Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 9, 2007

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 14:25-33)

Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, “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. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So, therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Perception is a funny thing. Perception is a funny thing.

When I was little, I was taught the same song you were: “Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats.” Until I was in my mid-teens, I would have sworn that the song went: “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey. A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?” I thought to myself, those zany adults, those zany adults, who teach us nonsensical rhyme with made-up words, until I finally realized it was: “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.” But I didn’t know that until I was a teenager. Perception is a funny thing.

I recall, too, a sermon that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and in this sermon the pastor told a story of a man who left everything and everyone in his life behind to be a missionary in Asia. There, in some small village with virtually nothing to live on, that man daily stood in the village square trying to speak to people about Jesus Christ. But nobody listened to him for years. They ignored him and they avoided him, and he had no friends. One day, overcome with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, he collapsed in the street. And that’s all I remember of the story. I don’t remember whether people helped him or not. I don’t remember if he got better or if he died. I don’t know what point the pastor intended to make with this story. I don’t even know if it was a true story. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what I heard and the way I heard it. My perception of this story was that the man was called by the Lord to give up everything, to go talk to people who didn’t care what he had to say, until finally one day he collapsed, penniless and alone.

My perception was that this was the kind of thing that happened when people surrender their life to God, and that surrendering our lives to God is what everybody is supposed to do. And I was scared. At fifteen years old, there were so many things I wanted to do and to have and to be before I had to give them all up and go to Asia and collapse on the street! I wanted to drive and have a car. I wanted to be a champion tennis player (which never worked out). I wanted to experience love and maybe get married. I didn’t want to live in Asia.

One of the reasons this thought weighed so heavily upon me was because of passages like the one we just read in our Gospel lesson, in which Jesus seems to be saying just this sort of thing, that to be his follower one must give up everything—family, friends, possessions, plans, potential, everything—and those who cannot, or will not, or are not prepared to do so are not worthy to be his disciple.

This was my perception. It is a perception widely held and preached. However, it is a perception based on an enormous mistake. We Christians often read the Bible taking the words of Jesus as spoken directly to us. But Jesus is not speaking to us—he is not. He is speaking to specific people in a specific circumstance, within the context of a larger narrative. To assume and teach that Jesus’ words apply to all Christians in all time in just the same way they applied to those he was speaking to in the narrative is mistaken.

In the passage today, Jesus is not speaking to us, he is speaking to them, and we overhear the conversation. Do you see that that is a very different thing, a different way to perceive what is going on? In the context of the story Luke tells, Jesus and his disciples are on their way to Jerusalem, where Jesus is going to lose his life. Along the way, however, Jesus has become quite popular, such that large crowds are beginning to follow him from place to place to place. At this point, Jesus does everyone a great favor by speaking sternly to those crowds, and he says, “If you’re not prepared to lose everything, your families, your possessions, even your lives, follow me no longer and go home.”

Can you see it was grace? He doesn’t say to them, “Look, if you don’t follow along with me to Jerusalem, God will hate you or condemn you.” “If you don’t keep following along with me, you’re stupid or bad.” “If you don’t follow along with me, I won’t love you anymore.” Jesus doesn’t say that. He is warning them about the very, very steep cost that everyone who follows him to Jerusalem at this point is about to face, and it would be better that those who are not prepared to do so go home now. Now, this is a horse of an entirely different color.

Do these stern words of Jesus to his disciples, or to those large crowds, have implications for all of our lives? Well, of course. But to lift them out of their context, within the whole narrative, and then to foist them on other people or upon ourselves as though they are spoken directly to us, is what we call fundamentalism, where biblical passages are taken out of their narrative context and dropped into the lives of people today, removed from that context by millennia, and then people are told to simply do what the word says. So we have churches, even Lutheran churches, where women are not allowed to vote or have positions of authority, because “that’s what the word says.” We have churches where Christians can’t divorce under any circumstances, because “that’s what the word says.” We have churches where children are punished with rods, because “that’s what the word says.”

I’m purposely using safe examples, ones where all of us are likely to agree that our sense of the Bible as a whole allows us to let go of these particular parts. There are a great many other examples we could name: That women must wear head coverings in church—well, we have let that one go; that adulterers shall be stoned to death—well, we have let that one go; that wives shall submit in obedience to their husbands as to the Lord. I think we have let that one go. And if any of the men out here think that they haven’t let that one go, ask your wife. We have let go a great many things the Bible clearly says in one place or another, and that’s okay. The meaning of the Bible for us is not simple, clear, and direct. It must be discerned.

So you see that we in our larger church body, the ELCA, are struggling and wrestling with profound ethical questions around serious issues, like abortion, like homosexuality, like economic questions of justice and equity, around the question of war, militarism, and retaliation. That we wrestle and that we struggle is not a sign of our biblical unfaithfulness. It’s not a sign that we’re simply ignoring what the Bible says. It is, rather, a sign that we take the Bible seriously, but not literally in every point. And that’s a good thing, even though it’s more messy and less black and white.

Jesus was stern with the crowds that were following him, and it was for those crowds a grace, and grace, grace is what this whole business is about. Life is hard enough all by itself. We’re not called to make life harder on ourselves or on others, especially by using the Bible. Rather, we are called to find in the Bible grace for living, the grace that is really there.

We don’t kid ourselves, the Bible is full of stern stuff, warnings, injunctions, commands, challenges, and truth we might not like to hear. But that’s life; that’s the way life is. Life is no skip through the tulips. We may face circumstances as grim as those first followers of Christ, where to follow what we believe may cost us very, very much. It’s then, but only then, that we find ourselves in a situation analogous enough to those first followers of Jesus that we might hear Jesus’ stern words of warning, to count the cost, as grace, and not condemnation.

Perception is a funny thing.

Amen.