Impossible or Possible?                                                      9/17/44

 

Scripture:  Luke 14: 25-33

 

Text:  Luke 14: 33;  “...whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”

 

That brief, pointed, puzzling statement lies in the portion of scripture read this morning which is reported only by Luke.

 

To stumble across it seems almost a pity, for it does not “mesh gears” with much that we like to think of in our religious outlook.  We like to think that the righteous prosper, are healthy, enjoy fine family life, command community respect.  What is this note about “forsaking” and “denying”?  Must we be forever thinking in terms of sacrificing something?  We only ask what is reasonable.  Sometimes we try to make our worship more splendid by stately ritual.  We like the cadences and the stately movement of our favorite Scripture passages.  We enjoy music.

 

And out among each other we are sometimes heard to say that a moderate, fair course of ethical conduct is, after all, about what should be expected of a Christian.  “I try to be a decent citizen,” (you’ve heard words like that many a time) “and I aim to treat the other fellow right.  That’s my idea of Christianity.”  How many of us coast along thinking that is about all Christ expects of us?

 

If we find ourselves in that more-or-less comfortable mood, we are jarred to hear, as a quotation from Jesus’ lips such a statement - “whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”  Another thing that Jesus said was this: “What do ye more than others?  Do not even the gentiles the same?”

 

What we think we want is the reasonable.  What Jesus seems to demand is the impossible!

 

The fact seems to be that Jesus was not satisfied nor tolerant (except the tolerance of forgiveness) with the mediocre, average, supposed goodness of any man.  He seems to have demanded the highest and best in every man.  And often the man proved no fit judge of what was the best he could be and do, but rather had to be drawn to something better and more capable.

 

A year ago last summer, I was visiting in the home of my parents when a young man in army uniform called.  The soldier had been a boy in that neighborhood from infancy.  He had grown to a considerable height and was really “tubby” in weight.  His chief exercise was playing in a dance orchestra, where he was really good.

 

Then he went into the army.  You fellows who have been in it know what the army does to toughen one up.  Merle lost some weight, but not a great deal.  Mostly, his body just became harder. 

 

“Why you know, Mr. Kingdon,” he said to my father, “I could never do ‘push-ups’ before I left home.  Now, after army drill I can do push-ups as well as the next guy.  You know, I never supposed I could until now.”

 

Well, isn’t that a sober truth in many a person’s life in many a phase of living?  Many a man’s mind and knees quake over the thought of making a speech before other people, until some friend or some duty leads him to the place where he just does it; and finds it isn’t so bad after all!

 

When you realize that the supposed impossible becomes possible in any number of cases you know about, this seemingly “impossible” demand of Jesus takes on in your mind, and mine, enough sense to be worth considering!

 

They tell us that the early church making its way under persecution was a church of Christians with strong spirit.  Sometimes it had to be in opposition to the decrees of corrupt government.  Death, and threats of death, were not uncommon for its members.  They learned to live above and beyond death - bypassing its supposed terrors.  Do we have to rely on the procedures of man’s devilish warfare to prove that man was intended to be of heroic stuff?

 

Perhaps we hide too often behind our ritual.  Maybe we seek  a fool-proof way of life in some creed or formulation of religious law.  Possibly we worship at the shrine of our own idea of what is good, awakening (if we awake at all) to the realization that we only bow down to an idol fashioned by our own hands and desires.

 

“What do ye more than others” beats in as the voice of our leader, bringing with it a divine discontent.  Perhaps it is a call to find that the “impossible” is possible after all!

 

Jesus says to his hearers in this 14th chapter of the gospel of Luke, in very plain words, that really following him will be a difficult and dangerous feat.  One must put loyalty to him above loyalty to everything else - family, home, firm, yes and country.  We may think that a citizen of Japan just now would do better to be loyal to Christ’s way than to the emperor’s.  The same demand is no less rigid upon us.  We believe that we live under a government where one can put his Christian loyalty first.  But let us never, for a moment, take that for granted without constant examination and vigilance.

 

Jesus refuses to minimize the hardships of following him.  He emphasizes those hardships.  A man should know the cost and count it carefully.  The cost is everything that one has.  (And that is the view of a good steward anyway - everything in his control - time, talent, substance, life itself, belongs to God.  God is the proprietor; he himself is only the possessor, the administrator.)

 

Sometimes it seems hard to give up what we’ve grown used to when a larger challenge demands it.  But last June I saw a young woman mount to the chancel of a great church saying, “Here am I, send me” as she accepted a commission to serve as a nursing missionary representing our Congregational Churches in Africa.  She was pretty, she was youthful, she was remarkably well-trained.  Riverview hospital would be tickled to death to get her on the staff!  But she was giving up home, homeland, friends, comfort - the familiar - in order to make a new home; in a land foreign to her; to make new friends for our Christ, to endure possible discomfort and uncertainty, perhaps many hardships.

 

She knew what she was giving, and she was glad.  It was not “impossible” to her.  It had become an eager possibility.

