Homily for September 8

Homily for the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Scriptures for today's Mass 



 

• Have you ever been lost?  Well, I get lost A LOT

-  due to my lousy, or more accurately,

my non-existent sense of direction.

Put me in the driver's seat behind the wheel

and any inner compass I might have just goes haywire.

If I have to choose between making a left or right -

I'll choose the wrong way about 99% of the time.

Knowing this, I will sometimes, at the last minute, make a left

- when I’d thought I probably should make a right -

trying to second-guess my bad sense of direction.

But even when I do that -

I almost always find out I’m going the wrong way

and I easily end up lost.

I'm sure - at least I HOPE - that maybe once in a while

you've made a wrong turn, too, and have found yourself lost.

I guess misery loves company - especially when you’re lost!

• Well I’m glad you didn’t get lost coming here today.

Or maybe you DID and you’re not sure how you got here

- or why you’re here.

No matter - I’m just glad you’re here.

With summer winding down and the kids back in school

it’s a kind of new year here at church - a fall kick off

and we’re beginning a new message series which we’re calling:

LOST and FOUND.

• We’re beginning the series by looking at what it means to be lost.

Not just physically lost, but lost in other ways, too

I think we’ve all had the experience of FEELING lost

even if we knew exactly where we were

And sometimes, feeling lost

is more difficult than actually being lost.

• Have you ever felt at a loss? 

At a loss for:

what to do, what to say, what to think, how to respond,

where to turn, whom to turn to.

Those feelings and experiences can build up over a long period of time

- or they can surprise us all of a sudden, out of the blue.

• Maybe you feel lost in your job.

It might actually be a fine job - just not what you had in mind for a career.

Maybe your work makes you feel like you’re lost at sea,

adrift in endless workdays lacking meaning or direction - lost…

• Maybe you feel lost in a relationship.

Maybe you’re just not in a good place with your spouse

or with a sibling or with a coworker, neighbor or a friend, a schoolmate.

And you might be wondering: how did we get HERE?

Things used to be so good between us and now I feel alone and - lost…

• Maybe you feel lost as a parent, trying to respond to and handle

all the phases of development kids go through as they grow up.

Parenting is one of your most important and challenging responsibilities

and maybe you often feel at a loss as to what to say or do,

or how to respond to your own children.

May you feel lost in your role as a mom or dad…

• Maybe you feel lost at school: in a new school or a new grade,

new teachers, new courses, new schedules.

Maybe you feel lost in the middle of hundreds of classmates.

Maybe you dread, Monday through Friday,

having to go to a place, to a school, where you feel - lost…

• Maybe you feel lost right here in church.

Maybe you’re not sure why you’re here, why you still come.

Maybe you’re lost in your relationship with the church,

in your relationship with God.

Maybe you feel lost on your life's journey

and you wonder why God doesn’t find you.

• Or maybe it’s not one particular topic or area where you feel lost.

Maybe there’s a persistent restlessness you just can’t seem to shake,

especially during times of challenge and change and transition,

a restlessness that leaves you feeling uncomfortable and unsettled - lost…

• Nobody likes to feel lost - or to be lost.

Being lost can leave you feeling in the dark.

Being lost feels heavy and burdensome.

Feeling lost can find you in a very lonely place,

unconnected from the familiar, disconnected from others.

Like when you lose your cell phone - now there’s a lost feeling!

Losing your phone leaves you feeling cut off, apart from,

out of touch - lost…

• So what do you do when you’re “at a loss…” when you feel lost?

- Maybe you panic - paralyzed with fear or worry.

- Maybe you try to escape --

you look for anything to help you avoid the feeling of being lost.

- Maybe you get really busy hoping that lots of activity

will distract you from feeling lost.

- Maybe you pretend to others - or even to yourself -

that you’re not lost at all:  “Me? Lost?  Oh no, I’m just fine.”

• But here’s the thing: when you’re lost - you don’t want to stay lost.

No one wants to stay lost.

We have a very strong, natural, ingrained human desire - to get un-lost:

a desire to be found.

 Well if you’ve felt lost - I’m glad you’ve found this place this morning.

because today we’re looking in the Lost and Found department.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at our experiences of

feeling lost, of being lost, of losing things - and of being found.

And we’ll be exploring IF and WHEN and HOW

God and faith might help us when we’re lost.

• And we start off today with the story we just heard

from the Gospel of Luke where he tells us:

Great crowds were traveling with Jesus. (Luke 14:25)

Great crowds of people followed Jesus wherever he went - they still do!

You know, you don’t have to believe in Jesus to admire him.

You can like Jesus - even if you're nothing like him!

All kinds of people like and admire Jesus -

maybe because of the way he welcomed everyone,

especially those whom others turned away and rejected;

maybe they followed him because of the way Jesus sought out and found

those who were lost…

• In today’s gospel, one reason the crowds are following Jesus

is that they know he's on his way to Jerusalem

and they think - and many of them hope - that he's going there

to overthrow the Romans and become a king -

- and they want a piece of that action.

But this is definitely NOT what Jesus is looking for or planning.

So to set all these “followers” straight, he says some pretty strong things.

