The Cost and Joy of Discipleship

Scriptures:     Jeremiah 18:1-11,  Psalm 1

Philemon 1:1-21,  Luke 14:25-33

The Cost and Joy of Discipleship

Our reading today from Luke’s gospel is one of those “hard sayings” of Jesus that we encounter from time to time in the Gospels.  Jesus is on what in Luke’s gospel seems like an endlessly long journey to Jerusalem, and we’re told that great crowds are following Jesus.  Jesus is at the front, his back to the crowd, making his way to Jerusalem.  The crowds are following behind him.  And then Jesus stops and turns to talk to the crowd.  And let’s hear again what he had to say to them – and has to say to us:

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple….. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."

Ouch!   We might wonder if the crowds still followed Jesus after these words – though we’re later told that many considered sinners were still eager to follow him, even after all that.  The words about hating our families go against everything we’re taught – including things we’re taught elsewhere in the Bible, such as “Honor your father and your mother”.    And if somebody tells us that they hate life itself, we might suspect severe depression, and recommend they see a therapist or go on medication, or both.  What is Jesus trying to tell us?

There’s a similar passage in Matthew’s gospel, and let’s hear what Jesus has to say there:

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

So Jesus is not talking about hate in the way that we talk about hate.  He’s not telling us we have to feel negative emotions toward our family or act in ways that are hostile to our families.  Rather, Jesus is talking about the way we set priorities.  In the culture of Jesus’ day, loyalty to your family was valued very highly.  If you were family, you stuck together.  You took care of your family first, and if you were lucky enough to have anything left over after that, well, you might spend it on your own pleasure, or if you were charitably minded you might use it to help others – especially if there was a chance the person you helped could help you back down the road.  But family came first.

But not for Jesus – and according to this passage, not for his disciples.  Remember that Jesus himself left his family behind to carry out his earthly ministry.  At one point when his family wanted to talk to them, he declared that those who listened to him were his real family, and left his mother and brothers standing outside the door.  And Jesus demanded the same of his disciples, that they be willing to leave their families to follow him.  In fact, Jesus said that in order to follow him, everything else – family, nationality, possessions, life itself – had to be on the table.  Following Jesus was job one, and everything else was negotiable.  Elsewhere, Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God.” – and Jesus is saying the same in our Gospel reading today.  Seek first the kingdom of God – and everything else will be added unto you.  So following Jesus was not just something done on Sunday mornings, but 24/7/365. 

Why did Jesus talk this way?  He wanted any prospective disciples to know up front what following Jesus would cost them.  And Jesus used two examples:  if someone wants to build a tower, they should check first to see if they can afford it – otherwise they’re going to end up with an empty bank account, a half-finished tower, and the laughter and pointing fingers of the neighbors.  Or if someone goes to war, they want to be sure they have enough military strength to win – otherwise, they’ll go to plan B and negotiate for peace.  Similarly, Jesus didn’t want prospective followers to uproot themselves from their families, leave their old lives behind…..and then drop out when things got tough, as things inevitably would, and be left with neither their families of origin or their would-be family of faith.

As I said earlier, this is completely counter to everything we’ve been taught – and often completely counter to the way churches operate.  Many churches try to make everything easier, try to make fewer and fewer demands on their members.  For example, I’ve even heard of churches on Ash Wednesday offering “drive through” ashes – you pull up to the front of the church, roll down your window, and the pastor will be there to put ashes on your forehead…..you don’t even have to get out of your car.   And believe me, I’m all for making the church as accessible as possible, all for opening those front doors and back doors and any other doors to whosoever is sent our way.   More than that, I think we as the church need to leave our buildings and hit the streets, to bring the gospel to our neighbors rather than waiting for our neighbors to find their way to us.  So there’s a part of me that likes the idea of drive-through ashes.  But there’s also some truth to the saying that, if a church asks nothing from its members, nothing is exactly what the church is going to get.  By contrast, other churches make heavy demands on their members, demanding that their members tithe – 10% of their income right off the top - that they get involved in church activities beyond Sunday morning, that they commit to leading others to Christ.  And contrary to what we might expect, many of these churches are growing.  Jesus did not want his disciples to compartmentalize, to set aside parts of their lives as off-limits. Rather than asking for as little as possible from his disciples, Jesus asked for everything – total commitment. 

