What is your priority?

 Based on Luke 9:51-62, the lectionary text for Sunday, June 26 - Pentecost III.

Rabbi Jesus set His face toward Jerusalem.  He knew His mission.  It was to challenge empire and its values of Greed, lust for Power and desire for Status.  It was to challenge hatreds.  It was to challenge the seat of corrupt Political, Economic, Military and Spiritual power and control.  It was to gather people who would demonstrate in front of and caricature the powerful of Rome.  It was to cleanse the Temple of the corrupt, greedy practices of false teachers.  It was to offer the ultimate sacrifice in the name of Agape Love as an example of what it means to be faithful to God and Neighbor.

I would submit that that is the mission of anyone who would profess to follow Rabbi Jesus.  Giving up personal comfort and gain, re-defining family and staying laser focused on the mission of living Agape Love in the face of empire and its values takes constant, consistent commitment and focus.  Having other priorities renders that mission irrelevant.  The world has had enough of the values of empire.  The divisions, despair, desolation, destruction and death caused by the living of empire values is quite apparent in the world in which we live.  The Way of Rabbi Jesus, the Way of Agape Love in the world is the only real, sustainable way for us to exist and hope to exist in the future.

What is your priority?  Is it your personal comfort and security?  Is it keeping the normative social mores of our time in order to fit in or "get along?"  Is it to get everything you can for yourself, your own and those just like you?  Is it to have power and control over others so that you can manipulate or exploit them, or even destroy their lives in hatred?  Is it to appear to be better than everyone else and reap the benefits of some false sense of your superiority that others are duped into believing?  Is your priority in life to promote the ways of empire and benefit from them at the expense of others in the world around you?  Or is it to transform the world around you in the living of Agape Love, to transform individual lives and communities by living an example of self-less, other-centered, communally responsible commitment that benefits all, equally?

One way leads to more of the same inequity, inequality, inhumanity, incivility, insanity, injury and destruction.  The other leads to sustainable life, unity, joy and peace.

What is your priority?  What will you put out in the world around you, the world in which you must live with the rest of us?  Will it lead to destruction or transformation?