Renouncing All

Gospel: Luke 14: 25-33

No other Gospel text evokes more pushback than this one: Jesus tells us we must renounce everything if we are to be one of his followers.  Our materialist age, our culture of property rights and self-interest, and our attachments to buildings, wealth, and influence all rebel against the words of Jesus.  And so we will hear many a sermon that will explain away what Jesus meant: you can still keep your stuff, keep doing what you're doing - that's not what Jesus meant.  

But this is the same Jesus who with his cousin John went into the desert to be alone with God, Jesus who left family to follow the call of God.  Consider the example of the desert fathers and mothers.  They fled into the desert to live in caves, to live a subsistence lifestyle in order to be with God alone.  Why would they do this, especially when the persecutions were over and the Church was favored with imperial privilege? That was precisely what they were fleeing - the imperial privilege, the compromise and corruption that has accompanied it, the slavish attachment to property, wealth, influence.  

Many lament the closing of churches, monasteries, seminaries, and other church properties as if these were God's presence itself.  They are not.  Perhaps they need to close in order to remind us of this fact, that we have too often equated God with these things and have not known God at all.  Perhaps the loss of these things will get us closer to what Jesus intended for us - intimate union with God alone.