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September 4, 2016
God: Transparent
Luke 14:25-33
Do you know they had a general election in Australia earlier this year? The campaign was the
longest in recent memory—it lasted an entire eight weeks! Don’t you wish ….?!!
We do it differently over here: we have never ending elections; it’s always campaign season and
every candidate endures incessant, intrusive scrutiny, so they employ campaign managers, and
image consultants and spokespersons skilled at what they call ‘spin,’ but what we all know is
lying, or maybe sometimes the truth but rarely the whole truth.
Is it any wonder that this year, one of the things people long for is transparency? Honesty.
Truth and reality. Remember the early days of personal computing, when the programs were
complicated and off-putting, and programmers developed the acronym, WYSIWYG—what you
see is what you get. Don’t you wish…?
Well, when it comes to transparency, Jesus has it nailed. No carefully crafted image to con the
crowds, no cunningly worded statements that may or may not represent a revision of his
program. What you see is what you get and what he says is what he means. “I am the way, the
truth and the life,” he says, and he stands by that.
Which makes our reading today daunting. In verse 26 Jesus 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.
He amplifies that point with pictures of a farmer building a tower and a king contemplating a
military campaign … to underline the danger ‘He started something he couldn’t finish.’
Is that a rebuke to the kind of Christianity that sells a sugary savior of the status quo, promises
people that Jesus wants them to be successful—rich, even—and assures them that they can be
Christian without anything in their life needing to change?
I like to think it is also an implicit rebuke to the management experts who pour over statistics of
church decline and announce that the church will be dead by 2035, or whatever the latest
projection is. After all, here is Jesus thinning the crowd. He’s surrounded by large crowds and
positively discourages people—pouring buckets of cold water on any who want to follow without
thinking about what he stands for and what he offers. A healthy response may well be, Help!
It helps to know that Jesus’ native tongue didn’t have a good way to express comparisons. Jesus
didn’t mean ‘hate’ in the sense we understand. Jesus meant ‘love less.’ A parallel verse in
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September 4, 2016
Matthew 10:37 says as much, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me …and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
So Jesus is warning them to think through the issue of commitment and count the cost, and be
ready for sacrifice.
And let’s face facts: there is a cost to following Jesus. We sometimes think we have it tough in
changing America, until we remember Christians in many middle-eastern countries today who
live in fear of militant and barbaric jihadists. Last week’s Economist had two articles on
“Christians in the Arab World”1 and the dangers they face. There is a cost of discipleship.
But that does not sit well with our modern mood. Sacrifice scares us, until we pause to think and
understand its meaning.
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Think of parents who sacrifice for their children, and save for their education. Or those
who give up scarce leisure time for their kids' travelling sports team.
Many people put in long hours at work to advance their careers or to secure a comfortable
lifestyle for their families.
There are people spending hard-earned money to join a gym or participate in diet
programs to get healthier. Or committing themselves to some community service in
hopes of making the world a better place.
People sacrifice gladly because these things are important to them. Christians sacrifice gladly
because Jesus is important to us. We sacrifice according to our priorities. All Jesus is wanting
is that we make the kingdom he is bringing a priority in our lives.
And he does so because of the priority in his life—us and our relationship with God. Did you
notice the mention of ‘taking up the cross’? That reminder of the center of our faith points to the
truth that we are priority #1 with our Lord. We are loved with a totally self-sacrificial love which
counts no cost too high to pay.
Glenn Macdonald went with his family on a Caribbean cruise to celebrate his parent’s 50th
wedding anniversary. Second night, they were all wakened at 4am by the ship's loudspeaker.
With apologies, the captain explained that the crew had received a report that someone was
overboard, and they had turned the ship around to search. They needed to account for everyone
on board. Would passengers check their party and report anyone missing.
Eventually, from the total of roughly 2400 people on board, they identified the person who was
missing and, with coastguard help, found him and retrieved him safely after 2 hours.
Turns out he had been up in the bow of the ship doing a Titanic imitation: you know, an 'I'm
king of the world' routine. Reflecting on the incident Macdonald found he wanted to meet the
captain:
1
The Economist, August 20, 2016, 41 and 42.
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September 4, 2016
I wanted to shake the hand of the man who, I knew, would pull out all the stops to find
one lost person, even someone who was doing the wrong thing at the wrong place at the
wrong time.
It occurred to me later that this is precisely what Jesus did on the cross. He pulled out
all the stops to launch a search-and-rescue operation for an entire world of lost people
…2
Our life of faith is our recognition of the priority that shaped Jesus’ life, and our response to his
sacrifice: his body, his blood—for you.
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2
Glenn Macdonald, The Disciple-Making Church. Grand Haven, Mi: FaithWalk Publishing, 2004, 21.