14th Sunday after Pentecost

It was the first day of school and the first day that the little boy had ever been to school. The teacher spent the first part of the morning getting the children acquainted with each other and the class. The children had been given a few minutes to explore the different learning centers in the room and the little boy found a book with a beautiful picture of a spaceship. He picked it up and ran over to the teacher.

"Teacher, Teacher, can I read this book please?" he asked excitedly.

Already knowing the answer, the teacher asked, "Do you know your ABC's?"

The little boy shook his head from side to side and his face dropped its excitement. The teacher tried to recover the little boy's excitement and said, "Only people who know their ABC's can read that book. Would you like to learn your ABC's now?"

The little boy dropped his head further and quietly said, "No," and walked away. He didn't quite understand that the teacher was just trying to help him be excited about learning to read, so that he could enjoy the book he found.

At the end of the day the little boy's mom picked him up from school and looked at the classroom with him. He showed her the book with the beautiful spaceship on it. She asked if he had read the book and he said, "No. The teacher won't let me." Mom knew that he had misunderstood something, but the teacher would help him understand.

The next day the children were on the playground during recess and the little boy was playing with his classmates. He was enjoying his new friends but he kept looking at a part of the playground that bigger kids were on. There was a pole that they were sliding down that looked like great fun. To get to the pole the children had to climb up another pole and then swing across hand over hand on a long ladder suspended above the ground. The little boy had never done anything like that, but he wanted to try it.

He walked over to his teacher and asked if he could go slide down the pole. The teacher asked him if he could climb up the pole and then swing across hand over hand to the pole to slide down. He didn't think that he could. The teacher said, "The only people who can slide down that pole are people who can climb the other pole and swing hand over hand to the pole to slide down." The little boy put his head down and walked back to his friends and continued playing.

But he kept looking at the kids playing on the sliding pole. Pretty soon he stood up and walked over to just watch them more closely. It looked like so much fun. He found himself in the line of children waiting to go up the pole and just shuffled along as he watched. Soon he was the next one in line and one of the bigger kids encouraged him on.

He took hold of the pole but didn't know how to shimmy up and was about to give up when an older boy and girl gave him a boost most of the way up. He pulled a little higher and then grabbed the bars going across and started swinging hand over hand. He was going to get there! He reached the end and grabbed at the pole to swing around and down. Down he spun, laughing as he dropped to the ground.

The little boy looked up and saw his teacher smiling at him and he suddenly understood what the teacher had meant. He got up and ran over to the teacher and said, "Teacher, Teacher, I'm ready to learn my ABC's!"

"Choose life," we are told. But what does it mean? What other realistic choices are there? Both the psalmist and the poetic speech of Moses in Deuteronomy tell us that there are really only two choices and everything else falls somewhere in those two choices. Choose life or choose death. Choose to follow God and God's principles or choose to follow other gods and other principles. Choose righteousness or wickedness.

Everything hinges on this one choice and everything we choose is part of making this choice. It's like learning the ABC's in order to read.

Much of the book of Deuteronomy is taken up with explaining this choice of life. It becomes what we eat and what we don't eat, how we prepare our food, how we deal with sanitation issues in our houses, in our town and in the larger world. The choice for life is about how to live in the world in a way that takes care of the world and the people around us.

The choice for life tells us how we will treat our neighbors and how we will help those who have no means of helping themselves. It tells us that we are not to harvest all of the grain in the field because there will be poor who need to glean after the harvesters in order to have just a little food to eat. It tells us that we will always be honest and truthful in our dealings with one another.

The choice for life is a choice that demands a lot of other choices be made to be consistent with this one choice. The choice for life is, first and foremost, a choice to follow God - to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

"That's fine," we say, "but what does that have to do with what I can and can't eat?" Good question. Particularly since many of us feasted on roast pig yesterday and that is one of the things that we are not supposed to eat, according to the rules in the Old Testament.

The choice to follow God or not quickly became a difficult issue. One family knew that they were following God by eating only fruits and vegetables. Another knew that they were following God because they prayed 5 times a day. Yet another family knew that they were following God because of how they dressed and wore their hair. All of these things set them apart from those who didn't follow God and required some sacrifice on their part.

The priests thought it was their job to help people through this confusion and so they came up with ways that everyone could be consistent and know that they were following God's ways and purposes. It would be wrong to say that they just came up with rules willy nilly. They searched the principles that they knew God was trying to teach them and they established rules that made sense, rules that they knew God would be pleased with. It's called the Torah, and although we translate it as the Law, it would be better translated as the Path of Enlightenment. It literally means the way to live. The point was to follow all of these rules on how to conduct your life and you would know that you were following God. That was what was supposed to happen.

As Fr. Casey pointed out last week, the job of the church is to keep us in line. It's not a new task. The "church", or the religious institution, has been trying to keep people in line since long before the time of Jesus. So why don't we just go back to following those rules and be comforted that we are following God's way?

