The Wholesale Cost of Discipleship

FBCGSO Sermons

https://fbcgso.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/09-11-2016_sermon.mp3

Luke 14:25-33

Jesus Teaching the Disciples by Rudolph Bostic

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, brother, and sister, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me, cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not give up all their possessions, cannot be my disciple!

And all God’s people said, “Wait… this is a metaphor, right? Jesus, you’re exaggerating, being hyperbolic; this is figurative, fanciful language.”

It’s just not the way we’re accustomed to thinking and talking about faith in Christ and following Jesus. More often, we speak of the assurance that can come through Christian faith. We speak about Jesus as the one who will solve all of our problems, and we present church as the place that will help us to find whatever might be missing.

So if you feel hopeless, we say come to a place where we believe the best is yet to come.

Are you lonely? Well then we invite you to come and connect in community.

Have you been isolated or left out? Then come to a place where everyone can belong.

Have you been burned by another religious institution? Come to us; we’re about relationships, not religion.

Have you ever felt like you were on the outs? We want you to know that this is a church where “All are welcome.”

These are all phrases taken from banners, signs, and websites of churches here in our community, including First Baptist. All of them hold great appeal. All of them are well-intentioned, and probably mostly true – at least in their aspirations. But none of these claims – optimism, welcome, friendliness, community – none of them form the full identity of the church.

The Church is the body of Jesus Christ. You can find “belonging” at the YMCA, community at your local coffee shop, friendliness and confidence in your scout troop or soccer team. The Church is the embodiment of Christ in the world – Christ’s actions, voice, and priorities. So it ought to be Christ’s words that we listen for. And Jesus didn’t come to merely say what we want to hear, but also what we need to hear. And it turns out, Jesus didn’t come only to solve our problems, but to create some of them, too.

“Hate your family; take up your cross; shed all your possessions.” Well, that might be a problem. Put that on the church sign and see what happens. It’s hard to sloganize the wholesale cost of following Jesus. And these words weren’t any more appealing or marketable to Jesus’ audience in the gospel of Luke. At the beginning of the passage, Luke is careful to say that large crowds were traveling with Jesus – large crowds drawn in by this man who passed through their towns with a kind of elegant grace that they wanted to follow. They listened as he told compelling stories that helped them see the world in a new way. He broke social taboos; he ate and drank with the riff-raff; he confronted the elite and powerful; he proclaimed a renewed vision of the world as the reign of God, with a place for the vulnerable. And then he started enacting this by healing in the name of God and, wouldn’t you know, the numbers swelled to the “large crowds” in v. 25.

Understand, the people lost in these crowds had much to escape. It was a hostile world. Divided. Tense. Powerful people overlooked the vulnerable. Plenty were hungry and praying for their daily bread. Others were wrapped up in conflict and war on some of the same land where the world wars with itself today. And amidst such a setting, many were probably beginning to project onto Jesus their own hopes for a savior, their own visions for their lives and their world, maybe understanding him through the popular narrative of the one who would overthrow the empire and elevate Israel to the top.

But that’s when he tells them just how costly it is to follow him in this way. He has already predicted that he’s going to his cross in Jerusalem. But now those who follow so eagerly are beginning to understand that they are more than just observers. It will cost to follow. Not just a piecemeal cost, but a wholesale cost. Not just here and there but across the whole of your life. It could mean a break with those you love. It could mean a loss of what you’ve accumulated. It will mean a cross on your shoulders, too. How foolhardy it would be for a king to go to war without counting the cost of the battle; how baffling for a builder to begin a tower and not calculate how much stone is needed. So before you take another step, Jesus says, consider just what I am calling you to do.

Notice, Luke doesn’t say anything about the size of the crowds after Jesus is done speaking. You’d have to think that the numbers of those large crowds began to thin. The people peal off. Many of us are left locked in place as Jesus moves ahead, still wondering if we are bold enough, committed enough to follow in this way he is calling us to walk.

