A Crisis of Discipleship
I don’t have to tell you the world is a scary place right now. Wars are raging, laws are coming undone, democracy is teetering, groceries are barely affordable. It’s easy to point fingers in a moment like this – to say it must be “their fault” that things are like this. But what we’re facing here, friends, is primarily a crisis of Christian discipleship.
Often when we hear the word “disciple” we think “oh, one of those guys who followed Jesus around.” But all the word really means is someone who has disciplined themselves – hear the same root word? – someone who has disciplined themselves to a particular teacher’s way of living.
And so in that sense anyone who calls themselves Christian is, in theory at least, a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Christianity remains the most-professed religion on planet Earth, and yet in two thousand years have we disciplined ourselves to behave like Jesus? Gentle toward the wounded? Welcoming of the outcast? Refusing worldly success to spend time alone with God in prayer? Angry enough to flip tables when confronted with injustice?
Do we behave like students of Jesus?
Right now, Christians control the largest percentage of the planet's wealth, and the largest percentage of the planet's weaponry. We own the most guns. We control the two largest nuclear arsenals. We have the greatest presence on platforms like social media that facilitate bullying and harassment.
Injustice will remain entrenched until Christians get serious about our discipleship.
We can spend all day filling hungry stomachs and march in all the anti-racism protests, but until we allow our hearts to be transformed — until we allow our priorities to be re-oriented to Christ’s reality — we will keep building new institutions that damage people.
adrienne maree brown, the author of a beautiful book called “Emergent Strategy”, puts it this way. She says, “The nature of the world is fractal. What we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system. … [We must learn to] see our own lives and work and relationships as the front line, the first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the Planet.”
We should absolutely be working for justice and systemic change. Please don’t hear me to be saying those things aren’t important! But unless we also allow ourselves to be changed, those toxic systems will always revert, because we haven’t changed the people who make up the system.
If the scale of the task at hand seems overwhelming, let me remind everyone that fixing the world isn’t our job. That’s God’s job.
God is in charge of redeeming and restoring the created order.
When you need a reminder of this, I suggest you go outside some evening and look at the stars for a while. Or if you’re a morning person, get up early enough to watch the sunrise tomorrow. Sit still for a while and saturate yourself with awe at the sheer enormity of the powers that are at work in our universe. At how tiny we are in comparison, and yet how much joy we get from witnessing God’s wonders at work.
The stars do not need my good behavior in order to turn. The sun doesn’t need me to end racism in order to come up. The tide is not waiting for me to give up my life savings before it can come in. God does not NEED anything from you or me.
Only my neighbor needs something from me.
The systems for healing all of this were already in place before the beginning of the world. They are at work already. The pressure here is not on us, is what I’m saying. What’s here is an invitation. Our job, like John the Baptist, is to make God’s paths straight. That’s our calling. To look for where God is at work, and to help ease the way. When we consent to discipleship we get to be part of healing this priceless fractured beautiful singular world of ours. I assume that if you’re sitting in a church pew, you care about this! You care about participating in what God is doing to rescue us.
This is why Jesus matters, today as much as ever. Jesus is telling us in this passage what it’s going to take to transform us through this incredibly scary and dark time.
Let’s hear the passage again. This time I’ll read from The Message translation by Eugene Peterson.
One day when large groups of people were walking along with him, Jesus turned and told them, “Anyone who comes to me but refuses to let go of father, mother, spouse, children, brothers, sisters—yes, even one’s own self!—can’t be my disciple. Anyone who won’t shoulder his own cross and follow behind me can’t be my disciple.
“Is there anyone here who, planning to build a new house, doesn’t first sit down and figure the cost so you’ll know if you can complete it? If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money, you’re going to look pretty foolish. Everyone passing by will poke fun at you: ‘He started something he couldn’t finish.’
“Or can you imagine a king going into battle against another king without first deciding whether it is possible with his ten thousand troops to face the twenty thousand troops of the other? And if he decides he can’t, won’t he send an emissary and work out a truce?
“Simply put, if you’re not willing to take what is dearest to you, whether plans or people, and kiss it good-bye, you can’t be my disciple.”
Jesus isn’t saying these things to be an elitist jerk. He’s saying these things because this huge crowd has come to him. This crowd considers Jesus to be A Winner®, and they’re following him because they wanna win too. Don’t we all? But Jesus is not only only his way to a crown. He is first on his way to the cross. He has to give everything up first. Then he gets resurrected into God’s kingdom.
Friends, we cannot get past the division and violence of our cultural moment without letting go of what we’re clinging to for our identity.
The answers Jesus gives the crowd are the answers to the questions we’re asking every day:
How do I dismantle racism? When I stop needing to belong to my family or my nation or my denomination – when I belong to God and I trust that’s enough – I am set free to speak up against oppression in my family, or my nation, or my denomination.
