Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 9, 2007
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33
This morning our gospel lesson confronts us with a really difficult challenge; but I can assure you it presents an even more difficult challenge to the one who has to preach it. Today Jesus presents us with a challenge which does not sit easily with us in the modern world. It especially does not sit well with people who call themselves Christians, people who talk the talk but do not walk the walk of a disciple. And I can assure you that Jesus’ message is downright uncomfortable for preachers who have to preach this text this morning, because it sounds much more like hard news than good news. But preach it we must. And hear it, we must. Because Jesus’ message gets at the heart of his ministry on this earth—to make disciples of all who will follow him. And where is the only place Jesus can make disciples of people who seek to follow him in this world? It is right here. In his Church.
That’s what makes me nervous. And I am sure it is making a lot of other preachers nervous, because we know how the Church falls short in making disciples. We are not good at making disciples because so much of what it takes to become a disciple flies in the face of what it takes to be a successful church. And I know pretty well what it takes to make a successful church; I have some training and background in congregational development, and I read several professional magazines each month which keep reminding me. Most Sundays I find it not too difficult to assess the success of my congregation’s programs and ministries in light of the gospel. Until I come to a Sunday like this. A Sunday which challenges me to think not so much about what makes for a successful church as what it takes to make faithful disciples.
To know the difference between a church which focuses on success as opposed to a church which focuses on making disciples, we might begin with a sign I read recently which issues this warning. “Beware of user-friendly churches!” At first my response was, “So what’s so bad about user-friendly churches?” I mean, don’t we pride ourselves on our openness and hospitality to strangers? Isn’t it a good thing that people get along and enjoy the things they do together in worship and programs and ministries of the church? And then it occurred to me, that this is not what the sign meant at all. There is nothing necessarily wrong with churches that show signs of being user-friendly. But there is plenty wrong with churches who judge their success primarily by how user friendly they are. User-friendly churches often compromise the gospel and the traditions they derive from in order to make sure people are happy and comfortable in them. User friendly churches are often feel good churches which tend to give their worshipers a friendly view of Christianity.
Today Jesus confronts any church which will not take the challenge and the risk of being the Church. The Church he modeled for us by his life, and the Church he sacrificed his life for by his death. The words which begin our gospel account today point out the first important difference between the user-friendly church and the church which seeks to make disciples. The narrative begins: “Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and said to them…” What is it about this crowd that makes Jesus stop dead in his tracks to tell them something that will not be pleasant for them to hear. Jesus realizes that this crowd is following him because he has become a kind of folk hero. Folk heroes always draw a following. But therein lies the rub for Jesus. His life and his ministry are about more than being a folk hero. He does not fancy himself a crowd pleaser. Jesus’ ministry is about making disciples. He has been hard at work making disciples of the twelve he called to follow him, and he expects no less of others who seek to follow him, including us.
So Jesus turns to the crowd and tells them point blank what he expects of them if they want to continue to follow him. He tells them three things they must do. Three of the most difficult things anyone will ever be asked to do because they challenge what believe about our relationships and our material possessions. First he tells the crowd, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciples.” Hard words, I’d say! Except for the fact that the word “hate” did not mean for Jesus what it means for us today. The Semitic word “hate” meant to detach oneself from someone or something in order to attach to someone or something more valuable or necessary to your life. Marriage is a good example of hate as detachment. In order to have a good and right relationship with your spouse, you must detach yourself from your parents. That doesn’t mean that you hate them. It simply means you have changed the focus of your life to someone else. In fact, in good family relationships, healthy detachment enables a family to form a new and even more vital relationships.
So Jesus is not asking us to reject our family, or love them any less; he is telling us that if we are to follow him; if we are to be his disciples, we are to love him more. Because loving Jesus teaches us how to love. Loving Jesus helps us meet God’s expectations of love in this world. Expectations of forgiveness, and sacrifice for the love of another. A recent story in the LA Times tells of a young woman whose love and sense of discipleship compelled her to leave the comfort of her home and the security of her family to go to Iraq to provide humanitarian relief. She was gunned down a short time after she arrived there. Her pastor opened a letter she had left with him to share with her family and friends should she not return. She wrote a simple summary of what it meant to her to follow Christ: “To obey his call was my objective,” she writes. “To suffer was expected, his glory was my reward.”
Loving Jesus more puts into perspective all the loves we have, including our love for money and possessions. So the second thing Jesus tells the crowd is that we must renounce both money and possessions if we are to follow him, and be his disciples. We must turn away from anything we love more in this world than God. When we are able to love God more than our family and friends, our money, or possessions, or the things of this world, then we are able to put all our other loves into perspective. We are able to form right and good relationships with family and friends and with our possessions. A common story told by people who become transformed by faith to become true disciples of Jesus is that money and possessions are no longer central to their life. And giving them away, or using them to good purpose only increases their joy in living it. This is what happened when wealthy businessman Millard Fuller became transformed by Jesus’ call to become his disciple. Fuller left the prosperity and security of his business and the comfort of his home and moved his family into modest accommodations in order to start a non-profit business called Habitat for Humanity.
