Monday, September 10, 2007

Today’s text

Luke 14:25-27

Now large crowds were traveling with [Jesus]; and he turned and said to them, “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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Prayer

You certainly know how to thin out a crowd, Jesus. Who can listen to this and want you? Many must have withdrawn from your side. Others, too enthralled with you to leave, surely scratched their skulls raw wondering if you meant it, and if so, how?

Is this a case of pedagogical exaggeration? I guess. But this takes the sting away too easily, glibly passing over the oddness I have always felt about you.

Loving you makes us odd, or at least it always has such effect on me. I hold fast the outrageous claim that you live, and live incarnate in the lives of all who love. I confess you as Lord of my and all life, believing that our lives do not belong to us but are to be lived faithfully in your service.

And I do this in a culture that celebrates the “cult of me,” worshiping king ego, sacrificing soul, substance even children to the fashionable whim of the moment with little thought of what endures. So much of it leaves me cold, a chill revealing the very good news that my heart belongs to a world that makes me strange in this one that so frequently lacks loving reverence for life.

So permit me to odd again, Jesus. For, I don’t find your words strange at all; arresting certainly, but beneath their surface flows the current of freedom carrying us to love what is Love and to find our home in what endures.

Fill our senses with the world of grace you bring, Jesus, that we may be the full expression your love intends in us. Freed and unhindered by the judgments of others, we will focus solely on what love and grace require. Strange it is, that any should find this odd.

Pr. David L. Miller