Another challenging sermon from my ‘rational humanist’ (theologically liberal) friend Harry Cook:

Sept. 9, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 14: 25-33

This passage from Luke tells us that Jesus and his following must be getting closer and closer to Jerusalem, their ultimate destination on the book-long journey from Galilee, because the going is getting tougher. One may now have to choose between family and following Jesus. One must now bear a cross and reckon with the cost of doing so. One must now renounce all.

The text actually says 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.

The Greek word ordinarily translated as “hate” actually means “a sense of indifference to or relative disregard for one thing in comparison with another.”

Certainly in the tumult of the First Century severance of Jesus Judaism from the synagogue communities, family ties were no doubt broken. Religion has a way of dividing people as well as uniting them – a fact I think we know well.

The challenge of a rational humanist kind of religion is two-edged. The first separation occurs between those who have sought meaning outside the strictures of orthodox tradition and outmoded theology and those who prefer to remain in them.

The second separation comes when the rational humanist actually takes seriously the challenge to strive for justice and peace among all people with respect for the dignity of every individual being paramount for its own value.

Such commitment causes one to brave the taunts of passersby while marching in anti-war protests, or as some of us did in the ‘60s to risk incarceration for standing with African Americans demanding basic civil rights, or as the vestry of this parish has done in flying the Rainbow Unity flag from our mast signaling the inclusion that awaits within our fellowship.

Those who engage with religion at the here-and-now level have no choice but to take up the causes, say, of peace, of economic and social justice and pursue them with as much zeal as the fundamentalist pursues the cause of trying to get people to believe in the blood atonement for the sake of their salvation.

Inevitably there comes division when such divergent ends and goals are in play. Luke imagined Jesus telling the crowds who, Luke says, were traveling with him, that they might consider saving their energy. Where he was headed was into a costly passage. If you’re going to go there, you have to go without hesitation, with no looking back, and with everything you’ve got.

It’s not so much that you have to “hate” those whom or that which you are leaving to follow him, but you have to want to follow him more than you want to stay behind.

Luke uses the metaphor of building a tower, by which was probably meant some kind of lookout platform to guard a vineyard. One does not rush off to the nearest Home Depot and lay in a supply of two-by-fours without first thinking through the cost of the project in terms of time and materials and long-term worth. So then the idea is that those who decide to choose to follow a way, whatever it is, had better figure out if they have what it takes to go down it and to bear whatever the cost of doing so may turn out to be.

Of course, you can never be sure. So you go, or you don’t go. You choose by going or by staying, and in so doing reveal where you heart lies: EITHER with what and where you’ve been, with the ties you’ve made here OR with what and where you will go and the choice of bearing the pain of breaking ties for the sake of intellectual or moral integrity.

This congregation of St. Andrew’s of Clawson is in exactly that place now. It is a fact that just as several families have joined us, another one or two have left us. We celebrate the identification that the new ones have established. It honors the means by which we are trying to be honest to our convictions. We mourn the departure of those who could not or would not follow the path down which the rest of us feel summoned to go.

We are exactly where the church in Luke’s day was, with the same dynamics in play, with the same kind of exhilaration at finding moral and intellectual clarity in our purpose and energy for its working out. Along with that, of course, we experience the emotional counterpart to the physical pain an amputee feels in the absence of a severed limb.

Nevertheless we say with Bilbo Baggins the words his creator J.R.R. Tolkien gave him to say as Bilbo himself, the quintessential home-body, was summoned out upon a journey from which he would never return – at least as the Bilbo he had been:

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the road has gone,

And I must follow if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet

Where many paths and errands meet

And whither then, I cannot say.

The Road goes ever on and on

Out from the door where it began.

Let others follow it who can;

Let them a journey new begin.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.