13th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 18C sermon

The 15th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18C
September 5, 2010
When I was in seminary, I got to hear the former Stewardship officer for the Episcopal church, Terry Parsons speak. She told us, “People ask me all the time why they should tithe, or give 10% of their income back to God through the church. I always tell them, ‘well, the Old Testament tells us to give 10% to God; and Jesus tells us to give up everything, so I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the 10%.”
In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us no such loophole for following him. He tells the large crowds who are traveling along with him as he makes his way to Jerusalem that there are demands for being his disciples. They must hate their families; they must carry the cross and follow Jesus. The must count the cost of discipleship from the very beginning, and finally, if that weren’t enough, Jesus tells them “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” With the challenge set so high, I’m not sure many people could actually become one of Jesus’s disciples, nor am I sure that many would even want to. So where’s the good news in this gospel?
The other night, I watched a PBS documentary called Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio. It’s a documentary about Sambo Mockebee, a friend of my family’s in Canton and about how he created a program at Auburn University called the Rural Studio for which he was awarded a Macarthur Genius grant. The documentary shows footage of an interview with Sambo from before he died in which he is adamant that it is the duty of any professional to work to make the world a better place. His concept of the Rural Studio was his way of doing that through architecture; bringing Auburn students to live in rural Alabama to live in the midst of staggering poverty where they would use recycled materials, innovative architectural designs, and their own labor to build structures to improve the lives of individuals and the life of the community. They built (and continue to build) homes, a fire station, a church, a community center, a Boys’ and Girls’ Club and so much more; most of these structures cost between $8,000-10,000 to build.
In this process the students learn not only how to be architects but also how to make the world a better place, and Mockbee believed that once they were bitten by the bug of using their gifts to help people then they would return to that vocation at some point in their futures. He talked about how at the Rural Studio, the students and professors all worked, ate, and celebrated together, so that some of the normal hierarchies and divisions of academy have no place in that environment. He also talked about how in families, we have people who do ok for themselves and others who aren’t able to, and that as a family, we take care of those who need some extra help. This was foundational in his understanding of the mission of the Rural Studio: that these people who live in abject poverty in rural Alabama are a part of our family who need a little extra help from us.
One of the people that they built a house for was a man called “Music Man” who had lived in a decrepit trailer with no running water. He was known in the community for his love of music and his extensive stereo equipment, and in his interview for the documentary (which was provided with subtitles because his speech was so challenging to understand), Music Man told how he never really went to school but was self-educated through comic books.
At the end of the documentary, they showed the inside of Music Man’s new house, built by the students and faculty of the Rural Studio, and it was a thing of beauty, made from recycled wood with high lofty ceilings and lots of light, and it was absolutely filled to the brim with all of Music Man’s music equipment and with plastic grocery sacks filled with stuff covering every surface.
As I watched I was dismayed to see how this man had filled this beautiful open space with all that clutter, even as he spoke with great enthusiasm of how wonderful and life-changing it was to have access to his own well and running water and not to have to go to the spring to get water.
Then one of the former student architects offered this insight. He said that the goal of the project had never been to radically change the way that Music Man lived and maintained all his stuff, but it had been to make his life better, to take who he was and how he lived and to make it better by providing him a safe, secure place to live, running water, and (this is the part that really spoke to me) high vaulted ceilings to let in both light and air and to give his soul a place to soar above all the clutter and trappings of his life and his poverty.
Urban T. Holmes, who was an Episcopal priest and dean of the school of theology at Sewanee wrote in his book Spirituality for Ministry that there are two ways of looking at religion. Some people see religion as a way of escaping from the harsh facts of their existence, while others see religion as a means of living into the unpleasant actuality of our existence with reasonable hope.[1] That second option… is what Jesus’s call to discipleship today is about, and so in closing, I want to share with you what Sambo Mockbee’s story taught me about this call to discipleship this week.
Discipleship moves us beyond our comfortable ties to kinship to forge new relationships with others who walk this way of faith with us and even with others who may be separated across the radical divide of life circumstance and poverty. It challenges us to expand our understanding of who our family really is. It means sometimes swimming upstream against what culture tells us should be our loyalties, priorities and affections, and using the example of Jesus Christ to order the values of life and our priorities. Discipleship, like anything involves a cost. Cost is what we give up to acquire, accomplish, maintain or produce something. It involves a measure of sacrifice, effort and resources. So often we think nothing of paying the cost of the things, success, or status that the world tells us are important, but we balk at what we perceive to be the steep cost of discipleship.
Discipleship means evaluating our attachments and asking ourselves do we hold our attachments to people, places, things, money, power, success, or status above our attachment to God and our discipleship to Jesus Christ? Discipleship means “the ability to enjoy the world to the full because I am not anxious about losing a bit of it or acquiring a bit of it…[It] also consists of the recognition that I have within my own resources ample enough…to meet [life] creatively so that it builds me up into my own selfhood.”[2]
True discipleship or ministry or giving is not something that is justified in our minds on the basis of what we get from it—money, merit, friends, popularity, success, a good spiritual feeling, or even salvation. Following the Lord Jesus Christ as his disciple is something that we do for the sheer purpose of making the world a better place through the talents and skills and resources that we have to give, and it is an expression of faithful service to the God who created us and as a way of being in relationship with Jesus whom we know to be the way, the truth, and the life.
[1] Holmes, Urban T. Spirituality for Ministry. Morehouse: Harrisburg, 1982, p 67.
[2] Ibid. p 74. Quoting H.A. Williams on Poverty.