Pentecost 7
2014a
July 27, 2014
July 27, 2014
Trinity
Lutheran Church (NALC)
“The Four ‘Ds’
of Discipleship: Devotion”
Luke 16:10-16
Out in
San Diego recently, some university researchers did a study with dogs that
showed the dogs exhibit jealousy and selfishness. The scientists watched three dogs as they
were being petted by another scientist, and they noted how the dogs would
compete to be petted. That showed
jealousy, they said. And they also saw how the dogs each tried to ‘hog’ the
petting for themselves; and that showed selfishness.
And the researchers noted that dogs
are a lot like people, and if dogs are (in their words) “hard wired” to be
selfish and jealous… then people must be hard wired that way, too. If we’re hard wired that way, then we can’t help being selfish and jealous.
I respect most scientists, but I think
these folks have it wrong in their analysis.
As human beings, we may be ‘soft wired’ to be selfish; and we may be
‘soft wired’ to be jealous; and we may be ‘soft wired’ to do all kinds of
things that we know we shouldn’t do but we do them anyway.
But being ‘soft wired’ instead of
‘hard wired’ means that we can (if we want to) choose NOT to do those
things. God has given us free will, and
one of the benefits of having free will is that we can CHOOSE to do or not do
something.
Now, today we continue our sermon
series on ‘The 4 Ds of Discipleship.’ Over the past couple of weeks we’ve discussed
how the first step of our discipleship journey is to diminish our own will and
make the will of Christ sovereign in our lives.
This was demonstrated when Jesus called his first disciples and said,
“Follow me…” and they dropped everything and followed him; they put Christ’s
will before their own. Then the next
week we discussed how discipline, the second ‘D’, is important in a
discipleship journey; developing spiritual disciplines – especially engaging
God’s Word in preaching and reading, and engaging God in prayer where we take
time to both talk to God… and then listen in meditation to His response.
And this morning, we tackle the third
‘D’ of discipleship. This ‘D’ is
DEVOTION. If we are to be disciples of
Christ, we must be devoted to Christ exclusively. To be devoted to Christ means choosing Christ
over anything else.
The famous opera singer Pavoratti
writes about having to choose between two things in his life when he was young. His father was a baker, and Pavoratti felt
drawn to follow in his father’s footsteps.
He really enjoyed the life of rising early to bake the bread, of creating
cakes or desserts. But at an early age folks noticed his voice; a professional
opera singer took him under his wing and began to give him singing lessons. Pavoratti was torn to between two possible
careers, so he went to his father. He
said, “Father, should I be a baker or an opera singer? Or maybe I could do both!”
His father stood up and placed two of
the dining room chairs in the middle of the room… separated so that there was a
few inches between them. Then he said,
“Luciano, if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. In chairs, like in life, you must choose one
or the other.”
Pavoratti says he chose singing. And
having made his choice, he devoted himself to it with years of study. But finally, 14 years later, he was accepted
to the cast of the Metropolitan Opera.
In an interview he said, “Whatever you choose in life, you must devote yourself
to it. Devotion is the key. You must choose one chair or the other.”
Making
a choice to love, fear, and honor Christ means that we choose to NOT love,
fear, or honor something else. This is
what Jesus addresses in our Gospel reading this morning.
This passage from Luke follows the
parable Jesus tells about the ‘Unfaithful Steward’. In that story, if you remember, a servant
embezzled from his master, and then when he knew he was going to be fired, he
forgave the debts of people who owed his master money in order to gain their
goodwill.
And in today’s reading, Jesus explains
to the crowd what the point of that story was.
Many of the folks in the crowd were tax collectors who had put a
devotion to money first in their lives; a lot of the others were Pharisees, who
had put a devotion to their religious dogma first in their lives. And in verse
13 Jesus tells them they need to choose in their lives if they are
going to follow God. They can be devoted
to their money or their religious practices… or they can be devoted to
God. But, they can’t have it both ways. “No servant can serve two masters”
Christ tells them.