Our reading from Paul’s letter to Philemon gives us a picture of what this looks like.  Unlike Paul’s other letters, the letter to Philemon is not to a church, but to an individual person.  This person owned a slave named Onesimus, and the slave ran away.  In that society, a slave was not considered as a human being, but as property – as a living tool.  And so to run away from his master was, in that society, to steal his master’s property.  Apparently Paul led both Philemon the slaveowner and Onesimus the slave to Christ – and now Paul was sending Onesimus back to Philemon.  While Philemon had every right to treat Onesimus harshly, Paul asked Philemon to set his rights aside and instead receive Onesimus not as a wayward tool that had been returned to him, but as a brother in Christ, on the same level that Philemon was on.  In fact, Paul strongly hinted that Philemon should free Onesimus.  In our day, we would say that no person has any conceivable right whatever to own another person, and would question why Paul didn’t demand that Philemon free not only Onesimus, but all his other slaves. Certainly Paul wrote as a person of his time - but by the standards of the day, what Paul asked of Philemon was radical and costly discipleship.

Since it’s Labor Day weekend, a modern-day example of the level of commitment Jesus demanded might be the work of the labor movement in the early 1900’s.  Many of the things we may take for granted – an 8 hour day, a 40 hour work week, laws protecting occupational safety, laws against child labor, just for a few examples – are the result of long, hard-fought campaigns by labor.  Corporate leaders did not just bestow these favors out of the goodness of their hearts – to the contrary, they fought them tooth and nail.   People in the labor movement, at least in the early years, made huge sacrifices for these rights, blood, sweat, and tears, including sacrifices of health and life. 

We even have an example of that level of commitment in the example of Emanuel’s former pastor, Rev. Grau, and his wife Dorothy, who have both gone on to join the church triumphant.  They had been missionaries in Africa and had served faithfully in a number of churches, including Brownback’s UCC out in Spring City, before coming here in his retirement years to Emanuel.  Dorothy Grau remembered that, for Rev. Grau, the ministry always came first, even before family.  And to us that sounds harsh – and some of the choices Rev. Grau and his family made may cause us to cringe -  but Rev. Grau and his family were living out their understanding of what it meant to be followers of Jesus.

Clearly, following Jesus takes enormous commitment and can involve enormous sacrifice.  So why do it?  Why bother? Why not take an easier path?  Life has enough struggles without adding more.  Why not coast through life when we can?

In his classic book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes a distinction between cheap grace and costly grace.  Cheap grace is when we make the assumption that, no matter how we live, no matter what bad choices we make, no matter how we hurt others, and whether or not we repent, at the end of our lives God will forgive us, almost whether we want to be forgiven or not.  Bonhoeffer described cheap grace as “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”  By contrast, Bonhoeffer described costly grace – the real grace offered by Jesus Christ – in these words:

“Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a [person] must knock.  Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.  It is costly because it costs a [person] his life, and it is grace because it gives a [person] the only true life.  It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner…..Grace is costly because it compels a [person] to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Bonhoeffer did not just write these words, he lived them.  In Germany during the Nazi era, Bonhoeffer was a leader in the Confessing Church, which faithfully taught and lived in a way that was faithful to Jesus Christ at a time when nearly all the German churches had caved in to preaching allegiance to Hitler.  At one point, Bonhoeffer had traveled to the United States, and he could have lived here comfortably through the war years.  But Bonhoeffer’s conscience would not let him take the easy way out, but told him that God was calling on him to return to Germany, even though it might cost him his life – and ultimately he was executed by the Nazis in 1945, just before the end of World War II.  Bonhoeffer sacrificed everything – but for him, it was all worth it, because he was sacrificing for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Elsewhere Jesus taught that whatever we give up to follow Jesus – family, houses, fields – we’ll receive back many times over.  And so we may sacrifice time with our families, but at the same time become part of a much larger family within the church.  And I’ve seen that happen here at Emanuel when members have acted as an extended family, acting as fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers to one another.  I see many of you posting on Facebook, celebrating each other’s joys and offering comfort in each other’s sorrows – sometimes teasing one another – and these postings are a pleasure to read - and sometimes I wonder – would these folks have known one another if they hadn’t come to Emanuel Church.   Maybe – Bridesburg is a small neighborhood and it seems that everybody sort of knows everybody at least a little.  But maybe not.  We may give up money that we could have used to make life easier for ourselves, but we also trust that, when the chips are down, God will provide – and I’ve seen our members share generously with one another.  So being a disciple of Christ comes at great cost, but there is also great joy – the abundant life promised by Jesus in this world, and eternal life in the world to come.

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”  May we at Emanuel Church take on the cost of discipleship, that we may experience the joy of discipleship, and that the good news of Jesus may be proclaimed to this hurting neighborhood, and to a hurting world. Amen.