13th Sunday After Pentecost,, 09/08/2019

Sermon on Luke 14:25-35, by Paula Murray

Sermon on Luke 14:25-35, Philemon 1-21, and Deuteronomy 30:15-20

25Great crowds accompanied {Jesus}, and he turned and said to them, 26“If anyone 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. 27Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. 28For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? 29Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, 30saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ 31Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. 33So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. 34Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? 35It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Luke 14:25-35

The cross changed everything. When Jesus willingly yielded up his life and his spirit upon that merciless instrument of death it appeared that sin, death, and the devil had won. But that apparent victory was proved to be the sham it was three days later, when the resurrected Jesus left his borrowed tomb and walked back into the world of the living. Since the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the world has worked out in bits and pieces what it means that Jesus died and was raised from the dead as we wait upon his return and the final restoration of a still fallen creation.

The cross that began this new epoch of history forces a stark choice upon us all. Will we choose life in Christ Jesus, or will we choose death and a fallen creation. Lutherans hold in contempt anything that looks like decision theology; “Accept Jesus! Be born again!” as though any choice we make might save us from sin and death. It is God who saves. Once, as I approached the bleachers on which sat the parents of our older son’s soccer team, I heard one of the soccer dad’s say to his wife, “That one’s a Lutheran pastor and they believe in baptismal regeneration.” I got to say I was impressed he knew the phrase. Still, I plopped myself down in front of them, black shirt and collar tab and all, and said, “Yup. Want to talk about it?” They declined. We do believe that we are saved by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ and that God begins in us a new life when God’s Word and the faith it creates is joined to the waters of Baptism. Will we, then, as Lutherans often put it, live the life of the baptized Christian, or will we walk away from our salvation? We admit that even faith is God’s gift, and that any choice to live faithfully in Christ Jesus is God’s work also. Still, we have that choice even if it requires the aid of the Holy Spirit to have and to accomplish, to walk as one baptized in Christ’s light or to walk away from our baptism and into the darkness of sin, death, and despair.

Last Sunday, the Scripture readings taught us to see the danger of pride to faith and to human relationship. Pride puts our own self in place of God, so we become idolaters. Pride makes us see other people as our tools and not our equals, just ways of getting what we think we want or deserve. Pride blinds us to our own sins, leading us to endlessly rationalize our wrongdoings so that bit by bit, one compromise after another, faith itself fades away leaving only shameful memory.

It is to avoid such faith-killing compromises that we have focused the first half of the season of Pentecost on being deeply rooted in Christ Jesus. A plant with shallow roots does not withstand hard times well if at all. Jesus himself notes this in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13). A plant with shallow roots has little protection against drought or its opposite punishing rains, wild winds, or blazing sun. To be deeply rooted in Christ is to dive into what sustained Jesus himself over the course of his very difficult ministry, the Word of God and prayer. Jesus, the Son of God, held fast to the will of God, and his will was sustained in his reading of the Torah and the prophets. Prayerful conversation with his Father lifted him up when fatigue and sorrow bore him down. All this and his own relationship with our heavenly Father rooted Jesus in his Father’s plan for our salvation, and roots us now in Christ. Also, we now have the accounts of Jesus’ own life and ministry and the growth of the early Church in the New Testament, the Lord’s Supper and the love and fellowship of one another to root us in faith. Deeply rooted in Jesus Christ, we have a better chance of avoiding the destructive effects of compromise on our faith and our salvation.

To avoid a compromised faith, the writer of Deuteronomy (30:19b -20a) exhorts us to “choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days.” Jesus echoes the Old Testament prophet in words that are straightforward and even harsh. “If anyone 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.” That word “hate” as used in the Bible does not usually mean the opposite of love or a violent dislike of another, but to love one person less than another. Jesus does not mean, then, that those who follow him are to have the kind of passionate distaste for dear old mom and dad that leads to three decades of counseling, just that his followers love him more than they love mom and dad, and everyone else, too. Our reading is confirmed in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves

son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Jesus goes on to say, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” Well, the cross might just be a bit of jewelry to many Americans, but the people to whom Jesus spoke had pretty direct experience of its use to torture and murder people in the cross hung corpses that “decorated” the sides of major roads into Jerusalem and other major towns. No one in their right mind wants to take up the cross, yet here is Jesus saying that to follow him is to do precisely that, to take up their cross, meaning, to take on a ministry like his that may lead to their deaths just as it will lead to his.

