Forgive By Any Means Necessary.

Luke 16:1-18

I.

            After Jesus gives his parables about the lost sheep, coin, and son, he keeps speaking to his disciples.  And he tells a rather difficult story about a rich master and his hired manager.  It’s difficult because not only is the manager either crooked or incompetent, which is why he gets fired, but the manager also gets rewarded for doing something we think is rather underhanded and sleazy.  Not only is Jesus okay with this, he lifts up the manager as a shining example of how disciples should act! 

            So: we should steal from our boss, and when we get fired, we should steal even more from our boss.  Got it.

            But to learn that from the story implies that we are looking at it from the wrong perspective.  We tend to see it from the perspective of the one stolen from, or the one doing the stealing.  But there are other people in the story.  What if we interpreted it from their perspective?  These are the debtors who have their debts partially forgiven.

            From that perspective, I suggest that this parable is really about forgiveness.  It is no accident that it follows immediately the Parable of the Lost Son, which features the astoundingly forgiving father.  Here, the boss does not seem to be particularly forgiving at first.  When he hears about the manager squandering his property, he demands that the accounts be produced and he fires the manager.  The manager was ripping off the master for selfish gain, we presume.

            Then it is the manager who, still acting as the master’s agent, and still acting out of remarkably selfish reasons, proceeds to approach on his own some of the master’s debtors, offering them a one-time-only opportunity to get out from under some of their debt. 

            Now debt is one of those terms that should get our attention.  What do we all pray daily?  “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”  What does Jesus say at the beginning of his ministry?  That he has come to proclaim “the acceptable year of the Lord,” which means the Jubilee from Leviticus 25, which means a wall-to-wall forgiveness of all debts.  Then, as now, debt is a major problem faced by most people.

            Once again, Jesus doesn’t seem to be bothered by how or why good things get done, like forgiving debts, only that they get done.  He is concerned exclusively for the debtors here.  If the manager is doing good for a bad reason, Jesus is okay with that.  As long as he’s really doing good.  It is even fine with Jesus if the manager is getting something out of it for himself!  The manager calculates his debt-reduction scheme so that he will have people who owe him some hospitality while he is unemployed.

            So, at first the manager squanders the property of the master, just for his own benefit.  But after he is fired, he still loses the master’s property, but now it is by helping others.  He gives away the master’s assets… and the Master… rewards him.

II.

            It is almost like what the Master wants is for his assets to be distributed.  He is unhappy with the manager who stole from him for his own benefit.  But the manager is commended when he gives some of the master’s wealth away to indebted people.  Perhaps the master does not really want them feeling tied to him out of duty and debt, like the older brother in the former story.  Perhaps the master realizes that he gets a share of the goodwill gained by the manager’s action.

            The manager inadvertently and as a kind of last resort, actually builds community.  He creates places where he will be received and welcomed, and he does this by forgiving part of their debt to the master.  And it is of this that the master approves.    

            Jesus says that the master “commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.  And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”

            In other words, go out there and be a debt forgiver, in every sense of the word, which is what Jesus teaches in the Lord’s Prayer.  Don’t even beat yourself up imagining that you are somehow indebted to God.  In one sense, we are, of course, indebted to God… but God does not want debtors, people who are always thinking that they have to pay God back, and maybe if they do pay God back then they won’t owe God anything anymore… which is ridiculous.  Walt Whitman once complained about people who “sweat and whine about their condition,” who “lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,” who make him “sick discussing their duty to God.”  Jesus is with Whitman on this.  God doesn’t want our forced duty.  God wants our love, that is, our generosity towards others and our forgiveness of their debts.  

            It is precisely because we can never repay our debt to God that we have to forget it.  God has forgiven it.  It is this basic fact of forgiveness that Jesus’ disciples have to embody all the time.  Our lives are about forgiveness by any means necessary. 

            All wealth is to some degree dishonest; it is about humans attaching value to this piece of paper or metal, value that fluctuates wildly and bizarrely.  Jesus says to make this and everything else a tool for mission, a way of spreading the good news.  A means of reconciliation, in which the lowly are lifted up, their debts forgiven, their lives restored.

