No Man Is an Island
The Rev. Joanna Adams
Senior Minister, Trinity Presbyterian Church
Atlanta, GA

A reading from the Gospel of Luke, the fourteenth chapter, beginning with the twenty-fifth verse. The cost of discipleship:

Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and He turned and said to them, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you intending to build a tower does not first sit down and estimate the cost to see whether he has enough to complete it. Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him saying, 'This fellow began to build but was not able to finish.' What king going out to wage war against another will not sit down first and consider the cost, whether he is able with 10,000 to oppose the one who comes against him with 20,000. If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all that you possess.

This is the word of the Lord.

Today's text from the gospel of Luke tells us that large crowds were following Jesus. It is not difficult to understand why that would have been the case. The young Jew from Nazareth was a charismatic teacher and preacher. He made the lame to walk and the blind to see. His ministry offered a fresh alternative to the increasingly rigid religious establishment of the day. No wonder the crowds followed him so eagerly.

I don't know if you have a similar phenomenon in your state, but in a little town in Georgia called Conyers, right outside Atlanta, there lives a woman who claims to be in close communion with the Virgin Mary on a regular basis. Every once in a while, she will make an announcement that she has news from the Virgin Mary to deliver. The last time she made that announcement, over 200,000 people flocked to her farm. Elbow to elbow, they stood in a field where until recently cows have grazed. They wanted her to give them something, a sign, a miracle, a word.

It is probably impossible to overestimate the human desire for an easy answer -- a quick fix -- to the challenge of living a human life. There are days when all of us might wish that all we had to do was to stand like a cow or a sheep in the meadow and that God would take care of everything. No sacrifice, no suffering, nothing required. And yet at some level, we all sense that it is simply not as easy as that. Here is the truth. Life is not easy. Here is the truth. The grace in which we live is costly. The grace of which I spoke yesterday cost God plenty. Witness the cross and the story it tells of the one who gave up everything, who underwent great suffering and shame in order that we might have a life that is free from sin and death.

When Jesus spoke to the large crowds who came out to hear him long ago, he was not afraid to lay out the terms of what it would cost them were they to choose to become his disciple. "Whoever does not come to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot become my disciple. Whoever does not carry a cross cannot follow me. Therefore, I tell you, no one can come after me if you do not give up all of your possessions."

I ask you is that any way to build a following? Wouldn't we assume in 20th century American culture that the purpose of religion is to make us feel good, to protect us from suffering, to give us victory so that we might live triumphantly in this life and in the life to come? The Christian religion has as its central conviction, however, the peculiar notion that those who would save their lives will ultimately lose them. Those who are willing to lose their life for Christ's sake, they are the ones who will find abundant life.

I invite you to look with me for just a moment at the three challenging statements in today's teaching: Whoever comes to me and does not hate family cannot become my disciple. These words sound particularly jarring in a day when the family as an institution is under siege and obviously needs all the loving care and allegiance we can give it. But, I think it is a mistake to hear Jesus' command as a literal command to hate our families. What he is trying to say and is saying in fact, he is stating as sharply as he possibly can the necessity for establishing the right priorities in life. He wanted his followers to be careful not to make their deepest commitment to anyone or anything other than God.

Then there is the great temptation in our day to retreat into the family, to leave society and the world to fend for itself. Sociologists have even come up with a term for it. "Cocooning" it is called. Cocooning, staying in, playing it safe, caring for our own. But the call to discipleship is another kind of call. It has always been a call to move out into the world whose streets our Lord walked, to engage the world, to love it, to work for its betterment and never to count the costs. Jesus' words offer an important reminder that the family of God is larger than our own family, that all people are God's children, and therefore worthy of our own concern. Kathy Galloway writes from the Iona community in Scotland, "Retreat not into your private world, sheltered from the storm, where you may tend your garden and seek your soul and rest with loved ones where the fire burns warm. To seek your soul is a precious thing, but you will never find it on your own. Only among the pain of other people's need will the love of Christ be known. Retreat not into your private worlds. There are more ways than firesides to keep warm. Finally, there is no shelter from the rages of life, so meet its eye and dance with the storm."

