FAITH'S COSTLY VENTURE

August 24, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

“If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and
mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and
even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." --Luke 14:26 (RSV)

Scripture
Luke 14:25-33

The idea that you and I begin to live fully when we find
Something to live for is at the heart of the matter. It is that
we begin to live with something approaching our full potential
when something comes into our lives and commands our loyalty,
allegiance, passion; that the full range of possibility comes
into focus when something is important enough that we would
sacrifice for it, suffer for it if need be. That idea shows up
in strange and interesting places. The motion picture, About
Last Night, may offend conventional morality, but among the
issues it explores is this one, It is about a young man and
young woman who live in the particular world of single adult
culture on the Near North Side of Chicago ~ the focal point of
which is the Singles Bars on Division Street. They cannot -
rather he cannot - reach deeply inside himself in order to be
committed to her: to rearrange the priorities of his superficial,
self indulgent life in order to live for someone else. As the
movie proceeds, without ever quite resolving the issue, by the
way, one sees the poignancy, the aloneness, the essential
emptiness of a life that is not lived for someone or something.

The .same idea runs through Robert Bolit's brilliant play A
Man for All Seasons. Thomas More, 16th century Chancellor of
England, has come into conflict with Henry, his King, and shortly
will be tried - and convicted - of treason. Thomas More has not
spoken out against his King or his King's Marriage, or his King's
claim of sovereignty over the Church. He simply will not sign an
oath which approves and endorses the King's acts. The issue
which emerges in all this, of course, is the big one - for. whom:
do you live? To whom are you willing to give yourself? Is there
something inside...a hard core of integrity, which you cannot
violate and for which you would accept suffering and death?

Richard Rich is the ambitious young protagonist, who for
his own political advancement will lie about More and provide the
King the rationale he needs to execute hin. Listen to a bit of
early dialogue between these radically different men:

Richard Rich: But every man has his price!

Thomas More: No - no - no.

Rich: But yes! In money too.

More: (with gentle impatience) No -
no - no.

Rich: Or plieasure. Letters, women,
bricks and mortar. There's always

something.

More: Childish.
Rich: Well, in suffering certainly.
More: {interested) Buy a man with

suffering?
Rich: Impose suffering, and offer escape.

More: ' Oh. For a moment [I thought you
were being more profound.

Thomas More, that is to say, is intrigued, not by the
possibility of tangible rewards - money, sex, power. His price -
is not these - but something important enough to command his
allegiance and call for suffering. The playwrite is probing the
human spirit deeply at this point, approaching an issue that is
more important to each of us than any other. It is not to go out
and find some way to suffer, a kind of artificial martyrdom. It
is that our wholeness, our fulfillment as persons, what religion
calls our salvation, depends on our finding something that claims
us, commands our passion, calls out of us our deepest commitment.

That is what Jesus taught one day in an incident reported
in Luke's Gospel. Large crowds of people were following Jesus
around the Galilean countryside. They were there when he taught,
when he ate his meals, when he tried to find a place to sleep.
They were there to hear what he said and perhaps because they
sensed the growing conflict and the inevitability of tragedy,

waiting as it were, for the disaster. One time, as Luke tells
it, he turned around, and said something the Bible scholars call
"a hard saying." It is that indeed... "If anyone comes to me

and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and
brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my
disicple... Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has,
cannot be my disciple.”

How could he say such a thing? Did he mean, literally,

that following him meant contradicting the noblest instincts of
our humanity - loving our families? That to be a Christian you

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have to hate your parents - your spouse - your children? We
know, intuitively, that it could not be that. We know, because
we have seen it tragically and graphically in recent years, that
religion which undercuts and destroys the basic relationships of
our humanness is sick religion: that the cults which make the
denial and severing of family ties the precondition of membership
are guilty of exploiting people who need help. We have seen that
kind of religion become tragically demonic.

It is helpful to recall that one of the ten moral
foundations of Jesus' culture was - "Honor your father and
mother," and to recall that he honored his mother, that she was
part of the band of disciples, that as he was dying he was still
concerned for her, tending to her care. The scholars help us
understand this “hard saying" by pointing out that the Aramaic
Jesus spoke was an extraordinarily vivid language, and that it is
common in Semitic rhetoric, to make a strong point by dramatic
contrast. “if you want to love God - you have to hate everything
else." "If you love the Sox - you have to hate the Yankees or
the Brewers." That's hyperbole. It is not precise ethical
instruction. It meant that to follow Jesus is a costly venture
which involves real sacrifice and an often painful reordering of
priorities. What he meant was that to follow him was more
demanding than a pleasant two week sojourn in the hill country of
Galilee. It had to do with something so big and so important -
namely the integrity and meaning and fulfillment of individual
life - that everything else pales by comparison. He used the
strongest language possible because he was asking people to save
their lives by giving them away.

