Taking God Seriously

Image Credit:  Christ: the Tekton – Kelly Latimore (from Art in the Christian Tradition) – https://kellylatimoreicons.com/

Proper 18 (23), Year C
7 September 2025

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
Philemon 1:1-21
Luke 14:25-33

When I was growing up in a secular Germany in which many people still held a membership in the church, I would often hear that being a Christian was fine and good as long as one did not become a fanatic. My Lutheran home congregation had a clear evangelical bent and I always thought that when people said being a Christian was fine and good as long as one did not become a fanatic¹ that they were really speaking to me, suggesting I take it easy, maybe go to church less and let my Christianity be defined as Judeo-Christian values, which then certainly were the values of the majority, and because they were the values of the majority, you really didn’t have to do anything different than if you were not a Christian. Ironically that meant that if you were like everybody else, you were a good Christian.

The problem with that is that you don’t need to have faith, you don’t need to have a community, and you embrace a religion that requires nothing of you. Embrace is, of course, much too strong a word because how do you embrace something that means so little? I mean, I like my life to be easy, like most of us, but if being Christian made no difference to my life in the way I live, think, vote, work, what would be the point of it?
I am not suggesting that we are better than our non-Christian neighbours, I am only saying that, quoting the late Mike Yakonelli, if being Christian was only about being nice that I am not interested.

In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus speaks to people who are physically following him. Luke says that large crowds were travelling with Jesus. In a literal sense they are followers, but Jesus reminds them that following him leads to the cross, at least to the cross of Jesus, but he also speaks of his followers having to take up their cross to follow him.

When I was a teenager, one day my mother came home from her Bible study group absolutely incensed. They may have spoken about what it meant to take up one’s cross and follow Jesus. They did speak about suffering.
Now, I have told you that my mother was not well. She suffered from a personality disorder and she certainly regarded herself as a person who suffered, which explains why she was so upset. And she did suffer. She suffered her illness, she suffered my father’s infidelity, and she generally would describe her life as unfulfilled. One of her friends had claimed in the Bible study that her missing the cruise she had booked due to a fracture she had suffered, constituted suffering. Not sure about how a fracture makes you miss a cruise, maybe because she was at the hospital when she needed to board the plane or ship.

The story shows quite beautifully that many of us don’t know what to do with Jesus word that following him entails taking one’s cross upon oneself. Like my mother’s friend we speak of our crosses as illness, or loneliness, or disappointment. We do so because we don’t understand what Jesus meant, and so we fill the void with our own experience of suffering.

Jesus, however, was speaking about following him. Illness, loneliness, or disappointment, unless somehow caused by our allegiance to Jesus, are not the crosses Jesus is speaking of.
Jesus is speaking of the kind of fanaticism I was warned against in my youth. He says that discipleship is serious business.
²⁸For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? ²⁹Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, ³⁰saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” ³¹Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? ³²If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. ³³So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

This week I spoke with a Japanese Christian who in her youth became a Christian against the wishes of her family. That comes a little closer, particularly in regards to division in the family.
Know though, that when Jesus speaks of hating father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even life itself, he is not advocating hate. This is a semitic turn of phrase. It is not about hating about subordinating all things to God.

It seems to me that most Western Christians do not understand this passage because we have been part of what was called a Christian culture, expressive of Judeo-Christian values. I mean by this not that it was easy for us to be Christian, because I think that it’s been harder than we would want to admit. It has been harder because our society’s deep commitment to materialism and militarism. “Commodification and power will solve all problems. If we have the power and the stuff, think of what we can do!” And if you wonder how for a small player like Canada power is a problem, just look at the history of colonialism, of how we treated First Nations, and how we still marginalize many groups, and in regards to reconciliation, we really have not come that far. Most of us don’t see this because our status and our affluence make us blind. Privilege makes you blind to those who who don’t have it, to those who are suffering. You will give a few dollars here or there, but that’s not radical discipleship, it’s not giving up all of our possessions, it is merely expression of Judeo-Christian values. Or put differently, it’s doing (a few) things for people, it’s not being with people.

When I was in youth group we sung a hymnic version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem “By Gracious Powers.” We did not know what to do with verse three,

And when this cup you give is filled to brimming
with bitter suffering, hard to understand,
we take it thankfully and without trembling
out of so good and so beloved a hand.

We told our pastor that we felt like imposters singing the verse. He wisely answered that we should sing it as a prayer, so that one day we could sing it with the martyrs.
That clashes with Judeo-Christian values, with living my best life now, though the scriptures witness that our best life is lived in God, and in obedience to God.

Our reading from Jeremiah presents the Gospel in a nutshell. Listen to verse three and four:
³So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. ⁴The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

God was working at the wheel. The vessel that God was making was spoiled in God’s hands, and God reworked it into another vessel.
God does not give up on us, and even a reading as demanding as today’s Gospel and our lack of understanding of it is not a barrier to God. God will rework us as seems good to God.

In the meantime, we can practice making God our priority in all things. We can practice being fanatic about our faith, which means there is nothing in our life that God does not claim, and there is nothing in our life that God will not redeem. And the times are such, that we will have more opportunity to welcome strangers and share our bread with the needy.

Amen.