Tag: consumerism

Jesus The Extremist? Luke 14:25-35 (Ordinary 23 Year C)

This is a sermon I wrote in 2007. When I deliver this live on Sunday morning in worship I shall of course be amending some of the references. For example, at the time both my parents were alive, we and my sister’s family were living somewhere else, and our children were small. The iPod reference will be changed to the upcoming iPhone launch. And so on. So this is not the exact script, although it is close.

Luke 14:25-33

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

Shoe Family III by Sami Taipale CC Licence 2.0

‘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:

Life And Death by Scott Law CC Licence 2.0

‘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

To The Top And Over by Ed CC Licence 2.0

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

Believe by Matthew CC Licence 2.0

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.

[1] Stephen Brown, Don’t Let Them Sit On You, p 140.

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Sermon: Overcoming Barriers To Spiritual Harvest

Jonah 4

Recently, for her bedtime stories, Rebekah has asked me to read some episodes from a children’s Bible that was written by the well-known Christian author Jennifer Rees Larcombe. We have been going through some Old Testament stories, and in particular she couldn’t wait to hear how Queen Jezebel came to a grisly end. For Rebekah, there was a real sense of justice in seeing a wicked person get her comeuppance.

However, when we got to Jonah and the part of the story where the Ninevites repented and God withdrew his threat of judgment, my beloved daughter was outraged. It just wasn’t right that God loved wicked people, in her estimation.

Just like Jonah himself in chapter 4.

So we come to this chapter today at the end of this short series, and we do so on Harvest Festival weekend. That is quite deliberate, because the Book of Jonah is about God’s desire for a spiritual harvest – for many more people to know his love and follow Jesus. That is, of course, often the theme of the Gospels where Jesus uses a harvest story in his parables.

This chapter could be conceived as being about the barriers to the spiritual harvest, and our first barrier is at hand here, in the way Rebekah echoed Jonah’s self-righteous anger.

I ended last Sunday morning’s sermon on Jonah 3 with these words:

I mean, you wouldn’t resent other people coming to share in the same privileges of the Gospel as you know, would you? It would be absurd.

Wouldn’t it?

I could tell from many people’s body language that they agreed. It would be absurd to resent other people finding the love of God. But I ended that sermon that way deliberately, so that we could build up to the shock of finding that Jonah actually is a resentful, angry, self-righteous man. (Apart from that, he’s quite nice!) In the first three verses of chapter 4, he complains to God about his mercy towards the heathen sinners of Nineveh.

But self-righteousness is dangerously common among religious people, and Jonah is a warning to us. It’s amazing and heartbreaking to see the way the concern for a righteous life loses its bearings and becomes judgmental. Jonah forgot that he was a sinner who had been rescued by the grace of God through the merciful sending of the big fish who saved him from drowning. He forgets he is a rescued sinner. He reverts to type. He says to himself, “I am one of the chosen ones. I am righteous. These Ninevites are wicked sinners. I enjoy the love of God. They should not.”

I’ve seen it time and again in Christian circles. You will know if you read my life story in the church magazine that when my life went awry due to a neck problem at 18, I took a job in the Civil Service. I worked in Social Security. (No, please come back! Please talk to me!) I recall being on holiday one year where a Christian woman asked me what my work was. On replying that I worked in Social Security, she said: “At least you’re the right side of the counter.” Clearly to her, every benefit claimant in the country was a despicable scrounger. Hardly the attitude of heart needed for reaching out with the Gospel of God’s love in Christ.

Or I think of a church coffee morning Debbie and I attended once. The doors were open in the hope that passers-by would drop in and meet the church members, in the hope that eventually they would come to church. But as we listened to the ordinary conversation, with its routine criticism of anything young people liked, or – and this was the deal-breaker for me – their disdain for gadgets (!), we knew that church would need a lot of prayer for it to connect meaningfully with the world.

Contrast that with the man I met once when he and I were both in-patients on a hospital ward together for several days. Before we were discharged, he gave me his business card so that we could stay in touch. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’. I couldn’t fathom what academic or professional qualification that might be, so I asked him. SSBG, he told me, stood for ‘Sinner Saved By Grace’.

That is where we all have to begin if we desire a spiritual harvest. Unlike Jonah, we need to remember that we have been rescued by God. That needs to engender humility in our lives. The great Sri Lankan Christian D T Niles once said that evangelism was ‘one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread’. In the economy of God, it is the spiritual beggars who see the harvest. He calls us to humility.

We can notice the second barrier to a spiritual harvest in Jonah when we come to verse 5. After God asks him in verse 4, “Is it right for you to be angry?” we read,

Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.

