Being Jesus Disciples Luke 14:25-33 Sunday, September 8, 2013 The Rev. Sharon Snapp-Kolas, preaching Scripture. Prayer. Opening. King Duncan shares this story about Frederick Buechner s wife s great-grandfather. There s a mouthful! Frederick Buechner is a well-known Christian writer and theologian. He writes about George Shinn, who is Buechner s wife s great-grandfather: Shinn was a pastor back in 1880. He was summoned one midnight to the bedside of an old woman who lived by herself. She had little money and few friends, and she was dying. She told Shinn that she wanted another woman to come stay with her for such time as she might have left, so Shinn and the old woman's doctor struck out in the darkness to try to dig one up for her. It sounds like a parable the way it is told. They knocked at doors and threw pebbles at second story windows. One woman said she couldn't come because she had children. Another said she simply wouldn't know what to do, what to be, in a crisis like that. Another was suspicious of two men prowling around at that hour of night and wouldn't even talk to them. But finally, as the memoir of Dr. Shinn puts it in the prose of another age, They rapped at the humble door of an Irish woman, the mother of a brood of children. She put her head out of the window. Who's there? she said. And what can you want at this time of night? They tell her the situation; her warm, Irish heart cannot resist. Will you come? Sure and I'll come, and I'll do the best I can. And she did come, the account ends. She did the best she could. This woman was willing. She was available. Is there a warmer word in our language? Available. It means, I'm here when you call. I'm ready, willing, able. Great crowds were following Jesus. He turned around and said to them: Anyone who 1
wants to be my follower must love me far more than he does his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, or sisters; yes, more than his own life, otherwise he cannot be my disciple. Jesus was asking, Are you available? (King Duncan) In order to be available, in order to be Jesus disciples, we need to give up a few things. I. Give up your family. Give up your family. This is a central teaching of Jesus on how to be his disciple. Actually, verse 26 reads, 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. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and in that language, hate is not a feeling word, for the most part. It is mainly a word about priorities. Theologian John G. Lynch says, It means to abandon or to leave aside; the way a sailor needs to abandon a sinking ship or the way a general needs to leave aside distracting things to win his battle. Jesus is talking about priorities when he tells the crowd to hate their families if they want to follow him. We could ask the question, is Jesus trying to thin out the crowd a bit? Is he trying to get rid of the hangers-on, the ones who love to follow him in a trivial way? Like in Jesus Christ Superstar, where the crowds follow him because he s the flavor of the month, the favorite popstar of the moment. Priorities are difficult, especially when talking about family. I think of the single mother who s working 3 jobs to care for her young children. She s criticized for not caring about her children s education because she never comes to parent-teacher meetings, and she never helps her children with their homework, and she s never home to greet her kids when they get home from school. 2
Should her priority be the education of the children? Or should her priority be to keep a roof over their heads and food on their table? Is Jesus asking her to leave all that behind and go off into the mission field? Maybe. We could name all kinds of heart-breakingly difficult family situations, in which priorities are challenged. Does a father give up his well-paid career to care for his homebound father? Or does he put dad in a nursing home? What if the career is not so well-paid, and he can t even afford the nursing home? How does he balance the needs of his wife and children with the needs of his own aging parent? Is Jesus telling him to leave this responsibility to others, and come give all his time and energy to the needs of the kingdom? Possibly. Or what of the family with a special-needs child? Time and energy gets diverted to that child out of necessity. If Jesus calls the parents of that child to a different priority, what happens to that child, and to the other children in that family? Let s look at it from a different angle. Suppose a person has followed Jesus call by devoting their lives to serving the urban poor. This demanding work requires their family to live in a dangerous area of town. The children go to a tough, urban school. This person is rarely home, due to the demands of the work. So the other parent has to take up the slack. Maybe give up an important career in order to support the call their spouse has answered. Is this what Jesus requires? Maybe. The demands of the kingdom are serious. I can t say for you what Jesus is calling you to do. I can t say for you what sacrifices you and your family may have to make in order to follow him. I do believe that we, as a church family, need to encourage each other to seek Jesus voice. Where is he calling each of us as individuals? As members of families? As a church family? 3
What is he lifting up for us as a priority for this day? David E. Leininger tells this story of a popular United Methodist Bishop Bishop Will Willimon: A while back Will Willimon, Dean of the Chapel down at Duke University, got a call from an upset parent, a VERY upset parent. I hold you personally responsible for this, he said. Me? Will asked. The father was hot, upset because his graduate school bound daughter had just informed him that she was going to chuck it all ( throw it all away was the way the father described it) and go do mission work with the Presbyterians in Haiti. Isn't that absurd! shouted the father. A BS degree in mechanical engineering from Duke and she's going to dig ditches in Haiti. Well, I doubt that she's received much training in the Engineering Department here for that kind of work, but she's probably a fast learner and will probably get the hang of ditchdigging in a few months, Will said. Look, said the father, this is no laughing matter. You are completely irresponsible to have encouraged her to do this. I hold you personally responsible, he said. As the conversation went on, Dr. Willimon pointed out that the well-meaning but obviously unprepared parents were the ones who had started this ball rolling. THEY were the ones who had her baptized, read Bible stories to her, took her to Sunday School, let her go with the Presbyterian Youth Fellowship to ski in Vail. Will said, You're the one who introduced her to Jesus, not me. But all we ever wanted her to be was a Presbyterian, said the father, meekly. As parents, do we want our children to be United Methodists, or do we want them to follow Jesus? As a church family, do we want the young people of our church to fulfill our 4
