Counting the Cost: Lectionary Reflections on Luke 14:25-33

August 30, 2010 By Alyce McKenzie 117 Comments

Lectionary Reflections for September 5th, 2010: Luke 14:25-33

This text is a sandwich. Before it comes Luke’s version of the Great Banquet. After it comes Jesus’ teaching about salt.At this point in his ministry, in Luke’s account, the cross casts it shadow on his path. The cost of discipleship is at the forefront of his attention, now more than ever.  These two little parables about the man and the tower and the king and his war are about the cost of discipleship. Jesus is expanding his message of discipleship as sacrifice to those beyond his discipleship circle (9:18-27, 57-62). In these two parables, unique to Luke, Jesus is not discouraging people from following him. He is discouraging them from following him without counting the cost (Stein, 112).

The verse about hating one’s family and even life itself is a sharp pinprick of hyperbole meant to heighten our awareness of the single minded commitment, the supreme devotion required of the one who would follow Jesus all the way that lies ahead (14:26). We are to count the cost before we commit. Counting the cost doesn’t mean we have to pay up, that we have to come up with enough renunciation and enough pain to earn our way into Jesus’ good graces. Jesus is not saying that we must earn divine love by hating our family or by holding a contest to see whose cross contains the most pain.

Robert H. Stein, in his Introduction to the Parables of Jesus points out that “the kingdom of God is offered graciously by God to all” (112). God’s love provides us with the perseverance and energy to follow Jesus as we live in and into that kingdom. We need to view this passage in the context of Luke’s gospel which repeatedly emphasizes the compassion of a God who seeks out and saves the lost, who stands ready to forgive the sinner. Says Stein, “We aren’t excluded from God’s kingdom because it’s too hard to earn entrance. We exclude ourselves when we willfully reject God’s gracious invitation” (112) Luke 14:15-24).

The grace of God is not cheap grace. It requires a response. Says Stein “one can only receive the grace of God with open hands, and to open those hands one must let go of all that would frustrate the reception of that grace. Jesus refers to this letting go as repentance…It is foolish and damning to answer the invitation if one is not willing to repent” (Stein, 112). Half hearted disciples rsvp to the messianic banquet and then find excuses not to attend (14:18-10). They come to the shore but won’t get in the boat with Jesus because rough waters might await them (Matthew 8:18-22). They put their hand to the plough and look back (Luke 9:62).They “taste the heavenly gift, and share in the Holy Spirit …and then they fall away” (Hebrews 6:5,6).

Says biblical scholar Earl Ellis, “Jesus’ purpose in telling these 2 parables is not to dissuade prospective disciples, but to awaken half hearted followers to the disastrous consequences of such a path”(195). They will be thrown out like worthless salt (Luke 14:18). Matthew is the evangelist we usually associate with the consequences of not responding to Jesus. He is the one who likes to end his parables with people being thrown into outer darkness where they will weep and gnash their teeth. But Luke’s little verse about salt is ominous because it is so non dramatic, so matter of fact.  It makes me think of other things that get thrown out because they are past their prime. They include milk, cottage cheese, and all those slimy, unrecognizable vegetables in the bottom of your refrigerator produce drawers which you toss while wrinkling your nose in distaste. It’s too late. They can’t be made wholesome and edible again.

When I was growing up, my dad was big on perseverance proverbs. “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” He even had a picture over his desk in his study of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s battle flag that flew over the USS Niagra during the Battle of Lake Eerie in 1812. It read “Don’t Give Up the Ship.” There is a long history to this motto I won’t go into here except to note that it was the dying statement of James Lawrence to the crew of his USS Chesapeake. Growing up we were never allowed to quit anything. That’s enough to make you think twice before you join the marching band.

These parables don’t deserve to be reduced to a moralistic sermon in which the preacher, wagging her finger at the congregation, berates them for ever giving up on anything, for ever starting something they can’t finish. Some things we start we should finish. Others- not so much. Sometimes I counsel a student to drop a course. Sometimes we need to end an abusive relationship. I should definitely have quit the high school basketball team way earlier than I did.

These parables depict a man staring at a foundation he can’t build on and a king contemplating a war in which he is outnumbered 2 to 1. They call for a sermon that encourages people not to get themselves into this kind of spiritual situation: the kind in which they are faced with a task without means to complete it. These two parables call for a sermon that urges people to count the cost of discipleship and to commit to following Jesus all the way that lies ahead. This cost and this commitment can only be preached in the context of God’s commitment to us. The cross conveys God’s extreme commitment to us. The resurrection conveys God’s power to see us through every obstacle that litters the path ahead.

