23 rd Sunday in Ordinary – Year C
September 4, 2016
Homily
- The gospel today (Luke 14:25-33) rubs us up the wrong way.
- Especially on Father’s day, it’s hardly attractive to think of families turning on one another. Worse, ‘hating’ one another.
- Of course families are good but, in an age where millions of people are displaced by war; made refugees and even where families collapse through addiction, mental illness and poverty, Christian families are called to respond.
- Following Jesus is bigger than the family as the Refugee Assistant Group have shown us.
- We can cocoon ourselves in families like silk worms – spinning a safe net around our own interests and advancement and opportunity in life.
- It is all very well to advance the families fortune but what about community?
- Last week Mark Zuckerberg – the Facebook billionaire met Pope Francis. No doubt the Pope reminded him that, with family fortune, comes a wider commitment to God’s poor people, many of whom live precious short lives and cannot even enjoy a glass of clean water?
- So, what looks like a crazy proposition about ‘hating family’, when given a context, challenges you and me to live outside the cocoons of income, prestige cars; mansions and luxury travel.
- The second part of the gospel is not unrelated.
- It also sets a condition to being a Christian. Both stories are about thinking well before making a decision, whether to build or go to war?
- There are two stories but only one point, namely, it is a serious moment when we become a Christian.
- For too many people today, becoming a Christian is not a personal choice at all; neither is it a decision for life. It is purely cultural.
- Anyone who is born an Australian is an Australian or anyone born a Brazilian is a Brazilian.
- We do not have to choose. This is how we are born and this is the way we will die.
- But being a Christian is a decision to live a Christian way of life.
- This is the most important condition to being a disciple. Christians by choice not birth.