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Cost of Discipleship Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 17, 2002, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Luke 14:25-35 If you would like to hear the sermon, please e-mail us
Biblical commentators turned politician are quick to point out, of course, that Jesus' speech does not mean to our ears what it meant to the crowd Luke addressed. The Semitic mind," writes G.B.Caird, "is comfortable only with extremes: light and darkness, truth and falsehood, love and hate--primary colors with no half-shades of compromise in between." Thus when Jesus says to hate our kin, his meaning is closer to Matthew's: "The one who loves family more than me is not worthy to be my disciple." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, long before his discipleship cost him his life, mocked such soft interpretations of Jesus' harder words. "If, as we read our Bibles," he writes in The Cost of Discipleship, "we heard Jesus speaking to us in this way today, we should probably try to argue ourselves out of it like this: 'It is true that the demand of Jesus is definite enough, but I have to remember that he never expects us to take his commandments legalistically. What he really wants me to have is faith. But my faith is not necessarily tied up with riches or poverty or anything of the kind. We may be both poor and rich in the spirit. It is not important that I should have no possessions, but if I do I must keep them as though I had them not, in other words, I must cultivate a spirit of inward detachment, so that my heart is not in my possession…. All the way along the line," concludes Bonhoeffer, "we are trying to evade the obligation of single-minded, literal obedience." The politician in most preachers is tempted to do the same on the Sundays leading up to Commitment Sunday. The temptation is to soft-peddle Jesus' words for the sake of a slight increase in your pledge and a nice comment at the door. But these words will not allow it. For what Christ says to us on this Sunday as on every Sunday and Monday and Thursday of our lives, is this: if you mean to follow me and not another, you had better count the cost. Left to our own calculations, the cost would seem to be manageable: some time given to the church here, a contribution there. Then the rest of our lives and resources are to do with as we please. More often I suspect, especially when it involves being parted from our possessions, the reasoning is reversed: first there is the mortgage and taxes, then the education loans, the class contribution, the private school tuition, then braces, lessons, cars, dues at the club, redecorating, saving for college, saving for retirement, and a well deserved vacation. Finally, after all else is covered, a pledge can made: five dollars a week, maybe, or fifty dollars a month should take care of that, though for almost half of the households on our rolls, church membership is not only priceless: it is free!! Still, even for those of us who give $500 a month rather than $50, God knows the Christian life has not precluded the comfortable life. The cost has never been too great, as we have counted it. Middle-class discipleship, Eduard Schweizer called this in his reflections on our text, "where there is only preservation of one's heritage and [where] radical renunciation can never flower." There is, says Schweizer, no such thing! How, then, might we count the cost not by our calculations, but by Christ's? Hate father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters, he says. Hate life itself. Bear the cross. Then, if anything is left over, renounce that as well. Go figure on that basis! But exactly how, we ask him, how? Well in the first place, far from softening his words concerning our relationship to family today, I expect Jesus would speak with even more vehemence to a community that worships the family above all (and in so doing, by the way, does its family members no favors!) I happened to catch the end of an interview on NPR this week with Patricia Heaton, who plays the wife on Everybody Loves Raymond. Raised a Roman Catholic, Heaton had some hard knocks in life and, as she put it, told God that she was giving God a break from her for a while. "Now |