Sermons

We Are Called to…What?

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.”

Well, today is the start of the fall schedule, a return to the programming and activities that create the hum of the church, which falls silent during the summer months. So we begin, …. and we have a text that is never easy to wrestle to the ground. Episcopal priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor once began a sermon on this passage from Luke this way:

“If any of you came here this morning believing that you were disciples of Jesus Christ, then I guess that you know better now.” In the church, especially in this church, we aim to create opportunities for formation, or, as some would say, discipleship. For many reasons, I prefer formation, and I will get back to that.

I want to address this prophetic hyperbole that Jesus rolls out to us with these loaded sentences of hating. I mean, I get that you want to catch people’s attention, and I get that you really want us to be of service. I even get that you are preaching that you know you are running out of time. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus has already turned his face towards Jerusalem, the image that Jesus will go there to die, and that he knows it. Yet he has these crowds who find all of this entertaining and not life-altering. Jesus senses he is building a crowd because he is asking questions against the authorities, and he wants those who are there to be entertained to see that a lot more is being asked of them. Not just the occupiers. He wants them to catch up and see what is at stake here.

I mean, I get all that, and I want to say to Jesus, “My dude, I just got back from vacation and we are looking for a new staff member, I have two new folks on staff, I have sick people to care for, and there is someone I am trying to find a safe place to sleep, our prayer list is growing every day and you want the brand new seminarian to tell everyone to hate her family? Hate life itself? Give up all possessions? Carry a cross? Where I want to build community, create a place of Joy, give the people gathered something, and instead I get to break open all of this?”

Okay, I got my preaching shoes on and here goes…I want to talk about formation rather than discipleship. I have often described my formation as my going to Seminary and hearing from an upperclassman that there’s a point where you have to question absolutely everything. What are you doing? Why are you here? Is this really what you want to do? This Dark Night of the Soul, where you ponder the big questions —the ‘how did I get here’ kind of questions. If you take that seriously, you make a commitment that continues to guide you down this path, for good or for bad. This is your life. Right now, in this city, what is going on? You, too, might be asking these kinds of big questions.

The image that I have is that if you take the gospel seriously, it’ll knock a hole in you, and your life will pour out before you, and you get to pick up all the pieces. You can’t throw out anything: The Good, The Bad, the pieces you don’t love. All of it goes back because it’s who you are as a human. It’s your life experience. It’s everything that you know: your brokenness, your trauma, your joy, your excitement. Your Love. But as you put it back, it’s all through a theological lens, so all a sense of who God is in the world; who that sense of the Divine spark is; that good orderly Direction.

And it sounds painful, and it kind of is, and it gives you a new way of looking at the world and a new measuring stick and all of the things that are easy and hard and community-building. Enjoy making and holding people’s hands when the world is caving in and standing in the streets chanting for a new way of being in the world; it’s for singing music is for participating in the good and the bad and the all the things of life and it’s worked to get there and it’s a deep questioning of whether this is how I want to spend my life and at no point in time did I need to think about it as hating my family is giving up all of my possessions how’s picking up the cross.

What it has done and continues to do is have me question how I live my life, on how I show up when, and whether I make myself less comfortable in the hope that I live more deeply into a life that I’ve been called into.

Sometimes it’s difficult, and sometimes I don’t want to worry about all of you, but I do, and I also worry about the community as a whole. I wonder what all of this is about, but I don’t hate any of it, and I don’t need to be forced into being shocked to find a deeper meaning than what I want in this life. And perhaps you can ask the same questions about your lives.

I ask you all to take comfort in our passage from Jeremiah and the image of Jeremiah as he stands in a potter’s house and watches the craftsman work. When the clay goes awry in the potter’s hands, the potter doesn’t throw it away. They reshape it into something new. That, says God, is what I can do with you. With every person and community who has strayed, you can be reshaped and set to a new purpose. It helps to see this all not as a finish line but as a formation. Maybe we’re not called to decide, once and for all, whether we’re “all in” —but most of us let ourselves be shaped, re-shaped, and shaped again by the hands of the Potter. That’s not an excuse to be complacent. It’s an invitation to be pliable.

I mentioned Barbara Brown Taylor in my opening paragraph, and as the Salt Blog would say, “Her point is that, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us are less like ‘ disciples’ and more like what Taylor calls ‘friends of the disciples.” God does raise up genuine disciples in every generation, Bonhoeffer and Teresa, Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero, Sojourner Truth and Francis of Assisi, and the countless others whose names we may or may not ever know, people who actually did and do, in various ways, give up their families and possessions and lives for the sake of the Gospel. The rest of us are something a good deal more humble than “disciples” in this sense. At our best, Taylor contends, we’re “friends of the disciples.” If we look closely at the Gospels, we’ll see something curious. Jesus encountered thousands of people. He healed, taught, forgave, and fed them. But he didn’t call them all to be disciples. In fact, he called very few. To most, he said something different: “Go in peace.” “Your faith has made you well.” “Return home and tell others what God has done for you.”

But discipleship? That’s a specific vocation. And it’s costly.

We are called to consider this call and not to dismiss it. Nor think that Jesus’ words are meant only for religious folks and saints, or to soften them so they no longer challenge us. We are called to tell the stories of the gospels, pour our lives through them, and we can support activists, pastors, caregivers, and all who’ve taken bold steps for the kin-dom. Not just in spirit, but in concrete, generous ways. And most importantly, we can emulate discipleship in moments, choices, or seasons—when we give generously, forgive extravagantly, or act justly, even when it costs us something.

Do not dismiss this gospel, do not soften it, live chasing the divine spark, show up, find a way to crack your life open, be molded anew, and be of service to a suffering world, make community, and spread joy when and where you can.

May it be so.

Amen