Well, it's here again the great September surge. Hordes of people who weren't in town just the other day have now shown up. School is open. Football is back. There is a new press of people on the sidewalks and streets. An electric freshness is back in the air, the returning crackle and buzz of new beginnings.
The energy is awesome that goes with new beginnings. You start something fresh, it can be intoxicating. New season, new studies, new project, new people, new love, new passion, new dreams doesn't starting something just feel good? And most of us find a way to make our beginnings good ones. The thrill of newness infuses us with energy to make beginnings that are focused, happy, hopeful, and strong.
It's a good thing, I guess. It's good we can be excited by beginnings, good that we don't feel at the outset how hard and how dreary and how draining any or all of these new ventures can become once we've been at them for awhile. Almost anything worth taking on will sooner or later weigh more, require more, cost more than we imagined when we began. It's true of love, it's true of learning, it's true of sport and art and all good work. Maybe it's best we can't fully know the painful cost of such treasures at the outset, otherwise we might never start trying for them. Maybe the blissfully ignorant thrill of beginning is essential for worthwhile pursuits that turn out to be hard.
But the opposite can also be true. The thrill of beginnings can set us up for failure. Because starting is easy, we may be fooled into thinking that the thing itself ought always to be easy, so that when it gets really hard we're shocked and dismayed and maybe even give it up. You know how true this is of relationships in our culture, especially the romantic kind. So many people are in love with falling in love, addicted to the chase, but once the real, ongoing demands and obligations of actual relationship start piling up, the thrill is gone and bye-bye love. Many a worthwhile pursuit is abandoned or otherwise weakened because our pleasure in the starting of it was unprepared for the rigors in the living of it. It happens in romance and in friendships and in the classroom and in your life's work and it happens all the time with reference to faith.
Jesus knew this well. He knew the seduction of an easy beginning. And it's a measure, I believe, of his kindness, that more than once when he saw people showing up to start some kind of new life with him, he let out a warning. Don't you start this, he said, unless you mean to keep at it for the duration. Think about what you're doing here. Carefully consider what the costs will be, do some serious reflection on what will be required of you to put my name and my way on your life. If you won't do what it takes, you can't come with me.
Jesus was not a church-growth specialist! He apparently had no interest in getting bigger crowds. Me, these days I'm all about recruitment. I spent hours on campus Friday trying to sign up new students for our campus ministry. Come Wednesday we'll be out on "the diag" trying again. And you who are visiting this church today and others who will be visiting in the weeks ahead, I hope and I pray that you'll stay with us and join with us and serve and grow with us as long as you can. I would want you to know that we've got a lot to offer here, and I'd want you to know that you've got a lot to offer to us and to the world and to God through a church just like this one. I want to invite you to join with us here. I want to invite you most of all, all of you, to be a disciple of Jesus. But while I am saying all this, Jesus himself is saying: "Not so fast. You'd better give this more thought. You don't want to join with me unless you've really thought through what it's going to cost you."
He made one such speech on a day when, sure enough, the big crowds were flocking to him. At the moment he's a star. He's charismatic, he's witty, tells great stories; he makes sick people well, makes sad people laugh again, gives you hope, gives you the thrilling sense that you're in the presence of God. They all want to be with him.
So he throws them a couple of questions.
"Would any of you launch right in on a building project without first figuring out what money and materials you'll need to finish it? Of course not. You could end up with a nice open-air basement! The neighbors would howl. They'd say you can't finish what you start.
"Or can you imagine a king so dumb he sends 10,000 troops to fight off an enemy of 20,000 without a plan for how his smaller force can prevail? Of course not! If he sees he can't win, he saves face, he saves lives he negotiates for peace."
So with us all, Jesus is saying. With reference to the ultimate concern with reference to God and to your own soul beware of beginnings that are doomed because they are naοve and unprepared to do what it takes. In the things that matter most, don't start without asking what it takes to finish.
Just here he speaks some of the harshest words he ever spoke. "You can't be my disciple, you can't be my disciple, you can't be my disciple." He says it three times, each time attached to the word unless.
The first one blows us away. "You can't be my disciple unless you hate your parents, your spouse, your children, your siblings, even life itself." Hate? Jesus, the very enfleshment of love, says hate your children, your partner, your parents, hate life too? Well, he doesn't mean hate as we mean it. He was using a Semitic hyperbole, familiar to his hearers. Hate in this usage has nothing to do with anger or ill will. It means loving something less ultimately than you love something else. It means a certain detachment from who and what you love because of a greater attachment that precedes and outweighs all else. You can't be my disciple, he says, if any of these attachments is absolute. Now that sounds more palatable than hating our loved ones; but in all honesty it hardly puts us at ease. He's warning us off drawing our identity from them, he's calling us to loosen our grip on them, to loosen, if need be, their grip on us. One way or another, we cannot keep them and they cannot keep us. Life itself we cannot keep. Unless we live like this is so, unless we uncurl our anxious fingers from them all, we cannot love, not really, and we won't have what it takes to be the disciples of Jesus.
He says the same thing about possessions. You can't be my disciple if you don't give up all your possessions. I don't think he means that possessions in themselves are bad. My guess is he means that you and I are incapable of possessing without somehow being possessed. If you can't let it go in a heartbeat, it's got you. You can't be my disciple, he says, if your stuff has got you.
And no one, he says in a kind of summary, can be my disciple who does not carry the cross and follow me. What does that mean? I don't fully know how to say, and I am not worthy to attempt to say. But it points at least to all that we are, and all that we had hoped to be, given to God with the willing submission to suffer for love's sake, as love calls forth suffering, to die for love's sake, as love requires dying.
Are you sure you want to be my disciple, he says And it's kindness I'll say it again it's his burning, brilliant kindness that sets him to saying such things. He knows we are dazzled by the prospect of boundless love, the truest desire of the world, the deepest and loveliest longing of our hearts. He knows how utter is our need for it. And he won't have us reaching for it in vain. It will take this, he says: all that you have, all that you love, all that you are. So infinite is God's gift to us, there is no response that is adequate or even meaningful apart from emptying for it fully and opening to it fully. That is all. Think about that, says Christ, because I want what you start with me and what I start with you to come to completion.
We may consider it, if we like, our cost. But more truly we could call it our necessity. A faithful detachment from possessions, people, and from our very lives is not some price we pay for God. It's an opening of the hands to hold and to share all that God gives.
It's an answering love, that's all, to the love that has already paid all costs.
