Beware of the User Friendly Church
Luke 14:25-33
September 5, 2010
Steve Hammond
Here we go, again. This is another of those gospel stories that really throws people off. How could Jesus say such a thing? Why does he want us to hate our family members? Relax This is one of those passages where you need to stop and take a deep breath and think about it for a minute.
We know that Jesus made it clear that God is calling us to love one another. He says we should love our enemies. He says we should love our neighbors as ourselves. He demonstrated a love that reached beyond the boundaries and prejudices and customs of his day, loving the outcast, loving the stranger. So wouldn’t it be a little weird if Jesus came along and said God wants you to love everybody, even the most unlovable of people, except your family, of course? You are supposed to hate them. Doesn’t that kind of invalidate everything else he talked about? That doesn’t make any sense. We run into problems when we take a couple of verses or a story and isolate them from everything else. So that must mean that Jesus is trying to get at something else in this story that doesn’t contradict everything else he has ever said.
I recently read an article about a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary who has been surveying teen-agers and young adults about who have left or are in the process of leaving the church. Teen-ager and young adults are leaving churches. Conservative churches. Progressive churches. Big churches. Small churches. White churches. Black churches. And the primary reason according to this study? They aren’t being challenged to do anything, to take any stands. They aren’t being called to live out their faith in ways other than taking vaguely personal moral stances on things like sexuality and drug use. As one kid summed up what many kids were feeling, “All they ask of you in church is to be nice.”
These are the same kids and young adults who are hearing all kinds of people from rock stars to the coordinator of the learning and service program in their schools challenging them to do something, to go out and make a difference in this world. And lots of them are leaving the church behind to do it.
It’s not just the kids, of course, who need to be challenged to make their Christianity mean something. It’s all of us. Jesus said following him has to mean something to us. There has to be something about it that costs us something, that makes demands of us. There has to be something to it that we have to think about, consider if it’s what we really want to do. Jesus said, It’s like building a house. You’ve got to sit down first and decide if you’ve got enough money, if you are really willing to make the investment to build it right for so it won’t fall over.
Jesus was nothing but serious about what it means to follow him. He knew that really following him would put us in conflict with the structures that shaped our lives. And in his day that was the family which, as we said a couple of weeks ago, was a much different thing than what we think family is about. Family is only one of the things that shape our lives, though it shapes us quite a bit. But in Jesus day, family was what shaped almost everything about people. Remember when we said that family in Jesus’ day was more like what we would call a clan or a tribe today? The family contained the real governing body you were accountable to. The family established the norms and customs you were obligated to follow. The family made the decisions about who you married, where you lived, what kind of work you did. The family determined who were your friends and who were your enemies. And in Jesus’ day, the challenge for the family was to continue to manage to do this with the demands the empire was putting on it.
So I think Jesus is telling us that following him may well put us into conflict with the structures that try to control our lives, including not only our families, but our government, our empire, our work and school places, our peers, our laws and customs, our traditions.
The kids have been asking if the church is really willing to do that. And too much of the time they look around and the answer is a clear no. We can’t challenge the status quo because we are the status quo. We bless the wars. We foster the prejudice and racism and sexism. We turn the stranger away. We fear the truth. We accept the lie. Why? Because if we don’t, it might cost us something. There might be a price we have to pay. Those folk that Jesus understood as family in his day might crucify us.
But what did Jesus say. “If you are going to be my disciple pick up your cross and follow me.” The kids see what we’ve done with the cross. Make it a decoration and a piece of jewelry.
There’s a story about the time Clarence Jordan, author of the “Cotton Patch” New Testament translation and founder of the interracial Koinonia farm in Americus, Georgia, was getting a red-carpet tour of another minister’s church. With pride the minister pointed to the rich, imported pews and luxurious decoration. As they stepped outside, darkness was falling, and a spotlight shone on a huge cross atop the steeple. “That cross alone cost us ten thousand dollars,” the minister said with a satisfied smile. “You got cheated,” said Jordan. “Times were when Christians could get them for free.”
The church was never meant to be easy, never meant to be user friendly. It was assumed the kind of cross Jesus knew would always cast its shadow. But the church was meant to change the world. And why would you want to be a part of a church, a lot of kids and others are asking, if you weren’t looking to change the world? If you weren’t serious enough about following Jesus for it to cost you something?
We are fortunate here. We have Kristen and Steve and Sunday School teachers and others of us who are helping our kids understand that following Jesus means something, and it’s worth paying the price. And we are all doing that for each other. We have taken some pretty risky stands around here and have been willing to pay the price.
But here’s the thing. Following Jesus is always about the future, not the past. The kids aren’t going to see what we have done in the past, but what we do now. Joining the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists with the full knowledge we might lose our building doing it is so five years ago. The risk we take to welcome folk now is what matters. And we never know what’s ahead, what price we may have to pay to follow Jesus. That’s when it will matter to the kids if we are willing to pay the price.
I think where we have failed the kids, and I mean all of us non kids all over the world and the kids we have failed are all over the world, is by giving them death. But Jesus came showing us that God is a God of Life. Jesus was willing to take on the cross, to take on death because he believed in resurrection. Do we believe in life that strongly? Are we willing to not only pay the price, risk crucifixion, but also risk resurrection for the sake of our kids?
Will our kids see us taking a stand for resurrection, see us bearing witness to the living Jesus Christ, see us being the body of Jesus Christ when it costs us something? It’s not a magic potion. It’s not going to get all the kids back in church or keep them all here. But it’s all we’ve got.
Do you know the band Rush? 80′s? Big hair? Loud guitars? One of my favorites. There is nothing about Rush that could be taken for a Christian band, except what they sing about.
If we burn our wings flying too close to the sun,
If the moment of glory is over before its begun,
If the dream is won and everything is lost,
we will pay the price, but we will not count the cost.
When the dust has cleared, victory denied,
a summit too lofty, river a little too wide,
if we keep our pride though everything is lost,
we will pay the price, but we will not count the cost.
And if the music stops, there’s only the sound of the rain,
all the hope and glory, all the sacrifice in vain.
And if love remains, though everything is lost,
we will pay the price, but we will not count the cost.
We will pay the price, but we will not count the cost.
It’s not the intention of the band Rush to be singing about Jesus and bearing witness to the gospel. But why are they doing a better job of it than we are doing in the church too much of the time? Why is this more like Christian music than so much of the music that is marketed that way?
Shane Claiborne in his book The Irresistible Revolution talks about the Palm Sunday stories in the gospels where the religious rulers tell Jesus to quiet down the crowds. Jesus replies even if he could quiet them down, the rocks would cry out. Shane Claiborne’s comment on that is that the because the church has quieted down it’s the rock stars who are crying out, challenging kids to work for peace, help the poor, take care of the stranger, comfort the broken hearted, find a spiritual mooring in their lives.
Do you know the name of this song by Rush? Bravado. Can we help our kids and ourselves be a little more brave in following Jesus? Can we be more willing to pay the price without counting the cost?
And that bravery is not simply about the dramatic sacrifices we are willing to make. It’s also about the day to day ways we can take a stand for and with Jesus. The times we can be brave and pick up the cross and make the ways of the God of life known where we live, where we work, in our families, and in our churches.
That’s all the kids and Jesus seem to be asking of us. Can we rise to their challenge?