『Sermon - 9/7/25』のカバーアート

Sermon - 9/7/25

Sermon - 9/7/25

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 Year C – 13th Sunday after Pentecost; Lectionary 23 – September 7, 2025 Pastor Megan Floyd Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Psalm 1 Luke 14:25-33 Grace and peace to you from God, our Creator, and from Jesus, our Savior, who urges us to choose life, so that we may live. Amen. *** These are some challenging words from Jesus today. …Reminds me of the good news from a few weeks ago, when Jesus said he did not come to bring peace, but division… these words make me catch my breath. Yet they are part of the Good News and have been set before us… and so today, we will wrestle with them… together. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate their family, and yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” Is Jesus really telling us that… hate… is a mark of discipleship? Isn’t God supposed to be all about love? Isn’t the greatest commandment, above all the others… You shall love the Lord, your God, and then… you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. Yes! Jesus did say that! …and it wasn’t new information… he was drawing from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, which his listeners would have known. And what about the fourth commandment… You shall honor your father and mother? How are we to follow God’s commandment to honor our parents if Jesus states that we cannot become his disciples unless we hate them? We call the gospels Good News… but Good News… isn’t always easy to hear. And yet… it is still good. It is good because it comes from God, who is, indeed, all about love. But it requires us to make choices… choices between life and death… blessings and curses. Choose to fear and love the Lord, your God, above all else. The one who created you, who loved you into existence, desires for you to put God and God’s commandments before everything else. Following God has always been about loving God above all else… because we are so loved. And we know… we know… that following God’s will for us… that following God’s commandments does, in fact, lead to a full life blessed with love and abundance… …it leads to communities that care for the needs of others, where all people are valued and supported, and where everyone has enough. Even though God desires for us to choose this life and these blessings… it still comes with a cost. See, the common thread between our texts today is God’s desire for us to first recognize all that God offers us… all that God has laid out for us to consider… and then to make the choice, the only choice… that leads to a flourishing life. …not just for us alone, for we are not meant to be alone… but a flourishing life as communities that have chosen to love God above all else. Choose life… so that you may live… but count the costs of this life of discipleship so you don’t make this choice blindly… and you will know …that what God offers is good. We know all about making choices… and we know all about making sacrifices for those choices. There are the little choices we make every day, like choosing a healthy lunch over fast food, because we know that while that burger and fries might taste great in the moment… if that was all we ate, every day… we wouldn’t feel so great. And generally what you choose to eat for lunch doesn’t become your whole identity… it doesn’t demand that you put everything and everyone else as secondary. That would be crazy. But there are choices we make… sacrifices we make… that require this of us… like for example… the choice to play youth travel sports. Working in youth ministry, I regularly lamented the rise in popularity of youth travel sports. Maybe some of you have had your kids involved in travel teams, I don’t know… And if you did and loved them, you might get angry with me about this… But here’s my perspective from the ministry side of things. Whenever one of my church youth joined a travel team, it was pretty much the death blow to whatever life of faith they and their family had been developing until that point. Participation in travel teams demanded that everything else be sacrificed. First, the family had to invest thousands of dollars every year for their child to be on the team, which wasn’t even a guarantee they’d play. And, it was a travel team, so every weekend, the family would be traveling for games… and over the years, it seemed that weekends alone weren’t enough, so they started planning for other games during the week. These teams insisted that for the athlete to be successful, every available moment needed to be devoted to the travel team. The team was the highest priority, and if you challenged that, you couldn’t be on the team. And so, these kids sacrificed a lot. They sacrificed any opportunity to be involved in anything else with their school or friends. They sacrificed their grades as they struggled to balance school and their commitments to the team. And they sacrificed their faith, and any relationships their family had been ...
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