LUKE 14:25 Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26 "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. 27 Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28 For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30 saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' 31 Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33 So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. Those of you who have had to listen to me more than once know that I am fascinated by what draws people to church. The mainline church in the western world is dying, say the experts, and it s hard to argue with them. Not so long ago, theologians were on the cover of Time magazine and every Sunday morning found the church pews packed and all the businesses closed. So the church is dying. The problem with the argument, however, is in how you measure the life of the Church. There are plenty of folks who measure it solely in numbers. So if people would just come back to Church, I guess it would be alive again. The goal of being an alive church, then, means becoming as appealing as possible. Billboards with attractive people smiling holding their children. Rock bands playing music to let the young people know that church can be cool, too. I went to one church service that was particularly awful, where I m pretty sure no one said anything about Jesus or anything remotely religious, and the children s sermon consisted of a puppet lip-synching to a Christian rock song. After the service I approached one of the pastors who asked me what I thought of the service. I told him it was interesting. He told me in confidence that he thought it didn t do much for him, but this is what it took to get people into church. That is a little different, you may notice, from Jesus approach. Jesus and the disciples are walking along, the story goes, and one of the disciples looks back at the crowd that has gathered. Wow, that is a lot of people. We are really popular. This is going splendidly. Jesus seems to wake up at this. Who knows what he was thinking about, but when he hears the disciples talking about the crowd, he turns and looks for himself. 1
It is a large crowd. The Church is growing. The ad campaign and the nametags and the refrigerator magnets have all paid off. People are feeling welcomed. People are coming to have their needs met. This is good stuff. So Jesus clears his throat. Maybe he will say something about the visitor cards in the pew rack, or about the new parking spaces in the church lot, or invite the newcomers to the covered lunch that will follow the service. Maybe he will give a three point sermon on how Church will give you everything that you need, that the Bible is really a self-help book designed to get your life on track, or point out how the new video screen in the sanctuary will help us reach the teenagers. Nope. None of that. Jesus clears his throat and says something the gist of which is this: Time to let you know what you re signing up for. Whoever wants to come this way, whoever wants to follow me, must hate their mother, their father, their spouse, their child, their third cousin once removed, even their own life. This is not the yellow brick road, people, and I am most definitely not the wizard. So you should count the costs before you decide this is a good idea. Otherwise you are no better than an architect who runs out of bricks, or a general who sends his troops in to fight a hopeless battle. Count the cost. And then, as a sort of aside, Jesus closes his little sermon with one last lighthearted observation: So therefore no one can be my disciple unless they give up every last possession. Jesus clears his throat, and clears away the crowd. Imagine, for a moment, if this were the Church s approach. If someone stood at the parking lot entrance not welcoming you in for the Starbucks and donuts, but waving a torch warning you stay away this place is dangerous we don t know what he s going to ask for next! Growing up in Alabama meant that almost every other Friday night I was being invited to a Baptist revival of some sort. Before I could drive, I went to a lot of these. They all worked basically the same way. A preacher would build us up into a frenzy about the fate of our souls in eternity, which is something middle-schoolers talk about a lot, and then throw out a life rope. He told us if we just said this simple prayer and believed 2 or 3 or 4 things, we would be Christian. Like magic words, that was all it took. There is something tempting about that notion of Christianity, because we can keep the rest of our lives intact and still be Christian. The problem comes somewhere down the road 2
when we realize our lives aren t that much different, we don t feel fulfilled, we just feel empty. That easy-bake Christianity does not correspond to Jesus version. I ve pointed out before how odd it is to me that the front doors to our own Chapel bear the signs of the 12 disciples. Seven of the twelve glass panes are symbols of how they were executed. It is the opposite of a warm welcome come in here and this may happen to you. I know many of you have been in Church long enough to have heard sermons and Sunday School lessons that take the teeth out of passages like these. Jesus tells the rich young ruler to go and sell all that he has, and the preacher says, Well, he was much more materialistic than we are. Jesus says, I have no mother, and the devotional book says, What Jesus really means is honor your parents. Just for this morning, though, I want us to stand squarely and listen to Jesus. I know the tendency is for us to clear out like the rest of the crowd, or to put a more comfortable spin on what he says, but for a moment, resist that. A few years ago, a group of religion scholars got together and thought they would just figure out what Jesus said and what he didn t. It was a pretty silly little event, they even voted with colored marbles, but they did make one very good point if the gospel writers were trying to convince