E. Earle Ellis, The New Century Bible Commentary on Luke

Robert H. Stein, An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus

Alyce M. McKenzie, Professor of Homiletics, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University

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Religion, Politics and the Public Square

August 30, 2010 By Guest Contributor 2 Comments

by Carol Hovis

The national uproar regarding the Cordoba House, a mosque and Muslim community center in New York City is a critical moment in the United States for all religions, for US politics and for the preservation of civil rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

It is no mistake that the First Amendment is first.  It is the bedrock of our democracy.

Up to this point in time, there has been no governmental interference with the Cordoba House initiative; their First Amendment right to freedom of religion has not been violated.  This is good news for our republic.

However, there has been an explosion on the internet, picked up by the mainstream media, of propaganda about Imam Feisal Abdul Raul and those who have been planning the NYC mosque.  The popular press and internet have fanned the flames of bigotry and hate, based on half-truths and outright lies.

On the positive side, the First Amendment rights of free speech and a free press are intact.  On the negative side, I believe the discourse in our public square is broken.  In my 20 years as an ordained Presbyterian minister, and the past six years as Executive Director of the Marin Interfaith Council, I have observed the tendency of thoughtful people, secular and religious, liberal, moderate and conservative, to be lethargic regarding our right of free speech in our civic conversations.  This includes me.

As long as a majority of concerned citizens remain passive spectators while a small minority of fringe ideologues whip up fear-mongering rhetoric about Muslims or any other “group” of people, our democracy is impoverished, even threatened by our silence.

I find good people of faith and conscience are reticent to speak up about controversial issues, whether in houses of worship or councils of government, because of the common misconception that expressing passionate views grounded in a religious or ethical belief system somehow violates the separation of religion and state.

The founders of this nation knew the disposition of institutions, both religious and political, to gravitate toward tyranny, without the proper checks and balances imbedded in our Constitution.  Also, the founders knew the inclination of individuals to persecute the “other”, those who are different from the majority.  For more than 200 years, our government has enacted laws to protect the civil rights of minority groups, albeit belatedly and imperfectly.

The current frenzy reaffirms for me the fundamental importance of interfaith, interreligious, multicultural work for the well-being of our nation and world.  The Marin Interfaith Council (MIC) seeks to contribute constructively to the public dialogue and debate on a myriad of issues, including immigration reform, homelessness and housing, Israel and Palestine, Proposition 8 and most recently on August 23rd, the Marin Education Achievement Gap.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote:  John Locke says ‘neither Pagan nor Mahomedan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion… It is refusing toleration to those of different opinion which has produced all the bustles and wars on account of religion.”

As we commemorate the March on Washington, August 28th, let us remember one religious leader who understood the power of freedom to transform politics and the public discourse.

Forty-seven years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed: We have come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

Now is the time to stand with Muslim Americans and all who know the virulence of prejudice and discrimination and say “No” to fear and “Yes” to the Dream of freedom for all.

Carol Hovis is an ordained Presbyterian minister and Executive Director of the Marin Interfaith Council in San Rafael, California.

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Ungrounding Ourselves into the Christ-Ethic

August 29, 2010 By George Elerick 2 Comments

olas peligrosas - dangerous waves

For Lacan, public law such as “No Photos” or “Do not go on the grass” implicitly attracts the subject of that law to commit the very thing it prohibits (exactly in the way that if we tell the child not to eat the freshly baked cakes, we are simultaneously pointing out the method with which the child can ignore our demands). The point at which the attempts of prohibition by public law fail, like here, is precisely where superego emerges. And for Lacan, as it is for Žižek, the superego is not the moral conscience (as it would be for Freud) but rather the stigmatisation of our ethical betrayal, or in other words the invitation to transgress the law whether we like it or not, what is known as the superego injunction to enjoy! This adds something rather provocative to the pushing of boundaries.

Galatians 3:28: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. – Paul of Tarsus

We tend to think ideas or truths are born out of tradition or something that has been established. In the narrratives where boats are involved in the New Testament, it does seem the idea that is being perpetuated is one where truths organically arrive out of what is ungrounded. Or said another way, out of the absurd comes the matieralistic. We use terminology like ‘we’ve been doing this for centuries’ or ‘we do this because others have done this’, and although they sound very poetic, these phrases induce a ritualistically bound coma where we live as zombies on the outside and ideologically are dying on the inside. Out of the darkness comes light. We must enter the darkness to experience the light. There is a 2nd century Rabbinic view that darkness is a good thing. That when God created the heavens and the earth and formed light, that the light isn’t what brought distinction, but it was the darkness that gives the light its purpose.

