Scripture Reading: Luke 14:25-35

Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

“Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Counting the Cost of Discipleship

A Sermon by James Huenink

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today in our Gospel reading, Jesus talks about counting the cost of being a disciple. He says a couple of things—some that are rather challenging—like: "If anyone comes after me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

He talks about someone who looks to build a building but starts without a budget, figures out that he doesn't have the cash, and then everybody laughs at him. And so the question for every Christian should be: What is the cost of following Jesus? What does it mean to turn and hate our father, mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters, and even our own life? Or to carry our own cross and follow Jesus?

Today, I'd like to talk about four stories from history that help to show us what people have done that are examples of this—counting the cost, carrying the cross, and leading the way in the Christian life.

Jesus Christ: The Ultimate Example

You can't start a set of stories like this without pointing to our Savior, Jesus Christ, who truly is the one who bore the cross and counted the cost. Jesus did exactly that. He is the one who came to earth to save you, who looked down from his heavenly throne and found lost and condemned sinners and said, "I will go and die for them."

Everything that is written in the New Testament has a Jesus who is looking forward to his death on the cross. He is constantly, always progressing towards that magnificent moment when he would give up his life for you and for me. Jesus does this knowing that it will be about suffering and death. He does it knowing that he will be beaten and whipped, have a crown of thorns jammed on his head, be rejected by the very people he came to save, and suffer and die perhaps the most brutal and terrible execution a man can face.

And he started out knowing that this is what would happen. From the very beginning, he knew that he would come and die to save you from your sins, and that his death would be the beginning of a journey through the grave to the resurrection, so that he could pave a path through death into life for you. And all it cost him was dying for you—his very life, everything that he had—and he did it gladly.

Knowing that at any moment he could have turned aside and called on the angels to go and defeat the enemy. At any moment, he could have said, "Ah, you know what? I don't feel like it today," slipped off into the crowd—but he didn't. He believed you were too important. He believed your life was too precious, and the lives of every single Christian that has ever lived, and every single Christian that will ever come. He hated his own life for you, bore his cross, died and rose so that you can live forever.

This is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus: to follow the path of Christ, to give up everything in the hope of everlasting life. Which is why Jesus tells us: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple."

Perpetua: Faith Above Family

The next story is one of my favorites. I know I've used it many times here before, but I'm going to tell it again because it is so good. It is the story of Perpetua, a North African Roman noble who heard the word of Jesus and became a Christian.

During the time as she was getting ready to prepare for baptism, she got caught—turned in by her own family—and they brought her before a judge, a magistrate. And you know what the cost would be for her to be set free? It was super easy. All she had to do was drop a few grains of incense on the altar to the Caesar and they would let her go. But she refused.

They even brought her dear father in front of her, who pleaded with her: "Daughter, if you care about me, give this up." She said, "No." They mentioned her baby, newly born and nursing: "Don't you care about your child?" She said, "No."

And as she waited in prison, they baptized her. And do you know what she prayed for? Not release, not safety—she prayed that she would prove to be a Christian when they let her loose in the arena.

Jesus said: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple."

Perpetua and the martyrs who died with her—there were several—they knew what this meant. They knew that the cross of Jesus Christ, the resurrection that he offers, is far more valuable than anything.

The Salzburg Lutherans: Leaving Everything Behind

The next story I want to tell you is one I don't use very often, but I think is pretty great. It is the story of the Salzburg Lutherans in 1731 in the German nations.

During this time, there was a rule that happened after the wars of religion. Once they brought about peace, the rule was: whoever was in charge, their religion was your religion. So if the king or prince or ruler of a nation was Catholic, his people were Catholic. If the king or prince or ruler of the nation was Lutheran, the people had to be Lutheran. And if the person was Calvinist, well, I think you get the idea.

Right now that does not sound like a good place to live in. If you want to be a regular person, your prince dies and a new one comes in, and he's a different religion, all of a sudden the church has got to change the sign out front. Many people didn't do that, though.

In the case of the Salzburg Lutherans, Leopold Anton von Thurmian was a Catholic archbishop and ruler. He reigned in that area from 1727 to 1744, and while he was doing that, the word of the Lutheran church was spreading through the rural Alpine regions of the area. And he didn't like that, so he decided to issue a decree: Everyone would have to convert to Catholicism or leave. If you owned land, he gave you a whole two months to get out of dodge. But if you owned nothing, you had to leave within the week.

And do you know what the Salzburg Lutherans did? They left. They walked with only what they could carry out of Salzburg and into other places. Didn't have a place to go, no property. They certainly didn't have time to sell anything, at least at market rate. They left—left property, land, lives, communities, jobs, people they loved—and they exited.

This was a very famous event that happened in Germany. Everybody knew about it, and the Lutherans all over that disparate nation used them as examples of faithfulness, because they decided that being one of us—faithful to Christ and the pure grace of the Gospel—was more important than their homes, their properties, their communities, their livelihood, their land. Everything they had, they left it behind with nothing in the future.

The King of Prussia, however, saw this as an opportunity, and so he wanted his lands settled. So the many thousands of Salzburg Lutherans all got an invitation to go to Prussia and find places there. And so they walked, faithful to the Gospel that they had, faithful to their Savior Jesus Christ, not willing to compromise on even a single point of doctrine because they loved their Savior.

Rafaravavy Rasalama: Singing Through Suffering

For the final story, I'd like to go to another African nation. This one is Madagascar, where one of the fastest growing Lutheran churches on the planet is located. Some of the first missionaries of modern times went to Madagascar in about 1824, and a woman named—please don't bite me on my pronunciation—a woman named Rafaravavy Rasalama was one of the first converts.

In 1837, Queen Ranavalona took the throne and, as part of a wave of anti-outsider sentiment, made Christianity illegal—outlawed following Jesus—and there was a new wave of persecution that happened. Rasalama was arrested and tortured and taken into prison.

And you know what she did while she was there? She sang hymns. Just like Paul and Silas when they were in Philippi singing the Psalms, she sang hymns from their own hymnal. And the onlookers—her guards—they couldn't believe what she was doing as she marched happily and gladly towards death.

In fact, what they believed was that these Europeans actually had some sort of magic. They came and they put a magic charm on her that would take away her fear of death. And instead, it wasn't that she wasn't afraid because she was a Christian—because she knew that on the other side of death was resurrection, that nothing the world could offer could possibly compare to the grace of Jesus Christ.

She wasn't the only one. In that time, during those early days of Christianity, between 50 and 200 Madagascar Christians were killed directly, and between 1,500 and 3,000 died in some other way, from sickness or starvation. And somehow Christianity came out stronger when the queen left her throne. It grew and grew until now it has more than 4 million Lutherans in that nation—many times the size of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

Conclusion

In Jesus' name, Amen.

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