No, we don’t talk this way about our faith; we don’t walk this way in the steps of Jesus, because so often we don’t really believe we can do it. But Jesus does.

William Willimon was once leading a college dormitory Bible Study at Duke University where he was Chaplain. The text was a few chapters forward in the gospel of Luke, where a rich young ruler approaches Jesus and is told the cost of following: “Sell all your possessions,” Jesus says to the man. The man is heartbroken, because he doesn’t believe it’s a way he can go. Jesus offered him a cross, and he stands there clinging to his possessions.

Reflecting on such a heartbreaking scene, one of the students asked, “Had Jesus ever met this man before?”

Willimon was curious, “Why do you ask?”

“Because Jesus seems to have lots of faith in him. He demands something risky, radical of him. I wonder if Jesus knew this man had a gift for risky, radical response. I wonder what there was about this man that made Jesus have so much faith he could really be a disciple.”

Another student said thoughtfully, “I wish Jesus would ask something like this of me. I am so tied to all this stuff I don’t think I could ever break free. But maybe Jesus thinks otherwise.”

“Yeah, I wonder what it was that Jesus saw in this man that he didn’t see in himself.”

What is it that Jesus might see in me, in you, that we don’t see in ourselves? Does he see someone who could set aside all that hinders them in order to take up the cross?

This is the call from Jesus in this passage: to take up your cross. And to do so means to free your hands of the other things on which you have a white-knuckle grasp. Specifically, Jesus speaks of family and possessions. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father or mother, brother, sister, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

“Hate your family;” there’s no way to soften it. Sure, in Matthew a gentler Jesus says that whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. But the word in Luke really does mean “hate.” This is even more dramatic when we consider the role of the family in the ancient world. It was the primary means of dependence and security. Families provided resources, rights, and a livelihood. Just think of those across the scope of scripture without meaningful family connections, like orphans, and widows, and strangers in a foreign land. These were the most desperate and disenfranchised in the ancient world, in large part because they didn’t have a family. And here Jesus is asking his followers to assume that vulnerable place in the world – to sever ties with this system of dependence, to leave the family fishing boats and their father holding the net. They must be able to turn over tables in the family shop in order to follow him where he is going. In the same way, they must be able to set down possessions, which can be so heavy and cumbersome that they keep us from moving forward in the way of Jesus.

Family. Wealth. Possessions. Set these things down. Your identity is not found in these, but in the cross that will replace them. In other words, when the way of the world is in conflict with the way of Christ, you have to make a choice.

Those followers are discovering something like what Lucy and Susan come to learn in C.S. Lewis’ Land of Narnia. They ask Mr. and Mrs. Beaver about the lion named Aslan, conceived in the imagination of C.S. Lewis as a representation of Jesus Christ. One of the children asks if Aslan is safe. Mr. Beaver then responds, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

He isn’t safe. So as he moved on from that place, there are many who stay behind. The gospels are very realistic about this, describing that there are many who rejected Jesus’ invitation to this wholesale, cross-carrying life. Many had heard him teach, and they calculated the costs, and they just stayed right where they were. After a particularly scandalous teaching, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. People in a Samaritan village did not welcome him. People in his hometown of Nazareth took offense at him and even tried to run him out of town. He experiences tension between his understanding of himself as son of God and his obedience to his earthly parents. The establishment eventually plots to kill him. He was completely rejected throughout his life. So the large crowds surely grew smaller that day.

But notice that there were still those who considered the costs and yet they followed on. They knew he wasn’t safe, but they must have sensed that he was good; he was the king who could bring about a new reign. Maybe they had heard enough of false promises and had enough pandering to their self-interest. They didn’t know everything about him, but they sensed that he was the way, the truth, and the life. And maybe somewhere in the midst of their lives they decided that they wanted a calling bigger than what they could conceive themselves. They wanted a purpose to call forth the best in them. And they knew that to live such a life is to lay some things down. They must have understood that it would be hard, but beneath the jarring power of this wholesale cost of following, they heard the softer, more subtle message whispered into the center of our lives even today: that if you want to find your life, you have to be prepared to give it away.

