Vicar Karla
Well, let me tell you, the gospel text for today is not one that has preachers chomping at the bit when they look at the lectionary. Throughout the book of Luke, we are shown Jesus as a peacemaker- not a peace keeper but a peacemaker. Someone who prioritizes the lowly, who exemplifies God’s love through justice making. Luke is filled with apt reminders of our shared calling to follow Christ’s calling to love and serve our neighbors, paying particular attention to our neighbors who are neglected, and not just neglected, but and even harmed by the powers of this world. Today’s reading from Luke, though, reminds us that Jesus tells us following these directives is not easy and that there is a cost to our discipleship.
One of the most prominent examples of this costly discipleship is the life and ministry of Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bohnhoefer. Bohnhoefer was a Lutheran minister living and working in Germany as the Nazis rose to power. He was a staunch critic of the church’s complacency and of the ways he saw the church bending to the will of a tyrant, the tyrant here being democratically elected Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer criticised the church for not exemplifying true discipleship to Christ, ignoring the plight of the ostracized and capitulating to an alarmingly rising fascist empire.
Bohnhoeffer left Germany for a time for further study at Union Theological Seminary in New York where he found himself inspired by the activism of African Americans in Harlem. He witnessed firsthand the ways that racism was blatantly on display in the United States, and he returned to Germany emboldened to speak out against the church’s capitulation to the Nazis. Not surprisingly, this made him a target. And though he was given numerous opportunities to leave Germany to live in safety and comfort, he refused those opportunities again and again eventually being executed by the Nazis as an enemy of the Third Reich. His discipleship and determination to follow Christ’s teaching led him to pay the ultimate price which was his life here on Earth.
Now, I don’t know about you, but as I look around at the ways harmful policies are advancing throughout the United States, targeting the vulnerable who are already on the margins, I feel pretty confident in knowing how Jesus would react. Despite the alarming rise in Christian Nationalism which proclaims a wrathful and vengeful Jesus Christ, we know that Christ centered the lowly and encourages us to love and to serve and to do so boldly. But, in today’s context, what is the cost of that discipleship?
Today’s gospel reading reminds us that our calling to follow Jesus, to follow his example of justice and services is a tall order to be sure and that it is not without the risk of making us a target of the powers of the world that do the harm in the first place, especially when so much of that harm is done by those who claim their faith as justification for that harm. I follow a lot of female theologians, pastors, and bishops on various social media platforms, and none of them can post anything without someone inevitably coming in the comments to accuse them of heresy, to “remind them” that women can’t be pastors….when in fact, as we know, it was actually women who were the very first to preach the good news of Jesus’ resurrection but that was my Easter sermon so I digress.
Jesus does not sugarcoat the call to discipleship, and today’s gospel reading reminds of that. Jesus doesn’t tell us to follow him when it is convenient, easy, and without risk. It is precisely the opposite; that we are called to enact that discipleship in the midst of the hardships and in the midst of the ways that sharing this message of justice and love may just put us at odds with the ways of the world.
It seems so odd, doesn’t it, that we can hear messages of prosperity gospel in various parts of Christianity. If you’re not familiar with the term, it basically comes down to the belief that if you are successful in life, it is because God wants you to be. That if you have the good job and the fancy house or the third vacation home or the private plane, it is because God is pleased with you and that is your reward for your ardent belief or faith in God’s goodness. And so often, we see the measures of success that are used are ones that celebrate the accumulation of wealth and of stuff. Those are the world’s metrics of success. Not God’s. When we have texts like today where Jesus tells us pretty point blank that not only does our worth not come from the things we are able to accumulate but that all of those things actually separate us from our discipleship.
May we all work earnestly to not measure our success by the things the world prioritizes, but rather by the generosity and humility that Christ advocates for. That where the world tells us to buy more, to earn more, to keep more for ourselves, Christ reminds us to be generous, to share what we have because in God there is abundance.