Philemon Luke 14: 25-33
It is costly to be a disciple of Christ. And the cost of discipleship should be weighed and considered – not in order to calculate the value but in order to make the sacrifice.
There are contrasting moods in this morning’s gospel lesson and Jesus’s words about the strategies of life against the demand to give up one’s possessions – including family ties.
People are conventionally possessive and, when it comes to material things, we kind of get that the gospel imperative is to be sparing about what we need and generous with our surplus.
And the stern and uncompromising message of today’s gospel reading is clear: we cannot be disciples of Christ if we do not give up all our possessions.
The letter from Paul to Philemon, our first reading this morning, is a letter urging a slave owner to release his slave Onesimus from servitude. For those of us who think that we live at a remote distance from the whole concept and history of slavery, it’s difficult to grasp the level of challenge which lies in this letter.
It cuts across prevailing expectations, contemporary norms, social structures. And, furthermore, it is a plea aimed entirely at Philemon’s faith. Paul describes the potential release of Onesimus as a ‘benefit in the Lord’ not as debt owed in return for some other favour. And he specifically avoids appealing to Philemon’s good will.
And it may be that part of the cost of discipleship for us today is to be less possessive about prevailing expectations, contemporary norms, and social structures – even more than about the money in our pocket.
That letter to Philemon might arrive on the doorstep of any one of us at any time: God making a demand which tests our ability to think and behave differently. So, far from suggesting that our response to God must be fully tried and tested before we enter the community of faith, God’s continuing demands upon us provide us with fresh opportunities to weigh the costs of discipleship.
It might be a demand to help someone in distress or it might be a demand to read the Gospel in a new light. It might be an obvious demand. It might be a shocking demand. But our response must be on God’s terms and not on our terms.
This has important implications for the connections we make – or don’t make – about other areas of our life, like, for example, our political affiliations, our response to the debate about climate change, the presence of homeless people in the doorways of our shops and public buildings, and so one could go on.
Does the cost of discipleship mean that we must be less possessive about our natural responses to the political, environmental and social challenges of the world we inhabit – God’s world of which we are temporary stewards?
Now what does that mean? Does it mean that, if we don’t believe that climate change is caused by human activity, we should change our view and start believing that it is? Well, no, because, in that scenario, we might become just as possessive of our revised stance – and that’s not quite the point I want to make.
A possessive approach to our beliefs and opinions tends to block our minds to other systems of thought and to other people’s experience of truth.
The seventeenth century polymath, Francis Bacon, puts it well when he says, ‘Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.’
The cost of discipleship might even include breaking out of our religious comfort zones.
It is as a direct response to Jesus’s modelling of a new way of engaging with God’s world and God’s people that Paul writes that letter to Philemon requesting the release of a slave so that he can be more fully human – which is what it means to be in relationship with God: imposing on Philemon – and indeed on Onesimus – the cost of discipleship.
In our material world right now all sorts of conventions are being turned on their head – and for all sorts of reasons, some good and some bad. But it may be that – far from being naïve and disingenuous – the Christian voice which interprets the cost of discipleship to include being less possessive of our beliefs and opinions has an ideal opportunity to model a different way of engaging in political thinking which is not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, but to weigh and consider.
Approaching each issue on the assumption that we might be wrong is not to weaken our resolve to make the world a better place because we follow one whose word is always true. If I hold to my opinion more zealously than I do God’s bidding in Christ, I fail to give up my possessions and be a follower of Christ.
Maybe the word ‘possessions’ is a red herring. Think more about ‘possessiveness’ – possessiveness of one’s opinions, possessiveness of one’s relationships, possessiveness of one’s possessions: all distractions to the central message of the Gospel which is that in Christ God has spoken his last and final word about absolutely everything.
So if Jesus’s teaching means that we must let Onesimus go, we must let Onesimus go.
To be less possessive of ourselves is part of the cost of discipleship and shows the world that we are in relationship with God which makes us more fully human.