Fourth Sunday of
Lent, March 1, 2016
A life spent following Jesus is a
blessed life. A person cannot have more
joy, deeper meaning, richer love, or greater hope in any other life. The life lived as Jesus’ disciple is the best
life a person can have.
Note the emphasis on following Jesus. People can come every Sunday and not spend
their lives striving to live in full submission and obedience to the Lord. People can be baptized, but then turn away
and not live under Jesus’ rule.
The best life is the life of a disciple. However, it is not the easiest life.
A Middle Eastern man, “Musa” grew up in a
Muslim home, but heard the gospel and put his faith in Jesus as Lord. When Musa’s father found out, he threatened
to kill him. He kicked him out of the
family’s home. Musa has since tried to
share the gospel with his sister, but when his father found out, he said to
Musa, “I will slaughter you.”
One of my best Christian friends was
raised by parents who are committed Buddhists.
They tolerated his participation in church, but he always feared that if
he were baptized, his parents would forbid him from bringing his younger
siblings and cousins to church with him.
Following Jesus costs. Maybe this is
not the case in your family. Maybe mom
and dad and grandma and grandpa are all in the same church – three
generations. The day I was baptized 1981,
at 11 years old, my relatives all came to celebrate. An entire row in the congregation was filled
with Tennants. From an early age my
parents taught me to follow and worship the Lord and they modeled this life.
But some families are actively
opposed to following Jesus. If a son or
daughter turns to Jesus, the family may kick that one out, or worse. In Musa’s case, his father threatened to kill
him. A young person, even a young adult,
should be able to turn to his father for support and protection. Musa’s father wanted him dead.
In our country, we say “Christianity
is under attack” because in December, store clerks say “Happy holidays” instead
of “Merry Christmas.” We say it because
our same sex marriages are a reality, and our society includes people from
other religious background.
Really? Are we seriously pointing to things like this
to make our case that Christianity is under attack?
I have never heard anything so lame in all my
life. To use such examples as evidence
of a threat is utterly spineless. No one
is telling me not to say “Merry Christmas.”
I don’t care if someone else says it or not. Who someone else marries does not affect who
I marry. I have never had a gay person
try to convert me away from heterosexuality.
And the presence of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews, Hindus, and
Atheists does not weaken my faith. If
anything religious plurality strengthens my commitment to Christ because I have
to know why I believe He is Lord and is the path to salvation.
Musa knows what it is to be threatened for
being a Christian. Most American
Christians do not. Parents and bosses
and friends do not threaten to slaughter us for our faith. They might fire us or disown, although that is
extraordinarily rare.
When American Christians say they feel
threatened, what they really mean is that as Christians they no longer feel
like they are in the majority and they don’t like that feeling. When American Christians cry out that they
are threatened it is because they feel they have lost the power and privilege
of being the controlling group in society.
They have lost hegemony, they feel.
It doesn’t feel good.
But, why would minority status surprise us
when Jesus told us the cost of discipleship?
26 “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and
mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself,
cannot be my disciple. 27 Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me
cannot be my disciple.”
Following Jesus is the best life a person can have – no
question about it. But, wait! I don’t want to hate my mom or dad. They are two of the biggest supporters of my
life as a Christian.
Yet, Jesus says, “whoever does not hate father and mother …
cannot be my disciple.” We know he
wasn’t looking for admirers. Jesus had
no interest in people acting as his fan club.
He wanted followers. He lived and
then said, “Look at how I live. And you
live that way.”
“I am bound to die on the cross. You take up your cross and follow me.” Luke 14 is a challenging collection of ideas
and we must face this challenge if we are to truly become people who walk the
way of Jesus.
Listen to the thoughts of a well-known Biblical preacher, Barbara
Brown Taylor.
She looks at Jesus words in Luke 14 and she says, “I have to
conclude that [Jesus] would not have made a good [local church pastor.] So much of the job depends on making it easy
for people to come to church and rewarding for them to stay. Talk to any of the church growth experts and
they will tell you how important it is to create a safe, caring environment
where people will believe their concerns will be heard and their needs be met. The basic idea is to find out what people are
looking for and to give it to them, so that they decide to stay put instead of
continuing to shop for a church down the street” (Bread of Angels, p.46).
