High Standards

Luke 14:25-33 090907

What would you like to be when you grow up?

What will you have to do to be that? Is it easy?

Will you need help, or can you do it all by yourself?

Same with being a disciple of Jesus – it’s not easy – sometimes we do wrong things, sometimes right things

but we don’t do it alone. God is there to help us do the right things.

Back to school sales: we’re always after a bargain

The less I can pay the better.

The less work I have to do to get something the better too

Ben and guitar

Kids and football

It takes work; it doesn’t come easy

But we’re always looking for easy, and convenient.

So how are we to deal with this text? Is this the good news, the gospel?

SLB – unless you’re serious go on home – they threatened to get up and leave when I say that.

Funny but not really. Unless you’re serious, Jesus says to the crowds following him, unless you realize what it costs to be my disciple, you’d better go on home.

3 times Jesus uses the phrase unless….you cannot be my disciple.

It’s shocking. It’s dynamite, an explosion of all the ‘family values’ and easy living we try to espouse in this nation. What can he be thinking?

Jesus has been known to exaggerate to make a point that needs to shock in order to get through to us. But Hate my family?

Well let’s think about what family meant in those days, to all those people following him along, excited by the idea that God’s story, God’s song, God’s kingdom was breaking into their history.

Family was an intricate network of honor. It was the foundation of status. Look at all the trouble God goes to to protect ‘widows and orphans’ in the law – if they had status they wouldn’t need the laws of protection!

In the family, the expectation was that you’d heed your family’s wishes, and no-one, except perhaps the patriarch, really had an identity apart from the family—it was all intricately linked. If the head of the family became a Christian, the whole family did. If the head of the empire became a Christian, as Constantine supposedly did, everyone else was supposed to follow along

Our identity sometimes isn’t so different; many of us are entwined with our families and social networks, often in unhealthy ways: we’re wrapped up in pleasing a spouse, not offending an in-law, being a good mother or a popular friend – and we lose ourselves in the process.

Jesus is challenging that system. First, the implication is that everyone has the right to choose whether to follow Jesus or not. It needs to be a personal decision, not dependent on what everyone else says. That’s one reason we do confirmation – young people decide for themselves, deliberately. Secondly, it does away with the power structures of society – gosh, even widows and orphans have rights they don’t under the present system. And the fact that he uses the two examples of cost-counting that he does strikes another blow for the prevalent culture – this new kingdom, this story of God, this divine song is also available to ordinary farmers who might build a lookout over their fields, and mighty kings contemplating their battle plans—everyone has access.

This is quite a freedom text! Maybe there is some good news in here somewhere!

But what about this word, hate?

There was extreme discomfort this week in SLB over this word. We scrambled for footnotes to see if that helped, and what is clear is that it is a word that did NOT hold the same animosity we give it today. It didn’t mean strong, intense even, dislike. one Bible version said it means ‘love less’ so we were more comfortable with that – of course we love God, Jesus above all else, don’t we? Or do we?

But then another source I found this week says it meant to turn away from, detach oneself from.

I’m not sure that’s much better. After all, there are many things that have #1 priority, first allegiance in our lives: it might be school, or job, or family, or sport—it might be a battle you’re embroiled in, or some tower you’re building for yourself.

However we might translate and skirt around this to make it more palatable, there’s really no doubt about what he’s saying.

You can’t be my disciple if you want convenient, safe, cheap and easy. Maybe you can be a Christian, because that seems quite a secular term these days, but you can’t be a disciple. Think of this large crowd as the western Christian world: we might associate ourselves with Jesus’ teaching, but our fundamental allegiances don’t change.

Following Jesus has to come before everything. This is what Clarence Jordan, in Cotton Patch Parables, called the realistic reckoning, and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the classic The Cost of Discipleship says the very first disciples had to do: he said their first step from the fishing industry cut them off from their previous existence: "they must burn their boats and plunge into absolute insecurity"

You can almost hear the large crowd slinking away as one by one they do this realistic reckoning.

It has become quite clear to me that I do not have what it takes to be a disciple. I can be a sort of Christian, but a disciple, with these standards? I don’t think so.

Now before you get excited, that’s not my resignation.

Because I believe there is good news in this text. And it occurs in the word cannot be my disciple. It could mean can and won’t as Luke uses it elsewhere, but he also uses it to mean what it says, cannot…would like to but cannot. And at least twice Luke uses this word, translated as impossible:

What is impossible for humans is possible for God.

A writer by the name of Stoffregen I read this week :

When we finally admit, I can’t…we are finally open to God’s I can.

Could it be that following Jesus, answering the call to faithful discipleship, isn’t done by our own power, but by God’s grace and guidance?

Bonhoeffer has a great image that struck me this week as I thought about all the things that get between me and Jesus.

He understands that Christ is the connector between people, no direct intimacy with another is possible, we have to go through Jesus.

So if we invite Jesus into the space between us and family, friends, job, sport, and filter everything through him, conversations, communications, even confrontations, might we not come to follow as disciples?

Join me in prayer:

--A Costly Business script