III.

             Jesus goes on to say that if we trust him in how we manage the little things, like money, we will be able to trust him in the big things, like love and justice, truth and beauty, goodness and wisdom.  If we can’t do what is right with our wealth, don’t expect God to bless us with these important things.  If we can’t serve God with all the things God has given us, how can we expect God to bless us in such a way that these things somehow belong to us?  Seriously, if your teenager has wrecked your car, who would give her her own car?  Do we expect to be rewarded for destroying God’s planet?  The whole reason the planet is as wrecked as it is has to do with people following, serving, loving, and worshiping money.

            How we act depends on whom we love and what we serve.  If we serve wealth, if we dedicate our lives to doing whatever is required to increase wealth, we will live in a certain way.  But if we love and serve God, we will live in a rather different way.  “You cannot serve [both] God and wealth.”  You have to choose one or the other.  In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, you can’t glorify God by making money; and you can’t make any money glorifying God.

            And it is the Pharisees who happen to be listening in who say, “Now wait a minute!”  They ridicule Jesus and what he is saying.  They, like everyone else, are “lovers of money.”  They, like everyone else, and no doubt like us, do not really agree that we can’t serve God and wealth.  Because, well, how is the church supposed to survive?

            We have buildings and property, we have investments, we have salaries to pay, we have mission to support.  This can’t be done for free!  Don’t we know it!  Jesus himself knows his group can’t survive without some involvement with money.  He has several wealthy women underwriting his ministry.  He even has a disciple appointed treasurer.  So he can’t mean that his disciples are supposed to live without money at all. 

            Jesus says that what people prize, what people value, what people use to measure their own success, that is, money, is an abomination in the sight of God.  And if something is an abomination, we should get rid of it as quickly as possible.  And if that abomination is something humans value, we should take advantage of that fact and translate its perceived value into real value by giving it away and making it serve human needs.  That way we gain welcome into God’s eternal household.      

            I am not going to fall into the trap of diluting or equivocating on Jesus’ words here.  There is no sense in which “well, it’s okay to have a lot of wealth as long as we’re not ‘serving’ it.”  Or: “I can possess it, but it I can’t let it possess me,” or some such nonsense.  God is not fooled by this kind of self-justifying, hypocritical doubletalk.  God sees the heart. God also sees the chasm between people with wealth and the poor neighbor… a topic he will address in the parable for next week. 

IV.

            No doubt the Pharisees were pointing out passages of the Torah that appear to indicate that wealth is a sign of God’s blessing.  Jesus says, in effect, that “Yeah, well, you guys are the experts on the law and all, so use it anyway you like, even to justify your own greed and selfishness.  I don’t think that’s what the Torah is really about, but that’s just me.

             “The law and the prophets were in effect until the coming of John the Baptizer; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and that is the deeper Spirit of the law.  I have always strongly urged everyone to enter this new relationship with God and each other, even if you have to force your way in past your own reluctance and the resistance of your family.  But, properly understood, every insignificant detail of the Torah and the prophets will last until the end of time.  And the spirit of the Torah and the prophets is always towards justice, no matter how many verses you can dig up to justify your own self-serving position.

            “I will give you an example of the way you guys mess up the Torah so that it means something the opposite of what God intends.  The Torah says divorce is allowed in some cases and according to a specific procedure.  It does this to give rights to wives and children, and to the community itself.  But you take that grudging and limited permission and turn it into a rationalization allowing men to ditch their wives on the least pretext, as long as they follow the letter of the law, which you manipulate.  In this way you use the law to break the law, and do harm to innocent women, letting men throw unwanted wives into poverty, the very thing the law wants to prevent.

            “I am speaking flat-out in the Spirit of the Torah when I say therefore that anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.  That’s because the deeper meaning of the Torah is the protection of the weak against the predations and violence of the strong.  And if even my words in this case should be twisted again into a ruthless letter that victimizes the weak, it is again the Spirit, blowing where she wills, that will correct our practice.

            “The Torah does not go away.  We just receive an ever deeper and truer interpretation of it.  Now it is about the Kingdom of God, which I have come to proclaim and enact, and into which I invite others.”

