Sermon: The Cost of Discipleship

Date Preached: Sunday September 9th 2007

Bible Reference: Luke Chapter 14, verses 25-35

Imagine a party political broadcast where the leader of the party says “ If you vote for me, you’re voting to lose your homes and families; you’re asking for higher taxes and lower wages; you’re deciding in favour of losing all you love best! So come on sign up – who’s on my side? Somehow I don’t think the media would even bother reporting such a no-hope political message – but they might be a little puzzled. Why on earth would anyone want to publicize his policies in such a way?

But at first glance, isn’t that what Jesus is doing in this astonishing gospel reading we’ve just had? You want to be my disciple? Well this is what you’ve got to learn how to do:

• hate your family,

• give up all your possessions

• (oh yeah) and prepare for a gruesome death.

Hardly, as they say, the way to win friends and influence people!

But hang on a moment. Let’s try and look at it a different way. Supposing, instead of a politician, it’s the leader of a great expedition, forging his way through a high and dangerous mountain pass to bring urgent medical aid to villagers cut off from the rest of the world – like in the Kashmir mountains of Pakistan a couple of years ago. “If you want to come further, the leader says, “you’ll have to leave your heavy backpacks behind. From here on the path is too steep to carry any  unnecessary baggage. You probably won’t be able to find the pathway again, the severe weather’s coming in, so it’s now or never; And you’d better send your last postcards home; this is a dangerous route and it’s very likely some of us won’t make it back.”

Now then, we can understand that. We may not like the sound of it, but we can see why it would make sense.

If we’ve begun to understand anything about the kingdom of God from Jesus’ teaching and action, then we can see that Jesus is more like the second person than the first. But since Christianity has often, quite rightly, been associated with ‘family values’, it’s got to come as a shock to be told to ‘hate’ your parents, wife and children, brothers and sisters. And then when the instruction goes even further – that you must hate your own self – and be prepared to suffer a shameful death (because to be told to take up your cross wasn’t just a figure of speech in Jesus’ world) then we’re beginning to get a sense of what’s going on.

Jesus isn’t denying the importance of close family – that’d be a great talk for today’s family service wouldn’t it?! He’s not saying don’t live in harmony with your kids – with your mum and dad. But when an urgent task is to be done – as there is now – then everything else – all our priorities and ambitions, including our own lives, must be put at risk for the kingdom.

This is especially true of our attitude to possessions. Many of Jesus’ followers, then as now, have owned houses and lands and have not felt compelled to abandon them. But being prepared to do so: to understand that with all those ‘makeover’ shows, that this isn’t where all our energy needs to be going - is the sign that at least we’ve understood the seriousness of the call to follow Jesus. Any of us, at any time, might be summoned to give up everything, quite literally, and respond to an emergency situation. And if we’re not ready for that, we’re like the tower-builder or the warring king that Jesus uses as illustrations of what he’s saying.

These two pictures: the tower and the battle carried a cryptic warning in Jesus’ day. The most important building project of his time was of course the TEMPLE in Jerusalem. Herod the Great had begun a massive programme of rebuilding and restoring it, and his sons and heirs were carrying on the work. But what was it all for? Would it ever be completed? Jesus had already warned that God had abandoned his house – and Herod’s Temple would shortly be left a smouldering ruin – and anyway, all the work would have proved useless when the Temple was destroyed in AD70.

And then there’s a second warning, and the two are connected.  If the people of Jesus time had fighting on their minds it was the occupying Romans that were their chief enemy – they were longing to go to war with Rome. But they probably only had a vague idea of who the Romans actually were, and what sort of forces they had at their command – and how organized and brutal they could be – otherwise, long before they came to blows, they’d have taken the wiser course and found a way of coming to some peaceful arrangement. But Jesus’ warnings urging them towards peace seemed to be falling on deaf ears. The Jewish people were intent on hanging on to their ancestral possessions – and eager for a war that would set them free and restore their land to them at last. They couldn’t see that Jesus was telling them there was a real emergency.

They’d lost their way – lost their vision of what they were supposed to do and to be – which is why I read the last two verses of chapter 14 – because this last warning comes with renewed force. Israel is supposed to be the salt of the earth; supposed to be the people through whom God’s world is kept wholesome and tasty – but if she loses this calling to be salt and light – is she loses her flavour, what is left? This is the all or nothing challenge that Jesus is bringing to his contemporaries – and it’s urgent – things are in crisis.

If you think about it, it isn’t difficult to re-apply these hard sayings of Jesus to the ongoing life of the church, is it? Luke probably had it in mind for us to do that very thing.

At every stage of its life the church has faced the challenge, not only of living up to Jesus’ demands, but of faithfully placing these before the world – and these days the post-modern world is completely unchurched – not familiar with the life of this community and all its done through the years. – nor are most people aware of what’s special about places of worship.

And that shouldn’t pitch us into a state of huge anxiety; it’s such an opportunity to try some more creative ways of getting the message across than just repeating what we’ve been doing for so long. By the way our traditions are great if they’re still tasty – if they still illuminate the emptiness of life without God for people desperate to know why they’re on this planet and where they belong. But if they’ve lost their purpose – and impact – then we have to ask whether we should still be doing them.

We have to understand that the world has shifted so quickly. And to use Jesus’ terms, where are the towers, and where are the wars, that our world is hell-bent on building and fighting? How are we going to summon the human race once more to the kind of costly obedience that Jesus is requiring?