We embrace part of that statement at HillSong. We promote a safe environment in which people
can come to Jesus as they are, broken, confused, lost, uncertain, anxious. Come to Jesus and receive love from his
people.
Where we resonate with Barbara Brown Taylor’s playful irony
is the part about giving people what they want. Most the time, people, me
included, don’t know what they want. We
offer to introduce people to Jesus.
Come just as you are and receive Jesus.
Give yourself to him in fully and He will make you a new creation.
Come to Jesus, not to get saved, or to get found, or to be
made whole. That will happen, but come and
reorient your life so that He is Lord in all things.
But, “hate your father and mother?” Really? In Jesus’ day, a rhetorical technique was to
indicate a preference by holding two things side-by-side and then stating
hatred for one and love for the other.
It was not hatred such as Hitler hated Jews. It was not an evil, emotion-driven
attitude. It was a clear, unwavering
choice.
As cited in the examples above, Musa had to choose Jesus
against his parents’ will. In fact, his
father became a mortal enemy. My friend
had to choose loyalty to Jesus over the approval of his Buddhist mother. We know Jesus honored family relations. The mother of his disciples, the brothers
James and John, was also one his followers.
His own mother was one of his followers.
He did not despise family relations.
He simply and directly put them in their place. Our families, our spouses, our closest ties
fall in line after our devotion to Jesus.
It helped me to go through Luke 14 and note the people who
became his followers. As the chapter
opens, Jesus is a Sabbath Day house guest of a leading Pharisee. All at the meal guests jockey for the best
seat. Jesus says when they are guests,
they should humble themselves and sit in the lowest position.
When they host parties, they should invite people at the
bottom of society’s standings. They
should invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (14:13). he would tell us to invite into our homes,
the refugee, the mentally ill, the illegal immigrant, and homeless person.
Jesus then tells a parable about a wedding banquet in the
Kingdom of God. All the important people
invited send regrets. One has to check a
new piece of land; another has to see the oxen he’s just bought; and a is couple
on their honeymoon. So the Lords call
others in to fill the empty chairs: the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the
blind. Jesus also mentions drifters in
the dark corners of society, people far from the mainstream.
On the first Sunday of Lent, we talked about Jesus’
attraction to the least desirable of people.
He came for the poor, not the rich.
We saw this in Mark chapter 2, when Jesus called a tax collector to be a
disciple and dined with prostitutes and sinners of all types.
In the disciple life, we welcome an endless stream of people
who don’t look like what we might say a Sunday morning crowd looks like. But that’s the way of Jesus, so we have to
change our idea of what a Sunday morning crowd is. Well, if we want Sundays at our church to be
welcoming to Him, then we have to welcome and love who he welcomed and loved.
His priorities set ours.
If that happens, then we become a church that would be quite comfortable
with him as pastor. If our families or
friends are shocked at the decisions we make that are out of step with
materialist American culture but aligned with Jesus we aren’t surprised. He said, we’d have to hate mom and dad.
We understand this doesn’t mean hate as an emotion. It means we’re in the Gospel and so we walk
the way of Jesus regardless of what mom or dad or husband or wife or friend
think. We invite those we love most to
come to the cross with us. But we go
whether they come or not.
That’s what it means to be all-in with Jesus. There is no other way to be a Christian. The only kind of Christ-follower is the
extreme Christ-follower. Any other way
is just playing at Christianity.
I end with a thought on when we do go all-in. The Kingdom is a massive party – bigger than
any wedding reception or inaugural ball.
The poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the lost, the found, the brown,
the yellow, the black, the white, you, me – we’re all there.
But something has changed.
We’re in resurrected bodies, which cannot be blind. Resurrected bodies cannot be lame or
crippled. We’ll call them “the healthy
and the strong.” Resurrected bodies
cannot be addicts or junkies. We’ll call
them “the whole and the clean.”
We’re with Jesus at God’s table. We’re all beloved and all together. Your mom.
My dad. You. Me.
We’re all there, in the Kingdom, with Jesus, at the Father’s Table.
We live in blessed relationship with God now, tasked to be
witnesses for the Gospel in the world today.
And we anticipate the table of God.
That is our destination when we are all-in.
AMEN