V.

            So there is a certain creativity, and kind of wildness, and s single-minded focus as well, to discipleship.  Jesus would have us do justice, love kindness, and walk with God no matter why or how or with whom.  Jesus would have us follow the Spirit of the Torah that he embodies, even if it means breaking the letter of the law and going against the law’s self-sppointed guardians, the Pharisees. 

            If it’s our selfishness and fear that is making us forgive people, that’s fine.  People are being forgiven.  Debts are being canceled, or at least reduced.  If money is confusing the issue, Jesus says, “So use money to enact the values and practices of God’s Kingdom by giving it away to people who need it more than you do.  If even the law, that is, Scripture itself, is apparently getting in the way of our mission to do the Kingdom, Jesus says follow the deeper Spirit of the Bible, and act on behalf of the weak, the victims, the destitute, and the vulnerable.  Jesus is the Word of God.  If we think the Bible contradicts him then we are reading it wrong.

            We can take dishonest wealth, an abomination, and transform it into something that does good in the world in Jesus’ name.  We cannot serve both God and wealth; but we can make our wealth serve God. 

            And I guess in this season in which we are talking about stewardship and the importance of giving of our time, talents, energy, and resources to God in the church, this is all good to remember.  Hopefully, this church is a place where we find forgiveness, acceptance, blessing, and peace.  Hopefully this is a place where we can show that we can be faithful with a little, and so receive the true riches.  Hopefully this is a place where we can show how even things valued by people can be transmuted into things that serve God.

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Get Lost.

Luke 15.

I.

            Sensing his acceptance, the tax collectors and sinners gather around Jesus to hear what he has to say.  The scribes and the Pharisees criticize him for associating with tax collectors and sinners.

            In order to explain why he hangs around with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus offers three famous parables.

            First, he asks, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”

            Let’s consider that for a minute.  Is this really how we act?  Assuming the shepherd is alone with the sheep, would he really leave the 99 alone on the hillside, to go off and look for one that wandered off?  Would he risk coming back with the one only to find that the 99 had scattered and even been attacked by wolves, or stolen by bandits?  Would he risk having to go back to the owner with one sheep, explaining that the other 99 were lost when he went to fetch it?

            Some commentators postulate that there were other shepherds there with whom he could leave the 99, in order to make sense of the parable.  They say it would be so understood that no shepherd would be out there watching 100 sheep all by himself, that Jesus doesn’t have to mention it.  And maybe that’s true.  Or maybe we should assume that the shepherd would lock the 99 up safely in a corral, and then go in search of the lost one. 

            But on the surface, if the shepherd is alone, the answer is that he would be irresponsible to the point of insanity to leave 99 valuable sheep unprotected to go after one that was missing.  Would we?  Wouldn’t we consider it more prudent to just write off the one, rather than jeopardize the 99?

            Jesus, of course, isn’t talking about best shepherding practices.  He is answering the charge of why he associates with the dregs and losers, the nobodies, and even the anti-social characters in society.  He places himself with the expendable, sometimes hated, always discounted, rejects.  He places himself with the people whom the general society is content to sacrifice for the greater good.

            He knows that it is standard practice in every culture to dismiss or hate these people.  Indeed, one of the ways society maintains its unity and coherence is by having a class or people whom everyone is united in dismissing.  It takes their attention off of the conflicts they have with each other, to focus on the “sinners” or the sick people whom God is obviously punishing, blaming them for the mess the society is in. 

            We still do this, for crying out loud!  We still identify individuals and groups whom we define as “sinners” in some way, and upon whom we decide to place the blame for our predicament.  Hating them brings the rest of us together.  So not only do we not go after the single lost sheep as an economic calculus, we often arbitrarily pick out a sheep specifically to reject!  As theHighPriest Caiaphus would later remark about Jesus, it is good for one to die so that the rest may be saved.

II.

