Yet another difficult passage of scripture—Luke 14.25-33. I don’t know about you, but I’m growing a little weary of Luke’s gospel by now. With the last several Sundays, we have faced some difficult words in our commitment to follow the Lectionary. To make matters worse, many of the themes are repeated frequently. Before we talk about last Sunday’s text, let me comment on what all of this might mean for our community. Last year I made a commitment to follow the lectionary. Why? First, I felt led to this. Second, I don’t always trust myself to create good sermon series (though I will that again next year). So the lectionary forces me (and us) to commit to something larger than our own personal preferences. Left to ourselves, we become less than ourselves. After all it’s easy to pick the stuff we want to hear. Secondly, and related to the repetition we’ve been faced with, is another spiritual lesson—we learn through repetition. The truth of the gospel has to penetrate our hearts that are more like stone than flesh at times. We always need to be reminded that the point is not to know some information but to allow the truth to enter deep within where it can change us. So for example, if Luke keeps highlighting Jesus’ teaching on possessions (which he does), we have to assume that money and possessions are some of the things in life that can make following Christ with a purity of heart difficult if not impossible. Thus we need to lean in and listen again . . . and again . . . and again . . . and again, even if it gets a little annoying. In short, though it might be difficult, everything we’re doing right now is probably what the Good Doctor orders—we’re committing ourselves to something bigger than ourselves and we’re opening up our hearts to the difficult but liberating truths of the Gospel.
Now to last week’s sermon. After preaching it, I told my wife, I think Jesus is just fleshing out the first commandment--“You shall have no other Gods before me”—in this text. Think about it: Jesus challenges some of our most cherished ideals in Luke 14.25-33—family, self, and possessions. Let’s look at each of those in turn. First, the core identity of a disciple is not shaped by family (14.26). Jesus uses the word hate here (perhaps communicating by hyperbole). The word hate is a way to speak of commitment; it is not a psychological or emotional hatred; it can mean “to turn away from” or “detach oneself from.” With that in mind, we learn that faith and family don’t always go together. Disciples are called to be committed to Christ and his cause first, even before family. But here’s the catch: in doing so, disciples obtain the distance necessary that makes love possible. If Christ and his cause is first, a disciple then has a foundation that makes love—a true love—possible. 1 John 5.2 speaks powerfully to this issue. John states that we love the children of God by loving God and keeping his commands. Love of God and obedience is the road we must travel in order to love. The point is obvious: we have to have a core from which to give true love; we have to live in love, and then we can live out love. Christ and his cause must be first, not family.
Second, a disciple’s core identity is not to be shaped by a commitment to self (14.26). Jesus says we must hate our life; again it means to detach ourselves from, not emotionally hate. This is somewhat revolutionary. Self worship is big business in America. We’ve been advertised to for so long that we're tempted to believe everything is about us, about being happy and having our needs met. The problem is love of self and love of God don’t mix. We’re not fully human if we’re not living in response to all that God has done for us. It is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves—our true selves.
Third, a disciple’s core identity is not shaped by possessions (vs. 33). The Greek verb is in the present tense. Many take that to mean that Jesus is talking about an on-going willingness to surrender. Bottom line: disciples can’t be shaped by what they have or what they don’t have. Disciples can't be possessed with their possessions, either their lack or their abundance. Hopefully, we’re so busy learning to enjoy God and love our neighbor that we’re no longer worried about stuff.
So how can we summarize all of this? I stated yesterday that the disciple is someone who is living out the good news that Jesus is Lord. God raised this rejected one from the dead as a powerful announcement that He is King and that one day everything will be recapitulated in Him. Disciples have turned (repented) from sin and are embracing the great news that Jesus is Lord. Which means, of course, that family, money and self should not be . . . should not be Lord. I don’t know about you, but I find this to be great news, because now we are called to participate in something that’s worth living for, something bigger than ourselves, something that gives us a foundation that makes love possible—God’s kingdom, here and now as well as there and then. Peace!
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