The Beauty and the Cost of Following

A reflection on Luke 14:25-35

There's a moment from years ago that I still carry in my body. I was pastoring a different community back then, and I'd gotten curious about worship music that was rooted in place — not just imported from wherever Christian radio was coming from, but grown up out of the actual soil of where people lived. So when I heard about a church out in PG County built on the go-go tradition, I got in my car before I could talk myself out of it.

And the music did exactly what I'd hoped. It pulled me into history and into place at the same time. It was unlike anything I'd experienced.

But that's not what my body remembers most.

What my body remembers is the altar call. The minister asked all the visitors to stand. I stood. And then people I hadn't even noticed — ushers, I guess — started moving through the room, getting within a foot of people's faces and asking, "Have you been saved?" The congregation members around me stood too, and I found myself surrounded by a circle of people repeating that question. I felt my body go into fight or flight. I'm a pastor. I've been saved. I've been saved, I kept saying, mostly to myself.

I tell you that story not to make fun of that church — I grew up Baptist, I'm ordained Baptist, I know altar calls, I know the songs sung fifteen times over until you're pretty sure your voice will lose its power before the blood ever does. I tell you that story because it points to something a lot of us have absorbed without examining it: the idea that crossing a line, walking an aisle, or saying the right words one time is the supreme moment of the Christian life. I want to spend some time with Luke 14 today, because I think Jesus is trying to correct that idea before it even has the chance to take root.

The Cost Nobody Wants to Count Here's our text. Jesus is traveling with large crowds — people drawn to his teaching, curious, maybe hopeful — and he turns to them and says something that, honestly, should come with a trigger warning for a lot of us:

"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." (Luke 14:26)

I want to sit with how rough that language is, because I don't think we should rush past it. This is difficult language for us because too many of us know the call to "hate family" as the first move into high-control religion. Too many of us encountered the command to hate our own lives before we even knew what our lives were — before we knew our personalities, our gifts, our own desires and intuitions. We heard it when we were too young or too inexperienced to protect ourselves from what amounted to an acceptable form of manipulation.

So let's be clear about what this text is not saying. It is not asking you to erase yourself. The language of hating our lives is about releasing the best-laid plans we make apart from God — not about extinguishing the parts of us that make us who we are. This passage, from the call to carry a cross to the instruction to hold possessions loosely, has too often been twisted to validate a pastor's own addiction to dominance and certainty. That distortion is real, and it can make it hard for us to receive a teaching like this one honestly. But underneath the distortion, there's something true: discipleship costs something. The cost is voluntary — never compulsive — but it is there, and it will change your life.

Right in the center of this teaching, Jesus gives us two small parables to help us understand that cost. Someone wants to build a tower — do they not first sit down and estimate whether they can finish it? A king is about to go to war — does he not first consider whether ten thousand troops can stand against twenty thousand? The punchline of both stories is the same: any sensible person counts the cost before they begin, so they can avoid embarrassment at best, or catastrophe at worst.

Building a Tower, Going to War

As a disciple, you are building a tower brick by brick. As a disciple, it will sometimes feel like going to war. I think that's the invitation underneath both of these images. Following Jesus will be radically inconvenient to be radically committed to. It will take patience. It will take an increasing tolerance for risk and for rejection. And here's the part I most want you to hear: it will not look like walking down an aisle once. It will look like a thousand steps in the direction of Jesus.

Jesus did not want the crowds who were drawn to his teaching to wander into an unsuspecting commitment. He didn't ask them to sign on the dotted line before reading the fine print. He got right to the heart of what discipleship requires, using language that unsettles us on purpose — because an unsettled crowd is a crowd that's actually paying attention to what they're agreeing to.

This year, our preaching has circled around what it looks like to have a heart re-enchanted by Christ — a life that stays tender to the mystery and the romance of faith. And even as we keep saying yes to that adventure, Jesus reminds us here of what it will actually require of us to journey well.

What We're Building Here, Together

We're in a season of building at The Table too, and building always comes with inconvenient requests. The request to show up with your actual presence, on a regular basis. The request to take the next right step in growing up in Christ. The request to link arms and build real friendships with the people in this room, on purpose. The request to step up and offer your gifts to build up the body. The request to open up — with whatever financial resources you have, and with whatever part of your heart you're most inclined to wall off. None of that happens in one dramatic moment. It happens in the ordinary, unglamorous repetition of showing up again tomorrow.

I know some of you are already looking ahead — next week we begin a new series in 1 Corinthians, and I suspect it's going to be a bit of a rollercoaster. Christian rivalry, the stewardship of the body, singleness, marriage, divorce, and yes, the long-disputed role of women in the church. We're not going to look away from any of it.

But before we get there, I wanted to pause us here. I wanted to remind us that there's a cost to following Jesus that runs against nearly every modern sensibility we've inherited. A cost that will create real tension, and sometimes real opposition. A cost we have to account for as we head into this new season — kids back in school, the whole city speeding back up around us. It demands a conscious, intentional yes, one we have to reaffirm again and again over the course of our lives.

The Beauty Underneath the Cost

Here's what I don't want you to miss, though: alongside the cost, there is so much beauty in this kind of following — in these vows renewed and celebrated over and over. God did not begin the work of rescue, reconciliation, and redemption in your life without being able to finish it. And Jesus did not set his face toward Jerusalem, did not allow himself to be nailed to a Roman cross, without being ready to say, It is finished.

"We serve a God who finishes what she starts, who rips life from death even when the cost seems too high, who raises us from the tombs of our own making when we thought there was no way out."

That's the God we're building toward. Not a God who wants one dramatic moment from you and then moves on, but a God who is present for every one of the thousand steps — including the ones where you stumble, including the ones that feel like war, including the long stretches that don't feel like anything much at all.

Salt is good, Jesus says at the end of our passage, but if it loses its saltiness, what good is it? It can't even be used for the soil or the manure pile — it gets thrown out. I think that's less a threat and more an invitation to stay awake to what we're actually here for. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

May we be people who are not surprised by the cost. And may we be people who never, ever resist the beauty.