"Whoever does not follow the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple," Jesus said. To carry the cross means at least this: to take on vulnerability as a way of being. To care about those outside our own inner circles of relationship. I don't know how you talk about it in your churches here in Memphis, but I've gotten into a habit in Atlanta of referring to the Trinity Presbyterian congregation as our church family. Makes me feel good. I wonder if that is an adequate description of our community of faith. To be a Christian community is finally to be a community of the cross. The core value of that kind of community is never comfort; it is always courage. The community of the cross is less interested in maintaining safety than in standing up for the right thing and in speaking out for those whose voices have been silenced by prejudice or poverty or just plain meanness. We should be the church of the cross, my friends, never insulated from the world, but the place where we receive training and empowerment to confront society and help to humanize the world.

It does appear that a great deal of work is left to be done in that regard, humanizing the world, I mean. We think of the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas; the murder just last week of Billy Jack Gaither in Sylacauga, Alabama; the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming several months ago. Matthew Shepard's funeral was held at an Episcopal church, and the priest conducting the service had this to say. "There is an image that comes to my mind when I think of Matthew tied to the wooden cross-rail fence. I replace that image with that of another man who hung upon the cross, and only when I concentrate on that man, fully human, fully God, can I come close to releasing the bitterness that is in my heart."

There you have it. The power of the cross still surging in and out through the human spirit. The reconciling, world-changing power of the cross. I cannot help thinking about another priest of the seventeenth century, the great preacher and poet John Donne, whose words are still not understood but which still speak the only truth that will save the human race. "No man is an island, entire unto himself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Any man's death diminishes me, because I'm involved in all mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."

Surely Jesus meant something similar when he talked about the family of God. In a theological sense, everything that would separate us from God and from one another has been defeated. Getting the word around about that, that is the job of the faith community. Being that actual demonstration project in the world of God's reconciling love -- that is our job.

Finally, I close with a word about possessions, as does our teaching from the gospel of Luke. "So therefore," Jesus said, "none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions." Surely, he did not want everything that they had for himself. What he wanted was freedom for them. He wanted them to have the abundant life that comes from loving God and loving neighbor with all one's heart and mind and soul and strength. He wanted to become rich in service and in love. What an important lesson for us not to lose sight of in an age in which the desire to acquire has become almost a universal obsession. We just can't get enough. Once the affliction only of the rich, this desire to acquire has taken over most every American heart. It builds upon itself. On and on it goes. There is an important word of redemption in the reminder not to allow acquisitiveness and self-centeredness to run amuck in the human heart.

Two weeks ago, a young couple that had been visiting our church called and made an appointment. They said they wanted to talk to me about something. When they came in, they let me learn a little bit about them. They had been married for eight years. They had been uninvolved with the faith community, too busy, they said, getting ahead in their careers, buying a house, traveling on the weekends. "Now we're having a baby," they said, "and we've begun to wonder just what kind of life are we making here. We thought that perhaps we ought to get connected with the church. We hope that through membership here we can find a way to give our Saturdays to help somebody. Do you all build Habitat houses? Do you have any projects that people like us can be involved with?" "Certainly," I told them. They smiled. The husband said, "You know, we just figured out that it is not enough to think about ourselves. That is no good." It made me glad to hear it. They came because they knew it would cost them something.

Large crowds were following Jesus. He turned and said to them, "Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." It sounds like so much foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it is the very power of God.
Let us pray.

Your Son, O God, chose the path that led to pain before joy and to the cross before the glory, and so our prayer today is this: that you would plant his cross in our hearts and that in its power we might come at last to joy and glory through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Copyright 1999 The Rev. Joanna Adams

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