Let’s look at three of them.

 First, he turns to the following crowd and tells them:

 “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,

wife    and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life,

he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26

This is NOT how to win friends and influence people!

Here’s one of those hard sayings of Jesus that easily turn people OFF.

A verse like this might be one reason people give up on the Bible -

or on Jesus himself.

I mean, what does he even mean here?

"HATE your father, your mother, your spouse, your kids, your siblings?"

Yeah! Go home and put that Bible verse into practice

and then come back next week and tell me how it's working for you! 

Well, let's look at this.

In the language Jesus spoke and the culture he lived in,

the sense here was very different from our own understanding

and how we hear it.

What we read in translation as "hate" had, in the original language,

much more a sense of PREFERRING one thing to another.

So, Jesus isn’t so much telling us to hate our family,

as he is asking us to consider preferring HIM to others,

preferring him to ALL others ----  even preferring him - to our own family.

He’s telling the crowds following him that they can’t be his real followers,

long-term, in a truly authentic way,

without making him number one among all their relationships.

That's the way of discipleship.

That's the path Jesus is inviting the crowd - and us -  to walk.

He’s asking a lot here:

he’s asking us to prefer, to put him ahead of everyone else in our lives.

And he’s asking us to prefer, to put him ahead of all things in our lives.

• Now all of this can sound pretty intimidating

especially if you’re hearing it for the first time

- or understanding it for the first time.

"Preferring Jesus" may be an easier proposition to accept

than "hating" family and friends - but it's still a reach!

But Jesus isn’t trying to put you off here or defeat you

right at the get-go.

In the gospel, when Jesus first meets people,

he often simply invites them to join him:

"Come with me. Come and see.  Come walk with me for a while.”

So if that’s you,

if you’re back to church for the first time in a long time

- or the first time ever - we’re just glad you’re here!

We hope you hear Jesus’ invitation to you,

to walk with him, to follow him.

And I hope you'll join us again.

And to folks who have been following Jesus

for a while or even for a long time, Jesus says,

"OK! Let's see how you can step it up!

• And that brings us to the second saying of Jesus we’ll look at today:

 “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me

cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:21

Another hard saying - but he's just being very honest here.

Remember: we catch Jesus here on his way to Jerusalem

- where he’s going to suffer and die.

He wants the crowd to know he isn’t going to Jerusalem to be made king.

This journey he's making is no cake walk. 

He’s heading to Jerusalem where things are going to get really rough,

where he’s going feel very alone - and lost…

So he’s giving us fair warning that if we follow him,

we’ll have to make some sacrifices, too.

He’s telling us there’s a cost to discipleship,

a cost to following in his footsteps. 

• But that shouldn’t come as a surprise to us.

We know there’s a cost to everything

and certainly there's a cost to everything worthwhile in life.

There’s even a cost to being lost.

Being lost costs you.

It costs you time and energy.

It can cost you money.

Being lost might cost you a relationship.

Being lost may cost you your contentment and peace.

Being lost can cost you -- a lot.

And, as we’ll see later on: there’s also a cost to being found.

In fact, that’s the direction in which Jesus is pointing us.

• He’s offering us a different path forward

and he’s telling us what it costs when he says:

Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down

and count the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?”  Luke 14:28

We’ve got to count the cost.

If we’re gonna head in a certain direction in our lives,

whatever that direction is,

first, we need to count the cost!

And sometimes the cost is losing something.

At the end of this gospel passage this morning,

and here’s the third thing

Jesus says that if we want to be his disciples

we have to lose all our possessions.

Does that mean throw away or give away everything we own?

No.  It means we’re called to prefer Jesus and his path

to every one and everything else in our lives.

So first, count the cost of being lost.

You can choose to escape or to ignore that lost feeling

whenever it sneaks up on you

or, you can choose to open yourself up to God’s help

 - as the path to being found.

But before we pick a path forward, we’ll be wise to weigh our options.

And to count the cost…

• There's no big secret here:  the only claim of this message series

is that wherever you are,  however lost you may feel,

following Jesus is your best possible path forward.

And following Jesus is a path, a process, a choice, a doorway

to the experience of “being found”

- and that's something we all want: to be found.

Maybe right now you find that hard to accept -

maybe right now you just don’t believe that.

If that's where you're at, then it is what it is -

but that doesn't need to be the end of the story.

So I want you to come back, I hope you'll come back.

I want you to come back and work with us in this message series

through all this Lost and Found business.

• Because if it’s true - if there’s a chance it’s true -

that following Jesus might help us find ourselves - and find peace -

isn’t that something worth being sure about

- before we dismiss it? before we walk away from it?

• Isn’t it worth being sure that you’re not missing out

on the one thing that could be the key to everything else?

If there’s actually a way to be found, really found, no longer lost

- wouldn’t you want to know about it?

• When you’re lost, following Jesus is so much better

than just scrambling for a way out.

Following Jesus isn't a short cut, he’s not an escape route.

Following Jesus is a way through all the people and all the things

that leave us feeling lost,

a way through our hearts' restlessness and loss,

a way to being found and to finding peace

in a new way of life.

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