Sermon for September 7, 2025

Readings:

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

The religious life is filled with paradoxes, or seemingly contradictory ideas that are nonetheless, both true. It can be frustrating sometimes, when you go looking for an easy answer. One of those paradoxes is that sometimes the more you know, the less you understand. This is especially true with scripture. Today’s gospel is a good example. 

Now on the surface, today’s gospel is about the cost of discipleship. What does it really take to be a follower of Jesus Christ? Can we just call ourselves Christians and leave it at that, or is Jesus looking for more substantial proof? And Jesus is shockingly blunt. He says, “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.” What a thing to say! Welcome back families! Here I am trying to make this a very family friendly church, and Jesus goes and pulls the rug right out from under me on the day Sunday school starts back up. Hate your families. Thanks a lot Jesus that’s very helpful. So to try and make some sense out of what Jesus is saying and to give some context, naturally I went back and looked at the whole passage of scripture and everything that came before this. That’s when things got more confusing. The more I read, the less I understood.

You see immediately before Jesus makes this statement to the large crowd, he had been at dinner with some Pharisees. It was at that dinner that he taught about being humble and not taking the high place at the table. That was the passage that I preached on last week. But then at that same dinner, Jesus goes on to tell a story that compares the kingdom of God to a great dinner. The host invited many people to come, but they all found some excuse not to go. Everyone was busy. Someone just purchased some land, someone just purchased some new cows, someone just got married. Everyone had some good reason to turn down their invitation to this free banquet. So the host sends out his messengers to invite the poor, and the crippled, and the blind and the lame, and when he discovers he still has room for more, he sends out his messengers again and says bring in anyone so that my house may be filled. Jesus tells this wonderful story about the Kingdom of God and he compares it to a free banquet, that some people refuse their invitation to, and then, in the very next line, we get today’s gospel passage. The very next line is Jesus telling the crowd the true cost of discipleship.

So which is it? Is God’s kingdom a free gift or is it something that costs us dearly? The bible can’t seem to decide. You see my confusion? Is the Christian life, about receiving God’s blessings, or is it about serving God? Are we supposed to celebrate the feast or carry the cross? Which is it? These two stories seem to give contradictory images of a relationship with God: the first image emphasizes God’s grace as a free and undeserved gift; the second image emphasizes what God’s grace can cost us. And yet, we are obviously meant to hear these two stories together. They are side by side in the scripture, and I am convinced that that is not by accident. This is another paradox, a truth about God that is not simple. We need to hold these two contradictory images together. This is the paradox of God’s grace: it is completely free, and it can cost you everything. It is celebration and it is sacrifice. It is rest and it is work. God’s grace, God’s Kingdom, the invitation to the banquet, the forgiveness of sins and the promise of eternal life, this is a free gift. We don’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. It is God’s love being poured out on us. That is a truth that is revealed to us in scripture time and time again. But, choosing to accept that invitation, does mean that some of the cares and pressing concerns of this world will have to come second. We will have choices to make. And sometimes choosing to put God and his invitation first, can be a really tough choice. It can and will involve hard decisions. It can and will involve sacrificing some of the things of this world. Maybe even our own lives. That was the problem with everyone that was invited to the banquet in Jesus’s story: they all had some other worldly concern that kept them from showing up. They didn’t hate the host, they were polite and sent their apologies, but they all had excuses that seemed more important. And those excuses kept them from receiving the great gift that God wanted to give them. This is the truth that Jesus and scripture is pointing us to: God’s love is a free and underserved gift, but how often do we choose to put lesser things first, before God? Is God always our number 1 priority?

You see, people get really worked up when they hear Jesus say “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.” We don’t like to hear Jesus use the word hate, especially not when it comes to those we love, but we need to remember where that love we share with our families ultimately comes from. It comes from God. It is a gift from God. Your father, your mother, your wife, your children, brothers and sisters, even your own life…that all comes to you from God. If we put anything else before God, we are getting things out of order. We aren’t paying attention to the true source. Jesus doesn’t want you to actually hate your mother and father, because honoring your mother and father is a commandment of God. But the first commandment of God is I am your God, you shall have no other God’s before me, so everything else, no matter how important, has to come second. Without the first commandment to worship only God, none of the other commandments like honoring your parents have any power or authority. The first commandment is the foundation of all the commandments. God has to come first.

I think Jesus is trying to shake people up a bit and make them think about their lives. I think Jesus wants his followers to understand that following him means accepting God’s invitation to the banquet, and that means a radical shift in priorities that is necessarily going to change how you live in this world. It can mean making some tough choices, because the world we live in does not want you to put God first. The world wants to keep you busy with good excuses, so it’s tough. Despite the message that many people are sold about what it means to be a Christian, the Christian life is not a simple thing. In many ways it is a paradox that many struggle to understand and many oversimplify. God does want us to have life and have it in abundance; God does want to bless us with good things. But God also warns us that truly following him is not easy and involves real sacrifice and real work. This is one of those occasions where both things are true. God’s grace is free, but it will cost you something. It may cost you everything.