Counting the Cost

Luke 14:25-33

Imagine one of your friends saying to you: “Oh, you’ve got to come to my church. It’s amazing!
They teach you to hate your family; to hate your parents, your kids, your spouse – to hate your life! It’s transformed me into a totally new person, you’ve got to try it!”

Makes you want to join right up, doesn’t it?  No?

Or is your friend crazy?

At the very least, your hypothetical friend is putting out one heck of a mixed message, with this bubbling enthusiasm for family hatred and an apparent death wish.

I mean, really, who wants to join a church that’s all about hating everyone, killing yourself, being made fun of, and giving up on success and accomplishment?

Not even in my most everything-hating teenage moments did I want to join a group that would advertise themselves like that.

And yet, that is exactly the message Jesus is pushing today – and not even to his inner circle, who’ve gotten at least a little used to all his talk of self-denial and disruption. This is a public advertising pitch to the curious crowds, the religious “seekers” or visitors, who’ve come to see what’s up with this Jesus movement.

It’s not a church-growth strategy, to say the least, and it’s not a message I’m going to approve for the sign outside or the front page of Calvary’s website.

We can’t afford that.

I mean, we have a hard enough time with evangelism when it means telling people about Jesus who loves generously and teaches us to love others, Jesus who proclaims and gives abundant life, Jesus who heals us when the world mocks us, and lends strength when we’ve been rejected.

I will bet real money that there’s not one person in this room who wants to try to sell family hatred, a death wish, and ridicule as a transformative religious experience. That’s not going to “grow the church.”

Sometimes it seems like Jesus is our greatest liability as a church, as well as our greatest asset. He’s actively trying to drive people away today, and he’s rejecting and insulting one of the things we’ve gotten used to thinking of as a core “Christian value” – loving and respecting your family.

The first century crowds must have reacted to this much the same way twenty-first century crowds are reacting to Colin Kaepernick sitting for the national anthem: quick offense at the way this pushes the buttons of our comfortable allegiance to good and trustworthy values, spirited but confused defenses of what “freedom” or “love” really mean, and a persistent discomfort with the way that somehow, some of these things that seem wrong are right… but several real “rights” are still making things wrong.

It’s messy. And it gets more so.

Although Jesus sets out to explain something we’ve heard before – that no one can become his disciple without carrying the cross, without giving away all our possessions – his examples seem a little contradictory.

Think through your commitment to discipleship, he tells us, because otherwise you’ll be like this guy who ran out of money in the middle of a building project, and people made fun of him.

But everyone in his first audience – like many of you – knows that a cross is an even better guarantee of mockery, taunting, and shame than an unfinished building project.

Think through the consequences of following me, he warns, because if you don’t you’ll be like a king who fielded a totally outnumbered army and got slaughtered.

But a cross is going to get you killed even more certainly than two-to-one odds in an even fight.

Even his advice about carefully considering the cost, asking seriously if you can afford this, suggests a completely opposite mindset to his insistence that you have to give up everything – every bit of your money and possessions – to be a disciple.

No one can rationally “afford” that.

What a mess.

If he were in preaching class or marketing, we’d send him right back to the drawing board, and be shaking our heads.

But this is classic Jesus, after all: Contradictions R Us.

God is human; last is first; death is life…

And there might be something to his contradictions today, too.

One biblical scholar tries to redeem this mixed message of Jesus’ by suggesting that his stories of the tower-builder and war-cost-counting king are actually assurances to us that GOD didn’t dive into this salvation project without a cost analysis, and that God has made sure of the resources to complete it, to see us through.

That’s good news, all right, because it was just as evident to Jesus’ first audience as it could be to any of us that it’s going to take quite a lot in the way of miracle and divine intervention to save this messed up world.

And as for some of those people I know – I mean for US –  well, God’s going to need to have a pretty big salvation budget, and unlimited patience.

Come to think of it, when you look at the history of our salvation, God has a lot more resemblance to a builder who plunges in to the project knowing it can never be completed

than to a rational homeowner who holds off on tearing out the kitchen until there’s enough in the budget to actually put a new one in.

And that suggests to me that Jesus’ messages today are mixed on purpose. That to be a disciple absolutely requires knowing the cost – knowing it means a loss of identity, and security, and even of all those respectable things we’ve come to think of as “good Christian values,” knowing there’s a pretty good chance it could kill us, even now, if we go all in – and making the whole commitment knowing that our resources will come up short.

We’ll fail.

You and I – like the curious first-century crowds Jesus said all this to, like even the tight circle of apostles at the resurrection – you and I cannot complete the task. We can never fully accomplish the work of following Jesus, of becoming that completely one with God.

Can’t finish the task of saving the world before we die.

We’ll fail.

But because we counted the cost, knew the demands and the value of what we’re plunging into, we may just complete ourselves by giving every bit of these selves to the unfinished and unfinishable work of eternal life.

It’s not a church-growth strategy, and it may never make sense as an invitation into the Jesus movement, but it matters in a way beyond sense.

The messages God presents are often going to seem mixed, as we encounter them not only in the church but in the choices of our weekday lives.
Being with Jesus – being like Jesus – always means being prepared for the impossible; and asks us to commit ourselves, ready to fail, so that God can succeed beyond our hope or expectation.

Because that transformation, mixed up and incomplete as it will always be, is exactly what God counts, when God gives it all for us.