Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost: September 7, 2025
Readings: Jeremiah 18:1-11 | Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17 | Philemon 1-21 | Luke 14:25-33
Today marks our first Sunday observing the session of creation. This is a short liturgical season meant to draw us into reflecting on God's relationship with creation as well as our own relationship with the more than human world.
But before we begin to explore those themes, we need to take a minute to unpack this gospel reading. This is no tender image of Jesus, no “let the little children come to me” moment. Jesus sounds downright harsh.
The idea of Jesus calling us to hate doesn’t make sense. The central theme of Jesus’ teaching is love: love God and love your neighbor. Love the people it is hard to love, the people it is painful to love. So what’s this about how you can’t be Jesus’ disciple unless you hate your whole family, and even life itself? That does not compute.
Some scholars think that the modern understanding of the word hate gets in the way of fully understanding Jesus’ intent here. Instead of the vitriol we typically assign to a word like hate, it is possible that we should understand “hate” to simply mean “love less.” Rather than hearing Jesus calling us to consider our family as dead to us, it might be that we are just called to love God more than we love our family.
Augustine, a seminal North African Christian theologian from the late 300s, has this idea about sin being disordered love. We are created to love God first and above all else, but there are any number of things that we can be tempted to love more: ourselves, our safety and comfort, wealth and status, another person or an ideology, mother or father, sister or brother or sibling.
It’s not that different from what I was saying last week about idolatry. Last week I was describing how idolatry can be more subtle than we often give it credit for, even sneaking into places like how we worship. Thinking about idolatry as a disordered love might help it make more sense. When we love any person or object or idea more than God we are falling into idolatry, and as so much of the Old Testament reminds us, this ends poorly.
In this time and place, it can be particularly tempting to make an idol of our possessions.
We live in a culture that values possessions. There is social standing to be gained from owning the right car, the right clothes, living in the right neighborhood. And so often those things we are praised for owning don’t satisfy us for very long. The next upgrade becomes available, the clothing falls apart after a wash or two, a new trend becomes fashionable.
On top of all that, the act of buying new things itself can entrap us. It can feel so good to buy ourselves a little treat. It becomes less about the thing itself and more about the act of drawing it towards us. The prospect of something new and shiny can be a seductive siren’s song in this time when the evil around us continues on repeatedly and the future looks dim.
But the thing about turning anywhere but to God for our sustenance is that it will not last. Possessions will not provide lasting comfort. They will break down or lose their shine. The dopamine from the most recent purchase will wear off, and soon you will be right back where we started if not worse.
God is faithful. God’s transcendent mystery is more than enough to keep us engaged. Sometimes our ways of encountering God might bear reexamining and creative renewal, but the God we worship offers us so much more satisfaction and meaning than what we could ever hope to find amidst these earthly things.
And loving God rightly, being sure to love God first and foremost, changes our relationship with our possessions. When we love God,we are changed by God. This is what we see in Paul’s letter to Philemon. At first, Onesimus was little more than a possession belonging to Philemon, an enslaved body rather than a person to be respected, let alone loved. Paul makes clear, however, that everything is made new in Christ, including our relationship with our so-called possessions. Onesimus is not simply a tool, but a beloved sibling in Christ. Because Philemon loves God, and God loves Onesimus, then Philemon is impelled to love Onesimus.
You know who else God loves? The more than human world. It can be easy in these theological conversations to keep an entirely human focused lens, but God’s view is much larger. God made this land and all that lives in it. There is an intimacy to God’s relationship with creation. This intimacy is especially visible in the version of the creation story we see in Genesis 2. God gathers up the dust to make both humans and all creatures. God is so closely involved with creation that God’s very hands get dirty in the process.
If God’s love shapes our love, then we, too, must be intimate with the more than human world. I would be a negligent Episcopalian if I didn’t talk about agitating for climate justice, but activism is grounded first in loving God and then in loving what God loves, and that starts with a relationship. Our psalm today describes how intimately God knows us, even knowing our shape before we are born. Do we know the created world around us even a fraction so well? Do we notice the shape of the leaves on the trees we walk by every day? Do we know the color of the rocks around us? Do we have an awareness of which birds come out at which times of day?
We are not all called to be professional botanists or geologists or ornithologists, but we are all called to be amateur committed lovers of creation. Again, we must be careful of the temptation to love the mountains and trees and animals as the ultimate thing, rather than as an aspect of God the creator. It’s like with a painting, do we love the art for the painting's sake or for the sake of the artist who painted it? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like we can love the art even more if we love the artist first.
Jesus pulls no punches when he says, “You cannot be my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” The monastics certainly take a literal approach to this, but I wonder for those of us who do not have the vocation of monasticism if this is about our relationship with creation. We can have no possessions if we respect everything as belonging first and ultimately to God.
All matter belongs to God and therefore never really is ours. It’s like when you’re at the house of your closest family or friend, and you know that they would share anything they have with you, but you work really hard to not break their dishes or stain the shirt you borrowed from them because you know they love it and you love them. We are responsible with our consumption and thoughtful with how we use the things in our lives because they are beloved of God and by extension beloved of us.
God made us. God knows each and every detail of our bodies and our inmost being. God loves us. And the same God who knows and loves us so well invites us to know and love the rest of creation to the best of our ability so that we may all join with the choir of creation as we sing our praise to God. Amen.