“Jesus, You Can’t Be Serious!”

A Sermon Based Upon Luke 14: 25-33

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Pentecost 16c, September, 8^th, 2013

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:27 NRS)

If the gospel is the ‘good fight’, as the apostle Paul once called it, then here, in today’s Bible lesson, it feels like Jesus hits below the belt when he says: “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions” (Luke 14:33 NRS).   

When Jesus says ‘give up all’, he can’t be serious, can he?  I know what you’re already thinking: “Preacher, you’ve got some explaining to do.  How are you going to get us out of this?”  

Good question, but not so fast.  Maybe that’s not my job to get you out of it, but maybe it’s my job to get you into it, that is, to try to get you into understanding just how serious Jesus was, and still is.  Let me explain.

GIVING UP YOUR POSESSIONS, Yeah Right!

Let’s get right to this outlandish demand: “You must give up all your possessions.”  If this requirement sounds like a strange way to encourage people to follow Jesus, and it does, try asking it another way: “Who are you without your stuff?”

Certainly we Americans are, according to Laura Cheifetz, ‘citizens of consumption’.  Today, more than ever, we are what we own, what our money can buy, and if we don’t have the money to buy it, that defines us too.  Are you an Apple person or Microsoft?   Do you carry a Droid or iphone?   Do you drive a Ford or Chevy, Kia or BMW?  If our brand is lesser, then Poor us! 

Perhaps there are still ‘some’ things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s not much.  Superstar Harvard Professor Michael Sandel makes an interesting list of some of the things today’s ‘money’ can buy and it’s quite a surprising list: 

A prison cell upgrade, $82 dollars per night.    Even prisoners can do things with money.

Access to the car pool lane while driving solo, $8 dollars during rush hour.   Yes, it’s legal. 

The services of an Indian surrogate mother to carry a pregnancy. $6,250.  Who wants to have                to carry that baby themselves?

The right to immigrate to the United States. $500,000.  All you have to do is create 10 jobs                    when you get here.

The right to shoot an indangered Black Rhino. $150,000.  If you are in to that sort of thing.

The cell phone number of your doctor: $1,500.  Yes you can pay your doctor to be on call just for             you.

The right to emit a metric ton of carbon into the atmosphere: $18 dollars.   That’s in Europe.

Admission of your child to a prestigious university.  The price is not listed but top university officials told the Wall Street Journal that they will accept less than stellar students whose parents are wealthy and likely to make substantial financial contributions  (See “What Money Can’t Buy” by Michael Sandel, 2012, p 3-4).

When you think about it, Sandel is right.  There is hardly anything that money can’t buy today.  But what happens if we let money and markets determine who we are and who we aren’t?   Will we come to regret it?   If you saw or felt what happened during the economic crash of 2008, some are already regretting it.  The people and nations who allow their lives, their values, and their worth to be determined by markets and money become a people where everything is for sale, even the price of their soul.  A smart jewish professor like Michael Sandel understands this and many Christians used too.   I can’t help but think about poor J.C. Penny, the man who built his company on honesty, hard work and faith.  My Father once worked in that company at its distribution center in Statesville.  Today the J.C. Penny company leads the way in false advertising, changing the price tags and trying to make a dollar on dishonesty.  J.C. Penny would roll over in his grave if he knew how his company lost its soul for the price of making or stretching a buck.  J.C. Penny is appears to be in a tail-spin of death.

So, let me ask it again.  Do you think Jesus is serious, when it comes to what we possess?  You bet he is.  It is one thing to have possessions, but the trouble comes when we let the possessions have us.  And do you know how can you tell whether you own something or whether it owns you?  Well, you can’t really tell, that is, until you are willing to give it up.  According to Jesus, you are what you give and what you can live without.   If you want what Jesus wants, if you want the kind of hope and life Jesus offered, and if you want the kind of world that comes close to us in Jesus Christ, then you’ve got to be willing to ‘give up’ the ultimate value of everything else.   Yes, when it comes to what we possess and what possesses us, Jesus is very serious.

HATING YOUR FAMILY, say what?

Jesus also says that to follow him as a disciple you must hate you own family.   We might understand Jesus’ problem with money, possessions and people who define themselves by how much money they have, but why did Jesus say that a disciple needs to ‘hate’ his ‘father, mother, brother, sisters, yes and even his or her own life’. 