            This is the reasoning of the scribes and Pharisees.  Their job is to hold society together.  This is done by maintaining a social order and hierarchy, part of which is and making sure there is always some class at the very bottom who can be sacrificed, hated, rejected, blamed, scapegoated, and sometimes even lynched.  There has to be an “other” over-against which we can all be united.  It’s those “sinners.”  It’s those predatory, treasonous tax collectors. 

            Jesus, however, is pretty sick of this attitude.  And he’s not alone.  The whole Hebrew Bible is written from the perspective of the lost sheep, the rejects, the losers.  It starts out as the record of a band of escaped slaves.  And it hits its stride with the prophets railing against sacrifices, and urging the people to do justice and love kindness.  Finding our social unity by ganging up on an invented common enemy is something the prophets find repulsive.  They demand that the people remember when they were the common enemy, and they were the slaves, and they were the victims, and not behave that way towards others themselves.

            The scribes and Pharisees are afraid that if this hierarchy is not maintained and if there is not a class of people at the bottom against whom everyone else can be united, then everything, the whole Jewish nation, the whole religion, falls apart.  Because if we’re not all focused on one common enemy, we all become enemies to each other.

            Jesus and the prophets would have us find our unity not in an arbitrarily determined and completely innocent scapegoat who becomes the focus of our paranoia, condemnation, righteous indignation, and violence.  Rather, our unity is discovered in our shared suffering.  In the middle of the Ten Commandments, Moses says: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”

            We are the lost sheep; God is the shepherd.  But unlike human shepherds, God always remembers us, seeks us out, finds us, and brings us home, even if we get lost.

 

III.

            In the second little parable, we are the lost coin, and God is the woman.  She searches diligently, sifting through the dirt of her floor, until she finds us, each one of us, an insignificant, barely valuable penny.  Pennies are what people don’t even bother to pick up from the sidewalk.  Pennies are what we store in large amounts in our drawers because they’re not worth the energy to take to the bank and have counted and redeemed.  Who invests all this time in finding a single penny, and when finding it, throwing a party at a cost of hundreds of dollars?  God, that’s who.  

            Then Jesus launches into what may be his greatest parable.  After the lost sheep and the lost coin, he gives us the parable of the lost son.  How many of our families can relate to a lost son?  I wonder if America does not now have an entire generation of lost sons.

            You’ve all heard the story and probably at least a few sermons on it.  The younger son basically gives his father the finger, in effect, wishing his father was dead by demanding his inheritance early.  He takes the money, which the father must have had to liquidate a fair amount of property to provide, and goes off to waste it in what Jesus understatedly terms “dissolute living.”  Use your imagination.

            He hits bottom.  The economy goes into recession.  The younger son winds up doing a job you couldn’t pay most self-respecting Jews to do: feeding pigs.  The remuneration is so low and he is so hungry that even the pig-feed looks appetizing.

            At this point the younger son is almost exactly mirroring the stereotype of a “bad kid”.  He is someone who deserves society’s just punishment.  Rewarding such behavior would only encourage him to act in a callous and irresponsible manner again.  He is wasteful, lazy, greedy, careless, selfish, and practically a sociopath.  When he winds up in the pigsty he is a shining example for all sons of how not to act.  Parents and civic leaders could gladly use the parable so far as a lesson to all sons who behave in this way.  See what happens when you waste your money and reject your family?  You wind up feeding pigs!

            The upright and responsible scribes and Pharisees would nod in approval at this point.  The younger son got what he deserved.  We can all be united in judging and rejecting him.  We can all feel superior and vindicated that for once bad behavior is punished.  We can righteously leave him there with the pigs to wallow in his misery, so we can walk by and point him out to our young sons and say, “See?  This is what could happen to you if you upset the order of things!  This is what happens to bad boys who run off on their own!  So now, when we tell you to work hard in the vineyard, I hope you will do as we say!”

IV.

            Society needs the lost, the losers, the failures, the victims, the sick, the outcast, so we have people to turn into object lessons of how not to act.  The more miserable their state, the better. 

            But Jesus doesn’t see object lessons.  He sees human beings.  His parable doesn’t end there where society would have him end it.  He continues talking.

            He says, “But when [the younger son] came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!  I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’  So he set off and went to his father.”