“Count the costs,” Jesus said to those thinking of following him, after he laid out just how expensive discipleship is. Not everyone even in the days immediately following Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension paid the price of their discipleship in their own blood. But that did not mean that there was no cost to pay. The middle reading assigned to the day, the tiny book of Philemon, plays out how one disciple will pay the cost of his discipleship.

The chapter long book of Philemon, attributed to St. Paul like almost every other book in the New Testament, begins with a flowery description of the faith and dutiful practice of one Philemon. This gentleman, likely a well-to- do-merchant, has a church in his house, meaning first, that his house is substantial enough to house a congregation’s worship, and second, that he leads worship in that place. Paul concludes his somewhat over-the-top description of the faithful Philemon with these words, “For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.”

Perhaps Philemon knew Paul well enough to know that this sort of pat on the back from Paul could be the prelude for a swift kick in the shins, or maybe Philemon just reveled in the praise. If he did, any good feelings he got from it did not last long, for Paul turned next to the point of his letter and it is a doozy. Paul is sending Philemon an odd sort of present, a young man, whom Paul claims is not only his helper but an adopted son of sorts. He, says Paul, would like to keep Onesimus, the young man with him because like Paul he is imprisoned for his faith and because he has been such a great help to Paul. But, there is that small matter of Onesimus being an escaped slave, Philemon’s escaped slave, to be exact, and while he, Paul, as an apostle could command Philemon to free Onesimus from slavery, he would rather that Philemon willingly let Onesimus go. And why should Philemon free Onesimus from bondage? Well, first to “refresh” Paul’s heart as he has refreshed the hearts of the faithful in his house church. But most of all, Philemon should free his escaped slave because after escaping Philemon the slave Onesimus met Paul and became a Christian, and is now Philemon’s “beloved brother.”

Paul contends that Philemon should let Onesimus return to Paul as a freed man because they are now brothers in Christ through baptism. Paul’s request, if we can truly call it a request rather than a subtle call to obedience to the Gospel, comes at a cost to Philemon. That cost is paid in the worth of the slave himself, clearly educated as he is literate and worth some real money. But the cost Philemon pays is paid in more than coin, for Paul has in his prayerful and faithful reasoning come to an irresistible conclusion that the cross and our baptism in our cross-shaped faith means that there can be no relationship between Christian siblings that is based on bondage to one another rather than our shared freedom in the Gospel. What the law allows, in this case, Christ does not. Now, we have no letter from Philemon saying he freed Onesimus although tradition says he did. But if he did, and who could resist St. Paul (other than a bunch of Christians in Jerusalem, the merchants of Ephesus, that pesky congregation in Corinth, okay, point taken), well, if he did he paid a price. The cost he bore for following Jesus came in his sense of who he is as one who commands others, or whose social standing was higher than others. There may be another social cost as well, as the world outside of the Church gets wind of what Philemon’s faithful submission to Paul’s “request.” So far as we know, Philemon never faced execution on the cross, but he certainly did pay a price for his faith in Jesus.

It is also unlikely that you or I will face the cross in any literal way either. But we will pay a price for faithfulness in a world that is not only increasingly secular but nasty with it. Many a compromise of your faith will be asked of you. Some of those compromises will be meaningless, largely because our opponents do not understand Christ and his Church, but others will undercut or even corrupt your relationship with both. You will be asked to count the cost, to do what is painless socially, or to keep the faith. The former will buy you a conflict free existence, at least with regards to the secular world around you, but it may very well buy you God’s judgment and condemnation. Choose rather to love the Lord your God more than anything else, including the approval of the secular world, pick up your cross, and with God’s help choose life, life everlasting.

Paula Murray

E-Mail: smotly@comcast.net

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