"It's Easier Than You Think"
What it means to be a disciple.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Text: Luke 14:25-32
I've been watching a television series that stars a man called Mike Holmes. He appears on Home and Garden Television and other channels as well, and many of you will have seen him. His program, Holmes on Homes, is a way of taking catastrophes performed by other, so-called contractors and turning homes into something beautiful, strong and safe. I'm fascinated with this man because he is becoming almost a one-person industry. At times, I must admit, he gets a little bit self-righteous - he'd make a good preacher, I think. He always comes up with an idea or two as to how to make something better, but in nearly all his shows he uses a line to make this point over and over again:
Why do you think people who want to be plumbers have to have years and years of experience as apprentices to work under master craftspeople and perfect their craft? Should we not ask them to do the job rather than bring in someone who has had two hours experience screwing a couple of pipes together? So then why do we wonder when we hire the latter and not the former that we have all these problems, catastrophes and houses that fall down?
Holmes says, and this is always his line, “Always make sure that you get an expert to do your work.”
The more I think about what Holmes says the more I think it is true for every facet of life. For example, would you allow someone who is very well-meaning, kind and gentle, who has a brand-new, well-sharpened Grohmann knife, a copy of Grey's Anatomy on his bookshelf and has seen three episodes of ER to remove your gall bladder? Would you allow someone who had spent a summer stacking shelves at Canadian Tire and has seen a car repair manual to change the ABS system on your car, that complex system that brings you down from 100 kilometres an hour (or, some of you, 150 kilometres an hour) down to zero in an emergency situation? I think not.
When it comes to matters of faith, we often have the same approach. We sometimes allow people - ourselves, with little or no training - to determine some of the most important things in our lives. It never ceases to amaze me that in matters of personal salvation, in working out the single most important relationship in our lives, in determining our relationships with other people and in our homes; in defining what constitutes justice, morality and truth, many of us believe that simply one hour of worship now and again, intermittent reading of the manual (the Bible) will suffice in helping us be the people that God wants us to be. But we do.
That is often the approach that we take. No wonder the church sometimes doesn't have power, or often our works are ineffectual or our passion is diminished. Very often it is because due to the fact that we take that approach. We think that maybe we can hire some “religious” people - some ministers, some clergy - to do that full-time work necessary for us to have a spiritual life. As long as we've got them, we're all right. But it's not enough.
Dallas Willard suggests that “non-discipleship is the great elephant in the Church.” Non-discipleship is basically predicated on the belief that all you need to do is to have that one hour of worship every now and again and read the Scriptures once in a while and that will suffice. Well, my friends, we need to alter the way that we think about discipleship.
Last week I wanted us to alter the way we think about Christ, but if we are going to alter the way that we think about Christ than we have to alter the way we think about following Christ - about discipleship. It is not something nominal. It is not something peripheral. Rather, it is something central, all the more so because of the state of society. I suggested last week that we are, to use Dallas Willard's phrase, “soaked in secularity.”
Now, I do not say that lightly, nor do I say that with an eye on restoring a form of civil religion in society. By pointing to the secular nature of our society, I am not automatically condemning it, I am making a statement about it. Nor am I suggesting that we return to the church-state synthesis of the mediaeval period, or that we go back to a time and a place where the church had a pre-eminent role in dictating the norms of society. In fact, it was pointed out to me very rightly last week that maybe it is in fact sometimes a secular society that saves us, because the passion that many people have for their religion can cause division and fundamentalist attitudes, causing all manner of problems in society. We see this all over the world.
What I'm getting at is that our secularly soaked society has an influence on us. We buy into its nominalism, we buy into the sense that we do not need to have passion, or a daily walk, or a strong sense of discipleship. We become immersed in the secular and therefore our faith becomes secondary. I believe there is no such way in which faith can be carried out on that basis, and I base everything on my belief that discipleship, and by discipleship I mean a true following of Christ, is what makes our life meaningful.
