13th Sunday After Pentecost

Deut 30:15-20; Luke 14:25-33

How is it September already?  I can’t believe the summer is ending.  The weather has certainly turned quickly on us and it is definitely starting to feel like fall. And man, I was really hoping to start the season off with something way more upbeat than the lessons we heard today.  Because these lessons today especially the Gospel are pretty tough.  But maybe they are also perfect. 

Because we open the scriptures today to another time of great transition.  First, we turn to the book of Deuteronomy to see the Israelites perched on the banks of the Jordan gazing at the promised land.  After 40 years in the dessert, their lives are about to change.  Their life is the wilderness is ending and they are about to start a new life in the Promised Land.  They have been freed from slavery and are about to start living on their own for the first time.  And so God sits them down and lays before them a choice.  Life or death.   Blessing or Curses.  The path of God or the path of others. 

Because God knows that this choice is about to get a lot harder.  It was easy in the dessert to focus on God.  No one could forget that they relied totally on God when everything they ate literally fell from the sky each day.  But everything is about to change.  Once people enter the land of Canaan, it is going to get a whole lot easier to get distracted.  The people there worship other gods.  There will be pressures and dangers and the desire to wander away.

And God knows this.  So he gives his people a stark warning.  “I will be true to my word.  I will bless you, I will give you great gifts, freedom, blessings you couldn’t have even imagined in slavery in Egypt.  But be warned, along with those gifts comes danger.  Those same gifts that seem to bring you new life and prosperity will soon bring you only death if you lose your focus on God.”  Because the blessed life begins with loving God and being willing to follow his ways.  Doing our own thing doesn’t cut it.

So God sets before the people Israel a choice, blessings and curses, life and death and then unleashes them into the Promised Land.  And the people fail.  They choose death.  Again and again for more than a thousand years, the rest of the Bible is filled with stories of how the people choose the way that leads to death.  Prophets and leaders get raised up and maybe the people turn back, remember who they are and choose life by following God for a while, but inevitably they turn away again.

And Jesus knows this too.  He has seen it lived out for a thousand years in the wandering and sinfulness of God’s people.  And so as he makes his own way to the cross, he warns his disciples again in the Gospel story for today of this same truth.  When God is no longer the center, all the things of this world can only bring you death.  And just to make sure they understand the depth of this claim, Jesus shocks the people following him by telling them they must hate their family, carry the cross and follow him, and give up all their possessions.

Now when we hear this command, many of us probably start feeling pretty discouraged.  It’s just too much.  I love my family, I can’t imagine selling all my things, and I don’t see myself as a martyr.  If this is what it takes, maybe this whole Jesus thing isn’t really for me.  It almost feels like Jesus is setting us up to fail. 

Because he is.  What he has says is impossible.  It simply can’t be done.  We can say we hate our family and reject them for a time.  But no matter how hard things get, even if it feels sometimes, maybe for long periods of time, like we hate the members of our family.  Could you do it forever?  To all of them? Could you ever stop loving your own child?  Your own parents? your own siblings?  It’s antithetical to our very nature as human beings.  Human beings are social creatures, even if we lose our whole biological family, we inevitably form new relationships with others, it is impossible to live a healthy life in complete isolation. 

And it’s the same with our possessions, we could give up all we own, but humans have very specific and constant needs, and very soon we would either need to possess basic things like food, clothing and shelter or rely on someone else who possesses them which would be even more impossible if we had already severed all our human relationships.

And most of all, we can never truly carry the cross and follow Jesus.  We cannot bear the weight or our own sins much less the whole world’s.  We can follow Jesus even to the point of giving our very life.  But our death no matter how heroic will never free the world of sin.

And that’s the point.  We can’t do it.  Left on our own, in the long run, we will choose death, we always choose death.  We are no better than the Israelites.  We can’t help it.  We just don’t make the grade.  If we were to as Jesus suggests to sit down beforehand and calculate the true cost of discipleship, we would find ourselves woefully short.  If we think we can build a tower that reaches to heaven or that we can wage war against the forces of sin and death all on our own, we might as well quit now because we aren't going to make it.

Because it’s not about us.  It’s never been about us.  It is about God.  It’s always been about God, about choosing to put our relationship with the one true God at the center of our lives.  And letting everything else flow from there.  And that is where Jesus comes in.  He enters into our lives, into our relationships, into our hearts and makes us his disciples.  We don’t choose life, we can’t choose life, we choose Jesus and he gives us life.  And making that choice changes everything.  

But be careful.  Choosing Jesus means allowing Jesus to change your life, it means that Jesus may indeed transform you into a disciple, one who lives in the way he describes.  So as we enter this fall season consider this, how is Jesus transforming your life and this church?

What would it mean to live like a disciple?  To put Jesus in the center of our family and human relationships, to treat each other with the love and respect which we would treat Jesus, to live out our faith in word and deed. 

What would it mean to take up a cross and follow Jesus?  For carrying your own cross was meant to be an act of humiliation, to subject the carrier to public ridicule.  What would it mean to follow Jesus like you don’t care what people think?  To be a disciple even if others disagree or if it pushes you into uncomfortable places.  To unabashedly declare in the public sphere that God loves everyone, no exceptions, especially those who are poor or black or brown or queer or undocumented, otherwise demonized by those in power. 

And what would it mean gaze at our possessions through the eyes of Jesus?  To know that while we need some things to survive it is not a marker for how good or successful or valuable we are and certainly not a replacement for the real and powerful relationships that should be the center of our lives. 

Each and every day in thousands of tiny choices, we have laid before us life and death, blessings and curses and right there beside it we have Jesus holding out is hands offering to show us the way of life.  Amen.