September 8, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

The First in a Series of Sermons on Luke

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 14:25–33

Over the next four weeks I’ll be preaching on four passages from the Gospel of Luke, each featuring a teaching of Jesus. None of the stories are simple, and I hope that you will find, as we explore these stories together, that this man Jesus whom we are called to follow has a deep understanding of how complicated a thing it is to be a human being. So he wants to teach us and to help us along the way. In the first reading in this series, Jesus speaks about the costs of following him as a disciple.

“If you want to be my disciple,” says Jesus, “you must hate your family and give away all your possessions.” Some might read that and argue that Jesus needs a little help with his recruitment strategy. It’s an especially bad strategy here in America, where having cool stuff and talking about the importance of family values is as prominent as anywhere in the world. I want to name it, right at the start, that this passage is very unappealing to most of us. It seems to send the message that you could never possibly do what is required to follow Jesus—and that you might not want to. I’m going to try to address that concern this afternoon by talking about family values and possessions and about some situations in which people make a single-minded commitment of the kind Jesus seems to be seeking.

I’m going to start by swinging the pendulum all the way to the opposite end of what Jesus says about family values and look at one example of what might happen if you were to place family above all else. I’m going to do that by talking about the TV show I’ve been watching the most lately: Breaking Bad. For those of you who may also be watching this show, please know that I am only in season three right now, so I hope you won’t come up to me after the service and offer any “spoilers” about what is going to happen next. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s the deal: Breaking Bad is about a middle-aged man named Walt, a high school chemistry teacher with a wife, a teenage son with cerebral palsy, a second child on the way, and plenty of financial problems—and then he develops serious lung cancer and the death sentence that goes along with it. Walt struggles mightily with how his family is going to survive when he dies, and so he makes a desperate decision. Walt uses his knowledge as a chemist to start manufacturing the best methamphetamine in the southwest United States and eventually becomes part of a drug cartel. As the show develops, all of the collateral damage of that decision comes right out. You see the broken lives of the addicts Walt is supplying, the extraordinary violence of the cartel, and the inability of the DEA to put a stop to it. You see an incredible story of evil that results from Walt’s decision, and in the midst of it all, there are constant, disheartening reminders that if Walt doesn’t make the meth, someone else certainly will, so Walt keeps the cycle going because remember, he has made a decision that nothing in the world is more important than the security of his family after he dies. It is a story of family values taken to an extraordinary extreme; it is a story of choosing one thing that is most important and following it—and that, I believe, is what makes the show so compelling.

Now I’m going to shift gears and swing the pendulum in the other direction, away from family, closer to what Jesus seems to be talking about. I’m taking a class these days in the religion department over at Loyola, which means that many of my classmates are Jesuit priests in training. Class began last week, and we were getting to know each other, when one of these young Jesuits who had recently moved from California said, quite candidly, “I love what I’m doing, but I’m finding that I’m terribly sad to have left my whole family in pursuit of this calling to serve the church.”

My initial gut reaction was to be humbled by that. I too am a minister, but the idea of being a priest, taking vows that would keep me from marrying and having a family and that might cause me to pick up and move from one place to another at the whim of a bishop—these are just not things that have ever appealed to me, and had I been raised Catholic, there’s precious little chance that I would’ve wound up in the ministry. When my classmate made that comment, I felt a little less bold about my ministry, like I’d kind of taken the easy way out. And I realized that I found the choice that young Jesuit had chosen to be fascinating.

Here’s what I think the stories of Walt and that Jesuit in training have in common. I think both of their stories catch our attention because they seem extreme. Every one of us hopes to find things in life that are so important, so powerful, so meaningful, that you’d be willing to do whatever it takes in order to get it. It’s amazing to think that you could be committed to something like that.

When you examine the situation a little closer, it occurs to me that deep commitment never happens without doubt and confusion along the way. That’s why Walt struggles throughout Breaking Bad with the compromises he’s made and the struggle about whether or not he is doing the right thing. And that’s why I’m confident that the choices that young Jesuit has made and the sadness he feels over leaving his family—he may get used to that tension, but I don’t believe it will ever go away. Life is never as simple as being able to give up everything: the external complications life sets before us and the internal complications of our feelings always get in the way. And it’s perhaps because life is so complicated and there are so many distractions that we are always intrigued by stories where we think someone else might have found something that is so important that it’s worth giving up everything.