expectations, or do we want them to make Jesus a priority? Jesus may call people we love in directions we don t want them to go. Jesus may call us in directions we don t want to go. II. Give up your possessions. Give up your possessions. This is another central teaching of Jesus on how to be a disciple. Jesus teaching begins with hate your family in verse 26, and ends with give up all your possessions in verse 33. In fact, Jesus says, none of you can become my disciple! -- unless you give up all your possessions. Martin Luther once said, There are three conversions necessary: the conversion of the heart, the mind and the purse. Of these three, it may well be that we moderns find the conversion of the purse the most difficult. I mentioned this earlier -- Jesus may be trying to reduce the number of followers to a small but deeply committed band of the faithful. A huge crowd of superficial worshippers may not be what Jesus wants at all. Maybe what Jesus wants is twelve or so people who are willing to die for him if it comes to that. For this small group of true disciples, giving up family and possessions is the least of their worries. They re living under the very real threat of crucifixion. Then again, Jesus may be giving a teaching to all his followers, both the bland and the on-fire. He may be teaching this very real truth: possessions take hold of a person. To literally give away all one s possessions -- this has an impact on others. Our family, if they rely on us for food and shelter. Our community, if others would have to care for us in our newly-impoverished state. How can it be right to give away all our possessions and become dependent on others when we are fully capable of taking care of ourselves? Ronald P. Byars writes: 5
Not everyone is called to be a disciple. Discipleship goes a step further than being a responsible human being. Jesus teachings may apply to everyone, but not everyone will choose to follow. Counting the cost, not everyone will want to pay it. Martin Luther says, along these lines: A religion that gives nothing, costs nothing, and suffers nothing, is worth nothing. Jesus teaching is serious. We cannot simply toss it aside as unrealistic. We must reflect on his words, allowing them to sink into the corners of our lives. Is Jesus calling us to give up our families and our possessions? Maybe he is not calling all of us to do so in this instant. But he may be calling on someone among us to do so. Right now! Today! Certainly he is calling all of us to reflect on where he fits in our lists of values and priorities. Does Jesus come first, or is he down the list, after a slew of other people who are more important to me? Does Jesus come first, or is he down the list, after my car and my house and my job. Maybe he comes first after one very special, prized possession that has personal significance. What is the one personal possession, more than any others, that would be almost impossible to part with, even for Jesus? For me, it would be the photo of my mother that hangs on the refrigerator in my kitchen. I d have to think long and hard before I d let go of that photo. For us as a church family we have a lovely church building. The mayor called it the most beautiful building in Yucaipa when he spoke at our 100 th anniversary. What if Jesus were to demand of us that we give up this beautiful building in order to follow him? (Don t worry, Trustees I m not suggesting we sell the church property. This is just an example to illustrate what it might cost to follow Jesus.) Jesus is saying, at the very least, that his disciples need to travel light. We should only 6
take what we need for the journey. We cannot be weighed down by too much attachment to our belongings. Otherwise, it is impossible for us to follow him. His way involves open hands that are ready to share everything we have in order to meet the needs of a hurting world. He is the example, having given his very life for us all. III. Give up everything, even your life. Give up everything, even your life. This is where we encounter Jesus teaching on the cross. He says in verse 27, Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Jesus calls us to be ready to die for his kingdom, as he willingly died for us. Baptism is the starting point. As baptized Christians, we acknowledge that we are disciples of Christ who share not only in his resurrection, but also in his death on the cross. In choosing, through baptism, to follow Jesus way, we accept that it leads to the cross as well as to the empty tomb. Baptism is the central symbol of our faith. When we are submerged in the waters of baptism, we die with Christ. When we emerge from the waters, we are raised into new life in Christ. Discipleship is a serious, challenging path. The church is a place where we can remind each other of the demands of discipleship. Individual circumstances require individual choices in how to best be a disciple of Jesus Christ. As a church family, we can encourage each other when the going gets tough, and challenge each other when we re getting too comfortable with the status quo. Rodney S. Sadler, Jr. talks about the seriousness of discipleship. He writes: The message is clear: discipleship costs. In fact, it will cost us everything. (see also 12:33-34)! The potent words of a sermon I heard preached in a big-steeple church in Charlotte, 7
North Carolina, a few years back emphasize this lesson. The pastor, preaching to a church of the affluent and influential, offered the challenge of discipleship to his comfortable congregation, then told them, If you cannot heed this call, then you ought to renounce your baptism. Contextually the message was poignant, because the upper-middle-class (and upper class) church members were reminded that this faith should cost them something dear. The pastor s exhortation shook all of us in the congregation that day, because it made us all cognizant of the deeds that being part of the reign of God necessitates that we perform, and of how our lack of action is tantamount to forgoing our faith. Closing Returning to Jesus story about building a tower (vv. 28-30), we can say this: The cost has already been counted. Jesus paid the price. And in the war between two kings, God our King! -- is able. With 10,000 faithful followers, he can oppose anyone who comes against him with 20,000 -- or 200,000! -- or 2,000,000! He is already victorious against the armies of the Evil One. The battle is won. That great theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, put it this way: The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one. The old does not give way to the new without trying to overcome it. Will you be a faithful follower of the one who gave his life for you? Will you be a disciple of Jesus? Will you seriously reflect on the cost of your discipleship what it means for your relationships, for your possessions even for your life? 2 nd service: [In a moment the band will lead us in some closing music. Let s have a word of prayer together, as they re coming up. (Prayer).] Amen. 8