In other words, Jonah left the city. The harvest had come when he had been in the city. Now he was outside, whingeing.  Often the religious believer stays outside the places that need the Gospel and fires darts of criticism from a safe distance. Isn’t it better to be cocooned warmly with other Christians, enjoying fellowship?

Well, OK, there’s not much fellowship in Jonah chapter 4, but I hope you take my point. We do all our relating to people who do not share our faith, whether positive or negative in tone, from the outside. We even see that in the typical language we use about wanting more people in our congregations. We say things like, ‘How can we attract more people to come to us?’ Yet note those words ‘attract’ and ‘come’: our assumption is that we are here, and people need to move in order to be part of us.

In one previous circuit, I knew a group of Christians who left the United Reformed Church in the town, because they said they believed God was calling them to reach out with the Gospel to a needy housing estate in what was otherwise a generally prosperous town. They hired the St John Ambulance hall, and began weekly Sunday afternoon meetings. They also ran the Alpha Course. There was only one problem. None of them ever moved onto the estate.

We cannot expect a spiritual harvest if we ‘leave the city’, if we don’t get involved in the middle of people’s lives rather than staying at arm’s length and expecting them to come running gratefully to us. Those of you who were at the welcome service three weeks ago may recall I made reference in my short speech to John’s Gospel. In John 20, the risen Jesus says to the disciples, ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you.’ Therefore, I said, to know how Jesus sends us, we have to know how the Father sent him. And for that we go back to John 1, where we read, ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’ Jesus’ approach to mission was very largely ‘go’. It was to live among the people he wanted to reach.

So if we desire to see a spiritual harvest of people finding faith in Christ and following him, we need to abandon the ideas that a church needs to put together an attractive programme so that we can invite people to enticing events. It is less important to build programmes than to build people.

You will hear more from me on this particular theme as we get to know each other. Do not ‘leave the city’. Be part of the city. Bless the people who do not yet know the love of Christ. Make your lives the kind that provoke questions. And then be ready to answer them.

The third barrier to a spiritual harvest that Jonah demonstrates comes in his attitude to the mysterious Jack and the Beanstalk-type plant (maybe a gourd, maybe a castor-oil plant) that God causes to grow and then wither (verses 6-8). Jonah enjoys the shade it provides, but starts moaning again when it has gone. God brings him up short in the final three verses of the story:

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the gourd?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this gourd, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

In other words, the barrier here is that Jonah has a consumer’s attitude to God. Jonah is happy when God does something for him. But when God doesn’t, or when he requires him to do something unappealing, he wants out.

It’s the same attitude we see in Christians who frequently move church, because no church ever satisfies them. Their assumption is that they are consumers, and they should be satisfied by what is provided. So you hear Christians saying, “We left that church because we weren’t being fed.” Well, what happened to feeding yourselves? Mature Christians should have cultivated ways in which they take on board spiritual nurture for themselves! Any idea that it should all be spoon-fed to them is quite outrageous! The job of the pastor – the shepherd – is not to feed the sheep, but to show them where they can feed themselves.

Faith is not simply about what we can get out of God. If you remember the famous words of John F Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” could be translated into spiritual terms. “Ask not what your God can do for you – ask what you can do for your God.”

Now don’t misunderstand me. Of course we should rejoice and seek the many things God does for us and wants to do for us. But when we simply turn the spiritual life into ‘what I can get out of it’, we have missed the demands of discipleship, and especially the call for discipleship to be practised in a missional way in the world. Those who think that Jesus and the church are here simply to provide for their spiritual preferences are the very people who are usually a barrier to church growth. They so absorb the time of others and distract good Christians from better purposes that they wring the life out of Christ’s church.

All of which rolls us round quite neatly to the theme of harvest. Today, we celebrate what – by the grace of God – we can give, so that others may flourish. Commonly, we think of that in physical and material terms. We give food, money or other items so that the needy may receive what they need.

But there is a spiritual parallel. As we seek not be spiritual consumers but spiritual givers, people who are keen to see what we can do in the service of God’s mission, then other people will receive their spiritual needs. They will find the love of God in Christ for the first time and commit their lives to being disciples of Jesus. They will ‘grow in grace and in the knowledge and love of God’. They too will become missional disciples.

And if too we have been people who have chosen the path of humility, not self-righteous anger; and if we have been people who have not ‘left the city’ for the Christian ghetto but dwelt in the midst of humankind in all its needs; then might we not indeed begin to see a spiritual harvest, and – unlike Jonah – rejoice in it?

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