‘C’   //   Pentecost 16   //   9-9-07   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian

Scriptures    Jeremiah 18:1-11              The Letter to Philemon

                                                 Psalm 139 (sung)              Luke 14:25-33

 

You might think he would not be so popular in the South. After all, the progressive – some would say radical – theologian Robert McAfee Brown had spent his entire academic career roaming the esteemed halls of places such as Union Theological Seminary in New York City and Stanford University. His one substantial foray into Dixie: a Freedom Ride for civil rights in 1961, with brief jail time in Tallahassee.

 

But, there he was: making a midweek appearance in Charlotte, North Carolina. And the large Presbyterian sanctuary was packed. Charlotte! Midweek! For this damned Yankee!

 

The year was 1989. Evangelical Christianity was alive and well and flexing its triumphal muscles. Two of their own, Presidents Carter and Reagan, had been elected for three terms as the most powerful leader on earth, and President Bush pere had just been elected largely by pandering to its base. And the mainline Protestant church institutional – Christendom friend of Presidents past? By then, it was well into its long slide of membership decline, and so had grown more irrelevant in the halls of political power.

 

And so, in that buckle of the Bible Belt, Bob Brown fielded many of the usual questions from his mainline audience that Carolina spring day: queries reflecting their grief and loss of social esteem, influence, and … well, clout.

 

One of the inquiries was typical. What, the questioner wondered – an etch of worry and anger crossing his face – could Presbyterians do to help the church grow again?

 

Dr. Brown’s head began to bob up and down in his disarming way – a physical effect borne of years of intense study and prolific writing. He spread out his hands and, with it, his engaging smile. His response was simple: “Why, I think membership loss may be a good thing for our churches right now!”

 

 

For Bob Brown knew – even then – that there had come a time for the mainline church, in the midst of the rise of imperial force as never before experienced by humankind, to make a choice. A biblical choice, of whether to become an extension of the temple-state – of claiming and hence being coopted by the self-legitimation of empire – or of becoming a church of exodus and exile. A church of kings and their kingdoms, or a church of sanctuary and synagogue, and the kin-dom of God.

 

 

As was the case with our mainline Protestant forebears of a half-century past, Jesus’ popularity was peaking. “Large crowds”, we are told today, are “traveling with him.”And then, the rabbi turns and faces his subjects: a sure sign, per the Jewish prophetic way, that something bracing was about to be spoken. As one of my mentors might put it, it was a come-to-Jesus moment.

 

 

Hate mother and father – even life itself. Carry the cross – as he would say elsewhere, “your cross.”

 

What a way to maintain – much less inspire – a fan club!

 

And then, Jesus told them a parable. It is a parable, because it’s a form of speech that’s built on irony. An irony meant to raise the wishful thinking of an audience in a particular worldly direction … only to subvert those wishful thoughts at the end, replacing them with the mystery and the majesty of the hope of God.

 

Know the costs of a building project before you begin to build, Jesus instructs them. He’d almost lost the crowd, with his anti-family values and cross-carrying polemic. But now – again – their necks crane back to him. Yes, yes: Know the costs. Be prepared. Finish the job.

 

Jesus continues. Know the size of your army, to determine whether you should wage war or negotiate for peace. Makes sense, the people nod. Know the numbers. Calculate. Then, make the wise choice. Be successful.

 

“So therefore …” Jesus concludes. The crowd, its attention regained, strains to embrace a coffee-break moral. “So therefore … none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

 

So long, rabbi. Nice knowing ya.

 

The crowds trudge away, shaking their heads. He had us, they mutter to each other, with all those good words of building up and being a success, of growing the economy and balancing the budget. All to scatter the decks – to give it all up – at the end.

 

 

Discipleship. That which happens to us only when we have grieved – fully grieved – over the loss of our Christendom power, and our superpower ways, and have moved, as Anthony Robinson puts it, “beyond a vague civic faith … a religion of good works and achievement that boils Christianity down to being a good person.”¹

 

For it’s not about the works of being a good person – as admirable as that is. Nor is it about a set of beliefs – as necessary as they are. Discipleship is about a set of faith practices: radical, in that they cut to the cost-free roots of our social ease and church clubbiness,² that we may reach out beyond being a caring community for ourselves and join God in making disciples of all nations.³ A set of faith practices that divests us of our egos, rather than invests us of the world. Practices that, in the manner of our psalm today, cultivate the true vulnerability of our being known by our God, rather than consummate the false victories of feeling that we are in-the-know – can you say, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Or, in the manner of Paul’s plea to Philemon today, faith practices that set free the slaves of the world to become fellow servants in Christ.

 

 

Faith practices. Discipleship we regenerate anew, together, each Sunday in worship, as well as generate anew in the monthly Exploring Spiritual Practices group that meets this Tuesday evening. A group that is not about talking about ourselves in the presence of others, that each may find inner peace. It’s about sharing the presence of God, in the discipleship of making our peace. For when we dare to lose our inner peace that we would build for ourselves, we find that God can make that peace anew with the help of our true family – our true sisters and brothers.

