You want me to do what?!?!

You want me to do what, Jesus? You want my to sell Nissan Rogue? My Smart phone? My Ipad, My Roth IRA? Everything? Ah, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m ready for that. I doubt any of us are.

There’s a great saying in the South that goes like this: “That preacher’s just gone from preachin’ to meddlin.” I think that whoever first coined that adage may have been thinking about the message we get from Jesus this morning.

Why does Jesus say all these disturbing things about hating family members and selling all our possessions? First off, he is speaking in were very different and dangerous times.

For Jesus and for most of the leaders of the early Church, the cost of discipleship was very high. To let God rule meant that they would no longer let Caesar rule over them.

To take this Gospel literally is absurdity. So, we wrestle here with this text guided by the fact that exaggeration was and still is a rhetorical device in the Middle East.

If you publicly rejected the authority of Caesar in favor of the authority of God, you would soon be carrying your cross to your own crucifixion. You would have to give up all human relationships and give up your life at that point.

The cost was very high for this depth of commitment and that is why we find the brief parables about being prepared included in this Gospel. Before you would make this level of commitment, you would do well to determine whether you possessed enough strength to make it.

Think about it: One of biggest challenges most people face is to overcome the disconnect we can experience between what we do on Sunday and what we do the rest of the week. Do we find something in the sermon, what we do during worship, and what we hear in Scripture that actually helps us make sense of our lives in the world?

And this is where this week's Gospel makes sense. We probably have been taught that when Jesus talks about "taking up the cross" he's referring to some major life crisis—some significant suffering or loss.  But what if it's more ordinary than that? What if bearing the cross has nothing to do with chronic illness, painful physical conditions, or trying family relationships but is instead what we do willingly as a consequence of our commitment to Jesus Christ.

If this is true, then we are invited to take up our cross anywhere, anytime, doing just about anything by offering what we can in our time, gifts, and labor on behalf of others with honesty and authenticity and integrity, we are bearing our cross by allowing the whole of our lives to be shaped by our commitment to Christ.

The rub here is this business about honesty and authenticity and integrity. Whether we’re talking about our workplace or home or the church—that can be a real challenge.

There will be times when it will cost us to do our jobs with honesty and authenticity and integrity, maybe even having to give up our status, security, and comfort for the sake of the truth of the Gospel.

A little boy about 10 years old was standing before a shoe store, barefooted, peering through the window, and shivering with cold. A lady approached the boy and said, “Little fellow, why are you looking so earnestly in that window?”

“I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes,” was the boy’s reply. The lady took him by the hand and went into the store and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. He quickly brought them to her.

She took the little guy to the back part of the store and removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his little feet, and dried them with a towel. By this time the clerk returned with the socks. Placing a pair upon the boy’s feet, she purchased him a pair of shoes. She tied up the remaining pairs of socks and gave them to him. She patted him on the head and said, “No doubt, my little fellow, you feel more comfortable now.”

As she turned to go, the astonished lad caught her by the hand, and looking up in her face, said, "Are you God’s wife?"

Maybe taking our cross is just being God’s presence in the world in the simplest of ways. I don’t think Jesus demands of us to sell all we have but I do think he asks us to give whatever of ourselves we can to make some difference, no matter how small, in this broken world.

Sometimes we not only need his preachin.’ We need his meddlin’ too. How we minister in the world or in church is holy and sacred and can have a powerful effect on God’s world.

Madeleine L’Engle, for more than three decades librarian and writer in residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, was an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time.”

“Why does anybody tell a story?” she once asked, even though she knew the answer. “It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

I think that is one concise and accurate way to sum up why Jesus told these stories—difficult as some may be to understand— and, through them, what the Spirit is saying to us today. And it’s very good news indeed.