Sermon: Luke 14:25-35
Brothers and sisters,
Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and
our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to honor our
parents and to love our neighbors as ourselves. How can those commands be
reconciled with the words that we hear from our Lord Jesus in this morning’s
Gospel lesson where He says “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and
wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he
cannot be my disciple.”
Jesus is speaking here of the cost of
discipleship. And it is appropriate that you are hearing a Word that addresses
the cost of discipleship on Rally Sunday. This is a day that recognizes the
importance of passing on the faith of the church to the next generation. This
is a day when we recognize our call to make disciples. And what Jesus is
describing here is the life of a disciple.
So does being a disciple of Christ mean
that we are to literally hate our family? Well the original Greek word; miseo,
does mean “to hate”. But understand, the
central message of Luke is that Jesus is the friend of undeserving sinners. Jesus wants us to realize that if we are
going to have Him as our friend, He does not want us to be half-hearted in it
and so He uses strong words and images, as He often did. In Matthew 18 He gives
what seems, on the surface to be a call for self-mutilation where He says: And if your hand or your foot
causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.. Of
course we know that Jesus does not literally call us to cut off our hands and
feet.
And in the same way He is not calling us to literally hate our family.
Hating basically means “loving less” here. In Genesis 29 we read that God saw
that Leah was hated by Jacob. But in the verse right before that it says that
Jacob loved Leah less than Rachel. Clearly Jacob loved Leah, but he strongly
preferred Rachel. Jesus is talking about priorities. He is talking about not
letting anything; not even our family; come between us and our relationship,
our friendship with Him.
And so being in fellowship with Jesus, being a disciple means rejecting
anything that might separate us from Jesus. At the same time though we are of
course still called to honor our parents and love our spouse and our children
and value our life. All of us are called to strive to put Jesus before
everything in our life. Is Jesus the
center of your life?
If we truly lived up to this we would have more volunteers to help out
with Sunday school than we knew what to do with. If we truly lived up to this I would be
inundated with different ideas coming in all the time on how to have a richer
and more fruitful ministry. And yes, if we truly lived up to this, we would
have no money concerns whatsoever.
But that is not the reality. The reality is that excuses get made and we
try to make our relationship with Christ take a back-seat to sports or work or
family or whatever else might come down the pike. And the biggest casualties of this might just be kids.
Look around you. Watch the news. There are so many attacks on the Gospel right
now. Christians are being persecuted left and right in places like Syria and
Egypt. And here is a sobering thought. It has been predicted that by 2050 Islam
will be the majority religion here in the United States. For those in my
generation that is the world that our grandkids and great-grandkids are going
to be growing up in.
These kids that are here today for Sunday school are part of the
generation that is going to be raising kids in that world. Can we expect them
to be prepared for that when we tell them that football is more important than
church?? Jesus calls us to reject even
our family for Him, and yet we too often are not willing to tell our kids to
reject sports for Him. Jesus calls us to be willing to renounce all that we
have to be His disciple. He is talking about picking up our crosses.
Of course the truth is, none of us love Jesus exclusively and strongly
enough or rejects their family enough or renounces all that they have enough.
We are not able to be Jesus’ disciple by virtue of our own strength or reason.
Martin Luther said that we don’t need to go looking for crosses to pick up
because crosses find us. The fact that Jesus mentions cross-bearing in the
context of the family and our possessions shows us that our crosses come to us
in our every day lives; in our vocations; at home, at work, at church.
A cross can be a loved one in need of constant care; or a child who has
become a real problem. Jesus is warning us against fearing, loving and trusting
our families, our jobs, our possessions and casting God to the side.
The good news of this difficult lesson is that Jesus welcomes sinners
into His fellowship, and He calls sinners to bring their crosses into that
fellowship. Look at the illustrations He uses. He uses the example of an
unthinking king who fails to count the cost of his impending battle and a
short-sighted builder who begins building a house without counting the cost.
Counting the cost of discipleship means recognizing from the beginning that we
are not worthy of being Jesus’ disciples, that we are not able to carry our
crosses on our own.
Those who assume they can enter into Jesus’ fellowship on their own
efforts or worthiness will blunder. But those who recognize from the start that
they are not worthy are the ones whom Jesus chooses to be friends with. And of
course when you recognize this then you will treasure your relationship with
Jesus above every relationship, no matter how noble a relationship might be.
You can do nothing to enter into fellowship with Jesus. He chooses you;
you do not choose Him. But in this fellowship Jesus joins you under the sign of
the cross. And in the midst of our crosses, whatever they might be, sinful
human nature tempts the Christian to seek the easy way out; the path of least
resistance.
But Jesus did not look for the easy way out. Jesus drank the cup of
suffering and death that the Father set before Him, for the joy that was before
Him. And because Jesus chose the hardest way for us He is everything to us. He
gave Himself to rescue us from sin. He chose us, who cannot pay the cost of
discipleship, to be in fellowship with Him. He promises to give us all we need.
He assures us that nothing will be able to separate us from Him. He gives and
gives and gives to those whom He has chosen to be His own.
You need not run from the cross that has been set before you. Because
Jesus sacrificed Himself for you though you do not deserve it, you can look to
Him for strength that you would be able to make sacrifices for others. You can
look to Christ for strength in the midst of your crosses.
And so we have this cross of a culture that is becoming more and more
hostile to the Gospel as secularism and false-beliefs take hold more and more
each day. And the passing on of the
faith to the next generations is at the core of this cross, but it is not just
about the children, it is also about our neighbors. But here is the good news. Romans 10:17
promises that faith comes through hearing and that hearing comes through the
Word of Christ. The creation of faith is for us a passive act. It comes through
listening to the Word of Christ. And we have the Word of Christ. We have the
words of eternal life that create faith. It is not up to us. We don’t do it. We
don’t have the ability to do it. The Holy Spirit does it through the Word of
Christ.
So Romans 10 also challenges us with this “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ 14How then will they
call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him
of whom they have never heard?” How
are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? This is a challenge
not just for me, not just for the Sunday school teachers, but for parents and
grand-parents and brothers and sisters and friends and neighbors; all of us. The
Holy Spirit creates faith through the Word of Christ that we are called to
share, proclaim, teach and pass on.
When you have
received what Christ Jesus gained on the cross, you become His disciples, and
you learn to give to others as He gives to you. You are sent out with the Words
of eternal life and with these words you are able to share with your kids, your
neighbors, your co-workers your friends etc, the things they need to enjoy the
abundant life-the strength of Christ that we all need when we are weak,
depressed, helpless or lacking courage; the promise that no matter what this
world and the devil throw at us nothing can separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus; that nothing can snatch us from the hands of our Shepherd Christ
Jesus; the promise that in Christ Jesus our sins have been forgiven. Jesus took
up His cross for you. He promises that He is with you to the end of the ages,
so you can go ahead and pick up your cross, because the same Christ Jesus who
comes with a cross also comes with the promise of the resurrection.
Amen
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