12th Sunday after Trinity, 2025. Year C.
Philemon 10,12-17; Luke 14:25-33
Abandon your family and give up all that you have. This is what Jesus tells us we must do in order to follow him.
The NSRV uses even stronger language – you must hate your family and give up all your possessions.
Strong words for us in Northwood today – many of us have many possessions that we would need to give up.
Strong words for the crowds that Jesus is talking to on the road to Jerusalem. They had fewer possessions that we do now, but for them family was the anchor of their entire existence.
Your family was your social circle. Your family was your financial security if things went wrong. They would stand up for you and testify on your behalf if you were accused in court. Land, the primary source of wealth for most people wasn’t held individually, but but families and clans.
In our atomised and individualistic secular western world of here and now, it is probably hard for most of us to imagine how strong those familial ties were.
Yet Jesus seems to be asking those who would follow him to give up all of this – all ties to the world, in order to follow him.
Those of you who were here last week and heard me preach then might be thinking that in my analysis of John the Baptist’s way of withdrawing from the world, and Jesus’ way of engaging with the world, I got it wrong – that even Jesus is now advocating withdrawing from the world.
Our epistle reading, from the very unusual letter of Paul to Philemon, seems to show that even his early followers didn’t necessarily read it this way.
The letter to Philemon can be very challenging to our modern sensibilities, and shows how much progress we have made in two thousand years, on the subject of slavery at least.
Paul disappoints many of us I think in this letter in the way that he accepts that Onesimus is a slave, and returns him to his master. This is the same Paul who in Galatians says that in Christ there is neither slave or free, and we might feel that this logic would extend to wanting to abolish the status of slavery entirely.
Instead we get a practical outworking of his message in Galatians.
He invites Philemon to receive Onesimus back, not as a runaway slave, but as a brother in Christ. He asks Philemon to see that in Christ neither of them is a slave, but also, of course, neither of them are free in the traditional sense either, because both of them belong to Christ.
To misquote Orwell, enslaving oneself to God is true freedom.
And this is what Jesus is demanding of those who follow him. They must break out of their existing social network, which both sustains and constrains them. That network brings them a measure of freedom, but it also enslaves them to its needs.
What it does not do is provide them with the support and resources that they will need if they are to truly follow Jesus.
The two parables he tells in quick succession illustrate this.
Both of them illustrate situations where people embark on a project with insufficient resources to complete, and in both cases the end result, easily predicted at the outset, are disastrous.
Jesus is warning us that following him is not something to be undertaken lightly or trivially. We must have sufficient resources to complete the undertaking that we are embarking upon.
Jesus, I think, is not asking us to start this by making ourselves less prepared though.
What he is highlighting is that we need to cast off things that might hold us back, or prevent us from properly following him.
Family in Jesus’ time was a support network, but it was also a place of hierarchy, control and authority. We may or may not have a different experience of family today, but in his time, the family controlled your life. To truly follow God, you needed to free yourself from that control.
Possessions are another thing that can keep us from God. In the case of Philemon, his possession of Onesimus is certainly something that is preventing him from properly following Jesus. But, like the One Ring, he must give up that possession voluntarily in order to truly benefit.
But this does not mean that we are separating ourselves from the world. Jesus’ language may be stronger than we expect, but that is because in those days the ties that bound people were stronger. You couldn’t be ambivalent about your family, or be semi-detached from it – you were either part of it, and submitted to the authority of the family patriarch, or you were not part of it.
Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem, and his death on the cross. People who wanted to follow him on that road, would need to give up everything, including their own lives.
Jesus is talking about his here and now in what he says here.
In the description of the early church that we get in Acts, we see how his followers fulfilled that vision in the light of not just the crucifixion, but also the resurrection.
They may have left their families, but they had formed a new family, the church. A much more equal family. Again, we may look at it and see the leaders and followers, the hierarchy, and the divisions between Jews and Greeks. But for its time, it was a place of radical equality and inclusion and freedom. We still have the church today, as a family that everyone here, and many many others all belong to. A family that supports, cares and loves all its members. A family that we seek to make a safe place for everyone, which is why we have safeguarding policies and procedures and training. That is not bureaucracy – it is living out God’s vision for the church.
The early church members sold everything, and held all their possessions in common. We no longer hold all our possessions in common, but we do hold this church building in common, between all of us in this community, as a place where we can meet with each other and with God.
That is why we ask the members of the congregation to contribute according to their talents, in both money and time and skills, to help maintain and improve this place, that it might be a beacon of God’s presence in the world – a physical sign of the kingdom that is to come. That is why we contribute as a parish to the work of the diocese according to our talents, so that other places may also be beacons of God’s kingdom in the world.
If we seek to follow Jesus, and I hope all of us here present seek to follow him in some way, then we need to be prepared for the journey ahead, because it will not be a straightforward road, and it will take us to places that we never expected to go, and lead us to experiences that we never expected to encounter.
Our existing resources will never be adequate for this, and it is not a journey that we can undertake on our own.
Instead, we must learn not to rely on our own strength, our own resources, our own networks.
We must place our trust in the Spirit, in God’s love for us, and in each other.
Amen.