The great Scottish writer, William Barclay once said, “It is quite possible to be a Christian and not be a disciple.” He said:
It is quite possible to belong to a golf club, but never play golf. It is quite possible to subscribe to the monarchy, but never be willing to go and fight for it. It is quite possible to belong to an organization or an institution and never make a contribution to it. It is quite possible to become a member of a church and never have any real meaningful engagement in its ministry.
Look at churches today. If you read their membership lists they are full of all manner of people from top to bottom. I get this very uncomfortable feeling sometimes when I get calls from employers who phone me because people have put on their CV that they are members of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, and they want to know what I think of these individuals. Now, my friends, if it came to most of you I would say nice things, not all, but most. But what can I say about people I've never met: “He's a jolly, nice person who is a line on our membership list?” We are filled with such people. I don't want to condemn them, I simply want to draw them in. I want to say, “Look, discipleship is exciting. Discipleship is life-transforming. Discipleship gives meaning to life and you are missing out on this most important and wonderful thing.”
Barclay goes on to tell the story of a man who ran into a university professor. The man said to him, “I understand that my granddaughter is one of your students.”
The professor replied, “Well, she attends some of my lectures, but I could never really say that she's one of my students.”
In other words, nominalism. Having an attachment to the form but not embracing the substance. Jesus was concerned about this with his very own disciples, never mind the Christians who were to follow. He said to them in very clear, but rather sharp tones: “If you really want to be my disciples, you are going to have to love me more than you love your mother or your father or your brother or your sister.”
It's like a person who pours a foundation for a building but never considers whether there are enough funds available to erect the rest of it.
So, what's the point of having a foundation if you're not going to finish it? What's the point of someone going to war but never figuring out whether there are sufficient troops to accomplish the task? Or no plans for peace in the event that this comes - a salient warning, I think, to a number of people in this world.
Jesus said, “What can you do as a disciple if you are going to place the things of this world above me?” For Jesus it is abundantly clear: He wants focus; he wants disengagement from those things that prevent us from following him on a daily basis; he wants us to set aside those things and to focus on how important it is to be clear on what it means to be a disciple. And to be a disciple means to take a step out in courage, to take a step out in faith.
At the 9:15 contemporary service this morning, we were fortunate not only to hear those who were able to speak this morning about their trip to El Hogar, but also to meet the whole team. In talking to those who went to El Hogar on behalf of our church, to help build and work in a boys' orphanage for the very poorest of the poor, I realized that they took a step in courage and faith. When they signed up to go to El Hogar, they did so with no money; they had to raise it themselves. They went to a country where a different language is spoken, with a culture that many of them had never encountered before. They went to work amongst the poorest of the poor, not knowing what they would find, to an institution for boys who had come in off the street, and they were to work and build when many of them had little or no experience in either of those things. Yet, they went, they took that step in faith and they were courageous in doing it, and they were able to build because they took that step in faith.
They knew that when they went out there they did not go alone. They realized that the most important thing was to serve God and, as a team, to care for people. I must admit, this week I'm thinking that just living our daily lives, never mind going to El Hogar, is fraught with all manner of uncertainties and requires courage. On 9/11 we are reminded that simply going to do your work as a banker can be fraught with terrible dangers. Going to a school, as those in Quebec realize, can be a life-threatening experience. In fact, with our society and world, it doesn't matter whether we are secular or religious, it doesn't matter whether we subscribe to the divinity of God or whether we ignore God completely and are consumed with ennui; the fact is, none of us knows what we are going to face on any given day.
Because we live with the daily uncertainties of this world whatever form they take, how much more important it is to have the tutelage, the guidance, the grace of Christ and to walk with him every single day as we walk into the unknown, as we walk into the undefined and as we walk into the uncertain.
To live the life of the disciple is much easier than we think. I love the bank ad at Yonge and St. Clair. It says, “You're richer than you think.” Now, that's the kind of thinking I like. (Mind you, I come home and look at my bank book and see that they are lying to me, but never mind.) “You're richer than you think;” I like that way of thinking. In many ways, we Christians are richer than we think. We are. We have a strength in the power of God's Spirit. We have the love of Jesus Christ that can go with us daily, but if we are not in tune with that Christ, if we think that it is simply a matter of one hour of prayer and a consultation of a book every now and again when we blow the dust off it, than we are the poorer for it. Is that really enough to give you the sense that you are richer than you think?
