"Spiritual Dynamite"
Luke 14:25-33
Jesus' words today are not the ones I would have chosen for our Rally Sunday. This is a Sunday in which we want our visiting students to feel welcome. There are surely others of you who came this morning to check out church, and we want to do our best to make everyone feel welcome and at ease. The problem is, Jesus' words are making our job harder. In our lesson today, he turns to a crowd of would-be followers and seems to say, in effect, "Whoever would be my disciple better think twice about it." What king would wage a war without first sitting down to calculate his chances of winning? Would a contractor start out building a tower without first estimating the cost, to see whether he has the resources to finish it? Well, Jesus implies, if you want to follow me, first count the cost.
Apparently Jesus hadn't read the church growth material. He would not be a suitable preacher for one of the so-called "seeker-friendly" services. He must not have gotten the memo that the best way to attract new members is make everyone as comfortable as possible. Exchange clerical robes for Hawaiian shirts. Make all the hymns easy to sing. Never take up an offering, because it reinforces some people’s suspicion that the church just wants their money. Remove the cross, because the cross tends to make people uneasy. Oh, and make the seats really comfortable. Pews are out, theater seats in. In other words, make churches as user friendly as possible.
Well, in this passage, Jesus doesn't sound very friendly. To the contrary, his words are shocking and offensive. "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sister, yes, 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." No doubt after a sermon like that, the large crowd that was following him became much smaller.
But why the verbal dynamite? Why does Jesus turn to the crowds and utter such hard words? Elsewhere, we hear Jesus speaking tenderly, with compassion and encouragement. But here he blasts away, seemingly without much concern for the consequences. When southern writer Flannery O'Connor was asked why her stories were so often shocking and offensive, she responded: "When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use some more normal means of talking to it; (but) when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard-of-hearing, you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures." Well, for perhaps this very reason, Jesus used explosive language. He blasted the hasty volunteers with explosive language in order to shock his would-be followers into a whole new vision of God's world.
Still, highly charged language such as this is hard for us to hear. Given what we know today about religious extremism, we tend to recoil when we hear strident religious language of any sort. Religious radicalism rightly makes us uneasy. Most of us here would probably locate ourselves in what Peter Gomes calls “the endangered middle, between strident voices of right and left, between secularism and fundamentalism.” If you saw the recent CNN special hosted by Christiane Amanpour, called “God’s Warriors,” you got a glimpse into the violent potential in religion when it becomes fanatical. But Jesus’ call to discipleship is not a call to fanaticism, not a narrowed vision that rides roughshod over people, but a radical inclusiveness that sets all our loves and loyalty within the larger vision of God’s promised Kingdom.
Remember that Jesus came proclaiming the advent of God's Kingdom. The Kingdom is the world the way God is reconfiguring it in Jesus Christ—a nonviolent world filled with peace and justice. Yet the bad news is that the very things we value most in this world are also the things that often block us from perceiving God’s new world. Think about the specific things Jesus targets for his verbal blasts: family, self-preservation and possessions. To read Jesus literally, as ordering hatred of one's family, is to miss the point and mishear the rhetoric. Rather, Jesus is attempting to startle us out of an orientation based on me and mine to one based on us and them.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas wrote an essay based on this text from Luke, to which he gave the provocative title, "Hating Mothers as the Way to Peace." That’s probably not a good title for a Mother's Day sermon. In this essay, Hauerwas points out that Americans in general, and Christians in particular, don’t think of ourselves as violent people. Indeed, most of us believe that we are a peace-loving people who will only resort to violence to protect those we love. In this sense, our loves are the primary source of our violence. Most wars and acts of violence toward others are not carried out by psychopaths who love to kill, but by peace-loving people protecting the things and people we care most about. Hauerwas writes, "The New Age is here in the person of Jesus Christ, so we are no longer under the powers of the old age—powers that feed on our fears and our loves, leading us to kill other people's children in the name of protecting our own. Hating mother, father, spouse, and children only makes sense if we live in a time when everything is made new, when the wolf now lies down with the lamb, and when we can love our children without threatening the children of others."
With the 6th anniversary of the September llth attacks upon us, we can't help wondering whether we could have responded in a way that didn’t lead to more than 3,000 additional American lives, and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, lost. Writing for The Nation, the late William Sloan Coffin offered an alternative response. He wrote that, in the aftermath of the attacks, the President could have said, “We will respond, but not in kind. We will not seek to avenge the deaths of innocent Americans by the death of innocent victims elsewhere, lest we become what we abhor. We refuse to ratchet up the cycle of violence that brings only ever more death, destruction and deprivation. I promise to do all in my power to see justice done, but by the force of law only, never by the law of force.”
Friends, Jesus has tossed a load of spiritual dynamite into our Rally Day festivities. When we read passages such as the one this morning, we're tempted to soften the shock, resolve the tension. But rather than defuse the saying, it may be more profitable to let ourselves feel the force of the shock. Sometimes genuine discipleship begins with nothing more than reeling in the awareness that God’s ways are not our ways, and that our loyalties are too narrowly drawn and our loves too limited. I think again of a Flannery O'Connor quote. She said, "What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe." It is hard to believe. After hearing Jesus’ words, you may be saying to yourself, “I can never be a disciple.” But remember: the word disciple means learner, student. Discipleship is a journey, a road, a way forward. It is practice, not perfection. I often find myself going back to Thomas Merton’s famous prayer, which says, in part, “…the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.”
So if you have even that desire—no matter where you are on your unfolding journey of discipleship—there is room for you in this community of faith. We are here to help one another grow as disciples--disciples who are living into the reconfigured world that Jesus has brought near.