Pentecost 14                                 Luke 14:25-33                                   9/5/04

                                                  "Don’t Be A Moron"

Goodness! Where did the summer go? Already our young adults are off to college (and we have an opportunity to show hospitality to students from Edinboro). This week also saw our children and teachers return to classrooms.

Of course, next Sunday we begin a new year of Sunday school. The basement will be full of young disciples eagerly learning about Jesus and what He did for them.

It’s a shame that so many young people think that confirmation is graduation and that discipleship ends there. To those of you who were confirmed last year, to those who will be confirmed this year and to those who are well beyond confirmation I’d like to say, "Don’t be a moron".

Now, before anyone gets offended, let me explain the real meaning of "moron". In the verses just after today’s gospel, but related to it, we have Jesus telling his disciples to be careful that they don’t become spiritually dead and useless. He uses the analogy of salt losing its taste. The Greek word for "losing its taste" is "moraino" from which our word moron comes. Moron originally meant someone who is foolish or useless.

Thus, a Christian who stops being a disciple risks becoming spiritually dead and useless. So, don’t be a moron; continue to be a disciple.

People have all kinds of strange ideas about what being a disciple means. Some think that the term applied only to the original twelve. Some think that you have to have special skills or a special calling to be a disciple. Some think that to be a disciple means leaving home, changing one’s whole life and being wholly dedicated to God.

Only that last phrase is a true statement about being a disciple and it is only part of what it means to be a disciple. First, we are all called to be disciples. This call is issued at the time of our baptisms, thus God expects each of us to be disciples.

Nor is a disciple expected to have special skills. In fact, it is the ongoing effort to develop in one’s discipleship that makes a person a disciple. A disciple is a student, pure and simple. In other words, we are called to life-long learning. Even if a person earns a Ph.D. in Scripture from a world class divinity school, there never comes a time when they have learned everything they need to know about God and what He did for us. There is always more and this is a large part of what feeds our relationship with God. It is what keeps our relationship with God alive and vital.

That term we Lutherans love, "saved by grace alone" can become matter of fact, even meaningless perhaps, if we don’t spend time regularly reading, talking and thinking about what it means for us and for our lives. It’s so easy to just take it for granted.

Does this mean that those who don’t come to Bible class and attend worship every Sunday aren’t Christians? No. Even if a person never joins in a Bible study and rarely, if ever, comes to church, we can’t say they are not Christians. Such a person will probably go on believing and may even have sufficient faith to weather the storms of life, but they are not disciples, they are only believers like the crowd that followed Jesus. If we said that you had to "do" something - be a disciple...or even come to church - to be a believer, we would be saying that people had to earn salvation. And that is not true. Salvation and the ability to believe is a gift from God which He doesn’t take away just because we choose to not be disciples. But, we could say that a person who chooses to not be a disciple lacks a deep appreciation of that gift. When we understand that the cost of our being in relationship with God was Jesus death on the cross, how can not respond by seeking to be disciples?

Jesus death on the cross meant much more though than just our being brought into relationship with God (wonderful as that is) or of being given eternal life or of being made believers. Jesus death on the cross also means that we have been freed from anything that might rule us. So often, when I ask people who haven’t been to church for a month or more if there is a problem, their reply is, "No, we’ve just been so busy."

That busyness may be from working extra hours, family obligations, school or athletic activities or exhaustion from them. Our lives can be taken over by our supposed need for "things" (cars, investments, vacations). Those things that crowd our lives and perhaps crowd out God, can come to enslave us. Jesus death on the cross offers us freedom. We don’t have to get our sense of self-worth or security from possessions, pride or power. We are given our worth - worth greater than anything we could earn - by the God who loved us enough to die for us. And we can choose to be claim our freedom from these slave masters. It may take time and determination. It may even take help, but with discipline we can claim our freedom from anything that enslaves us.

Discipline is the second part of what it means to be a disciple. Discipline, like moron, has gotten a bad rap. We think of discipline as what someone does to us, punishment of some kind. Please hear this. Discipline is NOT about punishment. Discipline is about being a disciple. It is about learning.

We create an environment for our children, whether as parents at home or as teachers in school, that we hope will help them learn. At home we insist that the TV be off while homework is done and that the child go to bed early enough to get sufficient rest. In school we have rules about idle chatter and what may be brought to school so that the child is not distracted from what we are teaching. And of course, there’s homework...

The same is true for us as disciples. In order to learn we need a certain amount of discipline. Of course, as adults we set our own disciplines. This may be a set time for Bible reading and prayer. It may be setting priorities like church comes before other activities. It may be budgeting not only so that we can be free from "things", but also free to give to God.

Jesus says, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple." This not only sounds like an impossible demand or discipline, but also very unlike Jesus. Again we can see how a deeper study of Scripture can help us know God better. Going deeper into this verse, we learn that for Semitic people (Jews and Arabs) hate did not mean animosity. Hate meant "turn away from or detach from". In other words, to be a disciple means not being so wrapped up in other people or even life itself that we are controlled by them. It’s that freedom issue, and thus ‘grace’ again. Jesus invites us to the freedom to choose how we will live our lives. This again takes discipline. We don’t loosen up the bonds just by deciding to. It takes thought and planning. Furthermore, these other people and parts of our lives are important too and we don’t want to reject or neglect them. We just want to choose and to make discipleship a part of life as well.

This then brings us to the third part of what it means to be disciples. Discipleship is our vocation. We need to live it out, not just by being active at church, but also by bringing it into our lives outside church. Discipleship is a way of life. Or as St. Francis of Assisi said, "Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary use words."

 

Discipleship is seeing our lives and the world around us through God’s eyes. It is caring for others, forgiving them, sharing with them even if they are not someone we find likeable, even if they have hurt us. This is what Jesus did and wants to teach His disciples to do.

Discipleship is caring for the environment and all that we have because everything is a gift from God and ultimately belongs to God. It is picking up that can by the side of the road and putting it in the recycling bin. It is using resources in a way that acknowledges their limitations. It is caring for our bodies because they were made by God and He sees them as beautiful and valuable.

Discipleship is making personal, business, and political decisions based on what we believe Jesus would do. And here is the place where we might find that cross Jesus invites us to take up. At the time Luke was written (around 70 AD), following Jesus, being His disciple, could be a dangerous decision. Persecution of Christians had begun and claiming Jesus as Lord could mean death. Even today, Christian disiples in some areas of the world, face persecution. As disciples, called by God to be Jesus’ followers in the 21^st Century - in the USA, we need to consider what taking up the cross means for us...and here’s a clue, it has nothing to do with suffering an arthritic knee in silence or putting up with a grouchy spouse.

Living out our vocation as disciples means taking time each day to assess where Christ was in our day and how we witnessed to Him in the way we lived, if not in the actual words we used.

Jesus’ description of what it takes to be a disciple may not sound like fun, but it has its rewards. Look around you. See your sisters and brothers who are enrolled in this school for disciples. Ask them what they have gained from being disciples and share with them your experiences. We don’t have to wait for a special day for our school to open and we don’t have to go very far. Please join us in our school for disciples. Amen.