What Does It Cost? (Luke 14:25-33; Proper 18C; September 8, 2013)

What Does It Cost?

Luke 14:25-33
Proper 18C
September 8, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

I remember my first contact with this congregation.  It was a meeting with the Staff/Pastor-Parish Relations Committee and our district superintend Anne Lippincott that Carol and I had at what we United Methodists in Iowa call a “put-in interview.”  It’s a chance for red flags to pop up that might make the pastoral appointment a bad idea.  But mostly it’s a chance for us to start to get to know each other. 

I don’t remember all of it, but I remember that one person observed, “It’s pretty easy to be a member of First United Methodist Church.  We don’t really ask a great deal.”  After three years here I can say that I agree.

It’s not that there aren’t people who pour themselves into this congregation heart, soul, strength and mind.  There are people like that.  But if you’re not one of them, we don’t send the participation police after you.

It’s not that there aren’t people who give generously, who even make lifestyle choices so that they can afford to give more.  There are people like that.  But if you’re not one of them, we don’t garnish your wages.

It’s not that there aren’t people who are here every Sunday, people who have a better record of attendance than I do, people for whom an absence would be a sign of something gone terribly wrong and a cue to call 911.  There are people like that.  But if you’re not one of them, we don’t send a truant officer.

You can be a member of First United Methodist Church without attending regularly, participating in any significant way in our ministries, and supporting our life and work financially.  We have no standards for membership.  The only time we will remove a member—actually, technically we never remove members; we move them to the inactive roll—the only time we remove a member is if we haven’t seen or heard from them in years and no one knows where they are or if they themselves ask for that action.

That may be a reason why nearly two-thirds of our members are inactive.  One of our bishops (I can’t remember which) has said, “If a system produces what a system is designed to produce, then the United Methodist Church must be designed to make inactive members.”  We certainly do make a lot of them.  We are a low-expectations organization.  It doesn’t cost much to be a member of First United Methodist Church. 

And there are benefits.  Not as many as there used to be, of course, but there are still some.

In my father’s day employers asked job applicants for their church membership.  Leaving the line blank was not an option.  In some occupations, it made a difference which church you claimed.  Mainline Protestant denominations were preferred.  That is, I am glad to say, no longer the case.

When I was a boy the National Council of Churches used to sponsor public service announcements.  Their tag line was, “The family that prays together, stays together.”  The theory was that going to church would lead to a lower divorce rate.  I have no idea what research supported that theory, but that idea is not entirely dead.

In fact, the idea that a church service should be of some direct benefit to the people who attend is very much alive.  We expect to “get something we can use” from the service and from the sermon especially.  Many people come to church with the hope that it will help them with the job of raising their children, a job that appears to have gotten harder in the last few decades.  The idea, I suppose, is that the church is a self-help movement and the Bible is a self-help manual.  Joining a church and reading the Bible—or hearing it decoded by the preacher—should bring the benefit of families that have fewer crises and are better able to get through the crises that they have.

As an aside I will that the trouble with this idea is that the Bible is not really interested in self-help and even less in families.  What it does have to say—about families in particular—is spectacularly unhelpful.  In order to turn the New Testament into a “family values” text, you have to limit yourself to a very few verses and even those have to be wrenched from their historical context.  The New Testament is not a family-friendly text because the movement that produced it was not a family-friendly movement.  That is a scandalous idea and there is more than one sermon in it, but this isn’t one of them.

No, I’m more struck by the expectations that we bring to church and, really, to every part of our lives that the things that we do, the things we’re involved with should yield more than they cost.  We’re not selfish about it.  We count it as a gain if our kids enjoy it or learn from it.  We count it as a gain if it makes our community or world better.  But we do expect that the gain will be more than the cost, that the income will exceed the loss, in short, that we will show a profit.  This is the measure of how much of the ideology of the market has leaked into our thinking and seeped into our very bones.

Maybe this isn’t new.  Maybe people have always thought this way.  Maybe people have always looked at life’s choices as a series of trades in which we should gain as much as possible and lose as little as possible.  Maybe even Jesus’ disciples, or would-be disciples, considered all of life under the metaphor of the market.  Maybe.

But Jesus turns this pattern on its head.  Belonging to First United Methodist Church may not be costly, but being a disciple of Jesus is very costly, indeed.  We may not ask very much of our members, but Jesus demands everything and makes no promises, at least here, about what we might get in return.

First, he demands that his would-be disciples “hate” their families.  Yes, I have a problem with that language, too.  In some families even to say the word “hate” is forbidden.  And here it is, from Jesus himself, laid out in all its ugliness, applied to the people who are closest to us, who have the greatest claim on our lives: parents, spouse, children, and siblings.  Not just applied but required, commanded of any who would follow Jesus. 

Now, maybe we have here what English teachers call hyperbole, exaggeration that is used deliberately for effect, you know, like “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” or “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times…”  But even if Jesus does not expect that his disciples will hate their families, it is clear that what binds Jesus’ followers to him is supposed to be stronger than what binds them to their own families. 

Second, in the same way, Jesus demands that his would-be disciples hate their own lives.  Again, Jesus must mean at very least that our commitment to Jesus’ and his teachings must be greater than our commitment to our own lives.

Third, we must give up all that we own.  I know our translation doesn’t put it that strongly.  I think that the translators lost their nerve at verse thirty-three.  “Unwilling to give up” does not translate the force of the original which requires that we “say goodbye to, or part from, or have done with, or renounce, or give up” the things that we own.

We aren’t even allowed the comfort of easing into these demands, either.  Jesus imagines two scenes—one involving building a tower, the other repelling an invasion—to suggest that we must decide before committing ourselves to the project of following him as his disciples whether or not we can pay the price.  We have to be “all in” or it doesn’t count.

If the reading had continued to the end of the story, just the next two verses, we would have heard Jesus say, “Salt is good.  But if salt loses its flavor, how will it become salty again?  It has no value, neither for the soil nor for the manure pile.  People throw it away.  Whoever has ears to hear should pay attention.”  Coming where it does, I think this means that the would-be disciples who are unwilling to set their families in second place, let go of their lives, and renounce their possessions are as peculiar, unnatural and finally useless as salt that isn’t salty.

This is a hard thing for Jesus to say.  It’s a hard thing for us to hear.  It seems like more than I can do.  Maybe it seems that way to you, too.  But this is the demand at the heart of Jesus’ invitation to follow him as his disciple.  Jesus has offered us what our tradition used to call “the counsels of perfection.” I find that I can neither fulfill them nor give them up.  I can’t make the leap.  I can only take one little step at a time.

Maybe this falls short of the way that Jesus lays it out for us here, but I don’t know any other way that any of us can do this, but one step at a time, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller.  I don’t know any other way to be a disciple of Jesus than to face one issue, one choice, one decision at a time and stretch as far as I can toward God’s hopes for me.  I don’t know any other way than to trust that God’s Spirit will never let me rest content with less than all that Jesus asks of me, but will always draw me further and always give me the strength to take that next little step on the journey.  In short, the only way I can live is in a kind of hopeful tension. 

If this is where you find yourself as well, let me suggest something.  It’s true that our congregation has very low requirements for membership.  Nevertheless it can be for you and me a place in which we can hear the sharp demands of Jesus.  It can be a place where we help each other to be clear about what Jesus is asking.  It can be a place where we can encourage each other to take whatever next step lies before each of us.  This congregation can be for us a place of hope.

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