Trinity XII Sunday 7th September, by Fr Jack

Jeremiah 18. 1-11
St Paul’s Epistle to Philemon 1-21
St Luke 14. 25-33

Jeremiah says today that God will change His mind. 

God doesn’t change His mind. God is God. Eternity, perfection, divinity - these things don’t change from lesser to more: they can’t. It’s sort of part of the deal.

What Jeremiah reflects here is how often we anthropomorphise God. God is a person, absolutely, but God isn’t an old man in the sky, a bit like us, just bigger, and older, and more in the sky. This could become a sermon about religious language, and what we can and can’t say about God. And I’d enjoy that very much, but that’s not what I want to explore so much this morning.

What I want to acknowledge as we start is that Jeremiah’s words say as much about our human ability to relate to God, who is always beyond our comprehension, as they do about God.

Look at the way Jeremiah speaks about sin. We humans drift off, away from God’s loving plan for us, and things go wrong. And should we be surprised!? And yet, somehow, we always are. We talk of teaching children through consequences. And these are natural consequences. Jeremiah speaks of it like thunder bolts from God in punishment, of course he does. But isn’t it as much revealing the natural consequences of sin? If we go off course by idolising wealth, power, violence, some aspect of our identity or anything else, guess what, we are not being who God made us to be, and things go wrong. Should we be surprised? 

I know I’ve mentioned this before. We poison this beautiful world God has given us, we speak and echo inhumanity, and we are surprised things go wrong?

Sin has natural consequences.

So what are we to do?

Well, now we turn to St Paul’s Letter to Philemon. The Apostle is writing to a part of the Early Church, and he writes of love.

St Paul wants us to see that love is our DNA. Crucially, he says, love, not commands.

Rules and punishments will alter people’s behaviour. They will sometimes prevent the worst of things happening, but they can never achieve the best of things. 

You can stop someone beating up an old lady and nicking her purse with the threat of punishment, but only human flourishing and mutual love can inspire someone to truly love their neighbour, and see Christ in them. The answer (to sin and its myriad consequences) in Jeremiah, in St Paul and in most of all in Jesus, is not regulation but love. 

The Kingdom of God cannot be got to through laws and policing and courts.

And this is not ‘airy fairy’ or ‘pie in the sky’ - here and now we are living into the Kingdom.

We have been baptized into it, and it and it alone will last forever. The answer to heartache and division and fear and violence, is this Kingdom of love, this Kingdom of God. Nothing else will do.

We will taste a fore-taste of it in a few moments when we receive the Body and Blood of the One who rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, into His Kingdom, so that we might follow Him there.

And every day of our lives, we are a people gathered, fed, and sent to be people in whom the world can see Jesus, and smell and taste and know His Kingdom. Even in this world so battered by sin and our broken responses to it. We are baptized and gathered and fed and sent, to be that Kingdom at work, at home, in communities, with friend and enemy, loved one and stranger. 

 In some ways our faith is ever-so complicated and mysterious, and requires us all to have 12 PhDs in theology to get anywhere. But then again, our faith is also remarkably straightforward.

And here we get to the Gospel given for today. 

One of those passages that Jesus quite clearly said to provoke people, and it still does today. These words are twenty centuries old, and as sharp as ever. 

‘Hate’ - famously a strong word. And remember Jesus is speaking in a society where familial ties are exceptionally strong. Who you marry, where you live, what you do all day - these were largely not matters of choice. They were determined by your situation and, alongside that, your family or other local hierarchies. So for Jesus to undo all those powerful structures must have been astounding. And then He goes further - you must even hate your own life!?

And perhaps we’re too busy being shocked by this to see that Jesus, in a classically rhetorical stroke of His rabbi’s tongue has not hurt us, but freed us. He has cut us from stifling bonds of approval, of acceptability, of ambition, and comfort, of what others think, of what we think we need to be happy or safe or complete. All of it is cut away in this fiery turn of phrase.

And we are invited, instead, to be nothing other than a disciple of Jesus Christ. 

For some reason I found myself this week (before I’d even read the readings for today) thinking about what it would be like to ask the people around me: ‘what are you?’. Its a rude and pompous question when I ask it, so I don’t think I shall. But, what are you? 

What’s the first thing that comes into your head?

I decided in my idle musings, that I wouldn’t ask, ‘who are you?’, because then you might just answer with your name too instinctively. But, ‘what are you?’. 

Is the first thing that comes into your mind a job title, or a status like ‘a child’ or ‘retired’? Or is it an identity marker, something you’ve had from birth, or one you’ve picked up later?

Jesus today is cutting away all these things, not because He wants to harm us, but because He wants to free us.

I guess it all comes down to this (and thinking about those two analogies Jesus uses of having worked out what you need to have before you start - the tower builder or the king and his army): by needing to have less, we find that we actually have all that we need. 

If all we need to be is a child of God our Father, and a disciple of Jesus Christ, we find that we need nothing more. That we are nothing more. Is that what Jesus means to be free by hating your life? TS Eliot, in Little Gidding, the climax to his magnificent spiritual poems the Four Quartets, leads into a quotation of Julian of Norwich calling it: 

‘A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well.’

If, as we go through life as followers of Jesus, as we live more and more into His Kingdom, if we do acquire more things (possessions, familial relations and the rest of it) we discover that our relationship with them is now quite different. They no longer possess us, but become blessings we desire to hold lightly and to give away.

So - looping back to where we began - Jesus is not commanding us to do this, He is simply inviting us to do this, because He loves you. He isn’t recruiting followers by threats or good sales to boost His own profits. Remember, human beings might act like that, and we so easily act as if God was like us. But, God is God. God’s desire for us is that of a lover, who loves us and knows us more than we could ever love or know ourselves or each other. 

Jesus is not threatening us. He is simply explaining that living worshipping our fantasies about ourselves, our possessions, our social norms… answering the question ‘what are you?’ with something other than ‘I am a child of God, a follower of Jesus Christ’ will never bring us to be our true selves. 

Just as St Paul is trying to tell us, He is not commanding us into His Kingdom, He is loving us into it. And only this love, this Kingdom, can answer the world’s sorry state, all those natural consequences to sin that Jeremiah laments.

I’m not going to tell you how to put this into practice. We all have different false gods that need disposing of, and it’s always a constant process of renewal, of liberation. But I am going to suggest that we all ask for God’s help in the silence after Holy Communion and in your private prayers this week. Begin again today and every day of our lives to be free for the Kingdom, because that alone will last forever.