Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost (C) – Luke 14:25-33
I have to admit, when I first was looking through the readings for this Sunday, I thought I wanted to focus on the second reading. This is, I think, the only Sunday in our three-year cycle when we get (almost) an entire book of the Bible. Just four verses short of the whole letter to Philemon, only 335 words in the original Greek, were read today. I really like this little letter; it has so many good things in such a nice little package. So I was prepared to do my research and all that, but thought I’d better read through the Gospel lesson once just to be sure.
And in this passage from Luke, Jesus tells two short parables and gives us some instruction that sounds pretty terrible, actually, at first glance. It’s one of those passages that preachers hate, because it’s so shocking it simply demands we say something about it, despite the fact that we don’t really want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. As Lutherans, we are focused on the Good News of God’s grace; that’s what our faith, our preaching, our celebration of the Lord’s Supper here every Sunday morning are all about. Although we do, occasionally, talk about how we can best live out our vocation as Christians, you’ll find that, unless we’re having a really off day, my sermons as well as Dan’s always, always center on what God has done for us, not what we must do for God. Some will call that a failing, but I call it the Good News of Jesus Christ. That’s what we’re all about.
And then we get a reading like this one. Jesus doesn’t tell us what God is doing. Jesus doesn’t do anything himself. Instead, Jesus tells us what we should do. This isn’t very helpful, God! And what Jesus tells us to do is pretty extreme.
Sometimes the right way to deal with a passage like this is to wonder what Jesus really meant. Because obviously, he couldn’t mean what it sounds like he’s saying, right? The classic example of that is in the story of the Rich Young Man, the guy who comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. After talking about the law, which he keeps, Jesus looks at him, and loves him, and says, “You need to do just one more thing. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor; then come and follow me.” And the man walks away sad, because he has many possessions.
Now, Jesus doesn’t really mean this, right? I mean, not as a universal instruction. It’s this young man who must get rid of his possessions, not us. Clearly, somehow, the man is so rich and has so many things that they get in the way of his relationship with God, and Jesus knows that, and that’s why Jesus tells him that. Different things get in the way for each one of us, right? And so Jesus’ instruction to us would be a little different. For someone, Jesus might say, “You need to do just one more thing. Stop using the Internet after 9:00 p.m. Or turn off the television and get outside, enjoy creation!” Right? It’s not possessions for everybody.
And besides. As soon as Jesus is done with the rich young man, his disciples ask him how anyone can be saved. And after saying some stuff about a camel and the eye of a needle, Jesus asserts, “For people, it is impossible. But for God, all things are possible.” So this lovely story has really been about what God does for us all along. {Smile and nod}
And what does Jesus think of that interpretation? He thinks we haven’t been listening. Because at the end of today’s passage, he says it more clearly: “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” {Long pause}
W-w-w-what do we do with that? It’s there, plain as day, no gray areas, no way to tug and pull on it until it starts to sound like Good News. If we want to be disciples of Jesus Christ—if we want to be Christians—we must give up all our possessions. Jesus is not talking about spiritual possessions, or some esoteric sense of quasi-poverty, good stewardship of what we have. His meaning is plain. Get rid of everything you have. All of it. Books and toys and everything. Your stapler. Your refrigerator. Your prescription corrective lenses. Your house. Your car. Everything. Get rid of it.
So, supposing I really do get rid of all of my things. I have nothing left, nowhere to live, even the shirt off my back is gone. I can’t stay here. I’ll have to move back in with my mother. Now, I’ve started a spiritual discipline this year that consists of a phone call to my mother every Monday evening, just before my Bible Study [here] at Immanuel. It was her Christmas present last year, and although, knowing me, you’d think I’d have gotten off to a good start and then kind of disappeared as the year went on, the fact is, we’ve kept it up faithfully, every single week. It’s been truly wonderful having her be actively a part of my life every single week! I enjoy her company. I look forward to our phone calls with anticipation. But I think neither she, nor I, have any desire to have me move back in. We’ve tried that before; it works out okay, but only okay. She and I are too much alike, which I mean as a compliment, but which also means we get in each other’s way. But, let’s be honest: If I don’t have any possessions at all, I don’t have a lot of other choices. So back to Pennsylvania I go.
And Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters…cannot be my disciple.” If we want to be disciples of Christ—if we want to be Christians—we must hate our own families? Really? Is that really what Jesus says? Because it doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s so absurd, Jesus is practically inviting us to interpret in another way. He MUST mean something else. But the problem with this sentence is that there’s no way to reinterpret it. Even if you soften the word “hate,” which may very well be appropriate; even if you think Jesus is laying it on a little thick to make his point; the fact is, it doesn’t get any better if he says we must strongly dislike our father and mother. We want to look for a context for Jesus to say this, so that we can find a way through it—but there is no special context. Jesus is sitting and teaching a large crowd, and he simply says, “get rid of your family, too.”
And if that wasn’t enough, if getting rid of every single one of our possessions and dissolving every single one of our relationships were not enough, Jesus says this, too: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” We have heard people say, “Oh, we all have our cross to bear.” And that kind of flip way of looking at the cross is only because we don’t see the rows of crosses, standing on the hillside, waiting for their victims, that Jesus’ listeners would have seen in ancient Judea. Jesus isn’t giving us a handy spiritual metaphor. Jesus knows he is headed to the cross—a real, physical wooden cross—to be stripped and beaten and painfully executed. And he tells us we must go with him, and he tells us we must die with him.
If you are not feeling shocked right now, if you are not extremely uncomfortable and kind of ready to bolt for the door, you are not getting this yet. I recently read a description of Christianity that went like this: “Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”* From what Jesus has to say today, I think that author, Annie Dillard, was right. Jesus has stripped away every bit of our security—our possessions, our relationships, and now even our life itself. If this is what it means to be followers of Jesus Christ, maybe we don’t want to be his disciples after all.
Now, you all have been listening to me for enough years to know how this works. This is the part of the sermon where I take everything I’ve said so far, and turn on a dime, and out comes this wonderful theological explanation of what’s really going on here. But I don’t have one today. I think, today, Jesus is teaching, plain and simple, about what it means to be his disciple. Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard how Jesus turns the messianic expectations on their head and promises to bring not peace but division. We’ve heard how Jesus turns the Sabbath expectations on their heads and does work when he’s not supposed to. We’ve heard how Jesus turns the social status expectations on their heads and tells us to take the lowest place at the table. And now he takes us, we who have done everything to accumulate wealth and build our relationships and protect our lives, and he turns us on our heads too, and tells us to give up everything, everything, everything we have. This is too hard a teaching. We cannot bear it. If Jesus doesn’t actually mean what he’s saying, then I don’t know what he really means. But if he does mean it, just as he says, then I don’t know that I can follow him, no matter how much I might want to. It’s just too hard.
But I do know two things. The first is that, I can’t—I absolutely can’t—do what Jesus is asking of us. But I can, maybe, take some small steps in that direction. Maybe it really is time to start going through my possessions—not getting rid of them all, but weeding out some things I don’t need. Maybe I can attend to the relationships I do have better, so that, like the conversations with my mother, they become less of an obligation and more of a joy. And maybe instead of sacrificing myself on the cross, I can give a little more of my time and energy to people who have a little less privilege than I do. And maybe you can too.
And the second thing I know is that while we cannot do these things that Jesus asks, we also know the story, and we know that Jesus DID do the things he talked about. He gave up all his possessions— and traveled from place to place, preaching and teaching and healing. He built a circle of friends, a family of people who tried to follow him, but who abandoned him when things got difficult. Even Peter, his closest friend, denied him three times. And Jesus did go to the cross. And as he hung there, with no wealth and no possessions, no friends and not even the safety of his life, he cried out to God. He had no one else to rely on but God. And maybe, Jesus thinks we also need to have no one else to rely on but God.
Because from what happened three days after the crucifixion, on that glorious Easter morning, we know how well relying on God turns out.
* Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (Toronto, Ontario: HarperCollins, 1988), 40.