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.
No comments:
Post a Comment