In this brief passage from scripture today, Jesus has some hard words to say to us if we are to follow him. But none so hard as his third challenge to the crowd: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot me my disciples.” Unfortunately, people in the modern world tend to interpret Jesus’ admonition to take up our cross and follow him to mean their own cross of pain or suffering, sickness or sorrow. But Jesus means something much different. Taking up the cross means that we are willing and able to suffer the consequences of loving Jesus more than family and friends, money and possessions, fame and glory, and all that would distract us from being his disciples in the world. The cross represents all that we are willing to sacrifice in order to love and serve the world as God would have us love and serve it.
“Take up your cross” is a voluntary commitment of renunciation in order to follow Christ. And Jesus, himself, is our first model. Jesus renounces his own family and his status in his community in order to serve God’s purpose for him. But his life became an example for the way his own brother James would take up his cross to serve the early church. In today’s epistle lesson, Philemon renounces his status and potential wealth as a slave owner to follow the example of Christ. After his slave Onesimus runs away and becomes a follower of Christ, Paul convinces Philemon to set him free. Philemon not only sets Onesimus free he accepts him as his brother in Christ. Jesus’ disciples tell us often in scripture what they have renounced in order to follow Jesus. And any encyclopedia of religious history is filled with stories of the transformed lives of people who took up their cross to follow Jesus. People who took up the challenge and risk of loving the world as God loves and serving the world as Jesus served it. That is the lesson Jesus has for those who follow him that day.
Jesus wants us to know that if we want to follow him we need to take up our cross; we need to renounce those things which keep us from placing love of God ahead of every other love; otherwise we cannot be his disciples. We will only be like the crowd who followed him that day. In Eucharistic Prayer C we are reminded that we “are not to come to this table for solace only and not for strength, for pardon only and not for renewal.” No wonder the crowds who followed Jesus thinned down to just his disciples and a few other followers by the time he got to Jerusalem. No wonder the numbers of people in churches become smaller in a world that only wants to worship folk heroes. It is not easy to be a disciple. It is not easy to renounce the things we love for the sake of the One who IS love.
And that is difficult message the Church must hear today. That is the difficult message a preacher faces who has to preach this text. Jesus challenges us to consider the ways we confuse being a successful church with being a faithful church, a church whose primary purpose is to make disciples. And the differences are quite clear. Successful churches place their emphasis on membership more than discipleship. Successful churches gage their success on numbers and growth in attendance, and having enough money to support successful programs and ministries of the church. Successful churches make it their goal to maintain regular members and to grow their church with new ones, and so they will do what they must to be certain that people will stay in them. They sing hymns that are always familiar and easy. Mostly happy hymns that fill people with incessant joy, and simple hymns that don’t require much thought or contemplation. Successful churches want their priests to be popular; they especially like male priests who are married with 2.5 children. They want their pastors to preach simple, practical and entertaining sermons which are meant to please. The problem is that when people leave the safe, comfortable, successful church to go back into the world, they must face the disconnect between the experience of their life and their experience of the church.
Then there are the churches that take seriously Jesus’ admonition to make disciples do not focus on numbers and growth in membership. They focus on being disciples and making disciples of others who join them to take up the challenge of living in the world as Jesus lived in it. People are intentional about becoming disciples. They work and study and pray together in small, manageable groups where they have high expectations and great accountability to each other and the larger church. Churches who make disciples create worship experiences for the purpose of transforming lives. They want to hear sermons from their priest which challenge their thinking and inspire their heart. Churches who make disciples maintain a strong sense of identity in their religious tradition and have a great appreciation of how they become formed for discipleship in it. Disciples are good stewards of their money and possessions, but they do not become anxious about their material life; they place their faith in God and trust that God will lead them into God’s future for them, and they follow him into that future. Churches that make disciples know that discipleship does not begin and end with worship. Disciples continue to follow Jesus out into the world to do the work God gives them to do and to be the people God is creating them to be.
These two models of church undoubtedly look like two extremes to you—even opposites. But, in fact, in most churches you can find both models functioning in various ways and by varying degrees. I don’t believe for a minute that Jesus would choose the church which is making disciples exclusively over the church which focuses on membership. I do believe, however, that Jesus would want us to “hate” the church who focuses on membership so that we might love the church who focuses on making disciples. He would have us love crowd pleasing worship and popular priests less than worship which engages our minds and inspires our hearts and priests who preach challenging sermons. He would have us love the church less that is comfortable and entertaining than the church which challenges us to transform our lives.
I began with this sermon with the hard words of Jesus. I end with hard words Martin Luther spoke about the church as it struggled with its new identity during the Protestant Reformation. I think Jesus would approve of them. Luther said: “a church that gives nothing, costs nothing, and suffers nothing is worth nothing.”
The question for us and for every church to consider today is this: Where do we see our own church in these models? What kinds of followers of Christ are we? Will we leave Jesus at the roadside at every challenge he gives us? Or will we follow him to the cross?