So in today’s scripture we find Jesus talking to his disciples about what it means to follow him. “You must hate your family. You must give away all of your possessions.” On the one hand, it’s a hard sell, or a bad advertising technique; but on the other hand, he’s making a very clear statement about the value of what he is offering. Jesus’ message of salvation, his ministry to the sick and the poor, as well as the challenges he brings to the powerful and the privileged are so important that there is nothing, nothing in the entire world, not your very last possession or even your family, that compares with the magnitude of what he is offering. And even though on the one hand that sounds scary, it’s also a fascinating idea on some level, because so many of us wonder, in our own lives, if we will ever find something so important that it will turn our lives upside down.

My best thinking on this subject is that Jesus knows that what he is asking for is more complicated than it seems. Following Jesus is not simple or single-minded, and I believe that because of what he says to them next: he makes an analogy between discipleship and building a tower, saying, “Which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost.” That statement immediately caused me to think about a book I’m reading.

Some of you might have read novels by Ken Follett; lately I’ve been reading one of his best-known books: Pillars of the Earth. It’s about the building of a tower—a medieval cathedral to be precise. The main character, Philip, is a Catholic priest. He makes his way into the profession without any choice: his parents are killed in a war, and he is adopted by a monastery. Philip lives most of his early life in a small country monastery, where he lives a simple and holy existence in a small community. By chance or fate, he suddenly finds himself transported to a bigger town and in a place of influence where he must deal with the most sophisticated of political players: a crafty bishop, the family of the earl, and even the king. And when the cathedral in his town burns to the ground, Philip discovers that in order to rebuild it, he must make compromises about what it has always meant to be a Christian and serve God. In order to navigate the world of the bishop, the earl, and the king, he himself behaves in ways that are calculating and deceitful, but he does so because he understands the complicated world in which he now lives and he thinks, even in the midst of making compromises, that this is the best way for him to serve God.

If you sit down and really carefully consider, as Jesus suggests, what it will take to build a tower, you will find that it will be a complicated task. You can make tons of plans and preparations, but the process will undoubtedly come with surprises you don’t expect. And this is how Jesus explains the cost of following him.

Is this not the way that many of us experience big decisions in life? Especially when we decide to do something important, something time consuming that will involve major changes for us—it is especially in those times that we find there are things we learn and experience in that process that we never expected. In every great commitment we make in life: a new job, a move to a new city, a committed relationship, there are always surprises. There are eventualities, some good and some bad, that we never could have forecasted. But those surprises usually end up being worth the trouble. And that’s true because there is an alternative to making these kinds of big commitments, and the alternative is quite sad: the alternative is that you might never do anything that really stretches you—nothing that involves real commitment—and can you imagine how disappointing that would be?

Imagine if Jesus were to have said to his disciples, “Come and follow me because I’m not really doing anything much different than you are. I have no particularly revolutionary wisdom to share, and ideally, if everyone joins my movement, things will stay pretty much the same as they’ve always been. Come follow me, and continue all of the troubled relationships in your life in the same difficult way that they’ve always existed. Come and bring everything you own. Bring along the house and the car that you own and all of the maintenance issues that go along with them. Bring along your fashionable clothes and also your worries about whether or not you look good enough wearing them. And most of all, know that everyone else will be bringing all their stuff too, so you can bet that no matter what you bring, there will be plenty of people who have more and better stuff than you have, so that you can continue to feel jealous and inadequate in the same ways you always have. Yes, come and follow me, where nothing is demanded of you, and everything will be the same.”

But that’s not what Jesus says, is it? Jesus invites us into a life that is dramatically different. Jesus invites us to be part of bringing about a world where people are not hungry or poor, a world where there is plenty to go around because we don’t have to hoard our resources out of fear that there won’t be enough. Jesus invites us into a world where you don’t have to worry so much about protecting or providing for yourself or your family because everyone is treated like family. Moreover, this world is so different than what you have come to expect that there are surprises around every turn. In the world Jesus has in mind, every day holds a new adventure and every encounter with another member of your vast human family promises to be just amazing, because in that world we can finally see and appreciate that God created every one of us to be an amazing individual person—and because you are one of them, much is expected of you.

It is a radically different and tremendously exciting way to experience life. It is a life that is inspiring because it involves deep commitment to the tremendously important things you’ve been waiting your whole life to find. And yes, there will be a cost.

Amen.