Tag: counting the cost

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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From Crowd Member To Disciple, Luke 14:25-35 (Ordinary 23 Year C)

Luke 14:25-35

Last week on the video and then in person at Knaphill (in front of my new Superintendent Minister) I said that a statement on the Methodist website claiming to sum up the good news was a half-truth at best. The words were,

God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached. That’s the good news.

I said that wasn’t the good news according to Jesus, who tended to say things such as ‘Repent and believe the good news’. Yes, it’s true that God takes the first step in loving us before we ever deserve it, but if it is to mean anything we need to respond. And that can be costly.

We see something similar in today’s reading. Here there is a crowd travelling with Jesus but he says that if you want to become a disciple, there is a price to pay.

And that’s a clue. The issue is, am I in the crowd or am I a disciple? To be in the crowd you just have to hear the attractive message that God loved us before we ever loved him and be intrigued. But if you want to be a disciple, then you have some big decisions to make in response to that love.

The story is told of a child who asked, “Mummy, do all fairy stories end with the words ‘And they all lived happily ever after’?”

Mum replied, “No, some end with the words, ‘When I became a Christian all my problems disappeared.’”

What do we need to weigh up if we are to be a disciple, rather than a crowd member? Three things:

Firstly, the Cross.

26 ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple. 27 And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Carrying the cross is paralleled with hating your own life. Because ‘carrying our cross’ doesn’t mean enduring whatever pain comes our way through life, it means being on the way to die. In Jesus’ time, someone carrying their cross was on their way to execution. Their life had effectively ended.

I think it was Winston Churchill who said there was a difference between something that was worth living for and something that was worth dying for. And a politician of a very different hue from Churchill, namely Tony Benn, took this further when he said that he preferred those who had a belief worth dying for to those who had a belief they thought was worth killing for.

And I wish I didn’t have to say this, but that is what Jesus says. Being his disciple involves being willing to die for our faith.

Of course, we frequently remark on how grateful we are that we don’t have to face that choice in our society, and we certainly should be grateful. For in one sense we are a minority, an abnormality. Historically and in the present day there are so many societies where faith in Jesus and in his teaching is seen as a threat that millions of our brothers and sisters live with this reality on a daily basis.

Each week I receive an email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide in which they urge Christians to pray and act for those suffering for their faith around the globe. In the last week we have been praying for Christians in Pakistan who are falsely accused of blasphemy against the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a crime that carries the death penalty. People with petty disputes against someone try to invoke this law.

And we have also been praying for those who have been forcibly ‘disappeared’ by government forces or terrorists around the world. These have included Malaysia, Peru, Nigeria, China, and other places. Some of these people have been missing for years.

Is our faith worth dying for?

Secondly, counting the Cost.

Here is a quotation from the tourist guide to St John’s College, Cambridge, referring to its magnificent chapel:

The 19th century chapel was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, apart from the tower which was an afterthought made possible by a former member of St John’s called Henry Hoare, who unfortunately died before he could pay for it all!

Similarly, Jesus talks about working out whether you can afford to pay for a tower before you build it, or a king calculating whether he can afford to wage war against another king. He concludes,

33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.

There is going to be a cost if we decide to follow Jesus. Although John Wesley found that some of his converts became better off because they gave up spending money on worthless and unhealthy things, nevertheless the way of Jesus has a cost.

It will call us to be more generous with people in need.

It will sometimes have a negative effect on our popularity, because people will mock Jesus and anyone who follows him.

It may have a cost in the world of work or even a social organisation where following Jesus may involve taking an ethical stand. We might have promotion blocked. We might not be able to hold office.

It may have a cost when family members or friends think we are crazy and dissociate themselves from us.

So, Jesus says, if you’re going to move from the crowd to the disciples you’d better count the cost.

Right now, many of us are counting the cost quite literally as we face a level of inflation that we haven’t seen for decades and wonder what the coming winter has in store for us. We are trimming the fat from our budgets, and cutting our energy use as much as we can. These are sensible things to do.

And if we do that in the economic world, should we not also do it in the life of the Spirit? What will we need to give up in order to follow Jesus?

Thirdly and finally, the Commitment.

What Jesus says at the end about salt losing its saltiness (verses 34-35) is a matter of commitment, not chemistry. As one scholar puts it:

The final saying about saltiness makes less sense to us than to Jesus and his audience, since we cannot quite imagine salt becoming unsalty. But salt from the Dead Sea was in fact a mixture of all sorts of things, salt itself only being one ingredient. If the salt crystals themselves were dissolved away, then the remaining residue would be useless, fit for nothing.[1]

So what is Jesus saying to us when he warns us not to let the salt lose its saltiness? He’s saying, don’t let your faith in Jesus get dissolved in the wider culture. It’s a call to retain a commitment to our distinctiveness as Christians.

As faith in Jesus began to spread across the Roman Empire, there were certainly situations where the temptation before the disciples was to dissolve their commitment in order to have an easier or a quieter life. One example was that under Roman law, Judaism had some special privileges which were not extended to the followers of Jesus. If they wanted an easier life, they could roll back all their emphasis on Jesus and just say they were good Jews. That’s what the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament is all about, and it’s why the writer reminds them of the supremacy of Jesus.

Or another temptation was when good Roman citizens, whatever their religion, were enjoined to burn a pinch of incense to the emperor and say the words, ‘Caesar is Lord.’ Surely just saying that once every now and again would be harmless? But it was a denial of who Jesus was, so to do it would be to dissolve their Christian faith. They had to resist, whatever the cost.

Today we face our own temptations to dissolve our commitment to Jesus so that we fit in with society. It can come in various forms, urging us to change our attitudes to money and possessions, to career and ambitions, to sex and relationships.

And sometimes people in the church tell us that the best way to reach people today for Christ is to adapt our faith to today’s standards. But given what Jesus says here about the risk of salt losing its saltiness, we have to say that such a strategy is spiritual suicide. Jesus calls us to a distinctive commitment.

Conclusion

You know, I wrote this sermon with a heavy heart. Not another one where I’m talking all about the cost and the sacrifice of following Jesus? Surely there is some good news somewhere rather than having to proclaim something that can sound so austere?

But the reality is our own culture is moving further and further away from Christianity as its basis. We do need to be aware of dangers that may soon stalk us.

But beyond all that is that this call to costly commitment is only in the light of the costly commitment Jesus gave to us. It does us no harm to remember the Gospel message that Jesus gave up the glory of heaven for an obscure life and death on the Cross.

May the Holy Spirit grant us courage when the only response of gratitude we can show is one that involves us paying a high price.

[1] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-costly-grace-of-following-jesus-in-luke-14/

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