folks to believe in Jesus, to become Christian, there was no good reason to include some of these harder teachings unless they were positive Jesus said them. In some ways, the most difficult sayings of Jesus are the most authentically Jesus. And it was easier for me to take them in a relative fashion before I started hanging out regularly in the Church. Because if you hang out with other Christians long enough, you will see that some of these folks are actually crazy enough to listen to Jesus. The Salvation Army was started by a Methodist man and his wife who were sitting in Church one day and just got fed up with all of the hypocrisy. So they went and sold what they had and started trying to feed and clothe the poor. The irony of it is that the Methodist Church loves to brag about that, even though it was frustration with the Methodist Church that sent those two packing. A good friend of mine from seminary named Lauren quit her church job, sold her car, gave the money to the poor and now lives among the homeless in Atlanta. We have a week every summer where some of us who graduated the same year get together to unwind from our stressful lives at the beach or the lake. She won t come anymore, because that s a luxury not afforded to her homeless brothers and sisters. 3
When I am honest about the time I got to spend in Africa or Calcutta, I tell people that the most frightening thing of all to me was seeing people take Jesus seriously. Because once you see people doing that, you can t dismiss his words so easily anymore. What I want is the Christian equivalent of the Army Reserves. I am willing to give up a weekend or two out of my life to be a part-time Christian. But my family? My beloved possessions? Jesus wants us to count the costs. Jesus wants us to know that this road of discipleship is not an easy trek. It s not something you can manage in your spare time. Christ asks us to count the costs, and if he is a bit sensitive about that topic, well, we can guess why. It is easy to read the scriptures where Jesus seems to have a handle on everything and be reading directly from the script. That is a Jesus that is easy to believe in. To be a disciple, though, means to stand even with this more human Jesus, who seems afraid and bitter and maybe even a little confused at what waits him and all of us over the hill. This is a Jesus who lets us know upfront that there are not enough supplies for the tower that must be built, and that we are joining a battle we will most certainly lose. And it may sound harsh, but I think at least a part of it is genuine compassion on Jesus part. He is interested in full disclosure. This is not an advertising campaign, this is not a self-help 10 step program, this is a cross. Most of us would rather have a divine Santa Claus, who just answers our prayer requests and fits into our schedules. But Jesus doesn t just want a slot on your calendar, he wants your life, your breath, your being. Will Willimon tells the story of a young woman at Duke, one of the brightest students in her class, who gave up a spot in medical school to go to Guatemala and live among the poor. Her father called Willimon in his office at Duke Chapel one day, livid, asking him how this had happened. Willimon calmly responded, This isn t my fault. It s yours. You re the one who had her baptized. You re the one who took her to church. You re the one who made her a Christian. To which the father responded desperately, We didn t want her to be a Christian, we just wanted her to be Presbyterian! Some days I have been able to live up to this calling. There are others, many others most days, in fact, when I have stumbled or lost his trail or run and hid from him. So feel free to follow the others in the crowd who are turning around right now, if that s what you need to do. No one would blame you for doing it, least of all me. That would certainly be the reasonable thing to do. 4
Unless. Unless he is who he says he is. Unless this cross really does lead to life. Unless this hard road leads to redemption. Unless losing our life to him is to find it in the first place. I hope that you will stay. Not that you know what you re in for, not that you are ready for what s coming, not that you are spiritually prepared to carry any cross, much less your own, but as Peter says when the twelve are given the same searing challenge, If we weren t here, where ever would we go? This is the only place, as cold and confusing and mysterious as it sometimes might be well, this is the only place we have ever really belonged. The life of faith does not just call us to be Mother Teresa or an African missionary dropping everything for the sake of the gospel. It s actually much more demanding than that. It means that we rise every morning and try our best to follow. It means more than memorizing 2 or 3 or 4 things about Jesus. It means more than being Christian. It means being a follower. And that does not mean we start hating our parents, or anyone else for that matter, in our understanding of that word. Jesus didn t even really have a word for hate the way we use it. In the Jewish vernacular, hate means to love something less than another thing. He s asking for our love, not our hate. But that s not at easy as it sounds. He s asking us to place our love in him, even though we know what happens to folks that do that. He s asking us to love him above all, which is not as easy as just singing about it or praying about it. That is why not even a thousand tongues are enough to sing God s praises, that is why we continue to stand around this place as if we belong here. Not because we have answers, not because we have any good sense in our head, not because we have the courage to hand over our car keys or walk away from our culture s ideas of success. We stay in the crowd because maybe this is about more than Sunday mornings, charming music and sharing coffee and donuts. Jesus clears his throat. Will you be foolish enough to stick around and hear what he has to say? 5