 

Being a good person? That’s nice. Believing the right things? That’s noble. Carefully building walls that separate, and calculating the costs of carrying the sword? That’s just plain costly. Then … what about carrying our cross? Practicing our faith that brings us peaceably together? That’s the cost of discipleship.

 

But … we must dispossess first – whatever it may be that is possessing us. But … we must be ready to leave family behind, if they will not claim the family values of Christ first. But we must leave behind life itself as we think we know it … that we might come alive as we never could have imagined.

 

 

I’m not a big fan of Rick Warren and his wildly popular book The Purpose Driven Life. Warren’s an unabashed fundamentalist; his theology at turns is trivial and atrocious. But an earlier book of his, The Purpose Driven Church – much less popular, I’m sure, because it speaks a language of the common good rather than the language of individual satisfaction – draws out our church’s call to discipleship in a clear and simple image of a baseball diamond. Our aim: Move people to first base – membership – then to second – mature faith (exploring spiritual practices; Christian education; Bible study) – then to third – ministry – and finally, to home – life purpose and mission.⁴

 

I wonder if we who lean to the liberal side of discipleship, in our rush to race from first to third, forget to touch second base altogether. I’m concerned that we really understand the maturing of our faith – second base of Warren’s diamond – serves as the necessary connecting point between becoming a church member (first base) and accomplishing our many ministries (third base). After all, we can fill our church life with committees and service work, but what of the essential spiritual nurture of knowing that we are known? What of knowing our biblical story of how we have always been known?

 

 

 

I serve on the Committee on Preparation for Ministry, or CPM, in our Presbytery of Detroit. The nearly twenty of us who serve on CPM act, in a manner of speaking, as both the midwives and gatekeepers for inquirers and candidates for ministry of Word and Sacrament such as our own Jenny Howard.

 

Recently, a young man sought what we call final assessment from our committee – i.e., release from our care to receive a call to ministry and hence be ordained. He presented himself as a most personable young man – which concerned me all the more when I read, in his statement of faith, of his certain belief that God sent Jesus to be crucified as a sacrifice for our sins. In a sermon manuscript presented to us, he likewise asserted that “God is in control” of all things.

 

Friends, in the maturing of our faith through means such as Bible study, we would find that this old doctrinal shibboleth – God caused the crucifixion –  is not the case at all. Certain scriptures, yes, would teach us that Jesus’ crucifixion fulfills biblical prophecy. But even these verses – by no means the dominant scriptural expositions of atonement – would not and do not state that God foreordained it. Omnipotence of this sort is not even remotely Jewish.

 

Too many eight-year-olds, like a friend of mine, have heard this story confusing such a tale of ultimate child abuse with God’s ultimate love for us, and they do not become what many church marketers like to call the unchurched. They become the dechurched.⁵ And it’s our theological ignorance, based as it is on our biblical illiteracy, that perpetuates such an image. An image, not of a loving and just God, but of a controlling and calculating one.

 

Why do I bring this up? Because it’s the way of the cross – his cross – our cross – our faith practices, our costly discipleship – our touching second base en route to third – that Jesus makes clear to us in scriptures such as the one today that make space for a loving and gracious God to do great things in this world. Not what some call “the cross-event”: inevitable for Jesus, perhaps, though was it in any way necessary? Was it, indeed, a foreordained murder, a blood ransom God demanded of God’s Son for our sins? I think not; I hope not.

 

 

 

Not so that, in carrying it, we will be crucified … though we may.

 

Not so that, in carrying it, the costs of dispossessing whatever stands in the way of ourselves and God will transform our very definition of life and living … though it will.

 

But we carry our cross that – as Robert McAfee Brown once taught me – we may live a life that has nothing to do with body counts in the church, and has everything to do with a church where everybody counts.

 

That’s the root – the radix – of the matter. That’s why our call to and way of discipleship is so radical.

 

Go … and live it.

 

Go out … and pass it on.

 

 

¹Anthony B. Robinson, “‘Follow me’: The renewed focus on discipleship,” in The Christian Century, September 4, 2007 (124:18), p.23.

 

²Ibid.

 

³Ibid., p.24.

 

⁴Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message & Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), p.144.

 

⁵I take the phrase “dechurched” from Mary Tuomi Hammond’s The Church and the Dechurched: Mending a Damaged Faith (Atlanta: Chalice Press, 2001).

Beware, disciples of Jesus, the Christ! Beware of watered-down piety that passes for mature faith – which would have us skip over second base en route from becoming a member to doing ministry.

 

For when we do so, we may become a good person: yes. We may become a more civic-minded servant, contributing to the reform of empire: yes. And yet … do we become a disciple – i.e., a radical servant, pledging allegiance to none other than God?

 

Go … and divest of whatever possesses you, that God’s love may possess you whole.

 

Go … and count the costs. To build a kingdom? To negotiate truces? No. To receive God’s kin-dom, and embrace God’s peace? Oh, yes!

 

Go. Go out … and pass it on.