The Cost of Discipleship
It’s a 2-panel cartoon. The left panel depicts a guy—a rather nerdy, hapless looking guy—walking down a street beside a tall brick building. Two or three stories up the side of the building, right over the spot he will walk through momentarily, an old-fashioned upright piano is being lowered from a window by a rickety rope sling and pulley apparatus.
In the righthand panel, God sits at his computer. You can tell it’s God because he is an old white guy with long white hair and beard! The image on God’s computer screen is of the scene we see in the left panel: the same hapless looking guy walking down a street completely oblivious that he is about to walk under a piano dangling from a rickety contraption.
God’s computer has just two buttons: A big, green “Save” button and a big, red “Smite” button. In this cartoon, God’s finger hovers over the “Smite” button.
Of course, the cartoon is open-ended. We are left wondering: Does God smite the poor schmuck? And what in heaven’s name has he done to deserve God dropping a piano on him?
I collected that cartoon because it so accurately and humorously depicts how millions of humans throughout the centuries have imagined God’s role in the universe. The OT is rife with stories of God visiting disaster upon people for behaving badly. Certainly Moses, the presumed author of Deuteronomy, thought it.
It’s as if God sits at a massive control panel somewhere, watches our behavior, rewards us if we are good and smites us if we are bad. From Sodom and Gomorrah to New Orleans, Louisiana, God sends disasters like hurricanes and floods to punish sinful cities, and according to the preachers of the prosperity Gospel, if you are sufficiently pious and give enough money to the televangelist, you will be rewarded with great wealth yourself—and if you aren’t wealthy, it’s because you haven’t yet sent enough to the televangelist.
It's a popular belief. It’s all over the Old Testament. But it’s not how it works. God does not micromanage the universe. Indeed, Genesis makes it pretty clear that humankind was left in charge of caring for planet earth.
Nevertheless, our lessons this morning have something important to say to us about the consequences of action and the cost of following Jesus. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first I must make a brief detour to share something I just learned about.
In 1989, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church—Dimitrios the First by name—declared Sept. 1 to be “World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation” and called on people of faith worldwide to join in honoring God’s Creation and praying for humankind to actively seek to restore our seriously neglected and damaged relationship with Creation.
The World Council of Churches jumped on board quickly and energetically, and soon a day of prayer became a Season of Creation, to be celebrated by a long list of denominations and organizational partners from Sept. 1 until Oct. 4, which is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of ecology. The Episcopal Church is a partner in the movement. We are represented on the Advisory Committee by Bishop Mark Andrus of California.
Every year the Season of Creation movement chooses a theme and leads individuals and churches worldwide in celebrating and taking action to restore our relationship with Creation and thereby with the God of Creation. Their website is a myriad of creative and compelling resources for worship and action on behalf of Creation.
Here’s what’s a bit shocking to me: I became an Episcopalian in 1998—9 years after the founding event—and I’ve been an ordained deacon since 2008, and never once in all that time and in all of the many Episcopal churches and hundreds of services I’ve attended.. have I heard mention of the Season of Creation. I found out about it a couple of weeks ago in an email from Mthr Meg Lovejoy, who serves the little church down in Moss Bluff.
So, Brothers and Sisters, we are in Week 1 of the Season of Creation 2022, and what you will hear from me this morning is a Care of Creation take on today’s lessons. For week 2 of the Season of Creation I’ll be preaching at Grace in Monroe and they will get same song, second verse!
Now let’s return to Deuteronomy, even better Jeremiah, the alternative OT reading for today, and think about it in terms of today’s escalating disastrous climate events, which a massive body of science tells us is due largely to our own behavior, to our overconsumption, our fossil-fuel addiction, destruction of nature, and—as one who earned her keep as a kid washing dishes for a family of 8—what looks to me like pure laziness in our addiction to the Styrofoam and plastic that are choking our oceans, killing critters and creating mountains of landfill!
Now let’s reread and know that the next disastrous storm about to tear our coastline apart is not God sitting at his computer hitting the smite button, but our own reckless disregard for and estrangement from the very Creation that is our home and life-breath—the dirt of which we are made.
But Jeremiah and Moses also give us hope. They both say we can repent of our evil ways and reform our ways and actions. God has not given up on us. We can restore our right relation with God and Creation and turn away from the disastrous path we are on.
In today’s Gospel lesson, Luke is talking about the cost of following Jesus, and he is making it clear that the Gospel is not cheap. Grace and forgiveness are readily offered and freely received, but following Jesus comes with a price tag.
If we are to be disciples, to really follow Jesus, we are called to put him, and his Kingdom values, before all else. The examples Jesus gives fall in two areas which, then and now, can easily distract us from or get between us and our desire to follow Jesus: family and material possessions.
Importantly, I do not believe that Jesus literally means we should “hate” our family, or anyone else. Jesus taught love above all else. Here he is using hyperbole to make the point that our focus on following him must be single-minded and highest of our priorities.
And to follow Jesus is to walk humbly. It is to see God in all of Creation. It is to reject consumerism and to recognize that from those who have much, much more is expected. It is to reject reckless exploitation of Creation for profit motives and to fight against the injustice caused by greed and over-consumption.
To put it in the most down to earth terms I can think of, it is to swear off all those “disposables” and wash the cotton pickin’ dishes! Yes, there you have it: I think washing dishes is a sacred act of following Jesus!
Jesus’ words here calling us to give up everything we have to follow him might well be our biggest challenge. And please note, in Luke’s account, Jesus delivers these words while in the house of a prominent, and no doubt wealthy, Pharisee. So they have particular relevance to those of us from affluent and religiously devout backgrounds.
Friends, we are called to follow Jesus, whatever the cost. Today, his challenging words on family, money and possessions call us to follow Jesus to a life of greater simplicity, to repenting from our selfish consumerism, and to uniting with all Creation in building community that models the way of God’s kingdom.
In the name of God, father, son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.
[Season of Creation Week 1 (Year C, Pentecost 13), Jeremiah 18:1-11; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33]
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