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Let us continue in prayer. Search me, O God, search me and know my heart. Try me, O God, my mind and spirit try. Keep me from any path that gives you pain, and lead me in the everlasting way.

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Let me begin with a confession. If we had not decided to be disciplined by the appointed scriptures of the revised Common Lectionary, I absolutely would not have chosen to preach this text. Certainly not on the second week of school. Indeed, I may not have chosen to preach it ever.

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As someone who has recently buried my father, my mother, and my husband, the last thing I plan to do as a follower of Jesus is to turn my back on my 12-year-old son or to cut off contact with my younger sisters. Yet, in today's lectionary, Luke, the gospel writer, puts these words in Jesus' mouth. If any of you comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters and even his own being, he is not able to be my disciple.

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To which I can hear my son reply, wait, what? This morning I am not here to defend Luke's hyperbolic recitation. It is shocking and it is intended to be shocking. However, I am here to suggest that when we listen to Luke, we should consider when and to whom Luke is writing.

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For Luke's gospel does not imagine a 21st century audience with primarily nuclear double-income families in a culture with an epidemic of loneliness, a culture with an addiction to personal handheld sources of disturbance, amusement, outrage, and general distraction, and to any number of legal, barely legal, and pointedly illegal forms of self-medication. Luke does not imagine being bombarded with constant scenes of violence and death, primarily wrought by firearms and other weapons of mass destruction that we manufacture in globally gobsmacking quantities and defend with more sacrality than any holy writing chiding us thou shalt not kill. Luke is not writing to people facing global multinational corporations that are actively and systemically causing catastrophic climate change that will, if unstopped, lead to human extinction?

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No. Luke is not writing to the empire in which we find ourselves. Luke is writing to the empire in which he is immersed. In Luke's empire, the center of power is Rome.

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And the highest ideal of humanity is the Roman man. personified in the Roman emperor. In Luke's world, everyone wants to be the man. The man who is married, the man who owns property, including people, the man who has progeny, especially boys, the man with the money, the power, and the status to protect his body and his people from whatever slights, real or imagined,

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the world might throw at them. This is the OG godfather, the dawn of the ancient world. All persons long to be the man. Women and the enslaved know they will never be the man, as does everyone else except the firstborn son.

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But in Luke's world, masculinity is fragile. Masculinity requires constant vigilance you must be able to protect what you have, to protect your people, to... your body or you lose some of your masculinity and you drop down. In the eyes of society, the point here is to save face, to keep up not only appearances but personal and societal protection

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It is to these men, quite specifically these men, that Luke directs his hyperbolic description of the demands of discipleship. For in the Greek text, Luke's Jesus calls his disciples to hate their parents, their wives, and children, and even their lives. Luke has none of our 21st century wisdom around sexual orientation and gender fluidity. Indeed,

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Luke is making a very specifically heteronormative argument here. He is speaking directly to the men of power and privilege, to the men who own stuff, to the men who have status because of who their parents are, who have status because they are married and have healthy, happy children, who have status built on the backs of the enslaved, and to these men, Jesus says, you must come after me bearing a cross. Understand, this call to take up your cross is not a theological statement of faith.

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This is not a call to salvation. This, friends, is a call to kenosis, a Greek word that means to self-empty. It means self-abnegation. The call to these most powerful of men in Luke's day is not simply, you must believe in the words that I have written in this book.

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The call is not to repeat some prayer or some believer's creed. Jesus is not coming forth their feelings like some glorified Hallmark movie special. The cross is not a gold chain sparkling around the necks of believers. For Luke's audience, the cross.

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The cross. was an ugly, bloody, brutal form of public humiliation and execution. A complete emasculation of the cross-bearer, who splayed out naked before the entire community, could no more protect anyone and anything he used to count as his property. Indeed, the crucified person could not even protect his own body.

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from the dogs and vultures that circled the killing fields. So no, I would not have chosen this text for you today had I had my choice of passages. Still we, like Jacob, must wrestle with this messenger of God. But we do not wrestle alone.

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Many companions guide our path, consider the wisdom of the Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by the Nazi party 80 years ago. Bonhoeffer teaches that the cross is laid on every Christian. Thus it begins.

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The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and follow him, or it may be a death like Luther's who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world, but it is the same death every time.

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Death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call. Bonhoeffer places Christ's invitation in stark relief. Come and die. Die to the empire and take up the cross.

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Die to Caesar and follow Christ. Yet death for death's sake is not our aim, Lest we find ourselves glorifying in our own self-denial rather than responding to Christ's call, as African-American theologian the Reverend Dr. Jared Calloway reminds us, as Christians, we are called to look death squarely in the face and we are called to do something about it.

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The call to bear the cross is a call to discipleship and a call to solidarity. with those for whom taking up the cross is just another Tuesday. Even as we die to the empire, we wear witness to its death dealing and work for the repair of creation until that day when God swallows up death itself. Still, be forewarned, my friends.

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Answering this call may change us forever. It may unfit us for the worlds from which we... came to this place. Thus we learn from theologian and novelist J.R.R.

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Tolkien in his epic fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings. The central character in this novel is Frodo Baggins, a well-to-do privileged hobbit living in a sheltered and protected world, blissfully unaware of the rising forces of evil, yet after he takes on his quest. the quest to demolish the ring. After he picks up his cross, he can never truly go home again.

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As he explains to his servant and friend Samwise Gamgee, I have been too deeply hurt. I tried to save the Shire and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so when things are in danger. Someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

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So it may be with us. Our path of faithful discipleship may lead us to ministries we could never imagine, may take us down paths of unimaginable sorrow and unquenchable joy, and in the end may separate us from our kinfolk, our culture, our community, everything we now see as central to who we are. The promise to each of us is this. The one who made all of creation and called it good has searched each of us and all of us and knows us.

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Every time we sit down and every time we rise up, the God who, according to our Christian witness, conquered death that all may live, that God discerns our thoughts from afar and knows our words before they enter our mouths. And just as he did to the frightened men and the faithful women, the risen Christ comes to us today. speaking a word of peace. Fear not, for at this table, Christ, our true host, is revealed once again in the breaking of the bread, and we are given the strength we need to choose, the strength we need to follow, and the command to love one another.

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to lay down our lives for one another. Friends, I would not have chosen this text. But then there are many historical and contemporary realities I also would not have chosen. Like Frodo Baggins of the Shire, I wish none of this had happened.

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But as the great wizard Gandalf reminds him, so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us. May the loving creator of all grant each of us the strength and wisdom to count the cost

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the courage to look death squarely in the face, and the love to bear each other up as we walk in solidarity with the cross bearers of the world until that day when the world chooses life. Amen. Amen.