Richard Bollman, S.J.

23^rd SUNDAY, C (2007)

Wisdom 9:13-19; Philemon 1-20; Luke 14:25-33

The Hebrew scripture, from the Book of Wisdom,

speaks of the struggle to understand and to follow God’s counsel.

It is hard for us humans. We can’t do it without the holy Spirit.

Without Wisdom herself which is a sheer gift to us.

Today we hear also a very short letter of Paul to a personal friend Philemon.

Philemon, Paul’s old friend, is presented with a situation

where he needs to listen carefully to the Spirit.

Paul, in Rome, had befriended an escaped slave

who belonged to Philemon,

While with Paul, the slave was initiated as a Christian.

So he returns to his owner, with a letter from Paul

that might help Philemon to reconsider this young man’s status.

Is he a runaway slave returning, or a brother in Christ.

It’s a very concrete example of how knowing the person of Christ

changes the way people regard one another.

Today’s Gospel moves on in Luke’s account of Jesus

to certain sayings and stories about discipleship,

teaching which often turns things upside down.

He seems intentionally to want to shake up people who were just interested,

to see if they would take a step closer, to trust him, and trust no one else.

That is the sense behind the famous saying today,

that those who would follow should, in these words,

"hate" their parents and family and step out and ally to Jesus.

It’s interesting to read how most scholars think

that when the text is more challenging it’s probably closer to Jesus way of talking.

Matthew’s gospel uses this same saying but changes it to read

"if you love your parents more than me, you can’t be my disciple."

And that is what Jesus means, I think, but it lacks the shock,

that we are called to wake up to our own faith, our own choices,

that we can’t just rely on family customs when it comes to discipleship.

Notice what it says to you this morning.

HOMILY 23^rd SUNDAY, C, 2007 "Risking Discipleship"

So we listen here to Jesus when he’s more and more aware

that living in truth, trusting God,

was going to involve a lot of courage, willingness to be tested,

not to just go with the flow or fall asleep.

You have to be your own person,

not just the member of a family or tribe,

not just following the expected career path of society.

Or if you listen in to this saying in the time of Luke,

it may reflect the early era of Christian living when

new Christians were coming forward away from pagan families

who would like to stop them from following Christ.

Of course that can happen now too.

There is always resistance to letting yourself be a disciple.

We’ve all been to school, to develop a familiar example,

and we know how learning, discipleship,

takes some humiliation at times, surrender.

It’s the difference between just attending class

or really being someone’s student, letting go of what you think you know.

I remember the resistance I had to learning to write,

when I moved on from high school and was an arts student in the seminary.

I had to face my own laziness, and my smug sense that in high school

I had demonstrated all the skills I needed: perfect grammar,

good organization, polish!

Then this new teacher at Milford

proposed that we write imitations of classic essay stylists,

right down to the length of sentences, to the way ideas lingered

or moved fast, from Francis Bacon to Joseph Addison, Thomas Carlyle.

This was excruciating. But gradually

even as I learned to write different kinds of sentences,

I was finding new thoughts.

I became a disciple of my teacher, and of the tradition of writing itself.

Discipleship in the Gospel is the difference between

believing some things about Jesus, reading through the stories,

and actually letting him uproot your life

and call you into a personal connection.

In such a relationship, you step up to your own calling,

the person YOU have to be.

I find it hard to describe this journey,

though a lot of it for me was not so much hating my family,

as pushing out against my own peers

who have been always so attractive to me: bright, courageous, great teachers, good with teenagers, scholars of history or social systems . . . .

And there I am reading books about Alfred Hitchcock, or the Buddha.

That proved to be crucial for me, finding my way

without being envious of others’ paths, or an imitator.

But mainly I can say this. The disciple is one who gradually becomes willing

to bring not only your own search and creativity,

but also your own sins along in your companionship.

Enough of this apologizing or hiding of our weaknesses.

Weakness is no obstacle to the core life of Christ’s spirit.

Discipleship is gradually catching a glimpse of our own lovableness

through the eyes of Jesus himself. This is empowering.

It opens up vision.

You drop your self criticism and allow for the suffering that is your own,

which becomes a kind of fuel for your trust.

This is the sort of discipleship, the necessary spirituality,

that frees alcoholics from the need to drink,

and it frees perfectionists from the need

to manage everything and everybody.

It frees us middle-of-the-road consumers

from the tendency to rely on possessions

to distract us from the hard road of emptiness

the unexpected pain that life can bring.

And finally, the disciple isn’t interested even in escaping the cross.

That’s where the miracles happen. In the actual cross.

Many of you have shown me this:

a talent for living in joy, in the mixture of pain and surrender that life asks,

even though you have lost a spouse in death,

or are sorting out day by day a recovery from cancer.

Some who are closest to death

live their lives with such gratitude,

it makes me wonder why I worry over anything,

or need to possess and control anything.

So these harsh words today are right at the core of the Gospel.

If you haven’t been put off by the Gospel before,

well you haven’t been listening.

Even if we’re not all that willing now,

we will one day give up everything for the love of Christ.

Teilhard de Chardin spoke of this gradual transformation

in words that I want to leave you with.

He says,

"I pray that I may recognize you, God,

under the species of each alien or hostile force

that seems bent upon

destroying or uprooting me.

When the signs of age begin to mark my body . . .

when they touch my mind,

when the ill that is to diminish me strikes from without

or is suddenly born within me;

when the painful moment comes

in which I suddenly awaken to the fact

that I am losing hold of myself . . .

into the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me,

in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand

that it is you who are painfully parting the fibers of my being

in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance

and bear me away within yourself.

Teach me to know my death

as an act of communion with you."

(From The Divine Milieu, quoted in Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury Press,

Norwich 1999, p. 508.)