Notice the word “servant” here. A servant is someone who is submissive to
another. In the Bible Greek, the word is doulas…
a form of servanthood expressed in total submission. If we are servants of God, then we must be
submissive to God and no one else. And
if we choose NOT to be submissive to God, then we are being submissive to
someone else. One or the other. “No servant can serve two masters.” And this leads us to a hard question in
these modern times. If we are not submissive to God in what we do or how we
live, then who ARE we being submissive to?
If we are simply being servants to
ourselves… it would be easy to stop what we want to stop we shouldn’t do or
things we really don’t want to do. But
we can’t stop. We are “in bondage to sin, and we cannot free
ourselves.”
That’s because if we are not fully
devoted to God, then whether we mean to or not we are being submissive to the
anti-God. We call him Satan.
It’s not fashionable to talk about
Satan these days. Scripture is filled
with references to him; he even has speaking parts now and then. But too often we are led to believe that
Satan doesn’t really exist.
Let me share some statistics with
you. In a Gallup poll taken last
December, 74 % of Americans say that they believe in God. But less than half of
Christians… only 35 %... believe that Satan is real. 65 % of Christians don’t believe in the
devil. Why is that?
I think that this denial is an
artifact of two things. First, many
churches have stopped preaching about Satan as an actual entity. If Satan comes up in the assigned lectionary
reading for that a certain Sunday, they either skip over that reading or they portray
the devil as some mythical boogeyman that was needed back in the “old days” to
scare people into going to church, but whom we don’t need in the modern age.
And the second reason is our
culture. This is a society that insists
on inclusivity and lack of failure; in a culture that says we can’t keep score
in youth soccer games so that no one experiences failure, and in a culture that
sometimes recommends eliminating letter grades in school so that no one feels
inferior: in THAT culture… there is no place for Satan. Because Satan represents bad and evil, and
inferring that something is bad or evil is judgmental. Satan… is not politically correct.
36 % of Americans believe that UFOs
are real, but only 35 % of Christians believe that Satan is real.
But he is. In our baptism pastors have asked the same
question for thousands of years. “Do you renounce the devil and all his empty
promises?” This is not a rhetorical
question that we stick in there just because it’s quaint or traditional. From the very beginning of our life in Christ
we are called to choose. God or Satan,
one or the other, we can’t have it both ways.
The choice we make many times each day is this: Which of those two are
we going to be devoted to in that moment of our lives? “No servant can serve two
masters.”
The evil one tries to get us to be
devoted to him. He does it subtly.
We’re on the beach and a young woman
walks by in a bikini and she has been blessed by God with some wonderful
endowments; or a muscular young man with ‘six pack’ abs wanders past… is it God
who leads us to daydream of what could happen if…? No, that’s the other one, trying to steal our
devotion to Christ.
Or we’re walking out of the store in
the mall parking lot, and we suddenly realize that the sales clerk forgot to
ring up part of what we bought. Is it
God who whispers in our minds, ‘Well, it’s not REALLY stealing because you
tried to pay for it; it’s their fault.’?
Or is it God who whispers, ‘Besides, it’s raining. Why should you have to walk back through the
rain for their mistake?’ If that
God? No, that’s that voice of the
anti-God; trying to steal our devotion.
Or we’re stopped at the traffic light
waiting for it to turn green, and we see the guy with the straggly beard
wearing a surplus Army jacket walking towards us with a handwritten sign that
says, “Homeless, Please Help”; who is it that instead of making us reach for
change in our pocket tempts us to instead roll up our windows and lock our doosr? Who is it that tempts us to stare straight
ahead and not make eye contact? Is that
God? No, it’s the other one… trying to
steal our devotion from God.
If we are going to move beyond just
being believers and try to live as disciples of Christ: make no mistake – Satan
is going to try to steal our devotion to Christ; just like he did with the
first disciples.
