Sermon Archive

Our texts for Labor Day Weekend are filled with metaphors of labor.

In our First Lesson, God is a Potter, who labors over fashioning a people committed to the fulfillment of justice and righteousness. And when God’s first go-at-it turns out somehow spoiled, this Potter, rather than giving up on the task, instead starts over, using the same raw material, the very same lump of clay. For only the outward form of the vessel has been spoiled, not its substance, not its essence, not its “clay-ness.” So, to apply Jeremiah’s metaphor: as God works on us, to fashion us into a people who really do justice, God sticks with us when our actions turn out “spoiled.” God never gives up on working with us. For whatever the form of our actions may be, our substance, our essence, our intrinsic nature remains the same—that of “ a beloved child of God.”

Thus the great Good News in our First Lesson is that God will stick with us throughout the long and arduous process of shaping us into a people, a church, who will in the end turn out OK, into a people, a church, who will in the end act faithfully, into a people, a church, who will in the end do justice and love righteousness.

So our First Lesson is really quite simple to interpret and explain, and its hope-filled message readily becomes for us sinners a source of great comfort. It preaches well. It preaches very well indeed!

But what is a preacher supposed to do with our Second Lesson? For while our first text offers comfort to those who are disturbed, our second is meant to disturb those who are comfortable. And most of us are surely to be numbered among “those who are comfortable.”

So when you heard me reading this lesson, weren’t you more than a little bit disturbed by the brashness, indeed the rashness, of the three sayings (Luke 14:26, 27, 33) and the two analogies (14:28–32) that Jesus speaks here to the crowds traveling with him, to the folks interested in becoming his followers?

The first saying: whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate their very closest family members cannot be my disciple. I mean, whatever is a preacher to do with that word, “hate”?

The second: whoever doesn’t carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. I mean, what are we to make of Jesus’s statement that his followers must be willing to suffer for his sake, and even to die?

And the third saying: no one can become my disciple who doesn’t give up all their possessions. I mean, how many of us are ever going to surrender all of our material wealth willingly?

Well, a preacher can seek to explain that the Greek word here translated “hate” wouldn’t have carried anywhere near the same emotional freight for Luke’s original readers that the English word delivers to us. And a preacher can go on to mention that in Jesus’s teachings he makes frequent use of hyperbole, employing this tactic of greatly overstating matters in order to shake his listeners out of their complacency. And both of these preacherly rationalizations are built on a solid foundation in fact.

But rather than spending time trying to pull Jesus’s punch, let me instead try to make clear the fundamental point that Jesus is making through each of these statements, the fundamental challenge to our comfortableness that Jesus is posing to us here.

Jesus is saying to us, as vividly and dramatically as possible, that it is loyalty to Jesus himself and his teachings, and to no one or nothing else, that must stand as the #1 priority in the life of every follower.

If following Jesus leads to tensions between us and those whom we love, then so be it. Our primary allegiance must be to Jesus. If following Jesus leads to suffering or persecution or even death, then so be it. Loyalty to the person and teachings of Jesus must come first. If following Jesus costs us a great deal in terms of material wealth and comfort, then so be it. The outcome of God’s work in Jesus Christ must take precedence.

Lucy Lind Hogan, Professor of Preaching and Worship at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., tells this story on herself (New Proclamation, Year C, 2004, Easter through Pentecost [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003], p. 200):

“…I was in my twenties and part of a singles group in a Protestant church. Several of us were given the assignment to pick up a well-known speaker at the airport and drive him to our church, which was a well-endowed congregation in a thriving urban setting. This speaker had his ministry on the [“unthriving”] streets of Newark, New Jersey. He ministered out of a plain coffee shop that would have been accessible to those of low income, or less.

“[As we drove along, m]y friends and I prattled on and on about the blessings we enjoyed as Christians, the benefits we received, and the bounty of [the] lively fellowship and activities in our [church’s] singles group. [Then, a]bout halfway home from the airport, our guest speaker swiveled around in the passenger’s seat, turned to the three of us seated behind him, and quietly said: ‘And what has it cost you?’”

You see, that question—“What has it cost you to be a follower of Christ?”—is exactly what Jesus was getting at in our Second Lesson when he swiveled around to warn the large crowd traveling with him, “Following me will cost you,” and it's exactly what Jesus was getting at when he next asked them, “Have you really counted that cost?”

