Monday, September 5, 2016

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle C

Luke 14:25-33
In my home town of Helena, Montana, there was a place called Gerties Drive Inn at one end of Main Street. It was a hamburger joint, and you could get root beer and root beer floats. It was one of those places where you could drive up to a parking space, give your order into a speaker, and a young lady would come out with your order on a tray which could attach to your rolled down window. It was a very popular place, and during most of my youth, even into my college years, it was a hangout for teenagers and young families. Alas, it no longer exists, and places like McDonalds have overwhelmed these home-grown enterprises.
My grandfather never owned his own home or a new car. He worked as a bartender for a while, and a salesman in Montgomery Ward which for those of you who are not as old as I am, was the Walmart's of that day. My grandmother, although she was a trained nurse, had decided that part of being a lady was not to work outside of the home, leaving the providing for the family to the husband and father.
One day when I was driving my grandfather to a doctor's appointment, we passed Gertie's drive in. He remarked that the person who opened the place had invited him to go into business with him, which would involve a commitment of money and time, and would indeed he could lose everything. My grandfather turned down the offer, and told me that he would always regret that decision. If he had taken the chance he would be rich.
Today Jesus tells us what it takes to be a disciple. He is not telling us what it takes to get into heaven. That's a different question entirely. But he is telling us that if we want to walk the road he walked and make a real difference in the world, as he did, it will take three things; we will have to hate all those we would normally love; we would have to take up our crosses and follow him; and we would have to renounce all our possessions. My grandfather was faced with a similar challenge, and shrank from it. His life could have been completely different if he had only taken a chance.
Mother Theresa is being canonized today. She is an example of what it means to be a disciple. As a teenager, she wanted to give herself to Christ. She chose to enter a teaching order, the “Sisters of Loreto” and spent some time in Ireland learning English. In India, she learned Bengali, and spent twenty years teaching middle-class Indian children, and eventually be came headmistress of the school. She became increasingly appalled by the poverty she saw, and in 1948 she began her true vocation of ministering to the poorest of the poor. She gathered some young Indian Christian women about her, and that became the seed of the Missionaries of Charity, now consisting of more than 5000 sisters. She also started an order of priests and another of brothers. She went on to become an international celebrity and won a Nobel prize. She was honored all over the world during her lifetime, and shared her message with the United Nations, with presidents and Queen Elizabeth, lectured the pope, and even returned to Albania where she was honored there, despite the fact that the country had exiled or executed everyone who was a religious leader.
So what did she hate? She had a large family, and after she joined the Sisters of Loreto, she never saw any of them again. She had many close friends in the Sisters of Loreto, but after she left them she had no more contact with them. She did not, obviously, hate them. But the hebrew word which is translated as “hate” means something more like “to turn away from, to detach oneself from”. It means that you would never let anything come between you and what God is calling you to do.
So what was her cross? We have a lot of information about her interior life; after her death her confessor wrote about it. Saint Theresa, as a sister of Loreto, began to have the experience of hearing the voice of Jesus, which lead her to her true ministry. But after she established the Missionaries of Charity, she no longer had that interior re-assurance. In fact, according to her confessor, she felt abandoned by God. She even went through phases where she wasn't sure there was a god. And yet, her public face showed no sign of doubt or disbelief. That was her cross. That was the burden she carried all her life. And how did she renounce all her possessions? Even when she became a Sister of Loreto she didn't have much, but after she answered what she called “the call within a call” she had even less. Her earthly possessions consisted of a rosary and a change of clothing; one to wear while the other was washed. She had no car or indeed no home; she slept on the floor even when she was being put up in fine hotels in New York.
And she has been canonized. When I read her life story and see how clearly she followed Christ's call to discipleship, my first reaction is that that's impossible for me and maybe for most of us. But when you think about it, Mother Teresa couldn't have accomplished what she did without the support of literally thousands of people who held down jobs, raised families, owned cars and homes – because for every Teresa, for every Francis, there have to be people who do earn money and can give some of it away. And Mother Teresa herself recognized this when she said “it is not doing great things; it is doing little things well.” To be a disciple doesn't mean to do what Mother Teresa did. That's a special calling. But it does mean that as we go about our daily affairs, we do everything well; it means that we struggle to keep our priorities straight; Jesus comes first; we gratefully accept the burdens we have, because they bring us close to the cross; and we look at our posessions with the eyes of the poor, remembering always how privileged we are compared to most people in the world. I'm not giving you or I an excuse; because becoming a real disciple, although it's within everyone's grasp, is just as hard for us as for Mother Teresa. But well worth it.