Family Pots
Luke 14:25-33
September 5, 2010
There’s a crowd around Jesus, again. It’s easy to dismiss a crowd, a nameless, mindless mass of flesh. You cannot tell me you were not part of a crowd once, I have been part of many crowds, and some of you are going to be part of a 30,000+ crowd of mindless green flesh this afternoon!
And we would have been part of one of those crowds that massed around this intriguing and strange wandering preacher. Nothing to watch on TV, no good movies, and this guy was better than a book. It is hard, however, to be an individual in a crowd; one tends to go along with the intangible emotions and inclinations that energize large clusters of people beyond their individual characters. Another way of putting that is in the title and thesis of Reinhold Niebuhr’s best known book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, which pointed out that we can be wonderful as individuals, but put us in a group and the group starts thinking for us.
Saskatchewanians are wonderful people if you catch them alone; but put them together in those stands a mile away from here on a Labour Day and they are just not nice to anyone wearing blue. Did any of you read that column by Mike Abou-Mechrek in Tuesday’s Leader Post? Do you think any of the Blue Bombers had an uninterrupted sleep last night? Moral people, but an immoral Rider Nation.
Let’s take this one step further as many people do. Many people are committed and moral Christians; put us together in the pews, however, and we become a religious crowd, a mob even, the Church. Is the Church an immoral society?
I have digressed big time. Jesus turned towards this particular crowd and felt tangibly that they wanted to be part of the Jesus Movement. Jesus was “in.” Everybody here wanted to be part of his action, to take in the excitement of the show. If you want to be my disciple, he plainly said, there is a cost. You cannot be what you’ve been if you want to be like me.
The examples he gives begin with a profound paradox. It is Jesus who calls us continually to love the unlovable, to forgive and love our enemies, but then he turns around to tell us that if we want to be his disciple we must hate our parents, and brothers and sisters as well. Did we hear him right? Is this a misprint, a major typographical error? I can assure you that all those large teeming evangelical churches that extol the Christian family and proclaim the inerrancy of the Bible do not read this passage.
Years back there was a son of my congregation who went into the ministry, a decidedly evangelical minister with a little chip on his shoulder for we back home certainly did not believe or behave the way we should. His parents were still members at home, but they took a few of his chips and put them on their shoulders for us to knock off. One Sunday this young minister was on holidays, so he came to our worship and more than a few people noticed that he was perched in between his mother and his father. The Lectionary reading that Sunday was this very passage about the necessity for a true disciple to hate his father and mother. He squirmed uncomfortably throughout the service and never looked at his parents, and they never looked at him. The Lord works in mysterious ways, a parishioner said in the narthex afterwards.
In the next breath Jesus declares what has become an almost prosaic commandment, “If you don’t pick up your own cross and come after me, you can’t be my disciple.” We repeat it too easily, even frivolously, but place it at the end of the commandment about hating your family and suddenly it takes on a new and terrible meaning. Jesus means this stuff. This Christian discipleship is not a casual hobby; it consumes everything you do.
That is, of course, our problem. We do not want to commit everything we do to the Christian project, and we resist doing so in a number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I certainly do. Let me assure you that in those huge evangelical churches that bring in the throngs to worship and proclaim such a wonderful devotion to the Christian life, they hold back important stuff even while pompously insisting upon their righteousness, all the Pharisees elbowing each other at the front of the church, sneering at the tax-collectors in the back rows. We mainliners, incidentally, are typically considered the tax-collectors by other segments of the church. “Thank God,” many a Christian pounds his chest, “I’m not United!” Too bad.
The cost of discipleship is no surprise. Discipleship requires calculation in a very literal way. Jesus’ two examples are different, but convey the same idea. If you are going to build a structure, you figure out ahead of time the materials and their cost to see if you can afford it. A few years back, the highway department started building a great overpass and cloverleaf over the main highway, not dissimilar to the one being constructed now at the intersection of the Lewvan and the Trans-Canada. Magnificent arching overpass of the highway you drove under, but then there were cutbacks and debates in the legislature, and they never did finish it. The on and off ramps were never built. It was a laughingstock.
While I am no fan of the military establishment, it is curious how Jesus employs the thinking of an army general to illustrate his spiritual point. The United Church and others have banned the use of militaristic language in its deliberations - “Onward Christian Soldiers” is nowhere to be found in our hymnal - yet it is quite easy to understand the logistics and common sense strategy of the general.
The most poignant of such calculations comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian whose book, The Cost of Discipleship, keeps the calculations alive. Bonhoeffer was one of the leaders of the Confessing Church that opposed Adolf Hitler’s regime. He taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York in the late 1930’s, but decided to return to Nazi Germany and became involved in the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer is an uncontested saint in Protestant circles, yet curiously no one has ever challenged the ethics of what he and his co-conspirators were trying to accomplish. He was captured and imprisoned, finally being hung two days before the liberation of his camp by the Allies in 1945. The Nazis made a calculated statement in the midst of their defeat; Bonhoeffer had long ago made his calculations of the cost of his discipleship to Jesus Christ.
Jeremiah uses a potter shaping and reshaping his pots as the image of God discarding the bent out shape of Israel and remolding it. In the next year we are going to be bent out of shape by the process of calculating the costs of our discipleship. Not so much money will be involved, but the willingness to figure out where God is leading us - never an easy or obvious task - and to calculate how we should change and adjust and risk our identities as disciples of Christ in this particular location on God’s world. In other words, into what shape will our pot now be molded?
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan