The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost | 9/7/2025 | Sermon on Luke 14:25-33 | by Paul Bieber |

Luke 14:25-33 Revised Standard Version

²⁵ Great multitudes accompanied Jesus; and he turned and said to them, ²⁶ “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. ²⁷ Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple. ²⁸ For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? ²⁹ Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, ³⁰ saying, ‘This man began to build, and was not able to finish.’ ³¹ Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? ³² And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends an embassy and asks terms of peace. ³³ So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” 

also

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Psalm 1

Philemon 1-21

REFRESH OUR HEARTS

Grace, peace, and much joy to you, people of God.

Do I have enough? We hear Jesus’ parable of the tower and his parable of a king going to war. As we listen, his teaching seems very congenial (after that troublesome talk about hating and crossbearing) to the way we think: count the cost; make sure you have enough. That’s the way our minds work. But then we are brought up short: “So, therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” The question, “Can you afford to follow Jesus?” puts a stumbling block before our calculating minds, which are always ready to count the cost to make sure that we have enough.

On his way to Jerusalem and the cross, Jesus gives the crowds that accompany him more advice about discipleship. He has already told us that families will be divided by differing responses to him. He has already told us that the only way to save our lives is to lose them. He has already told us that only a fool trusts his possessions to secure his life, a life which may be demanded of him at any time. So perhaps the stumbling block that brings us up short at the end of today’s Gospel should not really be so surprising.

The cost of discipleship is: leave your family, lose yourself, let loose of your possessions, and then come, follow. If I want to follow Jesus Christ, I must abandon my place, and the people and things around me, even my self—the things Jesus says that I must “hate.” But “hate” here is not the emotion opposite to love. We are called to love our neighbors, even our enemies. We have a commitment to honor father and mother, and Jesus is very strict about marriage.

But if my first priority is following Jesus, being his disciple, that commitment will relativize all of my other relationships. Jesus makes an absolute claim, expressed in hyperbolic language. It is really not a matter of “hating” your own life. But it is emphatically a matter of losing your life, this ego-driven calculating life—in order genuinely to choose life.

Jesus’ person and proclamation bring division, and the line of division runs not only through a whole society, not only through a single family, but through a single person. To say that we are called to hate our own lives is to say that we must abandon our will, our self-seeking desires, all that curves me in on myself and away from God and neighbor.

That’s the only way to make sense of Jesus’ “So therefore. . . .” He tells us to count the cost when building or going to war—to make sure we have enough resources to succeed in our venture. But then he says, “So therefore” you must renounce all that you have to be his disciple. In other words, when we count the cost for this venture, we will find that we do not have enough. We will never have enough. Our lives are an endless quest to have enough, to secure our lives through having enough, being enough. But when we honestly count the cost of our venture of self- constructed, self-sustained life, secure against any threat, we discover that we do not have enough. We will never have enough.

What, then is the way to make the choice between life and death, prosperity and adversity, which God places before his people in Deuteronomy, the choice that Psalm 1 and the Didache call the Two Ways, one to life and one to death, the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked?

In our reading from Deuteronomy, Israel, camped on the eastern side of the Jordan, hears Moses’ final instructions before entering the land of promise. The question for God’s ancient people is whether they will be faithful to the Lord who delivered them from slavery and guided them through the wilderness, or will they run after other gods and serve them. Here, between the deliverance already done and the fulfillment of the promise still to come, comes their question.

And it is our question too. In our pilgrimage toward God and the fulfillment of his promises, we stand between our redemption by the cross of Christ and the fullness of the kingdom. Will we be faithful to the God who redeemed us and his guided us through the wildernesses of our lives? Or will we run after other Gods—particularly those who promise (falsely) that we will have enough. Life or death, blessing or curse—we still face this choice.

Jesus’ person and proclamation show us that this choice is the same paradoxical invitation to find our lives by losing them that Jesus places before us time and time again. If I miss the paradox, then I might find my Christianity quite compatible with the satisfaction of all my desires. But that sort of Christianity would be a dreadful religion, because all my desires can never be satisfied. I will never have enough. Every day will be irritatingly unfulfilled, counting the cost and coming up short.

The alternative is to heed Jesus’ call to be his disciple, to follow him, and in this paradoxical way to choose life, finding life by losing it. He calls it bearing the cross. “Your cross” is not your aches and pains, your annoying relatives, or the things you hate about your job. When Jesus’ first hearers heard the word about bearing your own cross, the message was clear because the image was clear: a condemned man on his way to die a despicable death in utter nakedness for all to see. The roads to the empire’s cities, including Jerusalem, were decorated with crosses.

Is this the way to choose life?

Yes, because Jesus’ cross changed everything: Jesus’ self-sacrifice even to death, and the vindication—in his rising—of his way of life and acceptance of death. The cross that began this new epoch of holy history forces the stark choice upon us all: life or death, blessing or curse, the way of the righteous, the way of the wicked. Will we choose life in Christ or life unto death, healing or continued brokenness, the dawning light of a new day or deepening dusk?

I hasten to add that this choice is a response. God always acts first: his grace is received by faith. In the word and water of the baptismal font we are invited into the new baptized life in the Holy Spirit and the light of Christ, the daily dying and rising that responds to grace by choosing life, light, and healing. The alternative is the daily surrender of the dreadful religion of “enoughism,” which brings continued brokenness, gathering gloom, and finally death.

There is nothing in that religion, in that choice, to refresh our hearts. St. Paul uses that phrase twice with reference to his friend and brother in Christ Philemon. The God who calls us to choose life in Christ as our ultimate commitment—in response to his gracious call—refreshes our hearts so that we can refresh the hearts of our brothers and sisters. For we do not make this pilgrimage alone. All of us are called to take up the cross and follow Jesus on his self-emptying, self-offering, self-giving way to his cross and his empty tomb. With our lives joined to his death in Holy Baptism, we come to his table offering our selves, time, and possessions as a sacrifice of praise. In his grace, we receive our lives back, transfigured, joined to his risen life. And our hearts are refreshed in him.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Bieber

E-Mail: paul.bieber@sbcglobal.net

Retired Lutheran Pastor

San Diego, California, USA