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

Need people to help us – parents, SS teachers, church

we don’t do it alone. God is always 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.

And if I can get it with less effort, that’s great – catalogue or online shopping

I’m not alone in that:

Ben and guitar

Kids and football

It takes work; it doesn’t come easy

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

So how are we to deal with these harsh words of Jesus? Can this be the good news, the gospel?

SLB someone said unless you’re serious go on home – they threatened to get up and leave if I say that in sermon.

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 bargains ‘family values’ and easy living we try to espouse in this nation. What can he be thinking?

Now I know Jesus has been known to exaggerate to shock in order to get through to us. But hate my family?

Family back then was an intricate network of honor. It was the foundation of status.

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.

And family and social networks had power. 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

Before we all get to thinking we’re quite different… many of us are very dependent on and entwined with our families and social networks, often in unhealthy ways: we’re wrapped up in pleasing a spouse,

Tread carefully so not to offend an in-law,

Totally focused on being a good mother or doing anything to be seen as a popular friend – and we lose ourselves in the process. We’re so enmeshed we’re prisoners.

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? Really?

In practice, there are other things that are #1, have 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.

All things that in practice are more important to us than Jesus.

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 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 honestly 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 root, translated as impossible:

Twice he says:

As John said last week, it’s not all about me anymore.

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

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? With God as the primary actor?

What would that look like, in my day to day life?

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

He sees Christ as the connector between disciples - no direct intimacy with another is possible, we have to go through Jesus.

So what if, instead of relegating Jesus to the sidelines, we invite Jesus into the space between us and family, between us and friends,

job,

and filter everything through him: conversations, communications, even confrontations, might we then come to follow as disciples?

Join me in prayer:

--A Costly Business script