The Living Waters Sept 6, 1998

The Living Waters

A Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-20
Luke 14:25-33

Coming out as a Saint
I've got a surprise for you. An early Christmas present all wrapped up to help us get ready for our All Saints' Day Come-as-a-Saint Eucharist and Party. I've got a saint in this box. Open it up and you'll see.
We pass the box around the congregation. No saint jumps out when it's first opened. Often the peek inside is greeted with laughter. There is a mirror in the bottom of the box.
We are all of us saints. Saint's aren't perfect people, often not even what we think of as good people. They make their share of mistakes and some are very odd indeed. Many of them would be very difficult to live with. But they are all seeking God in their own way. Saints are people who know how to give themselves for others. People who know how to love.

We are all of us saints. "Saints in training" -- with lots of room to grow, but saints nonetheless. But our saint's box is closed up again now. What's it like inside a box? Or in a closet? Dark, scary, lonely. Like being in prison or trapped in slavery. What is it that keeps us boxed up? Our culture's expectations? Homophobia? Even our family and their expectations? Don't you just hate it -- being kept locked up so we aren't free to be ourselves?
"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple."
I don't think Jesus is talking about not loving our families. He's talking about loving God first -- like we read in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy and Jesus are both talking about idolatry -- about putting something before God. And even good things can be sinful and hateful if they separate us from God.
Anything that we hold onto too tightly -- families or friends, our work or possessions -- we are likely to lose, or to be imprisoned and enslaved by it. In that case that choice -- even a choice for our family -- is a choice for death and curses. It is a box that traps our lives. It is a closet that shuts away love.
We need to let go of the things that lock us up in boxes and closets to be free to become who God wants us to be. We need to release them to have them back again. We need to let them go to love them truly.
You've probably heard it said: "If you love someone, set them free; if they return to you, they are really yours, if not, they never were yours at all." Maybe that's what Paul means when he writes to Philemon about Onesimus: "Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever." Paul asks Philemon to give up a slave so that he might receive back a brother. And Paul offers Philemon and Onesimus this choice for freedom because he himself is "a prisoner of Christ Jesus."
Prisoners of Christ free others. Christ sets people free. Jesus tells us that the truth sets people free. To follow him is to find truth and freedom.
But in that paradoxical world where prisoners of Christ can give freedom, things aren't that simple. Jesus reminds us that the cross is expensive. The freedom to be who God wants us to be is expensive. It can cost us everything: family & friends, jobs & possessions. BUT final payoff of the cross is life & freedom -- freedom to live, to love, and (like Paul) to set others free.

Jesus calls us to come out of our prisons and boxes and closets.
Come out as a follower of Christ.
Come out of the closet and become the saint God calls you to be.

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