Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered September 9, 2007
25Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ 31Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.
The Cost of Discipleship
“You are one of his disciples, aren’t you?” That’s the question Peter will be asked three times after Jesus is arrested, after Jesus has warned him, “Three times you will deny me before the cock crows.”
Peter tells Jesus, “No, I will go with you to prison and to death!”
But, when the time comes, when the danger of losing his life because of his discipleship presents itself, Peter finds that he has not counted the cost.
Three times, Peter will answer without thinking to save his own life, “No, not me.” As much as he may have thought he had counted the cost, he had never quite imagined that he would be put in this situation. If he said, “Yes, I am one of his disciples,” he could well have been crucified with Jesus. The cost of discipleship in that moment became all too clear. He would have paid for it with his life. But the cost would not be borne by him alone. His mother and father, brothers and sisters, wife and children, would have paid for his discipleship, too, with the loss of their son, brother, husband, or father.
At that moment, waiting for Jesus to be condemned, warming his hands on a fire, when the servant-girl pointed at him and said, “You, you were with him,” he says, “No, not me.”
Perhaps Peter was just frightened. Perhaps he lacked the courage of his convictions. That’s the way we have portrayed him from the pulpit over the centuries since. But, if we give him the benefit of the doubt, we realize that Peter had a family. It was in the house of his mother-in-law that Jesus performs one of his first healing miracles. He could not turn away from his family like that, he could not put them in the position of paying the price for his decision to follow Jesus. To do so would be to turn away from them, to renounce them, to put loyalty to them in a far distant second place to loyalty to Jesus. The Semitic word for that kind of turning away is translated into English as “hate.” The word does not carry that deep emotional anger and rejection that it does in English. In that way, it seems an unfortunate translation, one that all the biblical scholars call “problematic.”
And yet, it is not just the translation of the word that is problematic. The call to discipleship is itself problematic.
In a nutshell, Jesus tells the swelling throngs who follow him, “Turn back and go away. Don’t follow me unless you are willing to put me above your family’s needs, unless you are willing to let go of all that you own, unless you are willing to die a criminal’s death on a cross, letting go of this life, letting go of your pride, your dignity, your good name.”
When the time came for Peter, around that courtyard fire, he was not yet there. He was an apostle, but he was not yet a disciple.
Becoming a disciple, that is, one who is being taught, is a process of spiritual formation. Like Jeremiah’s image of God as a potter and us, his people, as clay, God forms us, molds us, shapes us into the discipleship God intends for us.
It is not a steadily progressive process, either.
Some of you know that Nancy, my wife, is a potter. In our worship planning group, we had an idea that as part of this morning’s worship service, she could illustrate the process of spiritual formation by creating some vessels on her potter’s wheel up here in the chancel. We came up with that idea, of course, on a day that she was not with us in our planning meeting.
As Nancy went through the list of reasons that it wouldn’t work, it occurred to me that those reasons tell us something about the process of spiritual formation, too.
First of all, it is messy. When you mix clay with enough water to make it malleable, mud flies everywhere. It’s not just the potter and the pot that gets muddy, but everyone around you. In the process of spiritual formation, everyone around us gets splattered with our struggles, our questions, our doubts and fears. It is not a neat and tidy process.
Second, it is unpredictable. In worship planning, I had this idea of exactly what I wanted Nancy to create when she sat down at the wheel. But, that’s not how the creative process works. Sure, the artist has in mind the size and shape of the particular vessel she wants to create, but the clay has a mind of its own. In the process of becoming, sometimes the interaction between potter and clay creates a shape she could not have predicted. Sometimes that unpredictability leads to a beautiful creation; more often, however, the clay’s resistance to taking shape in the potter’s hands leads to letting it collapse and starting over.
And that leads to the third thing. Formation of a vessel on a potters wheel, like spiritual formation, happens in fits and starts. It’s not a steady progression from lump of clay to smooth and centered to beautifully formed vessel. More likely, it is trial and error, hard work followed by a sudden explosion of beauty.
For most of us, the cost of discipleship is relatively low when we compare our situation to that of the first century Christians who lived through a series of persecutions; or, when we compare our life of becoming disciples to that of contemporary Chinese or Arab Christians who have professed faith in Jesus Christ as small minority communities surrounded by a hostile culture.
For most of us, the cost of discipleship, from the tithe to the time we put into worship, fellowship, education, and mission is well worth the benefits we receive in the joy of deepened relationships with friends and family, a sense of meaning and purpose, and a faith that gives us the tools to deal with the inevitable struggles of living and dying.
Because of that, perhaps it is more difficult for us to know where we are on the road to discipleship, whether we have counted the cost. For first century Christians, it was common for some members of a family to declare themselves disciples of Jesus Christ and for the rest of the family to recoil in fear and confusion and rejection. To follow Christ was to detach from family members.
And, in the first century when Luke was written, it was not unusual for a local government to declare it illegal for members of small disruptive religious movements such as Christianity to own property. They literally had to give up all their possessions in order to become disciples of Jesus Christ.
If you want to be known as a disciple of Jesus Christ, the demands of our culture are few. Join a church, learn a few Bible verses, perhaps get a fish bumper sticker or a special t-shirt from a youth event.
But, if we want to be disciples, not just known as disciples, the cost is considerably higher.
The amazing thing to me is how often I find people are ready and willing to bear that cost. Over the past several years, we have tried many different ways to deepen our small group ministry in this congregation. For the most part, we tried programs that would make it easy to participate, and make few demands on its participants or leaders. As you know, we have had spotty results, with a few temporary flare-ups of small groups that provided a meaningful experience.
And then, we invited folks to register for a small group Bible study that would require commitment to a two and a half hour group meeting every week for thirty four weeks, and a half hour of Bible reading every day. You all signed up in droves.
The same is true for mission opportunities. Who wants to go on a mission travel experience that won’t demand anything of you? Not many. But, put before a graduating senior the opportunity to give up a year of his or her life to go into a foreign culture, learn a new language and live in primitive conditions to live out their faith, and not only does she sign up for it, she goes without pay and raises ten thousand dollars for the privilege of serving.
Deep down, we know this. All that is truly valuable is also costly. That is the challenge and the promise of this gospel passage. The challenge is that becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ is a lifelong process. It is messy, unpredictable, and full of a mixture of successes and failures and victories and disappointments.
The promise is that when we count the cost, and find it beyond our means, we are not without resources. The cost of our salvation, way out of our reach, has been provided for us through the cross of Jesus Christ. The cost of our discipleship, in response to the cross, is all that we have and all that we are. The blessings of discipleship, however, are far more than that.
Thanks be to God. Amen.