We must enter the darkness to experience the light.

The boat is an ungrounded object. The waves beneath it are not concrete, far from it. Peter was invited to step out of a boat, in that moment he walked out of something that itself was ungrounded into something itself that is inherently ungrounded (the waves). He found that he was able to believe in the midst of his ungrounding. He had to move away from the very thing he was sure of to find that Christ was present in the middle of his ungrounding. It when we move away from the solid things we have traditionally either been taught to or come to believe that we find that we truly have faith in ourselves and in the Christ ethic. It is in the pushing away of those things do we truly find ourselves.

I think Paul, the early church author, asks us to do the same in terms of understanding and relating to each other. That we can enter into a perpetual ungroundedness. Paul begins this ungroundedness in discussion of something that we tend to as westerners assume is the object of our groundedness. Paul refers to it as the Law.

In the verse above, Paul speaks of equality as if it supercedes the Law. We come to a place where we realize within the Law that the Apostle Paul speaks of is a perversion of transgression. That in the law there is an inherent expectation of breaking it. A good example is when we are casually walking across a patch of green grass and notice the sign that prohibits us from being present in the area. The ‘do not walk on the grass’ is a perversion in that it expects us to follow it yet realizing that the opposite itself is also true. That we might not follow it. It prohibits desire and defines desire as something to be transgressed. This is what I think was going in in the theology of St. Augustine who is repeatedly pointed to as the main ideological influencer of ‘Original Sin’; the idea that all of humanity is born with a permanent scar. St. Augustine seemed to call this permanent scar desire in era where the politicized Church got to define what was desirable and what wasn’t.

The Law represents that thing that is outside of us, for all-intense purposes it is the Objective. Paul redefines the Jewish law and opens it up to include the Greeks, the (majority) population of the known world. Paul introduces the idea of plurality and universalism by treating the law as something that is to be challenged. Which is in itself a challenge, because Paul himself was a Jew. Paul was re-envisioning the landscape of what it meant to be a Christian. By spending a lot of time on the Law, Paul was essentially distancing himself from what the Law represented. Its much like the person who overstates their case or exaggerates their position for the sake of direct irony.

The negation of something is found not in the public negation of it, but in the public acceptance of it. In fact, Paul’s re-envisioning of the Law from the ethnic to the personal took something objective and made it subjective. He seems to publicly accept the Law by speaking it, but he then changes the Laws focus on to the Christ ethic, the way we treat each other – Love.

Love is the

    new

Law.

The Christ-Ethic is the new way we see each other.

He took something initially meant for the small and made it big. He replace the Law with an Ethic. But this ethic is experience subjectively rather than objectively. If anything, in this regard was more a subjectivist act than not. (The danger is to hear this and assume that that is a bad thing). I see the letter of Paul not necessarily as a collection of modern-day handbooks with which to measure ourselves against, but rather as letters between himself and his communities. Almost like two-way journals into their ‘personal’ journeys toward understanding God.

In fact, in Pauls’ statement there is an anticipation toward a neutered identity. That there is a reality where all of our identities are suspended in the Christ ethic. That when we treat one another as Christ teaches us, there is something that occurs within the human condition – we stop seeing each other as labels. When we love there is no Methodist, no Baptist, no Mormon, no Buddhist, no Muslim and no Christian – because in this instance there is only what Christ represents.

It doesn’t mean we lose our distinctiveness, it means we lose the spirit of competitive aggression.

It means we die to ourselves.

Paul believes this reality can exist. I think it partially lies in what he says after the ethnic designation, that there is neither bound nor free. In our society there is a ritualistic addiction in having and not having. The have’s tend to compare themselves to the have not’s. Those who are ‘bound’ to the things they have seek justification in their violent comparison against those who lack. Paul says in this new landscape of hopeful equality, there are no have’s and have not’s.

That we all exist as equals.

That one religion isn’t better than another, nor is one house better than another, or one bank account is bigger than another, nor is one country better than another, that all exist as equals in this cosmic Christ. Paul is perverting the Law to the point that is beyond something that we could ever be bound to, in fact, in his talk of the law he continously turns the conversation back on to Christ. Essentially, make Christ the ‘new law’ or the new objective. And in Christ we are all one. We are all beyond the law, we are neutered yet defined in this Christ ethic, in the way we treat one another. When we treat one another in this new Christ Way we are perpetuating the dream of God.

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