The touble we have with that is that not many of us ever had

to make a difficult decision for Christ. We do not ordinarily
perceive the Christian religion in these radically "either/or"
terms. Not many of us had to sacrifice very much. Most of us
did not walk away from parents and family and culture to follow
Jesus - although many of the people who first read Luke's Gospel
certainly did. In fact, our parents dressed us up and bundled us

into a church and and had the mark of Jesus placed on us in
baptism before we had much to say about the matter. Unlike the

people for whom this was written - we didn't have to decide
between our families and Jesus. In fact, the very opposite of
that dynamic was and is often the case. Sometimes people reject

the Church and the Christian faith in the process of asserting
themselves against parental authority or adult culture in

general. That's another story, the first line of which goes, "I
don't come to church because my parents made me attend every
week." That has more to do with Oedipus than Jesus, I think. In
any event, deciding to be a Christian was not a terribly castly
venture for most of us. Nor is maintaining religion at a
respectable level a terribly costly enterprise. You want to stir

up a bunch of Presbyterians just suggest that their political and
economic views ought to reflect their faith and not vice versa:
or that Jesus' standards of discipleship are not quite fulfilled
by a financial commitment of several dollars per week. It's no

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wonder these radical demands make us uncomfortable.

And yet, it seems that throughout the long history of the
church, someone somewhere has always been paying dearly for the
faith. Almost on behalf of the rest of us history has treated
benevolently, someone somewhere is standing up courageously and
putting life itself on the line. You know the story of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the German pastor-theologian, who wrote so profoundly
paid that cost himself ina Nazi Concentration Camp. Some of you
know, perhaps not as personally as I do, about men and women who
heard the call of Christ in the Civil Rights Movement, who felt
compelled by their Lord to take a stand and paid avery dear
price for it.

Alan Paton has continued to remind the world of the dear
price paid by courageous Christians in South Africa. In his
book, Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, a distinguished jurist is
invited by the pastor of the Holy Church of Zion to participate
in the Maundy Thursday rite of foot washing. In fact, he is
invited to wash the feet of Martha Fortuin, the black woman who
has helped to raise his children. Judge Oliver accepts the
invitation. "She has washed the feet of all my children. Why
should I hesitate to wash her feet?" But the act and the
publicity that followed cost him the chief justiceship. Paton's
book is fiction, but there are Christian men and women, black and
white, in South Africe making very difficult decisions and very
costly commitments, trying - against enormous odds - to avoid the
extremes approving, cooperating with, endorsing of the oppressive
system of apartheid on the one hand, and the prospect of a
violent revolution on the other hand.

it is not easy, nor safe, to be a Christian today in
Belfast where, in the name of patriotism and religion, Protestant
para-militaries kill Catholics who step out of line and the IRA
shoots at Protestants.

What a privilege it was last April to hear The Reverend
Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian Missionary in Lebanon, one of the
seven hostages, talk about his experience as a prisoner of Moslem
extremists and on that evening to meet and express our concern
and our solidarity with the family of Father Lawrence Jenco.
Father Jenco, happily released since then, and Ben Weir who was
elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), are
honest, dedicated disicples of Jesus who had their priorities
straight and whose commitment to Christ compelled them to live
and witness and work ina place where their faith became a very
costly venture.

Christianity both fascinates and repels us because it
suggests that there is a price to be paid: that in order to be a
Christian you have to submerge your own self, negate your own
self, negate your own personhood...in Jesus' words “hate your own
life." This, I believe, is the critical juncture of Christian

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theology. Denying self is not an end in itself. Rather we
believe that authentic selfhood and true life begins when we
decide to live for Jesus Christ.

The social scientists assure us that somewhere along the
line we have to decide to be. Most adolescent rebellion, for
instance, is the normal and healthy process of a person deciding
to be a person (although sometimes it doesn't feel so healthy
when one is the object of the process!). Rollo May said it
clearly...

"An assertion of the self, a commitment is essential if the

self is to have any reality. --.-@ man or woman becomes fully
human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to
them." The Courage to Create, p. 5.

