Tomorrow’s Sermon, Jesus And The Sacred Cows

Luke 14:25-33

1. Family
It was an interesting week to read Jesus’ words in our Gospel reading today:

‘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’ (verse 26).

You see, on Thursday, my parents moved house. Having moved
after retirement from London to Hertfordshire, they have now reached an age
where they need to be nearer family. Moving near us is not practical, because
who knows where we shall be living in a few years’ time? So they decided to move
near my sister and her family in Hampshire. I spent Thursday and Friday helping
them move in.

How do you read my actions in the light of Jesus telling me I
should hate my parents? How do you interpret their decision that it was more realistic
to move nearer their daughter than their minister son? Did I fail to hate my
parents as Jesus instructed, by giving them some time I should perhaps have
devoted to ministry? Or did they recognise that I should put following my call
first by moving near my sister? Is the church right to think she can send me
anywhere, while expecting my sister to be the one who cares for our elderly
parents? If so, then my calling also affects my sister, brother-in-law and
nephews.

So how radical should I be? If I am also to hate my ‘wife
and children’, then should I do what some Methodist ministers in earlier
generations did, and send my children to boarding school? Some missionaries in
the developing world still do that – either sending their kids back to the UK
or locating them at a school provided by the missionary society. Or should I even
be like some radical missionaries who left their wives at home? The cricketer
turned missionary C T
Studd did that. And these issues are not limited to ministers and
missionaries. Many people have to move with their job. If they have felt the
call of God into their career, then similar questions arise.

And other questions pop into my mind. Should we take what
Jesus said literally? If we do, what does that make us? If we don’t, do we
dilute what he said and compromise our discipleship? How do we relate Jesus’
words here to other parts of Scripture that seem to contradict them – ‘Honour
your father and mother’, for starters? Isn’t that commandment all the more
relevant today in an age of family breakdown?

I think it starts to resolve not simply around the words
Jesus uses, but the way he speaks. Like the Jewish and Semitic people of his
time, he would speak in extreme terms to make a point, as we do sometimes. It’s
like drawing a cartoon to emphasise certain things. Fact fans will like to know
it’s called ‘Semitic hyperbole’, but most of us just have to know it’s this blunt
and exaggerated form of speech in order to get a message across.

That doesn’t mean we dilute it, but we do look for the
meaning underneath it. Jesus honoured his own mother at the crucifixion, when
he arranged for John to look after her. But he also said that those who
followed his teaching were his mother, brothers and sisters. So I think he
calls us to honour our parents and care about our families, but he won’t allow
us to make an idol of them.

There are ways in which the Christian church has made an
idol of family life. Single adults, divorcees and widow(er)s in the church will
have ready examples. I did when I was single. When moving on from my first
appointment, I came across a circuit that only wanted to engage a married
minister with children. I’ve seen ‘family service’ leaflets with logos featuring
two parents and two children. Widows and divorcees tell stories of being under
suspicion after they lost their loved ones from members of the same sex in the
church: people assumed they were sexual predators.

Now obviously, as someone who is now married with two
children, I don’t mean to demean family life, the importance of marriage vows
and the like. But I think he envisages the possibility of obedience to him
conflicting with the demands of family. While we mustn’t neglect our families,
we can neither use them as an excuse for disobedience to Christ’s call. Family might
even call us to do things that are displeasing to Christ, and we have to
resolve who will direct our lives, Christ or others. We did not sign up for a
hobby when we joined the church, but for the daring and costly life of faith.

And that takes us to two other challenges Jesus makes in
this passage.

2. Life
Listen again to Jesus’ words in verse 26 – and on into verse 27:

‘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.’

Hate your life. Carry the cross. Those two things go
together. To carry the cross was not to bear a burden of the general suffering
life dishes out to all without discrimination. To carry the cross was to be a
condemned person, on the way to execution. In his extreme language here, Jesus
surely speaks of discipleship being something where your own life is of no
matter to you. It is the willingness to risk. It is being prepared to follow
him, knowing that the consequences may involve suffering. That is, suffering
inflicted on us by the world, because we have faithfully, humbly and lovingly
pointed to a different way, the way of Christ.

Well, this too touches a raw nerve with Christianity as we
have conceived it. Just as Jesus makes obedience to him more important than our
families (even though a certain strong kind of family life would be a good
witness today), so he also calls us to hang loose to life itself. Yet we often
talk in the church about the ‘sanctity of life.’ Probably the great majority of
Christians generally oppose abortion, euthanasia and infanticide, just as we
believe murder is wrong.

Now again, I hold traditional views about those subjects. Life
is a gift of God. We should not take it away. However, if it is a gift of God, it may be that he asks for
it back. He may ask us to give it up. Whose life is it anyway? It is God’s, and
we are only looking after it for him.

