September 8 2013
Wisdom 9:13-18; Phil 9-10, 13-17; Luke 14:25-33
Today’s Gospel story is the middle of three teachings about how to fail as a disciple. The sequence occurs during Jesus’ long walk with his disciples from Galilee to Jerusalem. He has been a great success in Galilee and a big crowd is with him, but in Jerusalem all that will change.
The first way to fail as a disciple is to miss out on the invitation to God’s kingdom, typically because you are too focused on money or pleasure. That’s the parable about the rich man who gives a big banquet and all the people he invites brush off the invitation because they are too busy to attend. The second way to fail—and today’s subject—is not to be prepared for the potential cost of being Christian. It’s not all hymns and love. The third way to fail is to burn out. That’s the parable about the salt that loses its taste.
Today’s Gospel—the middle part of a parable sandwich—includes two mini-parables about the cost of discipleship. Jesus introduces them by saying you have to “hate” your family and your life and finishes by saying you have to renounce all your possessions. This is not an invitation to shoot your spouse or give away your life savings and go scrounge in dumpsters. It is a dramatically exaggerated way—hyperbole—to say that you have to be ready to pay the cost of discipleship if and when it comes due—and the cost may be high. We need to think about that ahead of time and be prepared for what it can mean to be Christian.
At the beginning of the film The Godfather, someone offers to pay the Godfather—a Mafia don—to do something for him. The Godfather explains that the offer to pay him is insulting. If you become his friend, he will help you because you are his friend. But someday, he may come to you asking for a favor in return. It might not happen, but if it does, you must be prepared to do what he asks. God operates a lot like the Godfather. God grants us many blessings, and we enjoy them. But maybe one day God will ask something from you. That’s the cost of discipleship, and you have to be ready to pay.
The German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an example of the cost of discipleship. He lived under the Third Reich, and he wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship, rejecting what he called “cheap grace” and calling on Christians to be ready to follow Christ even when it is hard. He lived what he preached. He returned from the US to Germany in1938, even though he had helped lead the Lutheran opposition to Hitler and was certainly on somebody’s list. Although he was a pacifist, he took part in the plot to kill Hitler. He spent two years in prison and was finally hanged about two weeks before Hitler killed himself.
The cost of discipleship is still high for many people. John Allen, a vaticanologist for CNN and NPR, conservatively estimates that every year about 150,000 people are murdered either just because they are Christian or because they are exercising their Christian ministries to people who somebody hates. Last year I met an African sister at St. Catherine’s, who was on her way to the South Sudan to help people in the refugee camps there. It’s dangerous work. I hope that she has not become one of the statistics.