Because it's not enough. It never was and it sure isn't now. That's part of what Jesus was trying to point out. It's only a start to try and follow that particular path because times change and circumstances change and the path has to change and besides, the path is not the point. Loving God with all our heart, soul and mind is the point. And the way we do that today may differ considerably from the way a culture that was in the process of changing from semi-nomadic to agricultural might have done that 3000 years ago.

It's the difference between understanding our worship and love of God as a set of practices that we have to get exactly right or principles that we believe God is trying to teach us. The path, or the Torah, was really about principles and Jesus knew that and tried to express it when he taught people.

The principle about loving your neighbor was all bound up in rules that governed who you could talk to and when you could talk to them and what position you would be in relative to the rest of the community if you broke one of the rules and talked to the wrong person at the wrong time. Jesus ate with tax collectors and other people that he wasn't supposed to associate with according to the rules of the day. He touched lepers and told them they were healed and made them acceptable to the community by doing so.

Jesus pointed out that the rules were about a principle of treating people with respect and that it wasn't enough to treat only some people with respect and leave others out of the community. But that is what the rules did because that is what rules always do. They set up a line between those who are in and those who are not.

I'm not suggesting that we do away with all rules. I haven't made that suggestion since I was about 20! We need rules because we need boundaries for ourselves. What we must remember is that the rules are not enough. They are only the way in which we are trying to live out the principles at this moment and in this culture. It made perfect sense to have a rule that said "you shall not wear woolen blends" (Lev. 19:19 my translation) in Moses' time because they would have torn apart the first time you washed them or they got wet and you would've been at least a little chilled and perhaps quite embarrassed.

What I'm suggesting is that we take Jesus seriously when he says that we cannot be his disciples and just follow the rules as they are handed down. It's not enough. This is the tricky part with rules. They are good and they give us guidance to better follow a principle, but they are not themselves the principle. As soon as we focus on the rule we have lost focus on the principle.

The Ten Commandments tell us we are to honor our father and mother. But as soon as we focus on that as a rule we lose sight of the principle that we are to love God with all our heart and soul and mind. We show God love by honoring those who have participated with God in our creation and those who have brought us up to be in relationship with God. But Jesus says that unless we hate our family members we cannot be his disciples. You don't have to be a logic major to see that there is a problem here.

Jesus is pointing out that the rules get in the way of following the principle, and the principle is to love God completely and totally. So completely and totally that nothing, not even family, should get in between God and us. This was even more radical to the people listening to Jesus than it is to us, if that is possible.

In Jesus' day people took their sense of self from being tied to a family. We would speak of someone as the son of so and so or the daughter of so and so. The entire society was based on children caring for and honoring their parents because that was the social security net at the time. And that was the only one. Not to care for one's family meant to sentence them to extreme poverty and homelessness.

So why would Jesus tell people that they had to hate their family? This hardly seems like the picture we paint of his personality. The clue, I believe, is in what he goes on to say. Luke doesn't have Jesus just stop on the road, tell everyone to hate his or her family and then start whistling down the road again. He explains that when we set out to do something we must count the cost. Even when we set out to follow God and live by the principles He has given us.

Because there is always a cost to love. And that is what following God is about. Being in love, loving. Choosing to love completely so that nothing and no one adulterates that love. We understand it better when we apply it to our own lives and families. We want our family to love us first, before they love their friends and co-workers, their work or their play. We want our spouse to love us more than they love golf or work.

Jesus knows that our lives and loyalties are easily divided, but he also knows that God's love, living forever in the presence of his Father, is worth the sacrifice. It is important to know not only what Jesus is saying, but also the tone in which he says it. Jesus is not standing over us to reject us and he is not saying that his Father is doing that either. He is simply explaining that this is the way that creation works. If you put things ahead of God then you will not find God. If you put God first you will sacrifice anything to keep God first, but you will gain all things that are of any importance by being in God's presence. It's like learning the ABC's in order to read.

Is your family important? Do you love one another? Then that relationship exists within the bounds of God, as God is love. By putting God first we are not losing that relationship, but are learning how to be more loving and more caring for our families' needs than we could possibly be without God. What Jesus is telling us is something that many of us learn the hard way as we are growing up.

If you are still in school you might want to plug your ears for a minute so you don't have to hear something that you won't really believe. Of course, you can listen if you want to, but you won't really learn this until you learn it on your own, not by me telling you.

What Jesus is telling us is that love costs. It costs the sacrifice of self and of selfish desires. In seeking to love our neighbor we give up the desire to take what another has or to deprive them of their life and livelihood. We give up the idea of taking advantage of people for our own ends because people are their own ends. We choose to love and we choose life, which means we choose to respect the dignity of every human being, allowing them to be responsible and accepting our own responsibilities as part of living in a community.

What Jesus is also telling us is that love is worth more than any cost we could ever pay. Even the cost of our lives. To love is to be in God's presence. To be in God's presence is to know that we are accepted and loved as wonderful creations of the source of all goodness. To be fully known, fully understood, fully loved, fully accepted and fully forgiven is to be loved by God and to be filled with God's joy. In that state, the state we call heaven, we will know what it is to love God completely.

In the mean time, we can choose life. And learn our ABC's.