Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Choices” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Deuteronomy 30:15-20/CEB)
Gospel Reading (Luke 14:25-33/CEB)
Last weekend, as I’m sure you all know, was the widely-acknowledged end of the summer season. Even though Fall technically doesn’t begin, in an astronomical sense, for a few weeks yet, the family vacations are, for the most part, over; school has started back up again; the days are getting shorter and, God willing, the weather will soon become a little cooler.
Our church is hitting the ground running this Fall with a flurry of activities: On September 1st we had our Labor Day picnic; next weekend is All-church Camp; the Sunday after that is the first day of Sunday school; and a couple of Sundays after that is our next new member’s class.
And if you happened to be looking for a gospel reading to tie in with the joyful, celebratory vibe of the church at this particular time of year, then it is hard to imagine a worse one than the passage we just heard from Luke.
You want to be a part of all this? You hope to be a disciple of Christ? Okay, but it’s gonna cost you — and I mean dearly. You’ll need to hate not only your family, but also life itself; you’ll have to carry your own cross; oh, and did I mention that you must also give up all your possessions? That sounds awesome! Sign me up!
In retrospect, I suppose that I really could have leaned into the spirit of this text instead of the spirit of this season and asked Mark and John to greet you as you came in by saying, “Are you sure you really want to do this?” instead of wishing you the more customary “Good Morning” as they handed you a bulletin, but I imagine that some of you might have just turned around and gone home at that point, and that would have been bad for business.
Jesus, however, was remarkably unconcerned about such things. He didn’t seem to worry at all about the number of followers he was able to attract; but he did worry quite a lot about how committed his followers actually were to living the gospel. And he wasn’t shy about making people a little uncomfortable when he needed to in order to figure that out.
Jesus was, in fairness, a little rough around the edges sometimes, and he wasn’t shy about speaking his mind — but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body and he was as honest as they come. So when he gives one of the worst pep talks ever to a bunch of new recruits in our reading for today, he’s not angry; he’s not in a bad mood; he’s not being overly dramatic or harsh; he’s just letting them know, in no uncertain terms, how challenging true discipleship really is so they can decide whether they’re up for the job.
It’s just like Jesus says: If you’re going to build a tower, you shouldn’t start construction until you’re certain that you’ve got sufficient resources to complete it; if you’re a king who’s about to wage war, you shouldn’t start marching toward the enemy until you’re confident that you have enough soldiers to win. What Jesus is seeking to make painfully clear here is that if you are truly going to follow him, then you really need to understand what you’re in for.
Let’s be honest, what Jesus says you’re in for doesn’t sound all that appealing — at least by this world’s standards. And he doesn’t exactly do a great job of selling it here either — indeed, all three things he mentions are phrased in rather negative terms. Just listen to what he says:
“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.”
“None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
This talk about hating one’s family, on its own, was probably enough to make some of these folks who might have been eager about joining Jesus up until this point head for the exits. We have to understand that the family was the single most important construct in the society in which Jesus lived — it took priority over pretty much every other allegiance that one could possibly have — so this was tough stuff for people to hear; and we know that the choice to follow Jesus often did break up families.
Today, we might find this hate speech so completely off-putting that it leads us to write-off what Jesus says here altogether; we might think, “I could never hate my family, so therefore I couldn’t possibly be one of Jesus’s disciples.” Because they seem so extreme, Jesus’s words are easy to ignore. But there’s more to all this than our modern ears might be able to hear at first glance, and Jesus’s words are definitely still relevant today.
The danger of reading a first-century text without understanding its original context is that we can’t appreciate all of the ins and outs and customs of the culture in which it was written in the way that someone living in the culture would have. And, in this case, a very literal reading of this text from our modern perspective misses much of its real meaning.
You see, in Jesus’s world to “hate” something (the Greek word miseo) didn’t necessarily carry with it the intense emotional baggage that we’ve heaped upon it in our time. In those days, it could simply mean to turn away from something, to distance oneself from something, or to prioritize something behind something else.
If you stop and think about it in light of what we know of Jesus from the rest of the Gospels, this kinda reading makes sense. I mean, if he were using the word “hate” in the same way we generally use it now, then what he says here would completely contradict all of the calls for us to love one another that appear over and over again throughout both the Old and New Testaments — calls that we often hear directly from Jesus’s own mouth.
But if we understand the word “hate” in a first-century way, then what Jesus says here is a lot tougher for us to dismiss out of hand. Because what Jesus is really asking his aspiring disciples to consider is this: “What kind of sacrifices are you prepared to make in order to follow me?” And this question is every bit as important for us to think about today as it was for his first disciples to think about two thousand years ago.
Let’s start out easy. Every single one of us made the decision to come to church this morning. We could have chosen instead to sleep in, or to mow the lawn, or to head up to the mountains, but here we are. I won’t be so presumptuous as to guess how difficult this choice might have been for you, but it does look to be an okay day out there (I’m just saying).
I also won’t second guess your motivation for being in church today — sure, it might be purely because of your unending devotion to God, but it could just as well be because your partner’s or your parents’ “encouragement.” I’m not here to judge anyone, so let’s just take your presence in this sanctuary at face value; but, in Jesus’s way of seeing it, you “hated” something else enough to prioritize it behind coming to worship this morning.
Now let’s make it a little tougher. You’ve volunteered to do some work in the community with the church this Wednesday evening; you dis this because you sincerely believe that you’re helping to do God’s work in your corner of creation, and your presence and participation are integral to the project. But tonight you get a call from your granddaughter, who tells you that her team is playing for the state championship on Wednesday at seven pm and she really wants you to be there. Which commitment do you choose?
Or let’s say you’ve finally managed to save up enough money to buy that new whatever that you really think you need and as you’re walking into the store to buy it, you pass a person on the sidewalk who clearly could use a shower and clothes and food and a safe place to sleep. You feel bad for her and you would like to help, but you’ve been scrimping and saving forever to buy this whatever. “I worked hard for my money and I deserve this,” you say to yourself to justify your impending purchase. “Feed my sheep,” says Jesus. Which commitment do you choose?
These dilemmas and choices that life presents us with are often not easy: Faith or family? God or country? Prosperity or generosity? Safety and security for me and mine, or justice and well being for all God’s people? Life as a disciple of Christ in this world means having to make these kinds of decisions all the time, but they all boil down to the essential question that Jesus poses to his potential disciples right here: Just what are you willing to put behind your faith?
Jesus, of course, did leave his family, he had no possessions and he did take up his cross. And the fact that Jesus did all of these things might actually lead us to think, “I could never walk away from all of my loved ones; I could never give away everything that I own; I could never take up the cross; and so I could never be a true disciple.” And that’s probably at least partially true, Jesus’s own choices might seem so extreme to us that, while we are willing to stand in awe of them, we are not so willing to see them as being possible in our own lives.
We are not Jesus — we will never be Jesus — and we need to understand and accept that. But this does not mean that we’re off the hook. Because, while we probably can’t reach Jesus’s level in terms of either what we have to offer, or what we are willing and able to give — his example does challenge us to consider what we do have to offer and what we are willing and able to give — out of love for God and for one another.
We can choose to throw our hands in the air and walk away from this lifelong challenge discouraged by our inability to get it right all the time, or we can choose to accept it, knowing that when we fail (and we inevitably will), the one who actually shouldered the cross and carried it for us will always be there to pick us up too.
So which is going to be?