Jesus
is walking through the countryside from place to place teaching, and preaching
where ever he goes. As he walks people begin to follow him. At first there is
just a handful of stragglers furtively following him, and then a couple dozen,
but soon there are crowds, following him where ever he goes. Jesus must feel
like a some kind of celebrity-rabbi who can’t step foot out of his trailer
without a sea of people greeting him or turning around without a loud cheer erupting
from a crowd of near swooning people just hoping to catch a glimpse of the new
famous teacher who just might heal you with a word or a touch of his robe.
There
is this unwieldy crowd of people following in Jesus’ wake. Wherever he goes,
whatever he does, they are there. He gets up in the morning, they are there. He
brushes his teeth, they are there. He tries to get alone, to pray and they are
there. It seems they will not be hindered no matter how fast, no matter how
far, or no matter where he walks, they are right there, just like a large, loud
3-demensional shadow. It seems there is nothing
he can do to shake them. Even the son of God is getting a little impatient
with this kind of following.
You
can almost see him stop take a deep calming breath and attempt to continue on
his way, but instead, he stops and he turns to them. It is “O.K.” if they want
to follow him. He won’t stop them but they need to understand what it means to
follow him. They are more than welcome to become his followers but he going to
be sure they completely understand exactly what it will cost them should they
choose to continue in this reckless behavior.
In
order to follow Jesus they must first understand, so he begins by explaining to
them, that in order to follow him they need to hate father, mother, spouse, children, brothers and sisters. If you
are not willing to hate all those closest to you, and even your own life, well
then you might as well turn around and go home.
In
my imagination the entire crowd gave a sigh of exacerbation at this point,
Jesus is taking it a little far this time. Sure his teachings have been a little controversial but he has never
said anything like this before. You must hate
your family in order to follow him. Seriously?
Come on!
I
have to say as a preacher passages like this are just a mite bit frustrating to
run across. This goes against everything I have ever learned about Jesus. It
goes against something that is foundational to the nature of Jesus’ teaching,
it seems to run directly contrary to the greatest commandment, the call of all
followers of Christ to love God with all of who we are and to love our neighbor
and the stranger. And here Jesus just
goes off and says, in order to follow him we must all hate all the members of our families and then just to be sure we
got it, he has to go off and list them all, every last one of them.
Jesus
is
using a little bit of hyperbole here to make his point. Jesus does not call for
us to hate anybody, not in the way we would think about it anyways. Jesus
is calling for these people to not blindly and undiscerningly follow him. Jesus
wants them to truly understand what it costs. In order to be followers of
Christ one must be willing to give up everything and follow him.
Not
too long ago I explained to you the primary unit of first century society was
the family. Family was supposed to be the most important thing in your life. You
were not to ever do anything to go against your family. Even as an adult it was
considered not merely rude but delinquent for someone to openly or publicly
disagree with your parents, so much more so if one left them and what they
stood for to follow some new teacher who claimed to be the Messiah.
Jesus
says that choosing to follow him, is not something to be taken lightly. It is
not an endeavor one should do on a whim so to speak. He wants everyone to know
and understand the cost of discipleship. Just as a builder carefully examines the
projected costs of building a building before he sets out to build a building; in
the same way a king examines what his armies are capable of doing before he
sets out to war, Jesus wants those who choose to be his disciples to calculate
what they are giving up, count the cost. If a builder or a war tactician does
not weigh the costs before beginning they will get halfway through and the cost
might be even greater than anticipated and they will not be able to follow
through or complete the goal they had set out to do. Likewise, if you are going
to follow Jesus you need to be completely aware of the endeavor on which you
are about to embark, least you are caught off guard by exactly how much
following Jesus can take from you and what you might lose in the process.
As
good children, grandchildren, well, descendants of the protestant reformation,
we all know that God’s forgiveness and God’s grace is free, but that does not
mean that nothing is asked of us when we choose to follow God. We like to
emphasize the free nature of the gifts which God gives to us but although the
gifts are free the cost of discipleship is most definitely not free. Giving up
our selves, giving up what we want to do, how we want to act, speaking the
words we want to speak, for doing, acting and speaking in the ways God chooses
for us is quite costly. There is nothing which is harder to give up, nothing
which is harder to let go of than the control we have over ourselves and doing
what we want to do, how we want to do it, when we want to do it. In fact it is
so hard to give up that even when we say we want to let go and allow God to be
in control we often find that we have retaken control back from God and have to
let go all over again.
Jesus
at this point is turning to crowds who have decided to wholesale follow him,
but do not truly understand what exactly they are giving up when they are
choosing to follow him. They think they are going for a stroll, listening to
the new preacher in town, going with the crowd, doing something new and
exciting but what they are buying into is a new way of life, a new way of
ordering everything we do, a whole new way of looking at the world. Being a
disciple of Christ means that we have to begin to see the world as Jesus sees
the world, love as Jesus loves, forgive as Jesus forgive, show the same kind of
grace and mercy to everyone we meet as if we were Jesus ourselves. Instead of
acting how we would naturally act, we have to think and choose to act the way
Jesus would act. And living as Jesus would live, doing what Jesus would do,
saying what Jesus would say, loving as Jesus would love does not come naturally
to any of us.
