A Sermon on Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18, and Luke 14:25-33
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

If there ever was a preacher who worried they might run out of things to preach about, if they’re still preaching, 2025 has wiped that thought from their minds. I could whip up half a dozen sermons a week these days just reading the news. Then there’s the beginning of the school year, and the changing of the seasons, and my own reflections on being back from my trip to the woods last weekend. So much to sit with. Don’t worry, though. I’ll keep myself to one sermon a week.

Then there are these sacred stories of ours that sometimes soothe, and more often, like this week, seem to throw all of Jesus’ teachings into question and leave us wondering if the only acceptable thing would be to sell all our possessions and serve the poor. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple,” Jesus tells the crowd around him. You might be asking yourself, doesn’t that directly contradict the Ten Commandments? What do we do with this passage?

I don’t have any answers. Other than, yes, there are plenty of places in the New Testament where Jesus seems to contradict himself and earlier Jewish teachings, and that makes it hard to locate the definitive answer. But maybe that’s the point.

Will you pray with me? Creator God, your son, Jesus of Nazareth, our sibling, teacher, and advocate, said some outlandish stuff in his day. Words of refining fire that continue to throw us off our seemingly solid ground. In your wisdom, catch us before we fall into despair. Challenge us, search us, lead us through the unanswerable depths of existence and back to your safe and abiding presence. Amen.

I’m not generally a big fan of crowds. My brain isn’t generally wired to thrive in the sensory load of big groups – either the sensory or the energetic mix, so often unfocused and uncontrolled. I mostly end up feeling slightly on edge. Not that all crowds are made equally, they’re definitely not.

Last weekend, I found myself in a crowd: an outdoor music festival at the family camp we go to every year. We joke about the camp that we see so many people that we know, or come to learn live a few blocks from us, that it’s like someone just scooped up South Minneapolis and plopped us all in a big lump on the shore of this idyllic lake in the North Woods. A big traveling family. Some of our identifying characteristics as South Minneapolitan Campers include: a lot of Patagonia clothing, a very hands-on parenting style (to put it charitably), and sore backs from showing others how far we’ll bend to be inclusive.

One of the amazing things about this music festival is that, for a camp five hours from the Twin Cities, it gets some big-name acts. This year’s headliner attracted some folks from nearby – a bunch of whom sat right in front of us in the field. The man sitting directly in front of me wore a red t-shirt declaring, “I Identify as a Problem,” and a 2028 campaign ball cap for our current president. He was very clearly not a part of the crowd plucked up from South Minneapolis.

One of the things that makes the gospels so difficult is that they are rough compilations of events and teachings, rather than complete stories. I’m a person who pays a lot of attention to narrative storylines, so a passage like today’s is particularly hard for me, because it sits alone between two completely unrelated events – a dinner on one side, and another group that Jesus addressed on the other. There’s absolutely no context for today’s reading, other than the rough idea that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to stir things up. I’m left wondering, who’s in this large crowd that he turns to? Did they ask for something that prompted him to basically tell them that they weren’t ready to follow him?

Without context, my brain tries to construct the crowd’s story. If it was like other crowds in the New Testament, they wanted things from Jesus: healings especially, but maybe they wanted him to lead them against the Romans, like the 5,000 did after he fed them. If the crowd talked about their love of family as justification for Jesus to lead them against their oppressors, the text clicks into place for me. And it also makes sense to me that Jesus’ response is to throw the coldest possible water on a group dynamic that held an explosive, violent potential.

I think we all know that love of family is the basis for a healthy life. Loving and being loved by one’s family gives a sense of belonging, a safe place from which to go out and take risks as we turn our care for the world into action. But the other side of the same coin is that, under stress, love of family can turn a person inward. Walls go up to protect one’s family from outsiders, and eventually you get tribalism and nationalism.

I wonder if Jesus is responding to the crowd’s tribalism and telling them, the bounded way you are holding your love for family is incompatible with the radical, universal love of God. Following me into God’s love will require you to lay down the kind of love that comes with loyalty tests, the love that asks a person to hate those outside the walls. And the metaphors he uses – the tower builder and the king going to war – they’re both in this protective, threatened mold. I hear Jesus saying, if you think of the world in these terms, of aspiring to the level of control and protection of a high tower or a big army, the first possession you need to give up is your need to know your odds of success before you begin.

I think the crowd took Jesus for a nationalist, and he set them straight.

The man in front of me at the music festival sat stiffly through a day of amazing performances. To be fair, I know as much about him as I do about the crowd around Jesus 2,000 years ago. But he didn’t clap, didn’t cause a fuss, didn’t even appear to appreciate the big headliner he presumably came to see. But I couldn’t help but overhear occasional interactions between this man and the friend who sat next to him.

The friend kept trying to engage this man, who was so clearly working to keep his visible and invisible walls up to keep out our South Minneapolis crowd. At the end of a particularly beautiful song the friend leaned over to the man, still sitting like a stone, and very gently said, “You know, it wouldn’t hurt ya to clap.”

We can never know everything that happens when humans gather. But that small gesture reminded me that God’s Spirit moves more often through small gestures than through words projected for a crowd to hear. My friends, whatever happens in this world, remember that we – the we that includes all creation – are fearfully and wonderfully made. From our creation to our return to our Creator we are known and loved. While we are here, may we be the softening voice, the soothing presence that calls hard hearts to release what holds them. Even if this calling only ever brings us to small actions at the margins, may we go there, because that is where God is, too, doing the holy work of love. Amen.