Today’s readings are about choices. What choices will we make in life? How we will think about one another, and act towards each other and what we will hold fast to as the guiding principles or foundations of our lives.
In the Old Testament reading – these choices are diametrically opposed – choose life and prosperity by following God’s way of love, or death and adversity by turning our backs on God. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.
All of us want to do this of course – to choose life, for ourselves and for those we love.
As Christians though we are called to go beyond our own immediate family and seek a way of living that brings life for all.
Now we know that living in this way is challenging enough, but in today’s Gospel, Jesus lays out what is required to follow him as a disciple – and its unbelievably tough.
When he talks about building towers and going out to wage war, he points out that no-one with any common sense at all would do those things without adequate preparation and weighing up the cost. If you don’t prepare the ground, you might not be able to carry through and all is lost. It’s all good, sensible advice.
But either side of this are two stark statements – put bluntly – hate your family and sell all your possessions.
Suddenly, we are into a completely different kind of conversation.
Did the disciples look at each other in shock and dismay?
What on earth did all those others in the crowd, the hangers on, think when they heard his words?
Not really the best way to carry out a discipleship recruitment drive, surely!
To follow Jesus then, do we need to sit down and work out beforehand if we are up to it? Can we meet the cost? This seems to be what he is saying here.
When Jesus speaks to his disciples about the cost of following him, it sounds to our ears impossible and unacceptable even. How could we hate our family, and even life itself? We do know that the Christian life is costly – carrying the cross and walking in the way of Jesus does demand much of us.
In this passage Jesus is speaking to those who will be his closest disciples – who in order to follow him – did indeed leave behind homes, families, livelihoods – and then later, when they carried on his work – became apostles and then martyrs as a result.
But we hear that he turns to the large crowd who are also following him to speak to them so we too need to take seriously what he is saying here.
Loving our own family as we do, we are also called to love one another – our brothers and sisters in Christ, our mothers, fathers, children in Christ – in a new way, because we are all one in Jesus as he is one with God. It is a new identity and a new relationship with each other – with everyone.
Paul makes this clear in his very clever and subtle letter to Philemon. Paul is putting the case for Philemon’s runaway slave, Onesimus and writes to his friend Philemon, in a letter that will be read out publicly, making it clear what Philemon must do – its a very clever sleight of hand! And he is doing this both to ensure a good outcome for Onesimus, but also because he is teaching Philemon and everyone who hears the letter something very important which is very radical and challenging. Paul is saying that in the new world that Jesus has brought into being there are no distinctions anymore, no slaves or free, Jew or Greek – we are to see each other as one family, all equal and all equally loved in God’s eyes.
Paul is telling Philemon that he should accept Onesimus back, in Christian love, not to be punished as a slave but welcomed as an equal and loved like a brother.
But we know that we find it a constant challenge – to really love one another as God loves us – whether family, friends or those who we see as different to us.
Being a Christian, following Jesus, is not easy! We need to prepare ourselves, we need to be prepared to make sacrifices, to carry the cross.
Today, as the Church enters into the season of Creationtide, and in the world as it is – there are some immediate challenges, maybe even sacrifices that we need to be prepared to make.
On the front page of this week’s Church Times is a stark photo of grapes in a vineyard in the south of France this summer, shrivelling and withering on the vine.
The organization Christian Climate Action has just published a document called ‘Stop crucifying Creation’ and exhorts the Church to ‘follow the example of Jesus by taking radical nonviolent action in this existential emergency.’
What does Jesus’ challenge that we must carry our cross and follow him, the Lord of Creation, mean, in the light of this?
What sacrifices are we prepared to make in our own life choices to help combat the effects of global warming?
And if we are to love everyone as if they were our sister or brother, how are we to respond when vulnerable and displaced people come seeking asylum with us?
Are we to go and stand outside their one place of safety, a refuge from the terrible traumas they have suffered – many of which our own nation is complicit in causing – and abuse them, threaten them?
What is Jesus, himself a refugee, forced to flee from his own land, saying to us about all this?
And even if we are not there, taking part in these protests – recently in Epping and over the last two Fridays, at the Dragonfly Hotel here in Peterborough too – then what is going on inside our own heads and hearts as we think and speak about these things and as we think and speak about these people with others?
Jesus’ words in the Gospel tell us that we do have to make a clear choice in our lives – between our own self interest and the needs of others, between truth and falsehood, good and evil, between the easy way of vilifying others and the hard way of loving them no matter what – ultimately to answer the challenge of choosing the way of God.
God’s way brings life and prosperity – although not necessarily prosperity in worldly wealth, so much as spiritual treasures – but to walk the way of God also asks us to challenge injustice, to live for others, to love unconditionally and to be prepared to give up our own comforts and interests. The challenge here is to a radical discipleship – that of unlimited love for everything and everyone that God has made.
Amen.
Service: Revd Michelle Dalliston 7th September 2025. (St John the Baptist Church Peterborough UK)
Readings: Deuteronomy 30.15-end; Psalm 1; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14.25-33