September 9

September 9, 2001

The Price and the Prize

Barry Penn Hollar

I would not serve you well this morning, nor would I be faithful to my responsibilities as preacher of the gospel, if I were too quickly to suggest that Jesus did not really mean what he said. These are wild words, hard words, words spoken in our face, so to speak, and it would be a mistake, I think, for me to try to tame them for you.

I must, rather, let them run wild among us, just as they are. I must allow for the possibility that we are so hard ourselves, that only hard words can break us down, that only by getting in our face can Jesus bring out the best of us. I must do my best to let this verbal dynamite explode among us or else the object Jesus was trying to dislodge from our lives will remain unmoved.

So hear them again: “Whoever comes to Jesus, whoever comes to this church, whoever accepts the invitation to this table and does not hate his family, even life itself, is wasting his time—for they cannot be Jesus' disciple. They haven’t counted all the costs. For none of us can be Jesus’ disciple s if we do not give up all our possessions.”

Don’t argue with me. Don’t say to me, “Preacher, I didn’t come to church to hear that foolishness this morning.” I didn’t say it. Jesus did. Besides I don’t like this lesson any more than you do. These words are as hard on me as they are on you. I’m not sure I know what to make of them anymore than you do. I don’t know if I’m any more prepared or able to be Jesus' disciple on these terms than you are. These words put us all in the same boat, if you ask me, clergy as well as laity, life-long Christians as well as new believers, those reputed to be the salt of the earth and those of ill-repute. Neither you nor I; neither they, nor we; neither saints nor sinners can be Jesus disciple' unless we hate our families and our lives, unless we relinquish all our possessions.

All I’ve got to say is this: evidently Jesus thought something precious, something of incomparable value, something worth more than home and hearth, more than the super powerball jackpot, worth more even than life itself was in store for those who could be his disciples, because evidently he thought that the prize was worth the heavy price. And so before we go away in despair we ought at least take a long hard look at the prize that awaits those who let go of life and possessions and family ties. And we need to try to understand why that promise and prize exact such a cost from those who would possess it.

What is the promise? Heaven? That may be one way to talk about the promise that awaits us, but to the degree heaven has come to mean for us a distant, spiritual place to which our souls may or may not go after death, a place in another realm, unrelated to the day to day realities of our lives, it is misleading. The biblical promise, the hope it nourishes is for the making of all things new, it is for the restoration of all that we are—physical and spiritual, individual and collective; it is for a reign of peace, prosperity for all, and justice. Jesus spoke of it as the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God and suggested that it’s not someplace else in some distant future, but it is here and now, among us, though surely its fulfillment is yet to come. That Kingdom is the destination to which our discipleship is pointed.

This semester I am teaching a course called Christianity in the African-American Experience. We are looking at the way in which the slaves took the Christianity that was offered them and reinterpreted it as a resource in their struggle to survive and even to triumph over the racist slavery they suffered. One of the books we are reading is by Vincent Harding, a veteran of the struggle for civil rights in the 60s, an historian, the founding director of the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, and a former professor at Iliff Seminary, a United Methodist seminary in Denver Colorado.

The book is called The River. Its a celebratory history of all the ways in which African-Americans struggled for freedom in the United States up through the Civil War. Last weekend I was reading the introduction to the book in which he explains why he describes the African-American struggle for freedom as a great River and what he regards the deepest meaning of that great river of struggle to be. I was moved by what he wrote and found it illuminating in terms of understanding this text and why Jesus indicates that the cost of discipleship or citizenship in the Kingdom is so great and yet so worth the price.

He wrote this: “The black struggle for freedom is at its heart a profoundly human quest for transformation, a constantly evolving movement toward personal integrity and toward new social structures filled with justice, equity, and compassion. …Thus at its deepest levels the river moves toward a freedom that liberates the whole person and humanizes the entire society, pressing us beyond the boundaries of race, class, and nationality...

Later he says, “So I am willing to take this history of my people as a sign of all human possibility. I see the way we have come, the chains we have broken, the visions we have maintained as a broadside invitation to all people. Our history joins with that common hopeful element in all histories of human struggle for community and calls each of us to develop e our great hidden capacities to dream, to imagine a new American society, to become full participants in its creation, bursting with our courage and hope the barriers of all the political, economic, and social institutions that now hold us in bondage to our worst selves.”

Is it wrong to suggest that there is a relationship between what Jesus called the Kingdom of God and what Harding refers to as the “profoundly human quest for transformation,” a transformation involving both “personal integrity” and “social structures filled with justice, equity, and compassion.” Is it wrong to suggest that Jesus promise of a coming Kingdom is the promise that what Harding calls “humanity’s best hope” for justice and peace beyond the boundaries of race, class, and nationality will in fact, by God’s grace, be fulfilled—whether we pay the price for going along on the ride or not? Is it possible that Jesus invitation to discipleship, is the same as Harding’s invitation “to become full participants in the creation” of a new society, bursting the barriers of injustice and hatred and greed and disinterest with our courage and our hope?

If that’s what discipleship is all about, and I believe it is, then it’s a bit easier to see why our attachments to family, to our possessions, even to life itself are among the most insurmountable obstacles in our struggle to respond to the call of Christ upon our lives.

The claims of family are powerful. Our families are the sources of our identity; often it is within and among our families that we feel the greatest sense of security, the greatest certainty that we are loved; our families are often the place where our most cherished values are nurtured and learned. Yet, precisely because it is so important to us, precisely because family is so formative of who and what we are, it can often become not a womb that nourishes and gives life to the best within us, but a cage or a prison which binds us and draws boundaries around our compassion and our love. Our homes and families too readily become places of comfort in which to turn aside from our potential and from the challenges of the world. Jesus calls us to a hear the cries of the needy, to feel and to share the suffering of all God’s children, Yet, often it is precisely our loyalty to family that keeps us from hearing those cries. It is our loyalty to our biological brothers and sisters that prevents us from recognizing all of suffering human kind as our brothers and sisters in the Kingdom.

We will not hear the cry of the needy and feel their pain as our own from fear that to do so will cause us to loosen the grip we have on the possessions for which we’ve worked so hard. To hear such a cry might change our politics, from one designed to protect what we have, to one that seeks justice for all. But without such compassion we cannot become Jesus’ disciples, citizens of the Kingdom, full participants in the creation of a new society of justice, prosperity for all, and peace. It may well be that it is not we who have a grip on our possessions, but our possessions that have a grip on us. And they will strangle our very souls, my friends.

Later in the gospel of Luke, after Jesus talks about how difficult it is for those with wealth to enter the Kingdom, as difficult as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, some said to Jesus, “Then who can be saved?”

That question applies here as well. If discipleship requires hating our families, giving up all our possessions and even our lives, then who can be a disciple? I can’t. Can you?

But Jesus replied, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.” Maybe God will yet make us disciples of Jesus.

People talk a lot about what theologians and philosophers used to call “freedom of the will.” "You got to make a choice for Jesus," we are told. "And you have that freedom, that power." I’m not sure any of us has the freedom or the power on our own to make such a choice, not on Jesus’ terms—not on the terms he describes in this passage. But what is impossible for us is possible for God and God is still working on us, still beckoning us, still challenging us, still trying to love us into the way of discipleship, into the Kingdom, into the communities of those who seek to be full participants with God in the creation of a new society; into communities lives are a prayer that says "Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."