Who's disciple are you?

Sermon for Pentecost XIII, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY

Text: Luke 14:25-33

In my first semester in college, a couple of my dormmates were recruited by the Maranatha Campus Ministries, a new religious movement that was just shy of a cult. One guy, Brad, came to school with the impression that being on his own was about partying all night and sleeping in, which meant he was on his way to failing out a couple of months into the semester. Around the beginning of October, he started hanging out with the Maranathas, and soon after that he was preaching fire-and-brimstone street-corner diatribes at their meetings. He was spending more and more time with them, and his grades didn’t improve. His parents found out what was going on and came in mid November to pack him up and bring him home. 

Again in this morning’s gospel reading, we hear strong words from Jesus, first saying that to be his disciple we have to hate our family, and then that we have to take up our cross and follow him. We know what it literally meant for Jesus to take up his cross - it meant that he was to die. So, following that interpretation of truth, we would understand “hate” to be literal, too, that you would despise your family members to become a disciple. But then we read about calculating the cost of building a tower, also understood literally to mean pulling up your on-line bank account balance, opening an Excel spreadsheet, and finding the cost of building a tower. This example is suggesting that there is an evaluation happening: do I have what it takes to build a tower? We can take that question back to the cross and hating family and ask “do I have what it takes to be a disciple? Have I considered all of the costs? Can I choose to be a disciple?” So, when we go back to the “cannot” in “cannot be my disciple,” it could be that we are unable to commit to being a disciple rather than being incapable of being a disciple. Jesus is not really saying that loving our family prevents us from becoming a disciple. It means that our relationship with them will be impacted by our discipleship or vice versa. It’s about priorities and what cost we are willing to bear.

My dormmate Brad eventually had a personal realization that he was in trouble academically, and he believed he couldn’t be a disciple, if you will, of the university. He wasn’t fulfilling the student covenant of studying and showing up for class, and not being a disruption in the dorm. He was in crisis, drowning in an aimless life and ripe for picking by a cult-like religious group who offered him what he thought he needed. But again, he failed to become a disciple, this time of Jesus. He went for the ‘easy’ salvation, full of smoke and fury, signifying nothing because he didn’t consider the cost of becoming a disciple: sobriety, discipline, and purpose. I think he found sobriety, but his new-found purpose in an over-dramatic delivery of memorized canned phrases won out over committing to personal change. The discipline he needed to study and spend time with the group just wasn’t there. The problem with hanging out with the Maranathas was that they didn’t offer anything of substance as he participated in the group. Brad’s parent’s decision to rescue him was humiliating because he picked the wrong battle to fight, and he lost. What he needed to do was to set his priorities, but that didn’t mean abandoning a secondary priority to focus only on the first. He didn’t have to “hate” school to be a disciple of Jesus, or vice versa, but he did have to understand and accept the cost of his priorities, whether it was drinking, or studying, or proselytizing.

In all of the sermons and discussions of what discipleship is and what it means, discipleship has always been in the context of being Jesus’ disciples. We have pondered what it means to be his disciple, we have considered the implications on how we think and speak, and we have understood what that commitment looks like. But as I mentioned above, we can be disciples of other people or institutions. We are not looking for salvation from sin from others because they cannot offer what Jesus offers, but we can still be disciples, followers of them. I can tell you from personal experience that working for a company with its own goals and workplace culture has seeped into me, and I act like a disciple when I talk about all the wonderful things about that company. The same goes for an author whose words have changed my way of thinking, or a sports team that I have some connection to. We can take this concept of discipleship even further, extending to religious and political figures and institutions who we have some relationship with. And even though we are not seeking God’s salvation from them, the strong words Jesus speaks still apply: you must “hate” something; you must bear a cross, however it may look; you must calculate the cost of that discipleship; you must determine if you have the resources to “win,” however that triumph might look.

As we encounter the political and cultural polarization in our country daily, we have become disciples of particular political institutions and the leaders of them. We have become disciples of a particular part of American culture. That has always been the case, but as polarization has pushed us apart from being a more cohesive American People, the disciple relationships have become stronger. I think it’s worthwhile to take on the difficult self-examination and ask ourselves who do we hate as a result of becoming social and political disciples? What cross, what requirements have we taken on as a disciple? Have we considered the cost to our principles, relationships, and professed faith as a disciple of the world? Is our discipleship leading us into battles that we may not win? Jesus’ harsh words about discipleship underscore the seriousness of committing to him, that this commitment is real and not to be treated lightly or be taken for granted just because he loves us unconditionally. There is a real cost to discipleship that we must acknowledge and accept. The cost of being Jesus’ disciple is outweighed by what we receive in terms of grace and wisdom. The same cannot be said for our worldly discipleships. It is those discipleships that we need to pay close attention to so that we do not prioritize them over our discipleship to Jesus.