Seriously, Jesus?

Scripture: Luke 14:25-33

"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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
“None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Seriously, Jesus? You don’t really mean that LITERALLY, right?

I have always found it very interesting that people are willing to build whole theologies, codes of conduct, even laws, based on one little piece of scripture they find that fits neatly into their lives and worldview.

But when it comes to sayings like this… we suddenly don’t want to take Jesus literally anymore.
Maybe he didn’t really mean it the way it sounds.

He’s using hyperbole, right? Just exaggerating.

He doesn’t expect us to give away EVERYTHING to be his follower, does he?  Because that’s ridiculous.

But… what happens if we actually do take Jesus seriously?

I mean… it’s not like this is the only place he talks about giving everything up - whether it’s family obligations or wealth - and following Him.

In fact… let me run through the places just in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus says something pretty similar.

Back in Luke 9:59-62
To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Or how about Luke 12:19-21…the parable of the rich fool...
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

Or the parable of the faithful and unfaithful slave…
From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded. (Luke 12:48)

Of course there’s today’s text: None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Or Luke 16:13
No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Or if we continue on into verses 14-15
The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him. So he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.

Then there’s the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and the great chasm between them that cannot be crossed. (Luke 16:19-31)

There’s Luke 18:18-27 - sell all that you own and follow me. For it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

How about the story of Zacchaes in chapter 19?
Or the widow’s mite in 21?

And this is just Luke’s gospel.

As Pastors we know how tough these words are to hear, because - well, let’s be honest, we don’t like hearing them any more than you do. So we try to avoid these difficult texts. Except, here’s the thing… if we try to avoid these texts, we have to avoid pretty much the entire Gospel of Luke. It’s everywhere.

So if we can’t avoid it… how can we spin it?

So then we spend a lot of time jumping through theological hoops and gymnastics to not have to take Jesus seriously here.

“Oh, this is just hyperbole, he’s trying to make a point, he doesn’t mean this LITERALLY…”
And, to be fair, it actually IS hyperbole… when he says to hate mother and father, etc. he doesn’t mean to actually “hate” them, because clearly that flies in the face of the whole “love one another” command.

But he is trying to get our attention and make a point that he is VERY VERY serious about.

Discipleship. Commitment. Trust.

That these things need to be more important than even your family and friends. Which... is where most of us draw the line and say "nope, that's not happening."

Jesus told us earlier back in chapter 12, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.”

Hmmm… Sensing a theme here.
I think Jesus means this. I think he’s serious and actually is demanding, and expecting, that if we want to truly be his disciples, to follow him, we will do this.

We will trust him.

We will not worry. To quote the Disney movie Frozen, we’ll “let it go…”

Because Jesus is telling us discipleship is radical. It’s demanding total allegiance. He is stating that if you’re going to follow him, you’ve got to be all in. It’s not just a weekend endeavor. It’s not just another task, not just another check list or thing to do on our crazy list of everything else that demands our time.

Again… there’s a reason Jesus was not popular among the leadership.

This is not just a way of thinking and believing… it is a way of living and being. It becomes who you are.  It is your identity.  That people know you first and foremost as one of Christ’s disciples.  It is a question of who do you belong to… God or the world? Who rules in your life? Christ? Or the world’s demands?

Now our world does not like it when something tries to demand total allegiance. Especially when we belong to so many things, whether it’s our jobs, careers, homes, hobbies, sports, our families, our kids, our friends, even our health.

So anyone who wants to be the sole and defining “thing” in our lives that says “Hey, you need to put me first,” just sounds ridiculous. There’s a reason the rich man walks away sad because he is still too attached to his worldly possessions to be able to just go, “OK, let’s go, Jesus.”

Because this is not about adding one more thing to your plate. Think of it more like your diet. Your spiritual diet. When you’re eating burgers, pizza and nachos and you throw a salad in, you’re not actually being healthier by throwing the salad in. You’re just throwing something in on top of something else.

That’s not what Jesus is telling us to do.

Discipleship is not “just one more thing” on top of everything else.

It’s about replacing the burgers, pizza and the nachos with the salad. It’s about disconnecting yourself and your identity from worldly ambitions and possessions and stresses and replacing it with being about the business of proclaiming God’s Kingdom.

