After I graduated from seminary my
first job offer was from All Saints’, Carmel, and it included a place to live
as part of the deal. Griffin House was
a quaint little cottage next door to the church, but it needed a lot of work
before my family and I could move in. So
while we were waiting for that to be finished, we lived on the
grounds of the church itself, in an old carriage house they used to give to the
Sexton. It had one room upstairs, about 15
by 20, with a small kitchen and a smaller bathroom, and a semi-finished basement
below. We slept downstairs, surrounded
by our furniture and stacks of unopened boxes.
And when it rained, which it did a lot that winter, we would run outside
in our pajamas, carrying the baby around the corner of the house and down the dark
stairs under the pouring eaves. The
walls were made of a single thickness of redwood planks, and in the worst of
the storms the roof leaked and the whole house creaked and swayed, filled with
sounds of the falling rain, and the wind in the trees, and the thunder of the
ocean at the bottom of the hill.
On a Saturday morning at the end of
January a party of folks from the congregation came and helped us move the
hundred feet into Griffin House. The part-time
interim pastor started work the following Sunday, and he and his wife stayed in
the carriage house a couple of nights a week while they were in town. Later, when the parish called a new Rector,
he and his wife agreed to live there, too, for the time being. How long “for the time being” would be was
never specified. Well, as it turned out,
and this is my point in telling this story, “for the time being” was until we left
Carmel to come to Petaluma, three year later. For three years the Rector and his wife chose
to live in the carriage house, which they renamed “The Chalet,” while his
junior associate lived right next door in the three-bedroom cottage.
You could say it was a smart decision. If he had pushed us back into The Chalet so
they could live in Griffin House, it wouldn’t just have caused hard feelings
between my family and his. It also would
not have sat well with many in the congregation, who were very fond of us, and whose
trust and affection they had still not won.
But even if their decision involved some measure of calculation, it was
still a remarkably generous act. It came
at a real cost. The Rector and his wife
looked at what they stood to gain by cementing caring and trusting
relationships with me and my family and with the All Saints’ congregation. They took stock of what it would cost them, and
they decided that three years in The Chalet was a price they could afford to
pay.
Our second reading today is the
text of a letter from the apostle Paul to a well-off fellow and patron of a
house church whose name is Philemon. The subject of the letter is Onesimus, a slave
who used to be part of Philemon’s household, but who ran away and who now has met
up with Paul, and has himself become a Christian. The exact location and circumstances of all
of this are unknown, but Onesimus apparently has been a great help and comfort
to Paul, who is in prison. But now Paul has
decided that Onesimus should return to his old master. In the letter that Onesimus carries with him
to Philemon, Paul is not shy to claim his rights as an apostle and spiritual
father. He points out that Philemon
himself owes Paul a great debt, for without him he never would have received the
promises of God in Christ’s New Covenant of grace. So from one point of view Onesimus has still been
working for Philemon at a distance, since the service he gives to Paul is a
proxy for what is rightfully owed by his master.
But Paul does not insist on his
rights because he wants Philemon to do the right thing, not because he is Paul’s
underling in the Christian pecking order, but as a free and responsible man. Paul gives up the one who has become like
his son, and Onesimus gives himself up, too, or this letter would not have
survived. The two of them pay this cost for
the sake of the new relationship they hope to gain with Philemon. By giving away their rights, they are asking
Philemon to do the same. Their hope is
that he will decide what to do as a disciple of Jesus Christ, that he will choose
the life of that new people of God in which there is no longer male no female,
Jew or Gentile, slave or free. Paul challenges
Philemon not just to take back his runaway slave, not only to forgive him, and set
him free, but after that to live with him as an equal and a brother in the Lord.
When Jesus says in the Gospel that
no one who does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and
sisters, and even life itself, can be his disciple, this gets our
attention. It’s a way of talking that is
meant to break into the comfortable place of our usual way of thinking, to tell
us that the circles of relationship we draw around ourselves are too
small. When we only have concern and responsibility
for our own lives and the members of our immediate families we aren’t doing
justice to the mission of Jesus, a mission to bring healing, and forgiveness, and
freedom, and the full dignity of human life, not just to us and the people we
love, but to everyone.
It’s a mission Jesus invites us to
share, but this doesn’t mean we have to take responsibility for the whole job. That is God’s work, in and through Christ, to
whom be all honor and glory and thanksgiving and praise. But we do have our part to play. We do have our choices to make. And Jesus wants us to know that those choices
are often costly, not because God demands a penalty for our sins, but because it’s
not easy to transform relationships. It
hasn’t been easy to transform the relationship of former slaves and slave master
in this country into one of equality and mutual love. It has been costly, and maybe the full cost has
yet to be paid. It’s been costly to
transform relationships between men and women in our society so that the work
of keeping the households, and nurturing the children, and producing the goods,
and making the decisions is equitably shared. The statistics on violence against women say
that this cost is still being paid, and the relationships still are not
transformed.
These kinds of transformations are
not first and foremost a question of public policy, but of personal
relationships, and individual decisions to pay the necessary cost. Knowing about the work that many of you do
every day—parenting children with special needs, or just plain parenting; supporting
families where there are disabilities, or mental illness, or where someone is
dying; as educators, and advocates, and artists, and employers; as partners in interracial
marriages, or interfaith marriages, or just marriages, period—I know that you
have made and continue to make costly choices.
Some of them might not feel like choices at all, but we always have a
choice, even if it’s just the choice to keep showing up.
And what makes these the choices of
discipleship is the hope that they will contribute in some way to the transformation
of all our relationships. That hope is
founded on the difference that it makes to know the cost that God was willing
to pay in giving Jesus to us. It makes a
difference to know what we did with that gift.
It makes a difference to know that in spite of what we did, God gave him
back to us alive, for no other purpose than to send us after him, as bearers of
his mission. When this story of God’s
transformed relationship with us shapes our own accounting of gains and losses,
when it becomes good news that we tell with our own costly choices, then we can
say that we are carrying our cross, and that we are Christ’s disciples.
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