How do I end poverty? When I stop needing to be wealthy & successful, when I trust that Jesus’ love defines me and not my bank balance, I am set free to be generous with what I have to give.
How do I love others better? I let go of my desire to believe that the problem is them, and I am set free to see the ways I also need to change.
If we follow Jesus to the cross, one by one he will teach us how to let go of the identities that are binding us. Remember what Rev Phil said about binding and loosing last week? Yes, this is going to be painful sometimes. Letting go of who we think we are is not a comfortable process.
But do we have any gardeners in the room? You prune a plant not because it’s bad and ought to suffer; you prune a plant to help it thrive and grow into its most gloriously abundant and expansive form.
I’ve always liked the story that the first disciple to see the resurrected Jesus mistook him for a gardener. Maybe she wasn’t wrong after all.
Discipleship is a pruning. Following Jesus to the cross means allowing him to set us free from what keeps us small. Mean. Greedy. Divided. Judgmental.
Jesus can teach us to let go of all that.
So no, discipleship is not a “get out of suffering free” card. It’s about embracing our deeply human vulnerability. It’s trusting in resurrection and putting down everything I think I need to be okay in the world, everything I rely on for my identity, until there’s nothing more important to me than truth & love.
Remember that piece of paper I asked you to to write on when we got started? I want you to look at that name right now and think about what’s the biggest thing getting in the way of you loving that person better. Remember you don’t have to show it to anyone, not even your spouse; this is just for you to reflect on before God.
What’s holding you back from loving this person? What it would take to let that thing go and put love first?
Or maybe love isn’t the problem. Maybe you love this person but you struggle to be honest with them. Maybe truth is where you’re stuck. What’s getting in the way of healthy boundaries, or saying no? What would it take to let go of being “nice” so you can follow Jesus’ example of flipping some tables?
I’ll ask another question here and I don’t want you to raise your hand, because this is really personal and I don’t want to put anyone on the spot. But I’m curious whether any of you wrote down your own name on that paper.
I am often the person I find it hardest to love. I have an exceptional capacity to love difficult people, but if I so much as steep my tea for a minute too long it gets added to the mental litany of Reasons Why I Am A Worthless Failure.
I say this because I want you to know that no matter what name you wrote down, there’s someone in this room facing a similar challenge. None of us are ever alone in this journey.
So there are three things I want us to take home from this passage today.
The first is that God wants our consent.
God isn’t going to force us to do any of this. God tells us honestly what it’s going to take, and invites us to choose. You get to take this discipleship journey at whatever pace works for you. Go as slow or as fast as you have resources to go. Just make sure you don’t quit until there are no more names left for you to write down on that piece of paper. As long as there’s someone in the world that you find it hard to love, there’s something you can work on letting go of.
The second thing is, Jesus always turns toward us.
Right there in verse 25, he turns toward the crowd to deliver the hard news. We can’t be rescued from the challenging decisions we’re going to have to make as disciples. Jesus has already done literally everything he can do for us — he has gone to the cross and given his whole life. He can’t make our choices for us. But he never leaves us alone in our pain. There’s a relationship here that we can lean on in ANY circumstance.
I do want to make an important distinction here that this doesn’t mean we’re never going to feel alone, because that part’s gonna happen pretty definitely. Feelings are valid and it’s crucial that we learn to treat them with respect for the information they can give us, but they aren’t necessarily true.
I can feel totally bereft while surrounded by a cloud of caring people who would love to help me out if they knew I was in need.
Next time you find yourself feeling alone, I invite you to be gentle with yourself and look around for a relationship to lean on. Whether that’s a friend or a family member or a therapist or a spiritual community, all of those are ways that Jesus’ love comes to us and gives us the resilience to survive our pain.
So, number one, God wants our consent. Number two, Jesus turns toward us. We need to lean on trustworthy relationships; we are not meant to do this discipleship thing alone.
But the third lesson is the hard one: It is possible to “come to Jesus” but fail to follow and learn from him.
This is the bit that I really wish Jesus didn’t say.
This is the reality that has landed us in this cultural moment. Millions of people across the world have come to Jesus, but we have failed to let him teach us. Transform us. Disciple us.
The point here is not to make us feel ashamed, but I do want this to hold us accountable. We must not stop at the first big transformation in our identities and assume that’s all that needs to happen. Jesus’ disciples didn’t just hear his first call and magically know everything they needed to know about the Kingdom of God. It took years of teaching and correction from Jesus to mature them into leaders who could carry on the church.
Discipleship is a lifelong process; it starts with the salvation of coming to Jesus as our teacher, but it continues for the rest of our lives, pruning layer after layer of defensive identity off us until what’s left is a bone-deep rest in the certainty that you are a beloved child of God — and so is the person you wrote down on that paper.
What might change in your life if you trusted that truth before anything else?