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Luke 14:25-35 · The Cost of Being a Disciple
If You Can't Stand the Heat
Luke 14:25-33
Sermon
by Mark Trotter
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I think it was Harry Truman's phrase: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." It represented a certain toughness of character which was typical of Harry Truman. Truman didn't want to do certain things, including being president. All you have to do is see the picture of him at his inauguration to realize that he really wanted to be some place else. But his sense of duty, his sense of loyalty, his sense of personal responsibility led him to do his best in situations he would rather have avoided. Toughness of character--that's what we think of when we think of Harry Truman.

But something has happened to the American character in the last fifty years. Philip Rieff has called it "the triumph of the therapeutic," by which he means that the ethic that is appropriate for therapy has now become the ethic for the whole society. For instance, our emphasis on feelings--"How do you feel about this?"--as if your feelings were the ultimate arbiter of what is right and wrong.

In Debbie Boone's smash hit record back in the seventies, "You Light Up My Life," she sang, "It can't be wrong if it feels so right"--which has to be one of the great moral affirmations of Western civilization.

In a therapeutic situation, you are supposed to get your feelings out. That's appropriate there. You're supposed to "go with your feelings," and "get in touch with your feelings." That's appropriate in the context of therapy. But the purpose of therapy is to move you to responsible adult living, where there are other realities that must be considered besides my own feelings--like my obligations and responsibilities, like my duties to something beyond myself.

The most recent term to come from the therapeutic world is "comfortable," as in, "Are you comfortable with this?" There are times when the question is appropriate, as when someone comes into your living room and they sit in a chair, and you ask them, "Are you comfortable there, or would you rather move over here?" Or maybe, when you look at the thermostat, and ask, "Is this at a comfortable setting for the thermostat?" But beyond that, especially in moral decision making, whether you are comfortable or not isn't really relevant.

That is why I like Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I can't stand to listen to her--but I like her. She is one of the few people in public life who believes that life is found only when you get outside of yourself and start thinking of other people. And our relationships with other people are not always structured according to my comfort level or to my personal feelings. There are things that I must do in relation to other people that I have a duty to do. There are certain things I must be loyal to in relation to other people. If it were simply the case that all I have to do is follow my own feelings, then there would be no community, there would be only chaos and anarchy.

Søren Kierkegaard used to say, "We are what we measure ourselves by." So if we measure ourselves simply by our own feelings, our own comfort zones, then on that scale of life from inanimate to animate, or from lower forms of life to higher forms of life, we come out at about the bovine level, about where cows are. Our highest achievement in life would be to eat a lot, and then find a nice shady spot to rest and chew our cud.

But if we measure ourselves by the highest that there is for human life, by the standard of the New Testament, namely the standard of the full humanity revealed in our Lord Jesus Christ, then, as Kierkegaard also said, we are expected to be giants.

Which leads us to our lesson for this morning, from the fourteenth chapter of Luke. The passage begins with these hard words: "Now great multitudes accompanied him." It's as if he wanted them to know that discipleship now requires something of them. In fact discipleship, he will tell them, requires your whole life. That's what he's asking, in these most disturbing words: "If you don't hate your father and your mother, your wife and your children, your sisters and brothers, indeed your life itself, you cannot be my disciple."

You talk about hard sayings--that's about as hard as it gets. We can temper it a bit, thank goodness, and I rush to tell you this. We know that this language is called hyperbole, that means it's a language of exaggeration. It's like when Jesus, at another place, said, "If your hand offends you, cut it off." He didn't mean that literally. He was exaggerating to make the point.

We can temper it further by looking at the context. The first century, the society in which Jesus lived, is called a kinship society, where the family had the highest loyalty, and one's behavior was dictated by what was thought to be good for the family. And the family was headed by a patriarch, the father, who told you what you were supposed to do, determined what your life was going to be, demanded your ultimate loyalty.