But then the question is why? Why does God want to demand this total allegiance from us? Is he really that needy? Is he just some little tyrant God who needs to feel like he’s THAT important? No. He demands it from us because he knows WE NEED IT. He knows we cannot be free to do his work in the world UNLESS we are able to detach ourselves from the things of this world. To be able to release anger, resentment, worries, stresses…when all these things encroach in and have equal weight… they weigh us down. Stress us out.

What is the biggest stressor in almost everyone’s lives? Money.

It ties into everything… it ties into how happy our relationships are. What’s the number one cause of divorce? Money fights. Will I have money for a roof over my head, will I have money to put my kids through college, will I have money for food, will I have money for the nice things I want. Can I pay my hospital bills? Will I have money for a vacation.

So we run ourselves into the ground, we neglect our spiritual lives because we are so busy consuming and being consumed by worldly things. We start eating chips on top of that salad.

Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God had come in him. Eternal life is not just a future event.
It starts RIGHT NOW. Right here. Jesus did not come just to give us comfort about an afterlife later on. It’s about the here and now and how we live and who we are and just our general state of being.

“Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)

Jesus knows when we let it go, when we change our priorities, when trust and turn everything, and I mean everything, over to God… it doesn’t matter. If we TRULY BELIEVE that eternal life is real, and that it came in Jesus Christ, and that it is right here, right now, and whether we live or die, whether we live in a nice house or on the street, whether we have exactly the right job or career that we want, ultimately does not matter because all of those things are just things that tie us down, distract us, and make us miserable.

Those are all the things that Jesus says will wind up on the burning trash heap outside the gates of his holy city.

So as you leave today… ask yourself, what does it mean for you to live a joyous life where the Kingdom of God is a reality in your life right here, right now, where when Jesus says “don’t worry about your life,” you’re able to go, “OK.”

Think about how will you relate to others in your life when proclaiming God’s Kingdom and doing God’s work in the world, to answer your calling and use the gifts he has given you to serve your neighbor, becomes your number one priority? What changes will happen there?

I’m not saying it will be easy. The first disciples knew it wasn’t easy. Matthew had to stop being a tax collector because it wasn’t consistent with his identity in Christ. Paul had to stop being one of those “rich Pharisees” because killing Christians and stuff was antithetical to his calling as a disciple of Jesus.

Their identities literally had to become wrapped up in Christ and not themselves or their worldly endeavors. Peter, Paul, Stephen, and countless others gave up their lives. Why? Because they knew--eternal life was already theirs. They were already living the joyous life where the Kingdom of God was their reality right then and right there.

They were truly free in Christ.

Christ calls US to be free in him as well. He knows, that the only way to be free, the only way to truly be his disciple, to truly follow him… is to be willing and able to shift all your priorities, go all in, and say, “Here I am. Where are you sending me?”

And it will only cost you what you will ultimately lose in the end anyway.

The Promised Land

Whenever I read the story of the call of Abraham, I come away with the question: why did God choose where he chose for the Promised Land?

I mean, of all the places on this planet, why would God choose this rocky, little plot of land seemingly out in the middle of nowhere as his special and holy place? What was so unique about this area? Why not someplace like the French Riviera? Or the Red Sea? Italy? Why this patch of desert rock?

Well the answer is actually amazingly simple.

Trade routes.

Shechem and Beth-el, the places Abraham first settled around, were strategically located in the ancient world between two of the most travelled trade routes that ran north and south from Mesopotamia into Africa. It was literally the crossroads of the world at the time. All the traders from all the nations passed through this area, which meant that every nation in the ancient Near East would be exposed to whatever culture inhabited the land. It would be influential. The greatest Empires of the world would use these two primary trade routes to exchange not just merchandise, but stories and ways of life.

Ruth & Naomi: Friendship & Redemption

Scripture: Ruth 4

There’s nothing harder than trying to look past your current circumstances and feeling as though there might be hope somewhere in your future.

I feel a certain empathy for Naomi in the Book of Ruth. When the book opened up, we heard about how rough life was for Naomi. Her husband and two sons both died – leaving her a widow with no means to support herself. There was apparently also a famine in the land, because she decided to go back to her ancestral home because she had heard there was food in Israel.

So great was her sorrow, she even changed her name to “Mara,” meaning “bitter.”

A bitter, angry woman due to tragic circumstances in her life. Personally – I can’t imagine that kind of loss all at once. So I really don’t blame the woman for turning bitter and angry. Nothing in life so far is telling her that things will eventually get better. In fact, anyone who said that to her probably got their head bit off because it seemed like such a shallow statement, an empty platitude that is said when people don’t know what else to say.