When
we choose to follow Jesus, we are choosing Jesus above all else. We are
choosing Gods ways over our ways. We are choosing the hard path over the smooth
one. We are choosing a culture of total abandonment to all that come naturally
to us and instead choosing a culture of being renewed, reformed, transformed
and remade to be people we can not and will not ever be on our own, but we are
choosing to be better than we are, truer than we are. By choosing to follow
Jesus we are giving up who we are and life
as we know it, so we can become who we were created to be, and enter into life
as it is meant to be lived.
Everything
in this world is around us is broken beyond recognition. The lives we live, the
choices which come naturally to us, the way we are accustomed to living,
moving, acting and speaking are fallen, bent, broken ways to be in this world. Sin
has twisted who are. Evil has bent and broken all creation beyond all semblance
of what it should have been. When we choose Christ we are giving up life as we
know it and exchanging it for life as God knows it can be. We have only known
life, broken. We have only known ourselves stained, twisted and tarnished. Life
this way is wrong. It is incorrect, but it feels right because it is all we
have ever known. The cost of discipleship is giving it all up, all we own all
we know, all of who we are, giving it to God so we can become who we could be,
who we can be, who we were created to be. When we follow Jesus we give up
seeing the world the way it is so we can catch glimpses of God’s kingdom come,
what the world would be like if the created order was restored; what life could
be if it was the way God desires for it to be. We get to give up life broken,
and experience life transformed. We get to begin to see the world in the same
way, broken waiting to be remade by the one who crafted it in the first place.
As
amazing as this sounds it is not easy. Giving up who we are, our very life, to
God is big stuff. It is scary stuff. It means going against everything and
perhaps everybody in your life. It means denying what the world around us tells
us is good and exchanging that broken idea of good for what is truly good.
It
may be a bit of an exaggeration when Jesus tells those following him around they
must hate their family members and even their own lives in order to truly
follow him, but he is not exaggerating all that much. Jesus was literally
asking them to decide could they turn from their families to follow him, would
they be willing to give up life as they knew it and go where he called them to
go, do what he called them to do, no matter who they had to leave behind or
what that meant for their own safety, security or sense of self?
For
the early Christians following Jesus could really mean leaving your family or
having your family leave you. Truly
following Jesus and what he stood for would eventually mean choosing the truth
of the gospel, the truth of Jesus over your familial commitments. Following
Jesus when your parents called for you not to, was not merely about going
against your father and mother’s wishes, it was not merely about creating
tension in the family unit, but it meant going against a time honored societal
norm, being labeled as a rebellious child, a delinquent, and a societal menus. Following
Jesus was not about pleasing your parents. It was not about pleasing your
family. It was about pleasing God and Jesus wanted them to know that pleasing
God might just put them at odds with the most basic understandings of their
culture and put them at odds with those whom they cared about the most.
Following Jesus would mean giving up life as they knew it.
You
can not be too attached to the life you have, because God is not about
upholding the status quo. God is not
about propping up that which makes us feel good and causes us to feel comfy and
cozy, God is about radically transforming us, changing us, reforming us into
the people we would be, we could be, if sin had not bent and twisted us beyond
recognition. And sometimes that means that we have to choose God over and above
things which are important to us. Sometimes that means we have to choose God
over and above things which our society tells us should be important to us. Sometimes
that means giving up everything we have ever known to be true and realize it is
false and be willing to learn a new truth and a completely new, radically
different way to look at the world. We have to be willing to give everything
up, our families, our loved ones, the things we hold most dear to us, even the
lives which we have so carefully built and put together, in order to live life
the way God is calling for us to live it. We have to be willing to put our
belief in Jesus Christ and living the kind of life he calls for us to live over
and above all things.
Jesus
sees us here this morning. He knows we want to follow him. Arriving at church
this morning, choosing to be here over and above the many other places we could
choose to be doing this morning says something about the choices we have
already begun to make. And as we are here in this sanctuary this morning Jesus
is turning to us this morning and saying, “Following me is serious stuff.” This is live changing, life altering. You
need to know what you are getting into. You need to be ready to pay the price
it might cost. You need to know what you might be giving up if you continue
down the path you are walking. It means choosing God’s ways over and above the
ways of the world around you. It means that many times people in the world
around you will tell you, you are wrong, that you are choosing something that
is crazy, something which is not good, and something which is causing you to
break up the things which our culture holds dear. Choosing God and choosing to
follow Jesus could mean going against those you are closest to. It means giving
up everything you thought was good and right. It means giving up what you
believe to be the right way to go, the right way to live and instead going and
living in the ways God is calling you to live. I am not saying that God’s way
is not better. I am not saying God’s way is not good. I am not even saying that
God’s way is not the way we are meant to live, because God’s way is better, it
is right and living God’s way means living the was were created to live, but it
might not feel better at first. I may not fee good and it will feel as if it
goes against your very nature. It means giving up control. It means allowing
God to reshape, remake and re-create you back into who God created you to be. It
means giving up your life, as you are living it now, giving up life as you know
it so that you can live life God’s way.
The
cost of discipleship is great. We are all here this morning following Jesus,
and Jesus is telling us what it means and he is going to turn back around and
go on his way and we have to decide whether or not we are going to choose to
continue to follow him or to stop, turn around and make our ways back home.
What will you do this morning?
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