A Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Patricia Gillespie
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Philemon 1-20
Luke 14:25-33
Psalm 1
The check in the mail is made out to me. It is for $25,000. Just sign it and all that money is mine. I can pay off some debts. I can get new tires for the pink jeep. I can send some to a favorite charity or even to the church.
I look at what else is in the envelope. I read the small print. The check, of course, is not a gift. It's a mortgage loan. And the terms are not particularly good.
Count the cost. The loan companies don't want us to do that. They hope we don't notice the small print. The wonderful 3.9 percent introductory rate on the envelope that soon becomes 22.9 percent in the small print on the inside. Count the cost. We don't want to do that either sometimes.
It's easy to forget that Our choices have consequences. In today's gospel reading Jesus is upfront about that. Count the cost before you sign the check or build the tower or go out to battle.
"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."
The choice to give up the $25,000 check was easier than this one. Jesus has gotta be crazy. Doesn't he remember what we just heard from Deuteronomy about choosing life? A choice to hate my family doesn't look to me like a choice for life and blessing "so that [I] and [my] descendants may live." What if I'd made that choice when my children were small? It could then have been choosing death. Doesn't Jesus understand what Deuteronomy is saying about choosing life and love?
So I look again at our reading. I try to win the argument with Jesus with his own scriptures.
I read again all that talk about "love" that I heard. But again I missed some of the small print. There's nothing here about loving your family (at least not directly). All the love is directed toward God. Choosing life means loving God first.
And there's more: "But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them ..." Well, then you're in big trouble -- no life, no blessing.
So what is it that might turn us away from God, away from choosing life? A check in the mail? An addiction or obsession? An overwhelming busyness? Even our family?
Jesus is talking about the same stuff Deuteronomy is -- about idolatry: that is, anything that comes before God, that turns us away from God and from choosing life.
Love of family can become idolatry when it keeps us from choosing life. A toddler who doesn't ever let go of her parent's hand may not learn to walk.
Sometimes even our love of our family can keep us prisoner. It's the small print that says "you are not free." Even a good thing if it keeps us from God can become a sin to be hated.
You've probably heard it said: "If you love someone, set them free; if they return to you, they are really yours, if not, they never were yours at all."
I like C. S. Lewis' words even better: "Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be yours." (Mere Christianity)
Anything that we hold onto too tightly, we are likely to lose or to be imprisoned and enslaved by it. In that case that choice -- even a choice for our family -- is a choice for death and curses. It's signing away freedom and life.
Onesimus apparently signed that big loan check that came in the mail. And became a prisoner to his debt. In first-century Palestine, those who couldn't pay their debt often became slaves.
In this story about Onesimus Paul too is talking about choosing life.
He suggests to Philemon that Onesimus be freed from debt and slavery: "Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever." Paul asks Philemon to give up a slave so that he might receive back a brother.
Onesimus the useful slave (that's what his name means - ‘useful') becomes the beloved child, the brother in Christ, who is loved because he is a child of God rather than because he's useful.
And Paul offers Philemon and Onesimus this choice for freedom because he himself is "a prisoner of Christ Jesus." Prisoners of Christ free others.
When Christ enters the picture there's an irony to counting the cost. If prisoners of Christ give freedom, it should be no surprise when we count the cost of following Jesus, that the choice between life and death becomes complicated.
The cost of discipleship is everything: your family, your friends, all your possessions, even your life. Jesus puts that part up front in bold letters: "Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." And everyone knows what a horrible death the cross means.
In choosing to follow Jesus, the bold advertising tells us that we are choosing death. It looks like a choice between following Christ and having life. In that case, a choice for life would be to tell Jesus to get lost. To this day that's pretty common advertising.
But then there's the small print. About losing your life to find it. About letting go of your family to love them. It's that little cross at the bottom that says "resurrection and life."
The choice is then not between Christ and life, but between Christ and death.
Count the cost. Be sure to read all the fine print. The cross is expensive. But when we let go of everything else to grab hold of the cross and follow Jesus, then Christ pays all our debts and sets us free -- free to live and to love and to set others free.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it when writing about The Cost of Discipleship "When Christ calls a [person], he bids [that person] come or die."
"See, today I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life."