A Sermon by Fr. Wood, 22 June 2008

Pentecost VI

Genesis 21:8-21
Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-29

+ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

SOME CONTEXT for today’s gospel:  Jesus has been on a tour of sorts, traveling to the cities and towns in Israel, teaching in the synagogues, healing the sick and announcing the kingdom of God.  Crowds are growing, pressing in, becoming more and more demanding, clamoring for Jesus’ attention and for miracles, but he isn’t put off; he has compassion because they’re as lost as sheep with no shepherd.  “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” (Matt. 9:37b), so Jesus called his twelve closest followers, men he had poured his life into as he crisscrossed the countryside, and he deputized them to go out in his name, with his authority, and preach the kingdom, and to authenticate their words he told them to “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”  (Matt. 10:8a)  Daunting marching orders, but following Jesus is never easy.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:  “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” 1  That’s the cost of discipleship.

It’s not that costly to be a Christian in modern America – get some water poured on you, show up at mass now and again, give a head-fake to a tithe.  But the word “Christian” appears in the NT exactly three times; the word for “disciple,” more than 250.  Lots of rabbis (or teachers) in the ancient near-East had disciples, learners who “followed behind them wherever they went and learned by observation and rote memory the minutiae of the OT and of rabbinic lore.” 2  This is how Archbishop Rowan Williams describes discipleship:

If you said to a modern student . . . that the essence of being a student was to hang on your teacher’s every word, to follow his or her steps, to sleep outside their door in case you missed any pearls of wisdom falling from their lips, to watch how they conducted themselves at the table, how they conducted themselves in the street, you might not get a very warm response.  But in the ancient world [t]o be a student of a teacher was to commit yourself to living in the same atmosphere and breathing the same air; there was nothing intermittent about it. 3

The New Testament is “a book about disciples, by disciples, and for disciples of Jesus Christ.”4   And we can tell two things about discipleship:  (1) It is demanding, and (2) it necessarily requires transformation. 

First of all, discipleship is demanding.  “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”  (Matt. 10:38)  The cross wasn’t an empty symbol to Jesus’ disciples because crucifixion was well-known in Palestine, and the Romans had perfected it.  The cross meant suffering and death, and as an image for discipleship it meant the ultimate self-denial.  Jesus had told his disciples they would be haled before hostile Jews and Gentiles, governors and kings (Matt. 10:18), and history tells us that’s exactly what happened when Jerusalem fell in 70 a.d.  Brother betraying brother, and father delivering up his child; most certainly not the kind of life that prosperity gospel promises its adherents today.  Discipleship was then, and is now, a costly, demanding life.

That’s why, secondly, discipleship requires transformation.  Which of us, on the day of our conversion, would have had it in us to stand before a hostile crowd and confess faith in Christ?  It takes extraordinary character and commitment to be a martyr, to stand by your convictions under intense opposition.  We aren’t born ready for that; we have to be transformed from the self-focused people we were when we first met Jesus into real disciples ready to take up real crosses.  And you don’t just start taking up big, life-and-death crosses; transformation starts in obeying God about the little, mundane things in our lives.  Oswald Chambers writes:  “My personal life may be crowded with small, petty happenings, altogether insignificant.  But if I obey Jesus in the seemingly random circumstances of life, they become pinholes through which I see the face of God.”  5 All of our lives are training grounds for discipleship.  Every day brings opportunity to meet Christ in the stranger, to serve Christ in the poor, to embrace Christ in the untouchables, but you have to want it and you have to train it.  Dallas Willard is a professor of philosophy, and he writes this:

In the heart of a disciple there is a desire, and there is decision or settled intent.  Having come to some understanding of what it means, and thus having “counted up the costs,” the disciple of Christ desires above all else to be like him . . . .  Given this desire . . . there is yet a decision to be made: the decision to devote oneself to becoming like Christ.  The disciple is one who, intent upon becoming Christlike . . . systematically and progressively rearranges his affairs to that end.  By these actions, even today, one enrolls in Christ’s training, becomes his pupil or disciple.  There is no other way.  In contrast, the nondisciple, whether inside or outside the church, has something more important to do or undertake than to become like Jesus Christ. 6

If you want to be a disciple, you have to decide, to set your mind, and begin a training regimen – go to mass, pray daily, study the bible, serve other people and get in a community where you’re forced to live up close with people who annoy you because that’s how we learn to forgive and our souls grow.  If anything had mattered more to the Twelve than following Jesus, they would never have withstood the rigors of walking close behind him, straining to hear his every word, slowly absorbing his life until finally his philosophy became their philosophy and their lives looked like his.  If anything matters more to us, we won’t be able to be disciples either.

So how can we do it?  How can we exchange our love of physical comfort, career advancement, achievement, wealth, pleasure – whatever matters more to us than discipleship – for the love of God that drives us to take up crosses?  The key is in the first verse we read:  “A disciple is not above the teacher . . . it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher . . . .”  (Matt. 10:24)  Thomas Chalmers was a mathematician and Scottish divine in the 1700s-1800s, and he wrote an essay called “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” 

There are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace from the human heart its love of the world – either by a demonstration of the world’s vanity, so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon simply to withdraw its regards from an object that is not worthy of it; or, by setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of its attachment, so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon not to resign an old affection, which shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange an old affection for a new one. 7

Chalmers is saying we need a new object for our hearts to fix on if we are to be up for the radical demands of discipleship, a new image of such great beauty that it displaces all the shadowy beauty of the goods we naturally give our lives for.  That beauty is Jesus himself – he became just like us, so we delight to become like him.  He laid aside deity and took on flesh.  He was rejected for us.  He was beaten for us.  He took up a cross for us.  The vision melts our hearts and makes discipleship our joy.  I’ve quoted John Newton’s hymn before: 

Our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before,
Since we have seen His beauty, are joined apart no more.
To see the Law by Christ fulfilled, to hear his pardoning voice,
Transforms a slave into a child, and duty into choice.

He became like us; and now we’re called to be like him.

+   In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.   

© 2008 Samuel Wood