What is Discipleship?

Readings: Luke 14:25-35, Acts 2:1-12, Secrets of Heaven 10490:6,7 (see below)
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Photo by Arnau Soler on Unsplash

Good morning, my friends. Happy Pentecost! Today we will be considering the question: What is Discipleship? What does it truly mean to “follow Jesus” in our lives as they exist in this day and age? Because, we all know of the 12 disciples in the gospels. We have had previous sermons on texts that treated of their journey, including their call. But that was a long time ago. Can we think of ourselves as “disciples” of Jesus today? What does that mean for us now?

Let’s begin with looking at the passage from Luke in our reading. Initially, it suggests that true discipleship is something unattainable for the vast majority. Who among us will truly forsake - nay, hate - our families in order to be a disciple of Jesus? Is such a thing even consistent with Jesus other teachings, such as the ones where we are told to love one another? Of course not. So we must look for a deeper meaning. What is Jesus really trying to tell us?

Swedenborg would assert that the way to understand this passage is to see how family members are being used as metaphors. The people who are typically the closest to us in our lives stand for the things that we hold closest to us in our hearts and minds. Our perspectives, our narratives about the world or ourselves, our identities and the actions we take that align with those, our habits and desires and preferences. When these desires that we are wedded to are evil, as in they privilege and support our own selfishness in large and small ways, and when these things that we think are false, again privileging our own selfishness in the same way, then yes, we need to “hate” them and cut them out. And certainly, the bibical language here is intense. We *can* have compassion for ourselves as we struggle to disentangle ourselves from them over time. But the overall message is clear: in order to be a disciple of Jesus, we need to be committed to the process of “carrying our cross.”  We need to be committed to the process of freeing ourselves and healing ourselves from everything that would cause us to create or perpetuate harm.

And while committment to this process requires many things, such as devotion, sacrifice and courage, chief among them, I believe, is humility. Because as we delve into the process of truly taking up our cross, things might not always seem so clear cut. 

This process of taking up our cross will play itself out on many levels, basically as deep as we wish to go with it. We can repent for or let go of any number of desires and ideas and their associated actions that are universally agreed to be “bad” or harmful. Anger, stubbornness, jealously, avarice, defensiveness, prejudice, this list goes on. Sometimes it is very easy to see where we have hurt someone and why. And then, the remedy is very simple. Apologise, *try* not to do things like that anymore, and eventually our diligence and our efforts make us become someone who *doesn’t* do things like that anymore. This is the process of regeneration that we spoke of last week. Eventually, we find we have cut those metaphorical “family members” from our lives, as Jesus asked. We have grown and evolved, and we hold mutual love as the ideal closest to our hearts and minds.

But sometimes the process doesn’t feel quite so simple. As we go deeper into it, we might need to increase our understanding of what are truly good or harmful desires, ideas and actions. Things that we have been taught are good or bad, might have contextual or societal elements, deeper layers, that require untangling. Separating righteous anger and from self-referrental anger, is a good example. Many of us, especially women, might have been taught that anger is always bad, and it certainly *can* be when we give ourselves over to it for selfish reasons. But, anger can actually also be a valuable guide if we are willing to learn how to regulate our experience of it. Can we learn how to avoid acting from it, and if we do, can we make sure we will willing to clean up the mess we make? Can we learn to ask questions of our anger so that we can see what is beneath it: hurt, fear, sadness? Can we learn how to harness its righteous aspects and use it to motivate our pursuit of justice?

Or on the other side of things, what if we have been taught that something is an unequivocal good, but maybe there are aspects of it that are not? Productivity is highly valued in our capitalistic society. We are groomed to achieve, and produce, and climb a ladder of ever-increasing achievement to produce both security and satisfaction for ourselves. But does it produce meaning? Does it produce community? It is good to take responsibility for ourselves, to contribute to society. But to what end? Our own exhaustion? Perhaps some reframing of this idea would help any one of our discipleship journeys.

Or, there is the notion of being useful and caring, in our tradition, and many others. We might have learned that these things are the highest good, and indeed they are! But the lessons our half-evolved selves end up taking from this might sometimes bear scrutiny. Those of us, and I’m including myself here deliberately, who tend towards co-dependence might need to pay attention to why and when we try to be useful and caring. I know for myself, if others are not OK, I find it very hard to be OK within myself. And so then in order to recalibrate my own inner tension, I try to *make sure* others are OK, which can often turn into over-functioning, and not letting other people have their own experience. I’m sure you can see how especially this plays out in parenting. Something that seems like it is good—being useful and caring—actually might not be so entirely, and might be coming from a self-centered place, an inability to regulate not feeling OK. 

And so this is where is all connects to our reading from Acts. The most important part of discipleship is not actually devotion but humility, essentially remaining teachable. Because like everything, devotion can have its dark side. It can become so rigid and unyielding, so attached to this or that ideal, that it actually prevents our growth. In my co-dependence just described, the possiblity exists of being so attached to the idea of “I’m doing something good!” that we are blind to the harm. And then, our very idea of what is “good” becomes one of those metaphorical family members that Jesus tells us to forsake. Or with the earlier example of anger, attachment to the very notion that it is always utterly “bad” means that we might miss all the really juicy and important ways it could help us grow, if we were to come at it all from a different direction.

In our Pentecost story from Acts, the most amazing thing about it was that the Holy Spirit spoke to everyone in their own language, that each person could “hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.” And they asked each other: What does this mean? When we remain teachable, when we center the question “What does this mean?” God will always be speaking to us in our own language. When we have ears to hear what is next for us to learn, God’s Holy Spirit will be present to communicate what we need. And the humility to hear it, to not throw up obstacles and objections based on our various attachments, is the bedrock quality required for taking up our cross, for being a disciple. We need to yield ownership, even over our best efforts and our best ideas.

And this means that the final thing we need to let go of is our attachment to what being a disciple will look like, our attachment to some future perfect self that we have devised. We don’t actually know where our journey will take us. We don’t actually know who we are to become and what that will look like. As Jesus stated in our reading: …those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. Discipleship is ultimately not about what we are willing to give away, but what we are willing to give up, the level to which we are willing to yield ownership over the journey itself.

I’m finding this to be a particularly hard lesson. Perhaps you are too. Or not. This is the beauty of the way the Holy Spirit speaks to us all so uniquely. What a blessed thing; to be so precious to God that we are guided so individually. For we know that there is not a language in the world, nor a language of any singular soul, that God does not speak fluently. Amen.


Readings:

Luke 14: 25-35
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said:
26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.
27 And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
28 “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?
29 For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,
30 saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
31 “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?
32 If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.
33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.
34 “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
35 It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Acts 2:1-12
1 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.
2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.
3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.
4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
5 Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.
6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken.
7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?
8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?
9 Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,
10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome
11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
12 Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

Secrets of Heaven #10490:6-7
…Is there anyone who does not see that these words should not be taken literally, at the very least from the fact that they say without any qualification that father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters must be hated before anyone can be the Lord's disciple, when yet it is one of the Lord's commands, that no one should be hated, not even an enemy?

[7] It is self-evident that the things which are a person's own, that is, evils and falsities in their own order, should be understood by the names of those family members, since it also says that a person must hate their own soul and renounce all their possessions, that is, the things which are properly theirs….’Being the Lord's disciple' means being led by Him and not by self, thus by the forms of good and the truths which come from the Lord and not by the evils and falsities which come from the person.