Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C
September 9, 2007
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Bentonville
Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, "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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 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? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, `This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' 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? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
I’ve been dreading the time when this gospel reading would appear in the lectionary cycle. Up to now I’ve been able to avoid dealing with it. Among the hard teachings of Jesus, this has to be the hardest. It’s almost unbearable to hear Jesus say, “If you don’t hate your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even life itself, you can not be my disciple.” I’m tempted to respond, as many in the large crowds listening to Jesus must have answered, “Now you are really asking too much.” And then as if breaking family ties weren’t demand enough Jesus says, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” It is difficult to understand, with a standard like that why anyone was left in the crowd. But the question I would really like to explore with you is, “Why, with requirements like those, would any of us still seek to be followers of Jesus?”
Jesus’ twelve disciples must have winced when they heard Jesus say these words. Here Jesus has assembled a fine crowd, people interested in what he had to say, potential followers. And then he has to go and say something like this. If Jesus had had handlers like our current crop of presidential candidates, they wouldn’t have let him make statements so likely to alienate his potential constituency.
In this land of megachurches, where the importance of a church is measured by the size of the Sunday morning crowd, Jesus would have been considered a dismal failure. It is certain that the crowds started making their way to the exits when they heard Jesus say what was expected if they were to follow him. The thing is, Jesus wasn’t trying to assemble crowds; he was looking for disciples.
So shouldn’t we, before deciding to be a Jesus follower, look at what it really costs? The true cost of being a Christian might be more than we are willing to pay.
There is a movement afoot called “true cost economics”. The guiding principle behind the model is that even though we, as consumers, appear to be paying relatively low prices for many items, that the true cost to society as a whole is very high. For example, let’s look at the cost of a tomato purchased at a chain grocery store and the cost of an organic tomato purchased at your local farmer’s market. Imagine that you pay a dollar a pound for the chain store tomato and two dollars a pound for the farmer’s market tomato. Consider the true cost of the chain store tomato.
The true cost of a gallon of gasoline, a new automobile, travel by plane – the true cost to society in terms of damage to the environment, noise pollution, destruction of a local workforce, our health, overall quality of life, is difficult to quantify. But that is exactly what true-cost economists try to do, to determine just how much cheap goods really cost us for additional heath care, for repair of our environment, to restore lost quality of life. What appears cheap, can, in reality, be very costly to all that God has created.
As Walter Wink wrote, “We are now slowly waking from a sleep of several thousand years to the realization that Jesus' most stringent commands are not calls to a superhuman piety, but the foundation of human survival.”
Dietrich Bonhoffer, the famed German theologian who faced death for resisting Hitler’s regime in WWII, said in his most well known book, The Cost of Discipleship, “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Bonhoffer, called for wider church resistance to Nazi treatment of the Jews, leading Christian opposition to the Nazi government. He was imprisoned and was executed in April of 1945, three weeks before the Allied forces liberated Berlin.
In one of his letters from prison, one written to his newborn grandson, on the occasion of his baptism, Bonhoffer wrote that the church of the future would find a new language, “perhaps one not quite religious, but liberating and redeeming – as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with men and the coming of his kingdom.”
Bonhoffer imagined a future in which people didn’t speak so much about Christ, but that Christ spoke through them, directly. It is the lived experience of following Christ that adds weight and power to any religious language – otherwise we are simply speaking empty phrases.
Jesus’ language was shocking. “Hate your father and your mother” “Sell all your possessions.” Jesus didn’t say, “There may come a time when you will need to pull away from your parents and make your own path.” He didn’t say, “Get rid of the things that you don’t need, so they don’t clutter your closets.” Jesus’ instructions were far more radical. He asked us to not be overtaken by the dominant culture – a culture obsessed with the pursuit of meaningless goals.
Rose Schneiderman the founder of an early 20th century workers’ rights group for women in the garment industry called Bread and Roses said, "There's a lot of pain and risk and fear in the change we want. If you don't know that, you don't understand yet."
How we choose our tomatoes and how we select our leaders, it’s all of a piece. We have choices, choices that involve sacrifice. Choices that require that we give up something, so that we might have something of greater value.
When I was in my late 20’s, I thought that the addition of children to our family would add an interesting dimension to our lives. In my naiveté, I imagined that having children would make our lives richer. I thought we could have kids the way we could take up rock climbing or salsa dancing – that it would be something like a very interesting hobby. Those of you who are parents know how absurd that was! From the moment our son Nate drew his first breath; our lives were never the same. Our lives were both richer and poorer, more filled with joy and more filled with pain, infused with love. We were rewarded by our children’s smiles and in anguish when they were in distress. In short, after having children, nothing was ever the same again.
It is much the same way when you choose to become a Jesus follower. I caution you not to go into it lightly. The church might provide an excellent way for you to make friends. It might help you teach your kids a better way to live. It might provide a means through which you can be of service to the larger community. You might receive the spiritual lift you need to make it through the week. But don’t be deluded into thinking that that is all there is. Once you make a genuine commitment to following in the footsteps of Christ, you have started on a journey from which you will not return. Jesus is saying that to be his disciple, you give up your life – change the old way of being, and become something new.
Reading these hard sayings of Jesus, about hating your life, giving up your possessions, carrying the cross – we might, if we take it seriously, grow despondent at the prospect of “giving up” “losing” so much. I suggest, on the contrary, that this giving up attachment to what the world has to offer, is an occasion of great joy and liberation. As St. Benedict taught his monks, “How great is the freedom to which you are called.” Imagine life, no longer bound to the old way of being. No longer bound to the accumulation of possessions. No longer a prisoner to an old, tired, unsuccessful way of relating to your spouse, to your children, to your parents. In Christ, we are offered a new life, a new way of being in relationship, a life overflowing with the inexpressible delight of God’s love.