Luke 14: 25-33

September 9, 2007

 

It’s been awhile since I’ve scraped my sermon to replace it with a better one.

Today’s your lucky day!  

Over last several years, one of the foremost preachers in America has been Barbara Brown Taylor.   I’ve quoted from her writings many times and I must have 6 or more of her books of collected sermons.  In May 2003 and again in May 2006,  Kathy and I have heard her in person at the Preaching Conference in Atlanta, GA.

It is one thing to read sermons yet another to hear the voice of the preacher.

I have her voice in my head this morning and will relay her craft of carefully discerning the meaning of some most difficult passages such as our lectionary gospel reading this morning.

But first, a short story from my son’s life.  He decided to try-out for the Illinois Institute of Technology’s soccer team – as a walk-on.   He was surprised when, as the coach gathered all 34 freshmen on the field, he said:  “I don’t want to see your soccer skills today.  Here’s what I want you to do…. run a 6 minute or less mile and you come back for practice next Monday, otherwise, try again next spring.”      Only 4 out of the 34 made it in under 6 minutes.   Taylor was not one of them.  He thought the coach would have tested their soccer skills!   He thought it would be fun, it would be cool to walk-on.   For everything there is a cost.   It requires everything you have to be ready and fit.   No pain, no gain.  No joy, no cost.

Hold that story as we now hear Barbara Brown Taylor in her sermon, “High-Priced Discipleship” delivered to her parish, Grace-Calvary Church, in the northern foothills of Georgia.

“After careful consideration of Jesus’ harder sayings, I have to conclude that he would not have made a good parish minister.  So much of the job depends on making it easy for people to come to church and rewarding for them to stay.  Talk to any of the church growth experts and they will tell you how important it is to create a safe, caring environment where people believe their concerns will be heard and their needs will be met.  The basic idea is to find out what people are looking for and to give it to them, so that they decide to stay put instead of continuing to shop for a church down the street.

This effort to please does not stop once people decide to join the church.   A good parish minister will work hard to make sure that worship is satisfying,   that Christian education is appealing,   that plenty of opportunities for fellowship and service exist.  A well-run church is like a well-run home, where members can count on regular meals in pleasant surrounding, with people who generally mind their manners.  It matches the American ideal of Christians as upstanding and good-hearted citizens.   When I hear people talk about Christian virtues and values, it is hard to imagine anyone but Norman Rockwell doing the illustrations:  a third grade classroom full of little girls with blond pigtails and little boys with slingshots in their back pockets, all of them bowing their heads in prayer;   families gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner table, with a carving knife in father’s hand and a slotted spoon in mother’s while all the children wait eagerly to be served;   a bench at the general store, where the milkman, the mailman, and the newspaper boy all stop to share a dozen doughnuts before getting on with the day’s work.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these pictures, but according to Jesus we cannot be his disciples unless we hate our families, carry our crosses, and give up all our possessions.   So why don’t we all – preachers and believers alike – just turn in our resignations right now?   Because clearly, none of us has what it takes.   If Jesus were in charge of an average congregation I figure there would be about four people left there on Sunday mornings, and chances are those four would be fooling themselves.  Jesus would greet newcomers by saying:  ‘Are you absolutely sure you want to follow this way of life?   It will take everything you have.  It has to come before everything else that matters to you.   Plenty of people have launched out on it without counting the cost, and as you see they are not here anymore.   The other thing is, if you succeed – if you really do follow me – it will probably get you killed.  Why don’t you go home and think it over?   I would hate for you to get in over your head.’

He is the complete opposite of the good parish minister.  Far from trying to make it easier for people to follow him, he points out how hard it is.  Look at the 14^th chapter of Luke, where Jesus is talking to a large crowd that has begun trailing him from town to town.  They are not people whom he has called to follow him.  They have simply shown up, bubbling with enthusiasm, but Jesus is less than welcoming.  He tells them not to get their hopes up, that more than likely they cannot afford what they want.   He suggest that they go home and do some sober feasibility studies before they decide to go with him, and I expect that some of them are puzzled by his response.

They all want to go with him.  They want to get as close as they can to the energy that radiates from him like heat from a coal.   They want to be the first to hear what he says next – to be part of changing the world with him – and they do not have a clue what it costs.   Jesus wants to tell them, because the worst thing he can do is to mislead them and let them believe they are running off with the circus when they are in fact headed into battle unarmed.

Why does he say all these disturbing things about hating their parents, their children, their lives?   One possibility is that he was using a figure of speech we do not use anymore.  In his day, the way you stated a preference was by pairing two things and saying you loved one and hated the other.  It did not have anything to do with emotions.   It was a matter of priorities, so if I said,  ‘I love the mountains and hate the beach,’  it would not actually mean I felt hostile toward the ocean, but simply mean that the mountains were my first choice.

I know that does not help much, but it seems worth mentioning since priorities are on Jesus’ mind in this passage.  He is on his way to Jerusalem, and he knows what a hard road he has ahead of him.   Luke knows even more.   When he wrote his gospel, Christians were already being persecuted for following Jesus.   To have a Christian in the family was dangerous for everyone, because the Romans were thorough.   If they found one believer in a household they would arrest everyone, so it really was true that turning toward Jesus meant turning away from your family, whether you wanted to or not.   Once you made following Jesus your first priority, everything else fell by the wayside – not because God took it away from you but because that is how the world works.  As long as the world opposes those who set out to transform it, the transformers will pay a high price.  Ask Nelson Mandela, (Martin Luther King, Jr. )  No one tangles with the powers that be and gets away unscathed.

I think that is what Jesus wants us to know.  He is not threatening us.  He is loving us, as usual – refusing to lie to us, refusing to make his way sound easier than it is.   He wants us to know clearly what it costs so that no one follows him under false pretenses.   He does not want us to get halfway through building a tower and have to abandon it,  or to go charging into battle without the troops we need to prevail.   If all that sounds overly dramatic, then maybe we have lost track of what following him is all about.

Is it about being good, stable citizens or is it about changing the world?   Is it about creating a safe, caring environment where people’s needs will be met or is it about living such a different way of life that those in authority get mad enough to kill us?   Ernie Campbell, one of the great old-time preachers, once said,  ‘If I’m following Jesus, why am I such a good insurance risk?’

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

Discipleship costs all that we have, all that we love, and all that we are.  That is less God’s doing than our own.   If the world were kinder to its reformers, discipleship might be a piece of cake, but it is not, and Jesus does not want anyone to be fooled.

He may not have made a good parish minister, but he made a very good Savior, and I do not think he is through saving us yet.  His best tool has always been the very thing that killed him – that cross he ended up on – the one he was carrying long before he got to Golgotha.   He is always offering to share it with us, to let us get underneath it with him.  Not, I think, because he wants us to suffer but because he wants us to know how alive you can feel even underneath something that heavy and how it can take your breath away to get hold of your one true necessity.  Even suffering itself pales next to what God is doing through it, through you, because you are willing to put yourself in the way.

It is not for everyone.  That is clearly what he is telling us.  There are not a lot of people who have what it takes to shoulder the cross,  but I do not think that means the rest of us are lost.  It is for the rest of us – the weak ones – that he took its weight upon himself.  If we cannot help him carry it, he will carry us too.   I think he just wants us not to take it for granted.   I think he just wants us to know what it costs.”

Source:   Barbara Brown Taylor,  Bread of Angels : Chapter 9. “High-Priced Discipleship”, Cowley Publications, Cambridge, Massachusetts,  1997,  pp. 46- 50.