Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 8, 2019
Scripture:
Luke 14:25-33
One day, as Jesus was
travelling to Jerusalem, he turned and said to the crowd that was following
him, “If you want to be my disciple, it’s easy – there are just three things
that you have to do. If you want to be
my disciple, all you have to do is hate your family, give away all of your
possessions, and embrace the cross, that thing that will bring death to your
body. If you don’t do these three things,
then you can’t be my disciple, you can’t be my follower.”
This is the part of
Luke’s gospel that the hosts of the Pulpit Fiction Podcast refer to as “Jesus’
terrible marketing campaign”![1] After all, who would want to follow someone who
is giving such challenging instructions?
Jesus isn’t making it very easy for anyone to just flirt with a
relationship with him – you’ve got to be all-in or nothing. It’s almost like he doesn’t want any
followers!
In preaching classes
and seminars, you are often told that the best way to prepare a sermon is to
find a point of tension in the reading – something that doesn’t sit
comfortably, something that is troubling, something that doesn’t make
sense. And then once you have found this
point of tension, lean into it, and see where that gets you.
Well, this reading
from Luke’s gospel makes a preacher’s job really easy since that point of
tension is right there on the surface.
“If you want to be my follower, all you have to do is hate your family,
give away all of your possessions, and embrace the cross, that thing that will
bring death to your body.” What is more
challenging is to see the place of grace, the place of love in this reading.
According to Jesus, it’s
a costly thing, this discipleship. But how
do we measure the cost of something? At
its most basic definition, the cost of something is what we are willing to give
up in exchange for that thing. Let’s say
that the grocery story has a loaf of bread advertised for $2. If you are willing to give up $2 to acquire
that loaf of bread, then the cost of the loaf of bread is $2.
If a loaf of bread
costs $2, what does it cost to follow Jesus?
Jesus says in today’s reading that it costs us our families, our money
and possessions, and even life itself.
So what we receive in exchange must be more precious, more desirable
than all of these things put together!
This reading is one
that is very challenging to me. I
remember when I first began this whole “follower of Jesus” thing 20 years ago;
it was readings like this that I found the hardest to accept, especially the
bit about hating my family. Yes, I loved
Jesus, but I also loved my family. I
didn’t want to have to give up my family in order to follow Jesus. I would read passages like this with my
fingers crossed – I will say it, but I don’t really mean it.
I’ve come to realize
though, that Jesus is the champion of hyperbole and exaggeration, not just in
this reading but throughout the gospels.
When he says that you are to cut your eye out if it leads you astray, he
is exaggerating to make a point – he isn’t handing out knives to his listeners
as he says it. And when he says that you
are to tie a heavy stone around your ankle and jump into the deep water if you
cause another person to stumble in their walk – more exaggeration; he’s not
going around handing out stones; Jesus is exaggerating to make a point about
how serious he is.
And so I believe that
this reading too, is hyperbole or exaggeration.
Jesus uses the words “hate” and “take up your cross” and “all of your
possessions” to grab his listeners’ attention, just as it grabbed our attention
this morning. He wants to challenge his
listeners, including us, to dig down and examine our priorities. What are our priorities in life?
Theologian Paul
Tillich has an interesting approach when he writes about faith – he calls faith
our Ultimate Concern, and he says that everyone has an Ultimate Concern, even
if they say that they don’t have faith.[2] Your Ultimate Concern is that thing that you
prioritize above all other things – the thing that you are willing to give your
time and your energy and your money to; the thing that you are willing to
serve; the thing that demands your devotion and promises you fulfillment. Your Ultimate Concern is the thing that you
consider worthy of giving all of this to; it is the thing that you consider to
be holy or sacred.
Having lived in
Germany in the 1930s, Tillich observed the problems that arise when nationalism
becomes the Ultimate Concern of a group of people – in fact, he was fired from
his position as a theology professor by the Nazi government, and had to leave
Germany shortly thereafter. Looking
around the world today, I can’t help but wonder if nationalism is once again
becoming the Ultimate Concern of more and more people. But there are other examples of Ultimate
Concerns that we can see as well.
An amusing example
might be the ultra-fan of a sports team – someone who spends all of their free
time and all of their money cheering on a team.
They give up weekends with their family to travel all around following
their team, and the team’s success or failure affects the super-fan’s emotional
state. Cheering on a sports team, in and
of itself isn’t a bad thing; but when that sports team becomes your Ultimate
Concern, then it becomes a problem.
Another example of
Ultimate Concern that we see in today’s world might be Wellness Culture. People who spend all of their free time
reading health and wellness articles online, who spend all of their money on
stranger and stranger wellness products, who are so concerned about what they
eat that they can’t extend or receive mealtime hospitality. Again, being concerned about your health
isn’t a bad thing; caring for and loving the bodies that God gave us is a good
thing; but when wellness becomes the most important thing in your life, when
wellness becomes your Ultimate Concern, then it becomes a problem.
So I think that maybe
what Jesus is trying to say in today’s reading is that he wants to be our
Ultimate Concern. Jesus wants to be our
top priority, the thing that we give our time and energy towards, the thing
that we consider to be worthy of everything that we give.
And this is where that
harsh teaching from Jesus starts to make sense.
He doesn’t want us to actually hate our family, he just wants this path
of following him to be more important.
Jesus doesn’t want us to go out and seek to be nailed to a cross – but
we are to follow Jesus even when that means some sort of risk to our
comfort. Jesus doesn’t want us to give
up all of our possessions, but he also doesn’t want our possessions and the
pursuit of money to become more important than our relationship with God.
From the comfort of
these pews, it can become a bit of a hypothetical mind game – if I were in a
situation where I had to choose between my safety and Jesus, what would I
choose? If I had to choose between my
possessions and Jesus, what would I choose?
And Jesus is very clear in what he wants our answer to be. We are to hold very loosely our attachment to
our things in the world, things that were given to us from God, and things that
are, in the end, transient. We are to
hold them loosely enough that we can put God first if and when they were to
ever come into conflict with one another.
It’s not always
hypothetical – these situations do arise.
When I was at AST, I did research into bi-vocational ministers –
ministers with more than one vocational calling – and how this affected their
identity. One of the things that I found
was that when the two vocations were in synch with one another, that was when
they were most comfortable in their identity.
However, when they were in their job outside of churchland and found
themselves in a situation where they were expected to act in a way that wasn’t
in keeping with their identity as either a minister or as a follower of Jesus –
that was when they felt very uncomfortable and pulled apart; but in the end, in
order to continue to walk through the world as a follower of Jesus, that is the
choice that they had to make.
And so I invite you to
consider – what is the object of your Ultimate Concern? When the rubber hits the road, when you have
to make a choice, where do your priorities lie?
No comments:
Post a Comment