            The conventional wisdom of the scribes and Pharisees might think they know where this is going.  The object lesson will no doubt continue as we watch the righteous father administer the just punishment to his evil son.  No real father will be taken in by that “I am no longer worthy” crap.  No real father would let this kid get away with what he did.  If we let people like this off, just let them come sauntering back with no consequences, society would just fall apart into chaos.

            We can’t let these people off the hook.  We can’t reward bad behavior.  We can’t foster dependency.  The poor and the sick, the sinners, they got that way because God is punishing them.  When this kid gets home, we hope that the father will at least give him a whipping he will never forget.  That will teach him!

            But the father in the story is not like the fathers, the leaders, of their society.  The father in the story does not righteously demand that his honor be appeased in blood.  He does not insist that his wrath be satisfied.  He does not crucify his son.  The father in the story acts very strangely.

            Jesus says that “while [the son] was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”  And the father throws a great feast to celebrate the son’s return.

            And at this point Jesus’ hearers are going, “What?  This isn’t like any father I ever heard of.”  And that is Jesus’ point.  God is not like any father we ever heard of.  Just like God is not like any shepherd or housewife we ever heard of.  God does not care about the stability of the social order and maintaining the civic hierarchy.  If God cared about that, God would have been on Pharaoh’s side, not on the side of the Hebrew slaves.

            The father in the story doesn’t appear to know or care how his son got into this state of abject poverty.  All he sees is his beloved son, returning home, in humility and sorrow.  And his heart goes out to him.

V.

            And that is all Jesus sees in the people he meets.  He sees their suffering.  He sees their sorrow.  He sees their brokenness and diseases and victimization.  Even in tax collectors, for God’s sake, he sees wounded and shattered souls, driven to do harm to others.  And he embraces, and heals, and receives, and welcomes, and forgives, and liberates them.  He gathers them together in a new community, without predatory fathers, but in equality and sharing.

            When the grumpy and resentful older brother shows up, everybody knows he represents the scribes and Pharisees, the forces of stability and responsibility, the ones who have to oppress and reject and hate and kill some common enemy to keep order and unity.  The ones who have to have someone at the bottom so they can have their place near the top.

            It is as if Jesus, and through him God, is saying, “You need someone to oppress and reject and exclude and blame and hate and kill?  You need a scapegoat?  You need a lightning rod for your own wrath and sacred honor?  You need someone to crucify?  Take me.  Leave these people alone!  I will receive and bear all your hate and injustice and violence, until you are exhausted; until you are empty.  Then I will receive and forgive and love you.”

            At the end of the story, Jesus tells us that the father said to the older son, “‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”

            If we just could realize that we are always with God, maybe we would not feel compelled to invent scapegoats and hierarchies and outcasts and others to blame and feel superior to.  If we could get over our mindless wrath and honor-driven psychoses, and wake up to the truth that God is here in infinite beauty and goodness all the time… then maybe we wouldn’t have to be enslaving or crucifying people for the sake of social stability, order, and peace.

            But in Jesus Christ, God is saying, “Yo, the people you hate and judge and reject and kill?  Those are the people I love the most.  So deal with it.”  Jesus doesn’t care what they did.  He is not so naïve and stupid as to imagine that what prostitutes and tax collectors do is all blossoms and bunnies.  But when they awaken to their pain, when they come to themselves, as the younger son does in the pigsty, Jesus is there, waiting in the humanity he shares with us, to welcome them home.

            And when we awaken to our pain and our bottomless sorrow, and our exhaustion from trying to keep it all together, and when we come to ourselves, our true selves as God made us and blessed us and gifted us, and when we can come home with nothing, with no awards or medals or achievements, with nothing but an awareness that we have fallen short, we have missed the mark, things didn’t turn out the way we planned, we actually worked hard against God, squandering God’s blessings and gifts and resources.  When we feel no longer fit to be a child of God… maybe that’s when we grow into our true nature as a son or a daughter of God.  Maybe then, when we don’t have an array of self-righteous porcupine quills deployed defensively around our souls, when we realize that we are just earthlings, just mud-people into whom God has miraculously breathed life, that we feel that warm, welcoming, redeeming, liberating embrace of the living God.