 

I knew a business man in a community that was dominantly Buddhist.  His own family was Christian - his wife and children.  He himself professed interest and sympathy with the Christian religion.  He was a good townsman, generous, fair, level-headed. --- But not happy!  He used to say, “I think I would become Christian, but I fear I could not stay in business if I did.  I think all my Buddhist customers would fall away and go to other stores if it were known that I had been baptized Christian.  And there are not enough Christians here to support the necessary volume of trade for a business like mine.”

 

Well, he counted the cost, all right, and became no bigger than the limited, unhappy man that he was -- restless to get away, sometime, from the divine discontent which he only resisted.

 

This last week I found two human instances of considerable inspiration.  I finished reading a book loaned to me by a good member of this congregation --- “Burma Surgeon.”  It is the story of a rather unconventional missionary doctor who specializes in the nastiest, dirtiest, neediest tasks of his profession - and loves it.  Not only does he love it, but he has taught a great number of Burmese nurses and a few other surgeons to love it, too.  The story of his heroic trek out of Burma into India with General Stillwell is a stirring one.  The story of the beginnings of his missionary life that prepared him for great service to people and to his country is even more interesting.  Is competent surgery “possible” only with the most modern and entirely correct instruments?  Nonsense!  He practiced for years with an exceedingly alert mind and a batch of instruments salvaged from a wastebasket at Johns Hopkins.  Mighty few feats of surgery seemed impossible to Dr. Seagrave.

 

The other instance I found in a movie which I had missed earlier here and so went to Nekoosa to see.  It was that movie that depicts so faithfully the main events in the life of Madame Curie.  There was a curious discovery that some mysterious light ray from pitchblende could produce a picture of a key on a negative left over it in absolute darkness.  But to most capable scientists it was impossible to account for the phenomenon.

 

To Madame Curie, it became possible in the determination of her soul to find out what could be discovered about that mysterious ray.  Past obstacle after obstacle, she and her husband toiled.  For four long years in a shed that was bitter cold in winter and insufferably hot in summer, they toiled at the most minutely exacting kind of work.  Partly through good fortune, mostly by sheer, careful diligence, she and her husband discovered a new element that shook and upset all old fixed notions about our world - radium.  And the possibilities of that “impossible’ are not yet all apparent.

 

Have you ever climbed a mountain?  I have.  Some of you have, too.  Why does one do it?  Perhaps there is a glorious view from the summit.  Perhaps it seems something to conquer.  But I suspect that chiefly man climbs simply because he needs to climb - whether it be a mountain, or a mystery of science, or a search for the lovely in music or literature.

 

Some years ago a great English climber, George Leigh-Mallory, left his frozen body a few hundred feet below the summit of Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world.  At a reception given for the members of his expedition shortly before they left for India someone asked him lightly, “Why must you risk your life trying to climb that awful mountain?”  Instantly Mallory replied: “Because it is there!”

 

The key to the mountaineering spirit lies not in what men do, but in what they are.  It is in something of the same spirit that people follow Christ.  They do so because they must.  There is something inwardly compelling about his invitation, “Follow Me!”  People are stirred by a divine discontent that makes achieving the high and difficult more important than love of ease or personal comfort.

 

When man has seen the beautiful, the drab will no longer content him.  When he has seen a vision of truth, he must pursue it no matter how precarious the road that leads toward it.

 

Of course there are people who seem never to feel that way.  Great multitudes went with Jesus when he was preaching the cost of discipleship.  But there was no crowding afterward.  Perhaps the whole thing seemed like silly business to many, after they had heard this much-heralded man speak.  The healings were all right.  The handouts of food were certainly fine.  But this talk of cross-bearing was nonsense!

 

It is so today.  Let word get around that “Sister Amy” is having healing sessions in Angelus Temple and the place will be filled.  Father Divine talks his meaningless jargon to a hall full of perspiring people on a blistering hot night, and then goes down stairs to a larger room to pass out quantities of food to a crowd that doesn’t even have standing room, all pushed together and swaying in rhythm, they sing “The Lord of the Table is Here.”

 

Even the gospel of “getting saved” has a great appeal (and I do not speak lightly of that, either.)  But the call to sacrificial spending of self and all ones resources reaches only those who can be stirred to reach toward the high and difficult.  It does not reach those who would rather stand in line for a movie ticket, or otherwise pursue their personal satisfactions.

 

But even in the crowd, some become mightily stirred.  Do you think that any one of the curious who stood on Golgotha to watch the Nazarene done to death was ever the same again?  When he had said that the price of discipleship was the putting of that loyalty ahead of everything else, it “got” some of those folk, and they never returned to their old complacency.

 

Is there anything wrong with our home life in a land where so many homes are so lightly broken up?  Maybe too many couples have never been told that holy marriage is one of the most difficult achievements in the world requiring infinite patience, wisdom, and artistry of two devoted people.

 

What about our churches?  Is it possible that there is too little requirement attached to church membership?  Is the gospel we ministers preach not made challenging enough?  Do we all avoid the self discipline of devoted attendance and service?  Christian church members had better think of these things carefully.

 

I suspect that, at heart, we do not want the easy way.  We wouldn’t want the cross removed as the favorite symbol of our faith.  We want a faith that calls for the very best that God himself know lies in us.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 17, 1944