It’s certainly easy to jump to the worse-case scenario.  When Jesus says ‘hate’ you think of all kinds of bad and negative situations.  You think of people going through a divorce and coming to ‘hate’ the one they said they once loved.   You think about children who had abusing parents growing up with an unshakeable chip on their shoulders.  You think of family situations where closeness that once was there, has been forever lost.  How in the world could Jesus tell people to hate their family, when from the looks things, many families are already full of too much bitterness, animosity, jealousy, and even sometimes rage?   When I think about that family in the Utah where the young Father killed his wife and eventually burned himself up in his home along with his two children, I can’t help but think that what this family needed most was a more love.  How could Jesus dare tell his followers that unless they ‘hate’ their families, they could not become his followers?  Is Jesus really serious?

To come to terms with what Jesus is asking, we must understand the very different world where Jesus lived.  These words are even more powerful when you consider where Jesus was coming from.   In that day, before welfare, before hospitals, and before all other kinds of social institutions, all people had was family.  There was no choosing your own profession.  There was no becoming a self-made person.  There was no striking out on your own.  A family determined who you were, what you had, and what you would be.  You did not simply have a family, you were family or you were nothing at all.  So, when Jesus says ‘hate’ your family, he sounds even worse, and it could even sound like he’s gone ‘nuts’.  (I’m quoting his mother as recorder in the Bible). 

In that ‘family’ oriented world, Jesus had something very radical to say.  He says that if you are going to be his follower and his disciple, you can no longer let your family decide who you are.  There are good families in the world and there are bad families---but the human family does not get the job done for God's salvation and coming kingdom .  If you want the kingdom to come near, you’ve got to stand for something beyond the comfortable place where you live, and you got to give shape to a kind of family that can put its arms, not just around you and yours, but around the whole world.   If you want the world to be a better place, you’ve got to put service to God beyond serving your own family.  In other words, in order to do more for the world, we’ve got to be more than who we have been.  Our family has got to be bigger than Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his Sons, or even Abraham and his children.   If Abraham’s family will fill the earth and be a blessing, we’ve got to think even bigger than Abraham.  This is the direction Jesus is going.  I'm glad he did, because this is how the Christian Church included Gentiles, which means us.

Some of you may know the story of St. Francis of Assisi.   He was the founder of the order of Franciscian monks that bear his name and the wrote one of the most popular prayers ever written outside of the Bible, which begins,  “Lord make me and instrument of your peace….”   But Francis was not always an instrument in the hands of God.  Even though he was baptized by his mother and given the name Giovanni, or John, that is named after John the Baptist, his father, being a wealthy man of the world, a cloth merchant, gave him the name Francis, naming him after the rich and wealthy elite in France.   Francis grew up wealthy, having everything money could buy.  His life was easy, compared to others.  As a youth, he spent most of his time enjoying the pleasures and luxuries only a few people in the world could enjoy.  

But one day Francis had a longing to do something more with his life.   He came upon a church in disrepair, and decided to use some of the money from selling his Father’s cloth to repair the church.  When his Father learned about Francis’ deed of charity, he accused him of stealing the money and demanded that the money be returned.  Standing before the courts, Francis new what he had to do.  He had found a peace in God that he had never found elsewhere.   Since his father wanted everything he had, he gave him back the money, and then proceeded to stripped off all his clothes, and then, emancipated himself from his Father, saying, “You are no longer my Father, now I can freely say, “Our Father who art in Heaven”.  (http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=50).

Most of us have never been and will never be in a situation like that.  Fortunately, most of our parents are supportive of us and our faith in God.  This is why they brought us to Sunday School.  But even in the best of families, sometimes the choice has to be made: “Do I serve the voice of God that I hear in my heart, or do I serve my family.”  Most of us can do both.  But there are times we might have to choose.  Teresa and I had to do that when we answered the call to overseas missions.  I did this, when I answered a call to preach, and my mother objected.  Others do this when they choose their own way and do not stay in the family business.  There are also those who need to step outside of an abusive or dysfunctional family to find a way to be family and to have a new life. 

