Dispossessed

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.03.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 14: 25-33

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Oh, Jesus.  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

Some weeks, that pattern of reading we call the lectionary serves up something easy on the soul.  Jesus, telling us to love one another.  Paul, talking about loving one another.

Love sermons are always easier.  Love is a many splendored thing.  Love lifts us up where we belong!  All you need is love!  

But easy doesn’t come most weeks.  Jesus is, well, he’s not easy, most of the time.  This passage from Luke this morning just hits hard, from the first gut punch about hating your family to the two hard tales about being an unprepared fool to the finishing blow about our possessions.  

None of them are easy to hear, but it’s that last one, that last moment from Luke’s remembrance, it’s that which hung with me this week, that echoes through my consciousness.

I think it’s because possessiveness is such a radical part of what our culture pours into us, such an integral part of how we are asked to value ourselves and our world.  We are taught to see ourselves as an agglomeration of things, as a collection of objects, our happiness defined by the things we consume.  Possessions possess us, just as surely as if we were a little girl with a bad complexion and an usually flexible neck living in a Georgetown brownstone.

And so I sat in air conditioned comfort in my comfortable suburban rambler streaming internet radio over my fiber optic line, staring wordless at this very laptop, my motorcycle sitting outside of my double glazed bay window.  I hear Jesus say:  “You cannot be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions.”  How to understand this?  How can I, who have so much, understand my commitment to Jesus when he’s giving me this as a baseline?

This week as I meditated on this difficult story of the life of Jesus, I fished around in my soul for other stories that might make sense of this

Because we are creatures of narrative.  Stories stick with you, clinging to your consciousness, shaping and forming who you are and your understanding of life.

Those stories go back a ways.  I remember reading Sam and the Firefly as a little kid, that old P.D. Eastman book about the adventures of Sam the owl and Gus the firefly.  That story taught me the power of words, I think, their magic as they hang in the air.

I remember losing an entire  week one summer reading the Lord of the Rings saga, which shaped my understanding of the insidious human hunger for power.  I was in fourth grade when I read it, and we were at my grandparents house in Athens, Georgia.  I’m not sure I would have remembered to eat that week, if it hadn’t been for Grandmother’s tendency to stock the house before our arrival with entire cases of Coca Cola and multiple boxes of Count Chocula.

And from when I was older, I remember a book from a class at the University of Virginia that helped me understand the impact of possessions.  It was called Fantasy and Social Value, and it was a legendary gut, the kind of class that’s pretty much a guaranteed A.  You read classic sci fi and fantasy, and then talked about how those stories illuminated social issues.  

I didn’t actually ever take that class, mostly because I think I would have been faintly embarrassed to tell my parents about it.  You’re taking what?  

But I read every one of the books that was assigned, because, well, they might have been left lying around my fraternity house.  One of the stories that hung with me was a classic 1974 novel by Ursula K Le Guin.  The Dispossessed, it was called, a story about a man named Shevek.  He was a scientist who lived on Annares, a stark utopian world.  Annares was a colony of anarchists who had fled Urras, their earth-like homeworld, with the intent of creating a perfect world where everyone has given up their possessions.  Nothing is owned by anyone, nothing at all.  In fact, the very idea of having possessions is viewed as an affront to the philosophy of Annares.

Which makes it...well...completely imperfect, because the people who live on that world still somehow manage to have all of the same flaws.  They may not own anything, but they are perfectly capable of harboring resentments.  They may live austere lives on their near-desert planet, but they still were capable of violence and distrust.

Their lack of possessions didn’t make them any less self-interested.  We can be dispossessed, yet still possessed with the desire to force our will on others.  We can live with nothing, yet still have the hunger for control that shatters human life.  That desire goes deep in us, deeper than the things we own, deeper than the stuff around us.

If we want to commit ourselves to the radical path of compassion taught by Jesus, that desire needs to be let go, and that’s particularly hard for us.  It would also have been particularly hard for Luke’s audience to hear this message.

From the style, language, and emphases of Luke’s Gospel, we can tell that it was written for an audience that would have had issues with possessions.

It’s written in the form of a classical Greco-Roman history, which wasn’t quite history as we tend to understand it.  We often make the mistake of approaching history like a sequence of dates and facts, a collection of flash card datapoints.  In the ancient world, history was first and foremost storytelling, to be mixed with poetry and adventure and song.   Meaning, ancient history was less like a textbook, and more like Hamilton or Jesus Christ Superstar.

It uses sophisticated language written for an audience that was used to reading.  Reading itself was a rarity in the ancient world, a luxury for the powerful and the privileged.  That this was a story meant to be read made the inclusion of this passage even more pointed.  Here, every soul who was a member of Luke’s community would have felt challenged as we feel challenged.

As, frankly, they would have throughout Luke’s Gospel.  Because it was written by and for the privileged and the comfortable, you might think Luke would steer away from saying anything uncomfortable.  

It’s exactly the opposite.  Luke’s gospel makes a point of retaining every part of the oral and written traditions about Jesus that talked about wealth.  Luke, more than all of the other Gospels, talks about the perils of wealth, power, and social position, because that was the primary challenge of the spirit facing Luke’s readers.

It’s easy, in a position of wealth, to take that wealth for granted, to take the things you own and the stuff around you as a mark of your holiness.  Clearly, Jesus must love me, because I have so many nice things!

This is balderdash.

Possessiveness is utterly alien to any Christian who wants to walk the path of Jesus. The desire to acquire is meaningless to those who yearn most deeply for God.

Of all of my spiritual teachers, it was CS Lewises’ master George McDonald who most firmly challenged the life possessive.  McDonald was a storyteller, who wrote strange and dream-like fairy tales.  He was the pastor of a couple of small Congregationalist churches, and wrote novels to provide for his wife and nine children.  Meaning, he wasn’t someone who had a lot of stuff.  From his hard, practical Scots mysticism, he pushed hard against the impact of being captive to what we imagine we own:

The man who for consciousness of well-being depends on anything but life, the life essential, is a slave...

and:

But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.

and, here sounding remarkably like a Scottish Yoda:

If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things you have not?

The mystic renounces desire for power in all of its forms, be they economic or coercive. That possessiveness simply ceases to seem meaningful. The unsatisfied, ever-empty hunger of the consumer is unknown and unwanted. That doesn't mean living a joyless, stale, or austere life. It simply means a different way of standing in relation to creation, one that is far richer and more abundant. As MacDonald puts it:

He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made them has them.

Next to the touch of a breeze, or the smell of the honeysuckle, or the laughter of your children, or the bright moon on a clear Spring evening, the cloying cornucopia of consumerism seems a rather empty nothing.

Like the Gospel itself, none of these things are our possession.  

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN