COUNT THE COST John M. Buchanan
Luke 14: 25-33 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September 25, 1977 Columbus, Oinio

How sad to have been a prudent, cautious person in 1776 and to have missed
the War for Independence. I was struck by that thought while reading a novel about
the experiences of a young recruit from Philadelphia in General Washington's Army,
The story was told in the first person, by an old man remembering how it was. With
some young companions he had celebrated the Declaration of Independence for a day
and a night in a series of Philadelphia taverns. When he awoke the next day he
discovered that he had, sometime the day before, enlisted to go to war, It was a
good story: it underscored the dubious potential of the Patriot cause - young men,
ill trained, with no equipment to speak of, left to their own devices to find food,
were trooped all over the Eastern seaboard to engage the pride of the British Empire,
professional soldiers with crisp uniforms, flashing bayonets and an air of invincibil-
ity about them, Initial enlistments were for six months; six months of hunger, ex-
haustion, cold and a series of military disasters, Anyone who could count calculatced
the cost and stayed out of it, After the battle of Trenton which was a Patriot
victory, the hero of the book is free to go home to Philadelphia. As a matter of
fact he has been thinking of little else. But then General Washington makes a
personal appeal and says something about the larger cause of liberty and offers a
bonus out of his own pocket, And against every dictate of common sense the young
man reenlists, subsequently loses a leg but lives to see his nation born, The vast,
overwhelming majority, of course, never lifted a finger for the cause, but watched
anxiously and waited the outcome, How sad, I thought, to be an old man in 1820, and
to know that one had missed one of the most important events in the history of the
world. The risk of caution is that one will miss life,

One of the most engaging motion pictures in the past several decades was a
little gem about a New York butcher by the name of Marty, You will recall, I am sure,
the poignant scene in that movie which made it a classic. Marty telephones a friend
to plan the evening's activities, "What do you want to do, Marty?" "I don't know;
what do you want to do?" "TI don't Marty, what do you want to do...etc., etc., ad
infinitum." It becomes apparent that there is nothing to do, because Marty is not
willing to take the risk of establishing new friendships. He has been hurt too
much by the rejection of others. Then a young woman enters his life: he breaks out
of the boring sameness of his existence and discovers a whole new world, But it's
costly, and heartbreaking at times. Commitment, decision are the necessary pre-
requisites for the emergence of the person, Real life begins when Marty begins to
take chances and extends himself in love to another human being.

Consider those two totally different illustrations and the common truth to
which they point. Real life is the result of making decisions, establishing loyai-
ties, taking risks. Real life is in the direction of spontaneity, involvement,
passionate engagement - and not - in the direction of caution and prudence. Consider
that and then think with me about one of the most enigmatic, perplexing passages in
the entire Bible,

Jesus had enlisted Matthew by calling him away from the tax table. He
recruited Peter and Andrew away from their fishing nets. He told a wealthy young
man thai if he wanted to find his salvation he would have to sell his possessions
and follow along. He seems, that is, to have solicited immediate, spontaneous,
almost cavalier decisions, But in the text this morning we encounter the precise
opposite, Think again about the content of the text,

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- He suggested, for openers, that a condition of discipleship was
hatred for one's family.

- He told two stories about a man who couldn't finish the tower he
was building because he ran out of money, and a king who calculated
his odds against a superior enemy and sued for peace,

- He concluded by saying that would-be followers must renounce
everything,

Staggering? Breathtaking? Infuriating? It is not, obviously, a favorite
Mother's Day text. Whatever He meant we preachers ordinarily stay away from this
one, One critic summarizes: Jesus is here "trampling under foot everything that is
human - blood and love and country, despising all natural ties," (See G,A, Buttrick,
The Parables, p.72). The text lends itself to the sick fanaticism of groups such
as the Children of God who have insisted on taking literally the business about
hating mother, father, brothers and sisters.

Some light may be shed by the situation, Jesus and His small company were
on the road to Jerusalem and great crowds were following along. Who were those
crowds? A cross section of Galilee I suppose, There were patriots in the multitude
who thought they were following a revolutionary into battle, There were devout
literalists who expected Jesus to assume the Messianic throne of Pavid when He
arrived in the city, There were curiosity seekers; many people following simply
because there was a parade to follow, But He knew what He was doing, It was not
the prelude to coronation, but crucifixion, And somehow He hac to tell them that.
The costs of being in the parade were about to escalate dramatically and dangerously.

He chose idiomatic language to tell them, In ancient Hebrew love and
hate when used together, become an idiom used to dramatize. The Talmud, for instance,
comments on handsome Rabbis, "If they hated their beauty they would be more learned."
(The Mission and Message of Jesus, Major, Manson and Wright, p.423). William Barclay
observes that ‘Eastern language is always as vivid as the human mind can make ei."
(Daily Study Bible, Luke p. 203), and that His fisherman friends knew exactly what
He meant even if ve don't, He did not mean that Christians must hate their rela-
tives. He used a Hebrew idiom - a dramatic paradox - to indicate that commitment
to Him must be unswerving, total and without reservation. He taught them to love
their enemies: He loved and cared for His own mother. He told His friends to love
one another. In the stories which follow He was not advising caution so much as
setting out the cost of the venture. It was no casual project they were about,
Discipleship would not be for the timid.

Our history has taught the lesson well, We were born in bloody persecu-
tion. Our family roots include countless men and women who were executed for their
faith. And today it is still the custom in some Moslem lands for a mother and
father to carry a coffin through the village in a mock funeral procession when a son
or daughter becomes a Christian,

We know in our own expericnee, the pure pain generated by conflicting
loyalties: between racial justice and quality education, for instance: or equal
opportunity for all and the best opportunity for ours, We watched the pain of a
President last Wednesday torn by commitments to a friend and larger responsibility.
We know exactly what John Galsworthy meant when he wrote, “Prejudices - or are they
loyalties - I don't know - criss-cross - we all cut each other's throats from the
best of motives," (Buttrick, op cit, p. 30).

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Jesus did not mean to discourage anyone, We simply cannot conelude that
He wanted men and women to watch and wait before deciding to follow, He meant
honestly to describe the cost, And every time He added the ledger it came out un~
swerving, primary, total commitment, There was no other way, He was asking for that
once-in-a-Llife commitment which transcends all other commitments; a loyalty that
suddenly judges all other loyalties. He was calling them to make the most important
decision of their lives. And He chose His words carefully to call that kind of
commitment out of them,

It is no secret that small causes elicit small commitment: that football
coaches win games by asking total commitment: you could not watch the drama in Ohio
Stadium yesterday vithout sensing that both coaches were calling something out of
their players far beyond what the young men thought they were capable of delivering.
King Arthur demanded so much of his Knights, according to Tennyson, "that they were
dazed as if half blind at the coming of the light." Patrick Henry would be long
forgotten had he volunteered to work a little harder rather than invite death if not
liberty: Winston Churchill well may have saved a nation by inviting ultimate sacri-
fice in the memorable phrase, “blood, sveat and tears."

So Jesus - whose goal it vas to express the cosmic truth that God reigned
on earth and to call a radical nev being out of individual men and women, did not
ask for a Little more effort, a little more time or money, a little more agreement
to philosophic principles, He asked them to renounce all else,

If you have ever thought honestly about the Gospel of Gesus Christ, you have
been made uncomfortable by that, No one ever struggled more valiantly and thought-
fully with it than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, His loyalty to Christ led to imprisonment
and execution by the Nazis. But long before, he had written a book, The Cost Of
Discipleship, in which he identified cheap grace as the fatal heresy of modern
Christianity, If it's cheap it's not the real thing and the only person who is
cheated by what seems to be easy religion is the would-be disciple. Bonhoeffer
labored over Christ's uncompromising demand. Listen to his struggle: 'What is this
power which so angrily comes between a man and the natural life in which it had
pleased God to place him? Surely such a break is surly contempt for the good gifts
of God," The reader can almost feel the dramatic conflict between this gentle
pastor's loyaltics to family, nation, profession and the good life and the demand of
Jesus Christ which was about to be tested by the ominous sounds of Nazi totalitar-
ianism, But, then, in the same paragraph he wrote down the intrisuing and winsome
truth of the Gospel, '...the barrier is no contempt for life.,,it is the life that
is life indeed, the gospel, the person of Jesus Christ." (The Cost of Discipleship,
p. 84).

Bonhoeffer understood that Christ does not ask us to hate our dear ones, He
saw, however, that when any man or woman hears the call of Jesus Christ he or she
must respond alone, He regarded it as the highest, noblest expression of human
personhood when the individual self confronts Jesus Christ and commits everything
to Him, Christ demands it: but so, Bonhoeffer suggested, does our integrity, our
selfhood, our individuality as free men and women, [It is in ultimate commitment to
Jesus Christ that we are fully human,

Before we back away from the white hot intensity of that, however, let's
come at it from another direction. Let's approach on the road of our needs as
persons, I continue to be fascinated by the insights of Rollo May, psychiatrist,
philosopher, author and articulate analyst of modern life, In Love and Will, May
suggests that the rampant sickness among us is apathy, We feel ourselves the

- & -

victims of fate, we have become cynical because the issues which determine our
existence are so large and grand that the individual simply bobs along like a cork
in the ocean. We have become spectators rather than participants, Or in the more
blunt words of a professor who once saw more in me than I was willing to see: "For
God's sake, Mr, Buchanan, don't spend your whole life sitting on the curb watching
the parade go by,"

The current Rollo May book which has my mind engaged is a small one: The
Courage to Create. Having wrestled with Bonhoeffer and the hard demand of Christ,
try this: "An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to
have any reality, This is the distinction between human beings and the rest of
nature, The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic crowth; no commitment is
necessary, The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct,.,But a man
or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment
to them," (p.5)

When we think about the uncompromising demand of Christ we are approaching
something vital about our identity as persons. And when we find ourselves repelled
by His insistance that we stand as individuals alone and either accept or reject
His Lordship we may be, in fact, repelled by the risks of making any commitment to
any person or any cause, We may be, that is to say, afraid to be fully human, to
be who we are, to become fully men and women through decision,

The brightest examples of full and courageous humanity are those people
who have found fortitude within themselves to take a lonely, individual stand
against forces much more powerful than themselves. Alexander Sol::henitsyn, for
instance, the crusty Russian poet who simply would not bend before the assembled
might of the Soviet Secret Police. In spite of torture and the more subtle pressure
of loyalty to his beloved Russia, Solzhenitsyn continued to cry out against the
Crushing of persons, On one occasion he was stripped naked and marched before a
firing squad and the ritual was completed all the way to the end: but the guards
fired blanks and then laughed at his fear, But he would not back away from his
loyalty to humanity and truth which was, in fact, the assertion of his own humanity
against dehumanizing oppression of Communism. Totalitarianism never gets along very
well with human integrity. Other cxamples come to mind: Sir Thomas More in Robert
Bolt's superb play, A Man For Ail Scasons, who literally lost everything because
of his commitment to his own conscience.

But perhaps the more pertinent arena for this disucssion is closer to home:
in the matter of personal relationships, for instance. Rollo May suggests that re-
lationships require courage - "the courase to relate to other human beings, the
capacity to risk one's self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy, Is is the
courage to invest oneself over a period of time in a relationship that will demand
an increasing ocpnness," (Ibid, p.°),

May I suggest that if we have trouble with relationships it is because a
good one is risky business? We may change. If we really are open to another we
may find our assumptions, ideas, prejudices, challenged, It may cost us our pride,
our precious egotism. We may find that a good relationship forces us to become
another person, to grow, to become something new, How simple it is to keep other
people at arm's length: to avoid the cost of changing by shuttins out the other at
the deep levels. How easy, according to the author, between men and women, to shift
the issue to the body because we can't work up the courage which real intimacy
requires, ‘It is easier in our society," he writes, “to be naked physically than

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to be naked psychologically or spiritually..." (Ibid, p.10).

The particular relationship which causes us the most consternation is
marriage - because it is the most costly. Perhaps that is why the institution seems
to be shaky in our day, People don't want to pay the price in decision, total
commitment, "I take thee to be my wedded husband or wife, and I do promise and
covenant before God and these witnesses; to be thy loving and faithful wife or
husband; in plenty and in want; in joy and in sorrow; in sickness and in health; as
long as we both shall live," That is the cost of the relationship: to be loving
and faithful in all seasons, When a man or woman stops paying the cost, or forgets
that there is a cost, intimacy disappears, distances widen, affection dims and some-
thing precious dies, Again, Rollo May says it well: ‘The essence of being human is
that, in the orief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons
and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will claim us all."(Ibid p.19)

The almost irresistable temptation in the Church is to soften the demand of
Jesus Christ: to make it as easy as possible to join up and remain a member in good
standing. Jesus asks us to pick up a cross and follow and somehow, after we filter
that through the necessities of institutional life it comes out xvather pathetically:
"please come to church on occasion and give a few dollars."

But the issue here is not the institutional church: it is not even Jesus:
it is you and me and our humanity. In the parables of our Lord the alternative to
commitment is no building - or a poor compromise, in fact a surrender, The issue of
the Gospel is life, real Life: it is our need, not God's, that the Gospel addresses,
We believe that in Jesus Christ God has shown that He wants us, But the need is on
our side - our need to be fully human,

The invitation to discipleship is for everyone, The cost is that we must
decide: we must villfully submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, or else we must
back away from it quietly, We must accept His Lordship in between ourselves and
others, ourselves and things, in His terms "renouncing everything".

But He gives it all back: the people, the dear ones - the mothers, fathers,
wives, husbands, children, and the goods, the good things of earth to be used and
enjoyed. But they are all different because now He stands in the midst of them,

The invitation is for everyone, The cost is dear - the promise is life.
Amen,

Father, sive us the courage to be fully human: to be decisive men and
women; to accept the Lordship of Christ and to follow where He leads,
Amen,