The Psalmist sets much the same thing to music. He ends with "For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish."
It's much the same in the gospel lesson, too. Jesus seems determined to confront his would-be followers with extreme choices. Whoever comes to me and does not hate everything else cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
And then two little parable stories -- one warning about the need to reckon on the cost of a building project before starting out on it, and the other about much the same thing, but set in a military context. The lesson finishes with yet more hard and discouraging words, "So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
Again, the challenge is to have faith and to be faithful - faith of a quality that sets all else aside, even life itself, and which sets its sights solely on total faithfulness. These lessons are enough to make even the most determined would-be disciple despair.
What is one to make of them?
Many of you will have had the benefit of hearing Father [James] Bottoms' sermon last week in which he too confronted similarly difficult texts. He distinguished between taking Jesus literally, and taking Jesus seriously, and we are all in his debt. His wise words carry us through today's very disturbing texts. For these texts too cannot be taken literally, but must be taken seriously.
In putting that into practice, let us remember the almost 2000 and more years separating us in our generation from the generations in which these texts were written.
Three points to remember:
Our culture is not theirs, and to ignore "the gap" and pretend it isn't there asks for trouble. It helped me no end to remember those three factors when examining our lessons today.
Place the Deuteronomy lesson in its time setting and one understands at once the heavy admonition being placed on the people in the Name of the Lord. Just think of the people's history. Is there anything they should not have done that they have not done? Did they miss a single trick? I don't think so... ...in the gospel [lesson], Jesus is going up to Jerusalem to begin his Passion. It will ends in his death on the cross. These too are last instructions, if you will, to people he knows are as weak as water. Now is no time for subtlety either. So we get the bald, unvarnished truth. "Either you are with me, or you are not." Either you have faith and are faithful, or you are nothing.
And, I suppose, when it comes to that, that's about the size of it. It's about having faith and being faithful...
Experience tells me that most people are people of faith, but they are in process of maturing to full faith. Most people are faithful, but they have yet to come to the full flower of faithfulness. Where are they?... The answer is going to vary from one member to another, but everyone is somewhere on the continuum...
So I see that these very difficult texts are not to be taken literally, but certainly are to be taken seriously. Faith - 100% quality, pure and perfect faith - is what is expected of us, and we are working on that throughout life. We don't start with that quality of faith and commitment, but we do keep working toward it. It is our aim. It is our spiritual ambition. We should be satisfied with nothing less.
I left Philemon until now because this text illustrates perfectly the need we have to take into account the passage of time from the times of the sacred scriptures to our own contemporary times. You cannot and must not jump "the gap" of thousands of years as though it did not exist, or as though it did not matter. No serious Bible student would ever do such a thing.
Oneismus was a slave who ran away from his owner. He found his way to Paul, and was very helpful to him. That we can tell from Paul's glowing report in Philemon. Paul sends Onesimus back to his owner. Paul does not chastise Philemon for owning slaves. He doesn't set Onesimus' feet on the Freedom Road of the day; a road that might allow him to escape his bondage permanently. Paul sends Onesimus back to slavery.
To react to this scripture without reference to its historical context is to fall into the mistake we have carefully avoided with the other texts.
The culture in which this event is set is not our own, and we make a grave mistake to ignore that fact. Slavery was a part of the culture of the time, and much as we may deplore it today, and speak harshly of those engaged in it in times past, we must remember our advantage.
We live in more enlightened times. While we might wish St. Paul had raged against the evils of slavery, he didn't. He accepted it as part of the culture of his day.
Applying Christ's teaching to the situation, as best he understood it, he asked mercy and kindness toward Onesimus, not that Onesimus be given his freedom. Paul was a man of his time - almost 2 millennia ago - and he worked with the limitations he had. He knew nothing of our times, its discoveries or its insights. He accepted the situation as he found it, applied Christ's law of love and mercy to it, and issued his directives accordingly. For us to come along 2000 years later and find him at fault is simply not to play the game fairly.
If Paul knew then what we know now do you seriously think he would speak as he did then? It is a dangerous form of literalism to take the sacred texts without proper reference to the context in which they were originally set. To my way of thinking, to do such a thing is really to fail to take them seriously. It's a form of idolatry.
I realize what I say is dangerous. But I see no avoiding the danger, do you?
Take the recent Lambeth Conference. One of the few major issues reviewed by the bishops concerned homosexuality, and how the church was to minister to and with the homosexual. You will recall that after debate that was frequently acrimonious, the good bishops voted overwhelmingly to take the scriptural stand as a literalist would interpret it.
The newspapers reported this as a conservative victory, but I would challenge that usage. What it seems to me to be is a decision based primarily on the culture from which the voting bishops came, cultures mingled heavily with fear and politics. The African bishops, whose vote was overwhelmingly strong, could not deal with, and maybe could not be expected to deal with, subtleties of any sort on the subject. Faced with what they were faced with when they got home to their dioceses, they could only deal in absolutes. To describe their anxious vote as the "bongo" reaction," as I have heard it called, it to make light of their home situations, to fault them on the crises in their own cultures.
The tough thing to do, (and the bishops' do not seem to have been able to show us an insight here,) is to figure out how we can hold together in one communion when even our own responses to the gospel in our own cultural settings place conflicting demands upon us, to say nothing of the difficulty of holding together in one communion with those whose cultures differ significantly from our own, and who gospel-responses differ dramatically.
If ever anything were clearly demonstrated to be culturally influenced, the African bishops' vote on the homosexuality questions proved conclusively to me that the response to homosexuality in the church is less theological than it is cultural.
Paul's response to the situation of the runaway Onesimus is grounded in the culture of his day regarding slavery. It would take centuries before anyone saw the basic flaw in that approach, and applied theology beyond what was culturally accepted, to what all would probably now agree is a higher vision of humanity. Slavery is contrary to the love of God as it has been manifested in the Christ Jesus.
That, of course, is my key to the scriptures. Applying the love of Jesus to every situation. It's always liberating, never easy, but essential if we are to take our faith seriously, rather than literally. Amen.
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