Luke 14:25-33
One of the comic strips that has always stayed with me is one of Cathy, a young woman who always seems to be struggling with some life issue. In this particular cartoon, you see Cathy standing in a supermarket aisle, first picking up one roll of paper towel, then putting it down and picking up another, and then putting it down and picking up another. In the last frame, she has nothing in her hands, and she’s crying in frustration: “I’m late, I’m behind schedule, there are so many important things to do in life, and I’ve just spent 20 minutes trying to pick out paper towel!”
You and I live at a time and in a country where we have an amazing plethora of choices. Some of our choices are relatively simple – what shall I have for breakfast, how shall I spend a beautiful day like yesterday. Other choices we make are more complex and have greater consequence – what education do we pursue, what work, do we find a life partner or not, raise children or not.
And then there are the kind of choices our gospel lesson suggests – choices that invite us to consider all our living in the context of following Jesus; or to use the words I told the children, to make choices that put God as ‘the most important thing’. I’ve always liked the way Katherine White, fiction editor of the New Yorker magazine for many years and wife to E B White, spoke about this dilemma of choosing. She once wrote to a friend: “I wake every morning torn between the desire to save the world or savor it, and that makes it really hard to plan the day.”
Our gospel lesson this morning is some of the hardest teaching Jesus ever shared with the disciples and the crowds. Jesus’ language was pointedly direct and stark in order to make it absolutely clear to his listeners that choosing to follow God’s ways wasn’t easy, and required great effort and even sacrifice. In this passage is the only time in the New Testament we find the word ‘cost’; and Jesus’ intent was to invite would-be followers to an informed, purposeful intentionality in their choices.
However, as you and I consider this invitation of Jesus to serious discipleship, rather than take his words literally – do we really have to abandon our family and loved ones, give away all our possessions and wander the streets as a pilgrim being ready even to bear the cross – what if, instead, we heard these words as simply the push to enter into life as fully as we can without letting anything hold us back from being the people God has gifted us to be? Jesus is calling us to pay attention to how we live; and to ponder what in our choices stops us from daring to believe and embrace the holiness that resides within each one of us.1
For example, think about what you and I cling to, what we hold onto so tightly that we’re unwilling to let go. Maybe it is loved ones, maybe it is material possessions – our house, our financial security, our stuff; but maybe, it is our attachment to the thoughts we have about who we are that is the real impediment to living life fully. If you and I cling to a self-referential way of seeing and being, we sustain the unexamined habit of grasping to all that isn’t fundamental and true to our being. What if we let go of the personal pronouns me and mine, and instead considered our life as intimately connected with God’s? 2
And then, instead of believing that God gives each of us a cross to bear in order to strengthen us or teach us or test us – which is furthest from what God would ever do as God is totally love – what if, in Jesus’ words about shouldering the cross, we heard it as the compassionate invitation to enter the suffering of the world and to bear it one person at a time? What if we heard it as the invitation to accept the weight of powerlessness and its power as we surrender our own way that we want to get? 3
Finally, as you and I think about both the privilege and responsibility we have in all the choices that are ours to make, knowing and trusting that the one thing God wants is for us to be fully alive and boldly honoring our holiness within; what if in thinking about those choices, we asked ourselves that time honored exercise: “You are on your death-bed. What would you regret?”
May God bless each of us with the courage to wrestle with that exercise, the patience to live into the answer, and the willingness to choose what our discernment reveals. And, may we believe that the cost our choices will require truly is grace.
Amen.
1. Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4 Bartlett and Taylor, p. 46
2. Unfolding Light Steve Garnaas-Holmes 9/4/13
3. Edge of the Enclosure Suzanne Guthrie for Proper 18, Year A