So Jesus is saying to those in that society, "To be my disciple means that you have joined something greater than family." A larger family, a greater loyalty, if you will--nothing less than the Kingdom of God.

So that's the way this passage is to be interpreted, for the first century. "Hate," as it's used here, is not an emotion, it's a ranking of priority, it's naming what you are willing to let go of. As Luther put it in his great hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," "Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also." That could have been taken right out of this text.

So if I were to interpret this passage for that time, for the first century, I'd say it had to do with being willing to let go of kindred. But if we were to interpret it for our time, I imagine we would have to substitute something else for family. In this society kinship no longer demands our ultimate loyalty. The highest value in our time is not the family--it's the individual. In fact, many individuals see family as holding them back. They have no problem dismissing themselves from responsibilities to family. We wouldn't have too much trouble letting kindred go--goods, that's another matter, but not kindred.

So put something else there. What is it that is the highest priority for you, what is it that demands your ultimate loyalty? And whatever that is, unless you are willing to put loyalty to Jesus higher than that, "You are not fit to be my disciple."

Those are hard words. That's why he says, "Which of you who is interested in building a tower, doesn't sit down first and count the cost to see if you have what it takes to finish it?" You notice, he doesn't ask, "How do you feel about this?" He doesn't ask, "Are you comfortable with this?" He turns to the multitude that had been following him and he says something like, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

This is serious business, discipleship. It demands something of you. "Now large crowds accompanied him." I suppose whenever large crowds follow him, you can assume that he was teaching them comfortable words. But when you ask the crowd to give, that's when the crowd thins out.

So maybe the problem was, Jesus had been preaching comfortable words. He had those comfortable words, you know, about God's grace, about how much God loves us--those beautiful parables he told about grace, the prodigal son, the lost sheep, the lost coin (which, incidentally, are in the fifteenth chapter of Luke, which we'll look at next week).

Grace--that's what he offered people, he preached it, gave it out freely. He healed the sick freely, he gave of himself selflessly, he gave of himself sacrificially for you. He preached the beautiful That was an issue back in Wesley's time in eighteenth-century England. There were those who said that God has saved us, not our good works. Therefore, if we go about doing good works, we'll show that we just don't have enough faith.

That was called "predestination" in those days. It meant God has already saved you without your doing anything. It was a marvelous doctrine, so beautifully structured to affirm that God is in charge, and God loves us. Predestination means that your salvation is completely in God's hands, not in yours, so you don't have to do anything. Just enjoy your status as a child of God. God loves you.

Wesley called predestination "that most pernicious doctrine," because he noticed there are those who go around saying that they were saved, but they did things that were wrong. They believed, "What I do really doesn't matter, because I have this certainty now that God has forgiven me, and that I'm saved, and God is always faithful to his word. So I know that I am saved no matter what I do."

Wesley said don't count on it. Because grace is something we freely receive, but grace is also something we're expected to use in order to become more responsible, moral, loving, faithful people. Wesley said your salvation is given to you as a gift, but you can sin it away--or, more often, you can fritter it away. "To whom much is given, much is required."

So what characterized the Methodists, at least the early Methodists, was not only did they believe that they were saved by grace--they believed they had to grow in grace. So they just kept working on it. They even called the Christian life "going on to perfection." That was the goal of the Christian life, perfection meaning the life that was held up to us in Jesus Christ. You talk about standards, you talk about becoming what you measure yourself by. That's about as high as you can get. And we are given grace so that we can move toward it.

It was said of Bonnard, the painter, that when his paintings hung in the Louvre, after the museum closed he would sneak by the guards and go in and continue to work on his paintings, because he believed they could always be better.

On this Baptism Sunday we are reminded that freely we have received God's grace. That's what baptism means--freely God gives us grace, gives us salvation. And with the renewal of baptismal vows, we remember that we are expected to use that grace to become better persons.

ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., Collected Sermons, by Mark Trotter