And to drive home his point about needing to count the cost, Jesus offers two analogies—that of a builder who’s planning to erect a tower; and that of a king who’s about to embark on a military campaign. Each analogy makes the point that it is of fundamental importance to count the cost before committing oneself to a particular course of action—as we Americans, by way of offering a modern analogy, have so recently, and sadly, learned with regard to Iraq. One must count the cost before committing to an action.

This summer I saw the movie “King Arthur.” Did any others of you? Well, that movie put me in mind of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s epic 19th-century poems about Arthur, which he published under the title Idylls of the King. And somehow my mental connection with those poems occurred even though the scenes in the movie were quite unlike anything Tennyson was imagining.

In one of Tennyson’s poems, entitled “The Coming of Arthur,” Bellicent, Queen of Orkney, describes to Guinevere’s father—Leodogran, King of Cameliard—just how strong and majestic Arthur really is, even though there are so few knights who follow him. Bellicent recounts to Leodogran the ceremony in which those knights swore allegiance to King Arthur. She says (ll. 260–266):

“…Then the King in low deep tones,
And simple words of great authority,
Bound them by so strait vows to his own self,
That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some
Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,
Some flushed, and others dazed, as one who wakes
Half-blinded at the coming of a light.”

Well, I can imagine some modern gospel writer employing these very words by Tennyson to describe not Arthur but rather Jesus, in today’s scene between him and his followers, today’s scene in which Jesus seeks to bind them strongly to himself by such “strait”—that is, such strict and constraining—vows:

“…Then [Jesus] in low deep tones,
And simple words of great authority,
Bound them by so strait vows to his own self,
That when they rose, [summoned] from kneeling, some
Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,
Some flushed, and others dazed, as one who wakes
Half-blinded at the coming of a light.”

Surely, we American Christians should arise from any such encounter with Jesus pale, or flushed, or dazed. But we don’t very often experience that intensity of encounter and demand at our services of confirmation, when we become members of Christ’s church.

We American Christians are, I think, really quite a naive people. We rarely entertain the notion that there could be any cost or sacrifice involved in following Jesus that’s of a magnitude much greater than, say, having to rise on a Sunday morning earlier than we otherwise might or than having to attend church on a holiday weekend. Rather few of us have allowed ourselves to perceive that so many of the common aspirations of middle-class Americans stand so fundamentally at odds with what it means to be a Christian that the cost of becoming, in this country, a fully devoted follower of Jesus is, inescapably, terribly high.

For example, last Thursday night, to great applause, President Bush spoke of building an “ownership society.” Yet, in today’s Second Lesson, Jesus clearly tells those who would follow him that they should own nothing.

And last Thursday night, President Bush advocated the path of rugged individualism, counseling each of us to do many more things for ourself, on our own—setting up our own private health savings accounts in lieu of depending on health insurance, and our own private retirement savings accounts in lieu of trusting in Social Security—whereas the vision of Jesus’s earliest followers was not that of rugged individualism but rather that of communal interdependence, a vision in which we are willing to sell whatever we have in order to share it in common, distributing the proceeds to all, as any has need. That’s the vision we find in Luke’s other book in the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles (e.g., 2:44–45).

And last Thursday night, President Bush led us in reveling in the fact that we’re paying lower taxes, even though paying lower taxes means that our nation will inevitably be less able, not more able, to fulfill all those noble intentions of leaving no child behind, and of providing many more homes for low-income people, and of ensuring access to a community health center for every person-in-need. For in reality, none of these noble ends can or ever will come to pass without an increase in tax revenues.

But what President Bush was saying last Thursday night by no means exhausts American Christians’ willful naivete about the cost of actually doing justice, of actually following Jesus. We love paying lower prices at stores like WalMart, even though those cost savings come out of the hide of the stores’ workers. And we’re glad to have the hungry and homeless cared for in soup kitchens and shelters, so long as it’s not we ourselves who are expected to do the work or pay the bills.

Yes, it’s time for all of us who claim to be followers of Christ, both politicians and us ordinary folk—it’s time for all of us to reckon seriously with the level of the cost and sacrifice to which Christ is calling us—a level which, were we willing to honestly assess and acknowledge it, would truly render us quite pale, or flushed, or dazed.

Yet, as our First Lesson reassures us, there is Good News, and it is this. God is willing to stick with us throughout the long and arduous process of reshaping us into a people who in the end have acknowledged the cost and counted it, who in the end are willing to act faithfully, who in the end do accomplish justice and love righteousness. Yes, God the Potter is standing by us, ready, willing, and able to re-fashion us into disciples who are faithful in both reckoning the cost and accomplishing the task. We have only to turn to God and, by God’s grace, let it happen.

Let us pray: