our first, our primary, our central relationship. That to live with any other thing or person in God’s place is to live a distorted life. And Jesus is calling us to something greater, something more full. I believe it was Ireneus who said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

Discipleship is us living our lives most fully alive. And surely, no one who truly loves us wants anything less.