Take Peter for example. In Matthew
16 Jesus tells Peter and the others God’s plan for salvation: he is
going to be crucified and rise from the dead, the first born into the new life
where we will follow in our time. And Peter speaks up, ‘Uh-uh! I don’t want that to EVER happen where you
have to suffer and die!’ And in verse 23, Jesus rebukes not
Peter, but the one who is trying to steal Peter’s devotion from him. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Jesus
says. If we are going to be disciples,
we are going to be tempted more than ever to give our devotion to the anti-God. He may tempt us with many things: money or
security… maybe with success or power… maybe even with theologies that reduce
God’s authority and make religion about pleasing ourselves. Whatever form it takes, we will be tempted to
not be devoted to the Lord.
Every day, many times, we have a
choice to make: God or not God?
And as disciples, our answer must be
Jesus Christ. We are to not just fix our
eyes on him, but devote ourselves to pleasing him. It’s God… or the other one. “No
servant can serve two masters.”
Making
a choice to love, fear, and honor Christ means that we choose to NOT love,
fear, or honor something else. But if devote ourselves to Jesus as
his disciples, then we experience the richness of faith and joy… because discipleship
is giving all… as he gave all for us…
A man named Dan Hingis writes about
something he witnessed one day while he was serving as an aid worker in a
United Nations refugee camp in eastern Africa.
The camp was filled with thousands of people fleeing from war in Sudan,
and they came to the camp weak and sick; many of them were starving. Even in the camp food was sparse. There just wasn’t enough to go around.
As Dan walked through the camp on
evening his eyes settled on a woman lying in the dust. She was weak from hunger, her bones so
prominent under her skin that she looked like a skeleton. Dan knew that she was starving. In her arms, curled up naked in the dirt
beside her, she held a tiny baby. The
child was probably a few months old, but she had all the markers of starvation
in a child: the bulging belly, hair that looked like it had been bleached and
was coming out in hanks. The mother was
so weak she couldn’t even call out for help.
She just pleaded with Dan with her sunken eyes.
In his pocket, Dan said, was a single
yam: a small sweet potato that was to be his dinner. His stomach was rumbling since there hadn’t
been food for lunch that day, but as he looked down at this desperate
woman. He reached into his pocket and took the yam… and he stooped down
and ever-so-gently placed it in the hand of the mother. And he watched as she slowly raised the food
to her mouth and took a small bite. Dan
says he was amazed at what happened next.
Slowly, with the few teeth she still had, she chewed the bite of
yam. But when it was soft and gooey,
instead of swallowing… she leaned over her daughter… and dribbled the chewed
food into the baby’s mouth. Bite after
bite she repeated the ritual until the entire yam was gone. She had kept none for herself. It all went to her child.
The next morning, passing by the spot,
Dan stopped to check on the mother and child.
During the night, the mother had died.
She had starved to death. But her
child lived.
Dan says he will never forget that
mother. In his mind, she will always be the
epitome of devotion. She gave all that
she had to the one she loved.
Jesus did that for us. He gave his life for us so that we will live
forever. And if we realize that and take
up the call to discipleship, our only right response is to live for Him as he
died for us. This is what we call
discipleship devotion, and this is what Christ calls us to undertake for His
sake.
“No servant can serve two masters”
Jesus tells us in our Gospel. We have to
choose: do we live for ourselves, giving in to the sly devotion of the
anti-God; or do we live for the one who died for us.
Let’s choose wisely. For the devotion of discipleship is hard, we
cannot deny that. But the reward is to live with Christ in a relationship that
is so rich and wonderful… it makes what we
give up in our devotion seem trite.
“No servant can serve two masters” Let us devote ourselves to serve the
Lord alone, and no other. AMEN
The Reverend M. A.
Greenauer 2014
Permission is granted to
reproduce this work in whole or in part if the glory for its content is given
to the Lord
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