We become full human beings, that is to say, when from
somewhere deep inside ourselves we decide to be. That sounds
like an abstraction. But the decision to be takes, shape in very
real decisions to live for something or someone other than
ourselves. It's a magnificent thing to behold, te see it

actually begin to happen in children, for instance; to witness
the first deep giving of self, to see a‘person begin to emerge as
the child begins to give himself or herself...to a sport, or

music, or-a school project, or a teacher. It's moving to see
your child - or any at bat, in a recital, taking a test; to know
that they are having to reach inside and be a person aione. The
real person in us emerges when we begin to live for someone else.
Rollo May put that exquisitely... "The essence of being human is
that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we
can love some persons and some things..." {Ibid p. 19]

Think about your strongest choices ~ your deepest

commitments -

I pledge allegiance to the flag...and to the Republic for
which it stands...

Alma Mater, thy sons and daughters, honor thee...

I solemly swear to accept the responsibilities of this
office...

I take thee to be my wedded wife/husband, and I do promise
and covenant, before God and these witnesses...

We promise, in dependence on the grace of God, to bring up
our child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord...

Somewhere in the midst of those promises, those choices and
commitments, or ones like them, your particularity and strong
personhood emerges. Somewhere in the process of giving yourself
away to these commitments your own life enlarges and takes on new
meaning and worth. And one place further -

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Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Bo you intend to be his
disciple and show his love?

The particularity of Christianity and faith's costly
venture begins here. The highest, noblest expression of your
humanity and mine emerges when we respond to God's love in Jesus
Christ by deciding, by chosing, by committing everything we are

to him: by putting him at the center: by reordering our
priorities, in whatever words we chose, to say and to mean, "Lord
-~ take my life. Live through me." We are never more fully

alive, never more human, than in that commitment.

Christianity, someone said recently, is not good advice but
good news. The Gospel of Christ is not simple maxims for
successful living, it is news of a powerful love that can turn
your life around and fill it with significance and joy. How sad
it is to live without anything compelling our devotion. How

tragic to live without anything important enough to command our
passion.

Bonhoeffer realized that short of that we are, very simply,

short changing ourselves. By softening and disguising the demand
for total commitment the church, he said, is guilty of dispensing
“cheap grace." In powerful words that were, in his own life,

prophetic, he wrote:

"When Christ cails a man, he bids

him come and die. It may be a

death like that of the first

disciples who had to leave home and
work to follow him, or it may bea
death like Luther's who had to leave
the monastery and go into the world.
But it is the same death every time -
death in Christ Jesus..." [The Cost of
Discipleship, p. 79]

Thank God we have not been asked to die physically.
Perhaps we will not be asked. Perhaps we will be asked for

something that is sometimes more difficult: to persevere - to
live faithfully in a skeptical, secular society that no longer
values faith and sometimes laughs at it. Perhaps we will be

asked to be honest. in a world that does not reward integrity.
Perhaps we wil be asked to be just and loving in a time and place
when love and justice seem soft, irrelevant, naive: to forgive
and to believe in the power of compassion in a world that has
given up on forgiveness and compassion. Perhaps we will never be
called to dramatic public martyrdom but to something more
difficult, to day-in - day-out, lonely faithfulness. Perhaps you
and I will live out our lives without ever coming to one clear

moment of truth when we must say yes or no. Perhaps, for us, it
will be a sequence of moments, of small, seemingly undramatic
decisions to “hang in there for Jesus," to love when we don't

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feel like loving, to care when we are weary of caring, to re-
think old values and adopt new, Christ-informed values.

To be a Christian in every age is a cestly venture. The
price - the bottom line - is your most precious possession, that
thing you and you alone own solely ~ your heart, your soul, your
life. He said that te be his man, his woman, you must give your
life to him. It was, he said, like picking up your cross as
he picked up his, and falling in behind hin. As you do that
tentatively, in the midst of the routines of your life, please
remember two things:

“you are not alone in that line of disciples

and
-Jesus died on his cross. Therefore it is not simply your
burden to carry. [It is the sign of his love for you. it
is your salvation. To pick it up and carry it is to be

alive, fully and gloriously alive.

Amen.

Lord God forgive us for the timidity of our faith. Forgive
us for trivializing your love by withholding so much. Help us to
see that what you offer us is our true and best life. So, give
us courage to follow your son, to be his men and women. Give us
the strength we need; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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