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The Cost of Discipleship.

Luke 14:25-35.

I.

            Luke tells us that large crowds are traveling with Jesus.  But far from being pleased, this appears to annoy him.  Jesus is not interested in popularity.  He does not seem to want large numbers of followers.  He has no strategy for attracting people or getting people to join his movement.  He does not care about getting a lot of new members.

            We know this because he repeatedly does and says things that no one in their right mind would do, were it their intention to attract popular support.  Today’s reading is an example.  It is almost with exasperation and frustration that Jesus turns around to the crowd of people who apparently think this is some kind of circus, and he shouts, “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!”  It not the kind of thing church growth experts recommend we put out on the message board.

            For Jesus sounds here very, well, anti-family.  And this isn’t the only place.  He says this kind of thing several times.  Now, there is a certain level of Hebraic hyperbole here.  Most commentators don’t think he means literally hate, as in despise, loath, and even wish ill on, your family. 

            Too often preachers dealing with words like these think they have to explain how Jesus doesn’t really doesn’t mean it.  But I think we have to take very seriously the possibility that Jesus means what he is saying here.  He says at the very least that disciples have to make their families subordinate and secondary to their relationship with him and with God’s people.  And he knows that families usually don’t put up with that.

            This is threatening stuff.  The family is the basic building block of society.  Everyone knows this.  Undermining the family is a deeply destructive to the social order.  “Hating” parents even goes against the Ten Commandments! 

            But Jesus knows that the family, and people’s commitment to it, very often gets in the way of discipleship.  Family ties are very strong, and they lead to ethnic and national loyalties.  He knows that when people have these commitments binding their hearts their discipleship is compromised.  He knows that it is the family bond that most effectively blocks the relationships that Jesus is creating in this new community he is setting up.

            Families can be little knots of dysfunction where our addictions are enabled and covered up.  They can be dominated by tyrannical fathers.  And they can be incredibly cruel to the weak, the diseased, the vulnerable, and the disfigured.  Jesus has no romantic, sentimental illusions about families; he knows that many are made, or kept, sick by their families.

II.      

            Jesus goes on to say that “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”  Once again just as he does not mean literally hating your family, he here doesn’t require every disciple to be nailed by soldiers to pieces of wood and lifted up to die an excruciating death.  But he does mean suffering.  He means that to be his disciple means doing what he does, in identifying with the victims in society and service to the lowest.

            Families are economic units engineered for “success” according to the world’s standards.  But families, like the larger societies, habitually achieve their success by sacrificing someone.  Usually it is the “other:” other families, strangers, other classes, other nations.  We lift ourselves up by differentiating ourselves from those others, with whom we are in competition.  It is perhaps the darker side of the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality, that is apparent when we also feel we have to keep the Smiths down.

            Sometimes the “other” is someone in our own family who is sacrificed.  It might be someone crippled, or diseased, or developmentally challenged, or even out of control, like a child refusing to stay in their appointed place.  And they are sacrificed, not be actually killing them, but by letting them bear the brunt of the family’s dysfunction.  That’s the one who is the “problem,” that’s the one we have medicated, that’s the one we place the demands on, that’s the one we use to generate sympathy for our family from others.    

            Jesus defines success in a radically different way.  For him, we do not process our suffering by setting up a scapegoat to bear affliction in our place.  Rather, he sees that the problem of suffering is solved by embracing and absorbing and taking on suffering, especially on behalf of others.

            Jesus’ approach is to neutralize suffering by exposing it, sharing it, embracing it… not in any masochistic and self-hating or even self-destructive way, as has too often been the case with Christians who felt that doing harm to themselves and causing themselves pain had some cathartic or even redemptive value.  There is already enough pain and suffering in the world, we don’t have to manufacture more.

            Rather, Jesus has us identify with and commune with others, in particular the others who have been rejected by their families and their society.  “Tax collectors and prostitutes” is the standard shorthand for these individuals in the New Testament.  Jesus always places himself with the people on the margins: the sick, women, children, and those classified as sinners.  The victims and people who need forgiveness, that’s who Jesus associates with. 

