Sunday, September 8, 2013

The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa

Deuteronomy 30:15-30; Luke 14:25-33

John Arthur Nunes, newly appointed to a professorship of Christian values and Public life at Valparaiso University, recently wrote about the beginnings of his new adventure moving from his role as an executive director of a non-profit religious group providing a ministry of relief and care to those in need around the world to a new beginning as a teacher of Christian values in an academic setting.

He wrote, “A life transition—like any effort to follow Jesus—is stressful.  Packing, unpacking, moving from one set of commitments to another, focusing on a new future. It might be best summarized by the ancient North African Bishop Tertullian’s interpretation of Luke’s Gospel  (Take up your cross and follow me)  “Take up your Stress and Tortures”

Once again our scriptures bring us in a forceful way to the drama of what it was, and what it is, and what it might be to be a disciple, that is a follower of Jesus. Once again we are given the narrative that is ours to discern and discover of what speaks to our own “being”, our own experiences, our own narrative of patterns in life where we like Dr. Nunes, experience the “cost of discipleship”. That is the experience of that stress or conflict as we find ourselves in our own lives either literally or figuratively packing or unpacking, moving from one set of commitments to another, focusing on a new future.

For those literally following Jesus in that countryside where today’s Gospel lesson takes place, Jesus captures that sense of the dramatic (as he does in Luke’s Gospel), upping the ante for those who might not yet quite understand just how deep and broad the commitment to a new future of following him may be. To follow Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem, one will be entering a new focused circle of family, literally leaving behind relationships and yes even possessions. (Because you can’t take your mother or your herd with you on this journey to Jerusalem.) If you are following on this journey it is going to cost you some, so “do the math” as it were, consider the “price of admission” to this journey, and if you choose, pick up your cross, and follow me.

Imagine the “Packing and Unpacking” literal and figurative for those deciding in those moments to set their eyes and hearts on this new future and commitment.

But surely you do and have had the experience of your own, “packing and unpacking” as you yourself follow Jesus. You yourselves have known by the nature of being alive and the nature of your lives of faith, those times when you may have literally or figuratively “left home” to be in the company of others who would lead you to a new future. You yourselves in time and in place surely have at times done the “accounting” and have made decisions in life that have cost you something when following a path that you know has been informed by your relationship with Christ. Perhaps spend a bit of time this day or this week pondering these things.

Recently in my prayer time I have re-discovered the power of walking the labyrinth. If you don’t know the labyrinth, it is a patterned walk with one entrance and one exit that leads you on a journey to a defined center, then leads you back out again from the pattern. The labyrinth pattern is an ancient one, pre-dating Christianity, though adopted by Christians and non-Christians as a tool for meditation or prayer.

The walking of the labyrinth for me gives me a pattern of journey that allows me to shed those things that distract me from centering my heart on the presence of the holy, leading me to a center where I can leave those things and lift my eyes to see what the holy might bring. The journey then back out of the labyrinth reminding me that I take that unity of the sacred center back to the margins of life, where surely the “stressors and tortures” of following Christ are felt as they conflict the uncertain and unsteady forces of the world in which we live.

I share with you my journal from my walk in the labyrinth this week, pondering our Gospel lesson today.

“I have prayed again the labyrinth and there I was greeted again and again, as I pondered in my heart the faith of generations and the demands placed on that faith. And there I imagined their and my own struggle to find reconciliation of the conflict that exists between my own need and desire for a deep pool of peace, Grace, and Joy — that place I find in a sacred Center — where life is full, congruent, authentic, and at peace.

And the demands that this Jesus seems to place on us — Where we know that when we do the accounting of following Jesus’ way, it’s going to cost us something, the cost typically showing up in the “conflict” or “stress” of “carrying a cross” emboldened with an ethic Jesus has taught us.

Then I realize again as I walked the labyrinth, at least today, that the journey to the sacred center is that place of becoming aware of our “true selves”, that is the self as God sees it.

It is that place where all the fear, mistrust, doubts, desires, and distractions of life that impede the joining of souls and beings, are peeled away on this journey, and offered on the cold stone Altar, and there in that sacred center is the opportunity to join with beauty, love, hope, joy, awe.

I began the pathway back out of the labyrinth, now making my way back out to the edges, a distance growing from the “sacred center” now aware that this is exactly what is taken to the edges, the margins of life, the sacred center. Back to the complexities and challenges of life and the decisions that are to be made in it.

The accounting I have this day, the cost of the journey, a few shekels of doubt, fear, mistrust, uncertainty. The real cost I realize in following Christ to that “Sacred Center” of course is the offering of the true Self to the edges and margins of life/the world.  Full of joy, and awe, of peace, and of Quiet, of certitude and grounding. Back out here now on the edges, I do the “accounting”.  This is worth the price of admission.