Counting The Cost Of Discipleship Series

Counting the Cost

Having Words with Jesus

THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, YEAR C

Luke 14:25-33 The Message Figure the Cost

25-27 One day, when large groups of people were walking along with him, Jesus turned and told them, “Anyone who comes to me but refuses to let go of father, mother, spouse, children, brothers, sisters—yes, even one’s own self!—can’t be my disciple. Anyone who won’t shoulder his own cross and follow behind me can’t be my disciple.

28-30 “Is there anyone here who, planning to build a new house, doesn’t first sit down and figure the cost so you’ll know if you can complete it? If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money, you’re going to look pretty foolish. Everyone passing by will poke fun at you: ‘He started something he couldn’t finish.’

31-32 “Or can you imagine a king going into battle against another king without first deciding whether it is possible with his ten thousand troops to face the twenty thousand troops of the other? And if he decides he can’t, won’t he send an emissary and work out a truce?

33 “Simply put, if you’re not willing to take what is dearest to you, whether plans or people and kiss it goodbye, you can’t be my disciple.

Our September series is called “Having Words with Jesus” to reflect a variety of moods and meanings we experience when we talk to Jesus. Maybe we want to argue, turn away, or give up when we talk to Jesus. Or maybe we really want to know, to spend some time in his presence to understand and to explore, and finally, we hope to hear a word to get us through the struggles of life and faith.

It is not the goal of this series to explain away the difficult sayings of Jesus; neither is the aim to make things more difficult than they are.

My hope is that we can sit at Jesus’ feet and wrestle with these words, much like the first hearers did.

Like them, we can grab hold of the things that seem clear and contemplate what doesn’t make sense on our first hearing.

We need to give the word time to work on us.

We also remember that Jesus is the Word made flesh, the very embodiment of the words we read.

The Word defines us, and transforms us into the followers of Jesus that we are longing to be.

This first week of this “Having Words” series is a great time to remind ourselves of the commitment that we made to make and to be made into disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Being a Christian in today’s culture simply means believing Jesus is the Messiah, but we have no way of discerning what someone actually believes is true because the enemy has convinced the church we can have faith in Jesus and not completely believe God’s Word.

Luke 14:25-33 is entitled “The Cost of Discipleship,” and for a good reason, because Jesus took faith and commitment to another level. He requires complete devotion from us, which means we cannot elevate ourselves or our immediate family above Him. Rather, we must prioritize our relationship with Him first and foremost, 24/7/365.

We have to learn what it means to look at the full price we pay for our relationships of love and of hate. Author Heather McGhee draws on a wealth of economic data to make the case that discriminatory laws and practices that target African Americans also negatively impact society at large. The heart of McGhee's case is that racism is harmful to everyone, and thus we all have an interest in fighting it. Drawing on a wealth of economic data, she argues that when laws and practices have discriminated against African Americans, whites have also been harmed. When people unite across racial and ethnic lines, she argues, there's a solidarity dividend that helps everyone. t was. I mean, it was - it's a really astonishing set of data. The majority of people making under $15 an hour are white. The majority of people without health care are white. We all live under the same sky and are all going to be vulnerable to climate change. And yet making race salient, as, of course, Donald Trump did and Trumpism does, makes people more - white people more conservative. It's this zero-sum idea that progress for people of color has to come at white people's expense. This idea of Zero-Sum is powerful. How many of us have thought in our mind the only way for Black People to come of Age is to take it from Whites and how many whites have pondered fear of a black and brown planet because of changing population numbers that we see in the Luke text and the research by McGee is that no one has to lose if we follow the word of Jesus.