Are You All In?

We’re still on the road with Jesus. For the last month or so, ever since Jesus “set his face for Jerusalem,” we‘ve been walking the dusty roads between Galilee and Judea with him. All the while, Jesus has been flinging hard words at us. If you become one of my followers, be prepared for conflict with your friends and family, he told us last month. Just last week he told us not to assume that we are the high-status people, and to invite the riffraff to our parties rather than our families and friends. It’s hot, we’re tired, and we’ve had enough of Jesus’ hard teachings. “That’s it, Master, no more. Leave us alone.”

Maybe Jesus can already see Jerusalem and the events that will happen there – if not with his naked eye, then perhaps in his mind’s eye. So he flings his hardest teaching yet at us. He tells us to be prepared for the cost, the full cost of truly following him. “You have to hate your family members,” he says. “You have to follow me all the way to unjust execution, if necessary.” “You have to give away everything you have.” “Wait, wait, you can’t mean all that Jesus, can you?” He can, and he does.

OK, the rabbis of Jesus’ day were given to hyperbole. Maybe Jesus overstated his expectations for their shock value, so that he could get our attention. So what, as Luke tells it, did Jesus want his followers – and by extension us – to hear? In a nutshell, it’s not a piece of cake to follow him. We don’t follow him because it feels good. We don’t follow him when life calms down and we have time to get around to it. Being Jesus’ disciple is not a spectator sport, as if you can watch the clergy try to do it, but sit in the bleachers yourself.

When we decide to follow Jesus in a serious way, we are making a deep commitment. We are committing ourselves to putting God before all the other commitments in our lives, before family, social class, nationality, before all those pieces of our lives that are not God. We are committing ourselves to a way of life that puts the needs and desires of others ahead of our own needs and desires. We are committing ourselves to working for the good of all creation. We are committing ourselves to travelling lightly with our achievements and our “stuff,” while acknowledging our responsibility to share what we have. We are making a commitment to letting ourselves be transformed by God. As we travel behind Jesus, we promise to be ready to respond to God’s call to grow in ways that may seem difficult, risky, and strange. And we know, that, at some point along that road, Jesus will turn to us and say, “Are you all in?”

In effect, Paul posed that same question to Philemon and the others to whom the brief letter bearing Philemon’s name is addressed. Oddly, this letter is the only truly personal letter of Paul’s that has been preserved. And sadly, we don’t know much about it. You can easily figure out the broad outlines of the story. The slave Onesimus ran away from his master, Philemon, possibly also taking money or property. He met up with Paul in prison, where Paul converted him. Now Paul writes to Philemon asking him to take Onesimus back as a fellow follower of Jesus and promising to reimburse Philemon for any expenses. What we don’t know are where Paul was imprisoned, how he and Onesimus got together, and, most important, what Paul means when he asks Philemon to receive Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.”

We do know this: whatever we now think about slavery – and some would criticize Paul for not taking a strong stand against slavery – Paul was following Roman law in returning Onesimus to Philemon. Upon Onesimus’s return, Philemon could have severely punished him, hobbled him, as was done to African slaves in the American South and in South Africa, or sold him away. Instead, Paul asks Philemon to treat Onesimus very differently, to treat him as a fellow member of a Christian community, and even, if possible, to send Onesimus back to Paul. In effect, Paul has forsaken the expectations of his culture, and is subtly undermining the system of slavery by reminding Philemon of his common humanity with Onesimus as a fellow follower of Christ. He is further asking Philemon to treat Onesimus differently than what law and custom would permit. And he does this, not by trying to coerce Philemon, but by gently requesting that Philemon follow his own example and treat Onesimus with love.

I wonder what we would do in Philemon’s place. I couldn’t help thinking of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and another letter, the letter that Huck Finn planned to write to turn in the runaway slave Jim. The laws and the customs of the day tell Huck that Jim should be returned to his owner. Huck even drafts a letter. But then when he realizes all that Jim has done for him, how Jim has been a friend and father to him, Huck tears the letter up. Huck is definitely all in. I wonder if I would have had the courage to do what Huck did.

Even the reading from the prophet Jeremiah indirectly poses a question of commitment to us. Here Jeremiah uses the image of the potter shaping and reshaping the pot to suggest the way God works God’s transformations within us. However, Jeremiah is not addressing individuals but rather the covenanted community, the Israelites who have promised to follow God’s law. As we hear throughout this long book, the Israelites get entangled in untrustworthy political alliances, amass wealth, exploit the poor, and visit all kinds of injustices on each other. Jeremiah warns them here of the dire consequences of forsaking the promises they made to God. He assures them that God will force then to undergo a period of transformation, which indeed, as it turns out, happens when they are sent into exile.

And so: are you all in? Are you committed to Jesus and willing to pay the cost of following him? What examples might we choose to illustrate what full commitment looks like? Actually, we have some wonderful examples of what such total commitment to the beliefs of one’s heart actually looks like – even when those beliefs challenge the status quo of the culture around them. Think about those who enter vowed religious life, convents and monasteries. They truly give up all their possessions, traditionally even their clothes and their name, and they commit to a life in common with others, traditionally a life of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. How about those who took part in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s? The Freedom Riders challenged the status quo of segregated buses by riding interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups and by defying local laws or customs that mandated segregated seating. Those who took part in the Montgomery bus boycott to protest segregated municipal buses walked to work for 381 days until the city finally caved in and allowed people of all races to sit where they pleased. Those of you who are athletes know the single-minded commitment that is necessary to excel in any sport. We were all charmed last month as we watched Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, Alys Raisman, Laurie Hernandez, and Madison Kocian defend the USA’s gold medal title in the team all-around gymnastics event in the Olympics. Those young women had practiced for years to get to that place. They were definitely all in!

And are we? What does being all in look like for us? John Calvin suggests that there are four different ways in which we can show our commitment to Christ. The first is through self-denial, i.e., not seeing ourselves as the center of the universe, but rather recognizing that of God in everyone else and affirming our kinship with all people. Second, we can bear our cross, i.e., face whatever suffering comes our way in life without complaint, knowing that Christ bears it with us, trusting in God for the outcome of what we bear, and sharing the suffering of others. Third, we can meditate on eternal life, i.e., we can seek to understand ever more deeply who we are and whose we are, that we are all beloved children of God. And fourth, we can use God’s gifts properly, i.e., we can live a simple life, knowing that we are on a spiritual pilgrimage. We are called to live neither ascetically nor overindulgently as we remember that we will ultimately be accountable to God for how we have used God gifts. To which I would add one more: we are called to recognize that salvation, spiritual wholeness and health, are not do-it-yourself projects. We are all in this together. Just as Paul wrote to Philemon and the others in his Christian community, so we are also called to build up each other and to call each other to greater and greater love.

Are you all in?