In the time of Jesus, “family/tribal affiliation was everything.  Everyone was "son of" or "daughter of."  Entire families converted, or didn't.  Families provided access, security, inheritance rights, a way to make a living.”  People without family connections, like widows, orphans, or aliens in foreign lands, suffered and had great difficulty surviving, unless they found some other family to take them in.  To voluntarily step outside of the family structure could mean death, but it could also mean ‘life’.  It was not always a rejection as it was a different understanding of priorities.   To hate one's family was a way of saying that family would not be the primary affiliation or the only choice.   (From a sermon by Laura Mariko Cheifetz, @day1.org, Sept. 1, 2010).   To choose to be a disciple Jesus meant you were putting your life on the line for something bigger, greater, and larger for the hope of the whole world.   Isn't this is what we mean when we sing, "He's got the whole world in his hands!"

ESTIMATING THE COST, and thinking it through.

To fully understand what Jesus means when he says, “give up your processions” or “hate your family”, you’ve got to look at the big picture and the specific situation.   Luke tells us that ‘large crowds’ were following Jesus at this time, but they did not have clue what discipleship meant or what it would demand from them.   I guess you could say he had a congregation full of ‘seekers’, but not many ‘takers’.  This is why Jesus holds up images of what business planners would call, “cost-benefit analysis” and “risk assessment” before his hearers.   Jesus says, “If you are planning to build something, wouldn’t you figure out whether you could pay for it first?”  “How would you look, if you couldn’t finish what you started?”  “And if you are a King thinking about going to war against another King, would you think about whether you had enough military strength to win?”    The point Jesus is making, is that that before you say ‘yes’, consider the cost?   The most important thing you can do to prove that you understand what Jesus is saying is to ‘think something all the way through’.

 RadioLab is a show on New York’s public radio.  One of its short episodes is called "Helicopter Boy" where a supporter of the show is interviewed because the show helped her son deal with an injury.  The story goes: “Over the period of a couple of weeks, this mother watched her 7-year old son try to solve the problem of flight.  He started out trying to make little things fly.  He rigged a tiny motor to run a propeller. He finally made the determination that if he could push the propeller himself, he could fly. He jumped off of a rock wall in a harness attached to a propeller, and swore that he hovered for just a moment.

One day, unbeknownst to his parents he pushed his hypothesis further. He jumped out of a tree. Not having yet conquered the physics of flight, he injured himself, and to get him to stop squirming while she attended to his wounds, her mother turned on RadioLab.  Not only did this kid listen to the radio show for 45 minutes, he retained almost all the information of their show on parasites.  His mother said to RadioLab she wished her son would retain what she told him about thinking all the way through the possible consequences of his actions, such as jumping from a tree.  The hosts of RadioLab made a special segment for her son about thinking all the way through one's actions.  They made the show ‘sticky’ with all kinds of radio props so he would take it all in. (From a sermon by Laura Mariko Cheifetz, @day1.org, Sept. 1, 2010).

A decision to follow Jesus requires thinking all the way through the possible consequences of discipleship.   He makes this lesson ‘sticky’ using words like ‘hate’ and ‘giving up everything’.   This very dramatic language makes a point: that following Jesus is more than an experience or a choice—it’s a way of life.   Sometimes it isn’t convenient to follow Jesus, but we still must follow.   Other times it might cost us everything, but we still must keep following.   Loyalty to Jesus comes first, then everything, family, self and things, come next.  The final word: "Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." Seriously, Jesus?   Yes, seriously. Because following Jesus is serious business.

Life demands a challenge, but not everyone is able to give a definitive yes to the challenge today.  Sometimes, we need time to think about.   Jesus too says we need time to consider.  How about a definitive “I'll think about it?”  That’s a good place to start, because the life of Christian discipleship may always be a work in progress.  But one day, we will all have to say good-by to family.  One day we will all say good-by to all our stuff.  We might wonder whether we are up to such a ‘cross’, but one day we will all have to bear it, whether we want to bear it or not.   

Since one day Jesus will be all that we have, is it not advisable that we consider giving him more of our heart right now?  Could that not put us on a better course of living and using both our heads and our hearts?  

Who are we without our stuff?  Who are we when all our family are gone?  The question will be alive and well until the day we die.  What might it mean if we were more of a disciple right now?   Are you ready to think it all the way through?   Amen.

(With Thanks and apologies to Laura Cheiftetz for her ideas and the ‘helicopter boy’ story in her sermon that asks, “Who are we without our stuff?”).