But holding lightly to life is not something that comes
naturally. Several of you know that at the beginning of this year, I had a
health scare. During a routine medical, blood was discovered in my urine, and I
was referred urgently to hospital for tests. During the two weeks between
seeing my GP and going to the hospital where I got the all clear, I was
terrified – not least, because of our young children. Giving up life, had I had
to face it, would have been appalling to me.

Yet older generations of Christians have much to teach us
about this. In a day of medical advances and increased life expectancy, some of
us (not all) have become rather detached from death. But the stories about
heroes of our faith challenge us to see this differently. Here is just one
story:

When James Calvert went out to Fiji in 1838, he was told by
the captain of the ship on which he sailed that he was going to a land of
cannibals. The captain tried to dissuade Calvert from going by saying, ‘You are
risking your life and all those with you if you go among such savages. You will
all die.’

Calvert replied, ‘We died before we came here.’[1]

They had died to sin. They had resolved to risk their lives
for the Gospel. Dare I say they were closer to the classical belief in the
resurrection from the dead than we sometimes are? They hadn’t been shaped by
the practical atheism of our day that thinks this life is all it is. Nor were
they so consumed by the vision of heaven that they were no use on earth. Their vision
of heaven and the resurrected life was so vivid they could take this attitude
to physical death. What would happen to today’s Church if we adopted their robust
Jesus-centred faith?

3. Possessions
Well, if Jesus hasn’t already attacked two sacred cows in the Church – family and
life – he goes for a third at the end of the reading:

‘So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions’ (verse 33).

Hold on, you say, possessions are the big thing in the
world. We know we live in a consumer society. Aren’t we in the church
different?

If only we were. Last night I watched an Internet video
created by a Microsoft employee,
which showed a woman demanding a divorce from her husband. The punch line was
that it wasn’t a real marriage; he had a t-shirt on saying, ‘advertiser’, and
she wore one saying, ‘consumer.’ Some Christian commentators
are saying it’s uncomfortably like the church.

We have made church into a consumer exercise. Listen to the
way some people hop from church to church and their reasons for doing so. We make
decisions about finances and purchases in ways that are not radically different
from the world. Was I the only one in the Christian church taking an unhealthy
interest in the launch
of new iPods this last week? We teach it to our kids. Recently I read
about the Christian couple who read a Bible story at dinnertime with their
children. One night they read the story of Jesus and the temple tax, where
Jesus sends Peter fishing, and he catches a fish with a coin in its mouth.
Their son was impressed. He asked to go fishing with his Dad and catch a fish. ‘Yours
can have a computer in its mouth and mine can have a new toy’, he declared. Can
it really be that surprising if Jesus wants to say some hard things about
possessions?

Again, isn’t he being extreme? Give up all your possessions to follow him? Even Jesus at his death still
owned some clothing for which the soldiers cast lots (Luke 23:34). He hadn’t
turned down the support of some wealthy women who had provided for him and his
disciples (Luke 8:3).

Maybe we get a clue to our response not from Luke’s Gospel,
but from Luke’s sequel, the Acts of the Apostles. There we see how the Early
Church put this into practice. They had all things in common and would sell
possessions to help those in need (Acts 2:44f; 4:32). Ananias and Sapphira were
not condemned for failing to sell all their possessions, but for being
dishonest about their actions (Acts 5:3f).

I believe Jesus challenges us to put our money and goods at
one another’s disposal. I believe he calls us to model a radically different
lifestyle from the world around us, rather than just being religious consumers.
The world rightly expects from what it knows about us that we will help the
needy. What it doesn’t always know is that we base that on such a sense of
belonging to one another as well as belonging to Christ. We may express it in a
community gathered in a particular geographical location, from a monastery to a
group of Christians moving into the same neighbourhood to an extended
household. But we need not. What matters is holding of things in common. What matters
is the willingness to help those who need it. What matters is the holding
together, rather than the sitting apart as isolated individuals, which is one
symptom of chronic consumerism.

Conclusion
What’s at the heart of all this? Probably what’s at the heart of this passage –
the two parables about counting the cost. Following Jesus is not an easy
option. I had a chat with one of the men from the removal company my parents
used. On discovering my profession, he said it must be nice to be able to
believe what I did in such a wicked world.

Actually, it isn’t the easy option to believe. Because Christ-followers
don’t simply believe certain things to be true. Christ calls us to live what we
believe. And what Jesus calls us to live out if we believe in him touches such
basic values as family, the sanctity of life and material possessions. It would
be wise to count the cost before believing, rather than thinking it’s a nice way
to feel good in a bad world.

It’s about following someone who himself counted the cost –
and paid it. In incarnation. In crucifixion. But who did it ‘for the joy that
was set before him’ (Hebrews 12:2). May we see the joy set before us, count the
cost, and follow his example.

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