No. There needs to be passion. There needs to be commitment. There needs to be something else: There needs to be discipline. Really, at the heart of a disciple is the life of a disciplined follower. If you look at the Latin, it is exactly the same word that causes the root for discipline and disciple: “disciplina.” When you break it down, if a disciple is based on a teacher than it is up to the student to discipline themselves to learn from that teacher.
A number of years ago when I was in Nova Scotia, I was invited to visit the Michelin tire plant not far from the village where I was living. As a car nut, I was looking forward to going to the Michelin plant. In fact, I had a page of questions about which were the best tires and why. I was going to tire stores weeks ahead of time, getting all excited about what types of rubber and compounds were used in the construction and what I could use to maximize my cornering ability on my car (I'm one of those 150-kilometre-an-hour guys). I went into the Michelin plant and right away they made me sign a form saying that I would not divulge any of the information that I had gleaned from being there. Well, what's the point? If you have knowledge you want to brag about it, don't you?
So, I went in and carefully followed the construction. I was introduced to a manager who had been working there for 20 years. His one and only job was to caress the tires. What was interesting was that this man had been caressing tires for 20 years. I thought it was strange, I must admit. I watched him rub his hand along the tires, and I asked him what he was doing.
He said, “I am feeling for imperfections. It is very interesting that with just one swipe of the hand over every 10th tire that comes off the line, I can tell immediately if the tread is straight, if the compound is right or if it's a good tire - and an original equipment tire or not.” What you may find interesting is that one of the other managers told me that he is 10 times more accurate in discerning whether a tire works properly than the computerized machine that's supposed to analyze whether the tire is perfectly formed or not.
I said, “How do you know? How can you tell?”
He said, “I have had to discipline myself over a 20-year period and I can tell by the feel, the touch. I will know it there is an imperfection. I will know if there is something wrong, but I have to work at it every single day and keep a sensitive and open hand in order that I might know whether this is right or true or proper.”
I thought, “My, that's the power of discipline.”
I read a wonderful line: “Discipline is your conscience telling you not to do something and you not answering back.” It is that sense of knowing almost intuitively what is right and what is wrong. But that doesn't just happen. It isn't just something that comes as a bolt out of the blue, it is something that needs to be nurtured and developed and strengthened in a daily, living relationship with Christ in prayer and study and learning and growing.
In 1915, Lord Joseph Devine, a famous artist who was known for a great gallery in New York, sent one of his young apprentices to England to look at a piece of pottery. The only problem was that he'd booked this young man to sail on the Lusitania. Now, the Germans, through their embassy, informed people that the Lusitania might be torpedoed at some point. Devine went to his young apprentice and said, “Look, I don't want you to go to England. I'd rather you just stay at home. It's too dangerous.”
But the young man said, “Sir, I'm all right. I've heard of the problem and I am ready. I'm a very strong swimmer so I know I'm going to be all right.” Then he added, “I have been sitting in a bathtub of ice-cold water for the last two months. When I first started I could only last a couple of minutes, but last night I was able to stay in the bathtub for two hours.”
Sure enough, the young man got on the Lusitania and, as predicted, it was torpedoed. The young man ended up in the cold and icy water for two hours, but he survived. He came out of it alive because of his discipline, because he was ready. He had immersed himself in the cold waters and when trouble came he was prepared.
Now, my friends, that is the kind of discipline that we need as followers of Christ. We need to immerse ourselves completely in his grace and love. We need to learn from him as our teacher and as our guide. We need to pray to him daily and foster a relationship that informs our consciences. We need to have a passion for those things that he wants in our lives. And, in the end when we are so disciplined, when we so follow, then no matter what calamities come our way, no matter what challenges present themselves, we're richer than we think and we're ready. And, my friends, making that decision, living that life is actually easier than we think. We just have to have the commitment to do it. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.