Because when you’re in the midst of angst, darkness and tragedy – it’s hard to see that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, that life is ever going to be something different than where you’re currently at. On some level you might know it – but on another, all you see in front of you sometimes is the pitch black tunnel you’re careening through.

Walking in the Dark

Scripture: 1 John 1:5-2:2


1 John in this passage is an apt description of the tension we live in as human beings and followers of Christ. We are called out of the darkness of sinful, selfish, greedy, self-serving lives that come so naturally to humanity and into the light of Christ – that is a life of sacrifice, caring more about others than yourself, and always, always, behaving in the best possible way at all times.

The reality is – none of us are going to live that way in this world 100% of the time. Think of the number of Christians in this world if they never acted sinfully – if they never in their faith journey “walked in the dark,” so to speak. The world would be a different place, no doubt.

But we know, for a fact, no Christian out there walks in the light 100% of the time. Because sin is not just an action that we do – it is a state of being. Our world itself is filled with dark corners, with brokenness, problems that are both in and outside of our control… and we simply cannot avoid falling into the depths of darkness at times.

So how can 1 John state, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness we lie and we do not do what is true?”

The Word Made Flesh

Scripture: John 1:1-18

Admittedly, John’s Gospel is one of my favorite gospels. Probably because it is littered with imagery and symbolism. While other gospels, like Matthew and Luke, may open with genealogies and the nativity story, or Mark opens right up with Jesus’ baptism – John’s Gospel is more cosmic and sweeping. It takes us back to those first words of Genesis – in the beginning – and reminds us that what God is doing involves the whole of creation. That this is the God who speaks life in the midst of darkness.

That the God we are about to hear about is the same God whose Word brought everything into existence.

If you remember back to Genesis – God’s creative acts were always prefaced by, “And God said…” and God has continued to speak ever since. He has continued to speak into our world. He has continued to speak into our lives.

From the very beginning, God’s relationship with humanity has been centered around communication.

So the question of course that Genesis raises is: what happens when that life-giving communication between the creation and the divine breaks down?
If you think about it – the vast majority of all relationship problems are about communication. There are misunderstandings, unintended meanings… we just don’t communicate well with each other much of the time because we have many selfish things that drive what we are hearing and what we are saying.

Our relationship with God isn’t much different. It’s just as broken. It’s just as misunderstood.

But communication is also the way in which we build relationship. It’s the way in which we are able to mend relationships as much as it breaks them.

O Come, O Come Immanuel

Scripture: Daniel 3

Now I have to admit – the first time I saw this story was what was scheduled to be our first week of Advent text, my reaction was… “huh?” How on earth does the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being thrown in the fiery furnace have ANYTHING to do with the first week of Advent? I mean – I guess they both involve fire.

Then I realized it might be helpful to recognize the context of the book of Daniel. As we’ve been going through this Narrative Lectionary, we’ve been following the trials and tribulations of the people of God. Last week, Pastor Meg talked about the Prophet Jeremiah, who was one of the prophets who was alive during the time of the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonian Empire and were taken away as exiles into Babylon.

Daniel is a book that takes a look at what happened during their time in Exile – in fact, many scholars believe it was the last book of the Old Testament to be written – and they believe it was written as a book of hope that looked back at their time in Babylonian exile while living under the oppression of what was known as the Seleucid Empire – which was about 100 years before Jesus’ birth.

A book that addresses issues of faith in the midst of oppression and difficult circumstances. Faith in a time when it seemed God wasn’t really listening to His people. It’s a book that deals with issues of hope in the midst of despair. Hope in the midst of oppression. Hope in the midst of exile.

Imperfect Saints

Scripture: 1 Kings 19:1-18

On this All Saints Sunday, I think there is no more fitting story one could tell than the story of Elijah. An important prophet of God, revered throughout the scriptures as one of the most important prophets that ever lived… is one of the two prophets who appear at Jesus’ transfiguration… and at this moment in his story…

He says, “It’s enough. Take my life away.” I have done enough – and it’s over.

He’s lying under a broom tree, begging God to kill him. He’s given up. He doesn’t want to be the prophet anymore. He’s sick of it. He did what was asked of him – now he just wants to die in peace. How can God continue to ask him to keep going when the battle is a futile battle?

Not quite what we expect when we think of one of the greatest of all prophets.