And maybe once they knew that Jesus believed that they could do it, they started to believe it too.

This text in Luke was the lectionary text last week. The lectionary, which we are following this fall, groups texts in a three year cycle. The idea is that by the end of three years, we would have covered much of the Biblical text in worship and in preaching. Every three years, around the same time, we read the same texts in the lectionary, which means that five cycles ago, 15 years ago, on September 9, 2001, this was the gospel text.

And since then, we’ve come to know so much about this hostile world, and what it means and what is costs to be people who model another way, a way of Christ, where security is not the ultimate aim, where we are willing to set aside what is comfortable for what is true, and just, and transformative.

Jesus still believes we can do it. And sometimes we even see it done.

Five years ago, on the 10^th anniversary of September 11, we gathered with our church Metro Baptist in New York City. As someone relatively new to New York, one thing I observed is that New Yorkers didn’t talk about September 11, 2001. I suspect it was because of the many ways it had been politicized in the intervening years, but on this, the 10^th anniversary, we felt that we needed to provide some space for people to tell the stories they had to tell, to say what it was on their hearts to say, so we held an open mic event for testimony and sharing, which turned into the better part of an hour. I’ll never forget the story my friend Ken shared on that day. Not a tragic story, but a glimpse of the world as it could be.

Ken owned an African music store located in the shadow of the towers, three blocks away, which he ran with his friend, Alberto Barbosa (or “Beto” as he was known). Beto was from the very small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. On Sept 11, 2001, Ken was heading into town when he was stopped in the traffic on the expressway, and he saw from the bus window the events unfold, and he worried as he did about his friend and one employee in his store: Beto.

Beto was on the last subway to arrive at the World Trade Center terminal, meaning as he came up from the tunnel he entered the madness, and he just wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. But he noticed a woman who was very pregnant, and very frightened, struggling to breathe. He walked over to her, and her eyes opened, but she couldn’t really speak, so he lifted her up in his arms and carried her to the shelter of an archway to let her catch her breath. And they made plans to leave.

“I’m not in labor.” she said. “I’m just terrified.”

“Me too,” said Beto, “But we’ll help each other.”

He helped her to her feet, put his arm behind her waist, and they walked.

It took them 7 hours to walk 7 miles from the World Trade Center to Midtown Manhattan. People raced by them the whole time, but still they walked slowly, arm in arm, until they arrived at West 33^rd Street, where a ferry was transporting people across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Beto had her sit on a bench and after some searching he found someone of authority who said there was space for her on the next ferry.

As she went to leave, she said “I won’t go without this man.” And so they made space for him, and they crossed together. When they arrived in Hoboken, Beto flagged down a car, and they said they would take the woman wherever she wanted to go, but there was no room for Beto.

She wanted to wait for him, but he said you go on ahead of me. And 10 hours after they met, she went her way and he went his.

It wasn’t until 8 years later that Beto told anyone that story. See, he had been in a shopping mall, and he bumped into a woman.

“Alberto!” she shouted.

“I know you,” he said.

“September 11,” she continued, “You saved my life.”

“Ohh, you were strong… we helped each other,” he said.

“Beto,” the woman said, “when death surrounded me, I prayed to God that he would save me and my baby and when I opened my eyes you were there, and you lifted me up and you carried me away from danger. You saved me and my baby.”

And Beto said “How is your baby?”

The woman said, “Wait here.” And as she came back a man rushed ahead to Beto and embraced him, nearly knocking him over, and said, “Every night I thank God for you and pray that we would someday meet.”

Behind the man, of course, was a boy.

“Alberto…” the woman said, “I’d like you to meet our son. His name is Alberto.”

And Beto said, “Is that a name in your family?”

And the father said, ‘It is now.’”

What if it wasn’t a metaphor? What if it wasn’t figurative or far off? What if we came to believe it was possible within us?

That we can lay down our lives. That we can take up a cross. That we can become a new family.

Dear God, let it be.

Amen.