Psychiatrist Rachel Remen tells a story about a young skier who got lost in the mountains during a snow storm.[1] He was found and transported to the hospital, but he had spent three days in below-freezing temperatures. Even after treatment, one of his feet was so frostbitten that it was beyond saving. The doctors told him that they would have to amputate that foot to save his life. The young man refused. For days, he kept ignoring the pleas of the doctors and his family, while the gangrene in his leg kept worsening. One day, as the man lay dying, his fiancée couldn't take it anymore. She took off her diamond engagement ring and slipped it onto his blackened toe. It sparkled with life and light on top of the dead and rotting flesh.
"I hate this [stupid] foot," the brokenhearted fiancée sobbed. "If you want this foot so much, why don't you marry it? You're going to have to choose, you can't have us both."
The next day, the young man scheduled surgery to remove the foot. Dr. Remen asked him later what had made him decide to amputate. He said that seeing the diamond on his toe had shocked him. He had realized that he had been more attached to keeping his foot than he had been committed to his life, and especially to his life with the woman he loved. He remembered that it had been the promise of life with his fiancée that had kept him going during those three horrible days alone in the snow. Yet later, the attachment to his foot had kept him from choosing life.
Remen points out that there is a difference between "attachment" and "commitment." Attachments to things, to people, to "the way things have always been" can close down new life and possibilities; they can trap us and bind us and drag us down. Yet commitments open us up to life; they might feel constricting sometimes, but they point the way to freedom.[2] Think of how a fierce attachment to "our tribe" can lead us to war, violence, and exclusion of others, but a commitment to our group leads us to caring participation for the good of all.
Today's readings all show people who are put before hard choices between attachments and commitments. In Jeremiah, the people of Israel are called to change who they are as a nation, to turn from their selfish ways and to embrace right relationship to God and to their fellow human beings. They are called to give up their attachment to their "own plans," to choose to commit themselves to God's Ways.
In Paul's letter to Philemon, Paul also sets Philemon before a difficult choice. Does the slave-owning Christian give up his attachment to his useful slave Onesimus? Does he renounce the money and ease that keeping this man enslaved could bring him? Does he give up his attachment to the clear hierarchies of the Roman world? Or does he free his slave, committing himself to a completely new kind of Christian freedom? Does Philemon commit himself to the radical Gospel call that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, but that all are one in Christ Jesus?
And then there are Jesus's words to us in Luke. These are probably the most difficult words of Jesus in the whole New Testament. Talk about difficult choices! Is Jesus really asking us to give up all of our dearest attachments? To turn from our loved ones, our possessions, our very lives—in order to commit ourselves entirely to him? I'm not going to wishy-washy this away. It sure sounds like that's what he's asking. Jesus wants for us the healing freedom that we find in committing ourselves entirely to his Way of Love. He's putting the sparkling diamond of Life everlasting on top of our rotting attachments and asking us to make our choice. And yes, sometimes choosing life in Christ might well result in chopping off things that we hold very dear.
That's not what we want to hear today, is it? If you're like me, you're echoing Jeremiah's listeners about now: "It's no use. We'll continue with our own plans; thank you very much, God." I may not want to hear this Gospel, but I do at least appreciate the warning from Jesus. Jesus seems to want us to know what we're getting into. He wants for us to count the cost of discipleship before we take up his dangerous calling. I can't help but remember that the man who wrote a book called, "The Cost of Discipleship," Dietrich Bonhoeffer, died as a young man in a concentration camp for opposing Christian Nationalism and German Fascism.
Before you run out of church never to return, though, we also need to remember the God that Jeremiah describes to us: God the Potter. I've watched a potter work, and it's a fascinating process. She starts with an immobile lump of clay and sets it spinning. Quickly, oh so quickly, the clay takes on life, rising and falling, at the slightest pressure from her fingers. As it spins, she sees what the clay can become—a useful utensil, a work of beauty. Quickly, oh so quickly, a wrong touch, a hint of decentering, and the whole thing starts to wobble. In the blink of an eye, it is ruined, collapsing in on itself. That doesn't stop the potter, though. She spins and caresses the clay until it takes on a new shape, a new piece arising from the same old lump of clay. Her hands become a part of the clay itself, completely covered in it, one with the work of art that she is creating.
So it is with God in Christ. We are works in progress, all of us. Our whole cosmos is a work in progress. God didn't create the world once, millions of years ago. God is creating the world, every day. We make our choices while held in the hands of a master potter, approximating, always approximating, the ideal set before us in Jesus Christ. Spinning from choice to choice, we rise; we wobble; we crash; we rise again—all within God's loving hands.
Our churches today, our nation today, our world today, are whirling on the potter's wheel. Everything spins, feeling as if we are lost in the mountains in a blizzard. Before we can become what God intends for us, there will be pressure applied. There might even be some amputations involved. There will definitely be hard choices for each of us to make and commitments required. Yet, at the same time, we are sustained in our whirling by God's ever-creating hands. As Bonhoeffer wrote to his own fiancée from prison in 1944: "By [gracious] powers so wonderfully protected,/ We wait with confidence, befall what may;/ God is with us at night and in the morning,/ And oh, most certainly on each new day."[3]
[1] Rachel N. Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 191-192.
[2] Remen, 192.
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Von Gueten Maechten." In Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8, trans. Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, and Renate Bethge (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 550.
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