            Following his example, Christians have always been known for taking on the pain of others, identifying with and serving victims, living with losers.  These are characteristics of being a Christian that many even today find ridiculous and incomprehensible.

III.

            Then Jesus tells two parables to illustrate how important it is that we honestly count the cost before we make commitments.  He knows that these people who were following him in droves really don’t know what they are getting into.  They did not count the cost first.  Are they all really going to situate themselves with the lowly, the needy, the broken, the excluded, and the sinners?  Are they all prepared to die with Jesus a “death” that starts when they symbolically reject and surrender everything that measures a “successful” life? 

            The first example is someone who starts to build a tower, but has to stop in the middle of the project because he didn’t calculate how much it was going to cost.  He ran out of money before the tower was completed, leaving an embarrassing, unfinished, publicly visible building.  If we start doing something we need to know beforehand that we have the resources to finish it.  Don’t decide to be a disciple of Jesus unless you know you can pay the price, which is often rejection, exclusion, unpopularity, and even suffering.

            The crowd following Jesus around has no clue about all this.  They’re in it for the entertainment value, or because they gain something from being associated with Jesus.  But not only are they going to look foolish when it turns out that Jesus really means it when he says he is going to be crucified, but it also reflects badly on Jesus to have shallow, half-baked, uninformed followers throwing his name around.

            Sometimes I think that the crowd of mindless followers represents and foreshadows the church.  They are people who are willing to be associated with Jesus as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.  In the end they will be screaming for Jesus’ death, even as many Christians over the centuries have been content to bring oppression and death to exactly the people with whom Jesus identifies. 

            Jesus’ second example is of a king faced with war against a stronger power, who wisely negotiates a settlement with the enemy to avoid being defeated in battle.  The king has to pay tribute to the enemy to save his army and his kingdom.

            It is better to give up our wealth, our possessions, our assets, than to be destroyed because we underestimated the cost of what we were getting ourselves into.  If we start on the path of discipleship, we have to be prepared to lose everything.  “So therefore,” Jesus says, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

IV.

             This project, being a disciple, costs us everything: our family, our possessions, even our whole life.  Jesus is saying that this is not a hobby.  This is not something we do in our spare time.  This is not something way down on our priority list.  Discipleship has to be your whole identity, or it is nothing.  We can either be salt, or ash.  There is no such thing as “sort of,” “almost, or “sometimes” salt.  Salt that has lost its flavor is not salt at all.  It is something else with no value.

            Jesus is calling for a completely new orientation and constitution in people.  Discipleship must be done wholeheartedly, or not at all.  It must become your new family.  It must be your only possession.  It must override every other allegiance, loyalty, commitment, relationship, and story in our lives.  And everything else in our life serves this primary, wholehearted devotion.

            No longer do we sacrifice others to achieve our goals.  No longer to others pay for our success.  No longer do we gain from the work of others.  Discipleship means that we are the living sacrifice, as Paul says.  We take on others’ suffering.  We identify with people in their pain, exclusion, brokenness, and bondage.  We become the ones whom others sacrifice for their self-serving vision of the greater good.  We identify with the Crucified, and so identify with God.

            If we die with him a death like his we shall surely be resurrected with him to a life like his.  The only way to the other side, beyond suffering, is through suffering.  Our old, selfish being is sacrificed on the cross with Christ.  We take up that cross ourselves by consciously giving up the loyalties and possessions that people try to use to give themselves meaning, but always fail. 

            We do hate and give up whatever separates us from God.  And at the same time, we become able to express God’s love to all, through whatever resources we are given.  That is the meaning of whole-hearted devotion and single-minded discipleship.  Nothing gets in the way of God’s love pouring through us into the world. 

            Seek first the Kingdom of God and God’s righteousness and justice.  Then everything else will come to us, not to hold, hoard, save, or possess; but to give away.  That giving away we see in Jesus Christ is the Kingdom of God.  It is God’s righteousness and justice.  Whatever we try to keep kills us.  But whatever we give away creates room for God to give us even more.  “For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

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