{"id":1882,"date":"2025-09-07T07:38:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T11:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/?p=1882"},"modified":"2025-09-07T07:38:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T11:38:06","slug":"how-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/2025\/09\/07\/how-much\/","title":{"rendered":"How Much?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a92025<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

13th<\/sup> Sunday After Pentecost\/C \u2022 September 7, 2025<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Jeremiah 18:1-11 \u2022 Philemon 1:1-21 \u2022 Luke 14:25-33<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow much is that doggie in the window?\u201d is a silly song from 1952 that reminds us of one crucial fact we all face almost every day: we count the cost of something. If you remember the song, you probably remember the Patti Page version, but I remember my mother singing it. Little did I know then how much of my life would be tangled up not in the cost of the doggies but the cost of food, rent and other things. We drive a lot, so I check the cost of gasoline; May and I do the grocery shopping, and she does an amazing job of keeping costs down with that. Every Saturday, after we check out, we look at the total bill, and we\u2019re pleased if it\u2019s less than the previous week. What\u2019s true for us as families is certainly true for our church; I know that we have folks who work hard at keeping costs down here and every year we have to approve a budget, a plan for spending throughout the year. But we seldom think about the cost of our spiritual life. What if we asked, not how much is that doggie in the window, but how much will it cost me to be a Christian? How much will it cost to follow Christ? That\u2019s exactly the issue in today\u2019s gospel reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luke says, \u201cNow large crowds were traveling with him\u2026\u201d [Luke 14:25a] The setting for this section isn\u2019t a little group of committed disciples, it\u2019s the larger crowd around Jesus. Some barely know him; some have been healed by him. Some have taken on the task of caring for him and his disciples. And some, I imagine, just got attracted to the crowd. Some people like crowds; some people can\u2019t resist being part of what feels like a large movement. So we have all kinds of folks with him, traveling with him. And at some point, he says something startling to the crowd: \u201cWhoever 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.\u201d [Luke 14:26] Wow! That sounds harsh, doesn\u2019t it? We aren\u2019t as family based today as people were in Jesus\u2019 time; most families don\u2019t live in multi-generational homes with an old patriarch running the show. Still, what does he mean by saying that following him is going to mean losing your whole family?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Partly, I suspect, Luke is reflecting the reality of the people to whom he\u2019s writing. We know that the conversion of people often split families in the first century. Just because you went out and were carried away by this new preaching, this new faith, it didn\u2019t mean your dad agreed or your brother or sister or even your wife and kids. I grew up in a home where my mother went to church and dragged me along. My father read the New York Times on Sunday mornings. If he had any Christian faith, I never heard about it. I got involved in a church when I was 12, and it gradually became the center of my life. There was youth group on Sunday nights, camp for a week in August, weekend retreats two or three times during the school year. I learned to be a leader there, I felt the confirmation of God\u2019s call. I knew God meant me to be a minister, but I didn\u2019t tell my dad. Finally, in college, he was questioning my choice of courses one day and I blurted out, \u201cI\u2019m going to be a minister.\u201d He asked why I didn\u2019t want to do something worthwhile with my life. Although he later more or less reconciled to what I did, it was always a point of division between us. So I hear this in that context: yes, faithful life is going to divide people, including families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus seems to want people to consider that as they think about the way forward. He tells these two short parables. In one, he points out that if you are going to build something, first you sit down and consider what it\u2019s going to cost. In the other, he offers the image of a king, getting ready for war, making a plan. Both seem to be on this point: count the cost, so you are ready to pay when the bill comes due.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder if Philemon counted the cost. We don\u2019t know much about him, just that he must have been an early Christian and a well-to-do one. He\u2019s able to host a church in his house. I couldn\u2019t do that, could you? We\u2019d never fit in our little living room! But here is Paul writing to Philemon, calling him a beloved coworker, mentioning people he knows, and greeting the church in his house. I have a sneaking suspicion that all these nice words are there partly to grease the burden of what Paul wants. Philemon\u2019s slave, Onesimus, is hanging out with Paul and Paul wants to keep him. None of us own slaves; I\u2019m not sure that we really understand what Paul\u2019s asking here. But suppose I borrowed your car, as your pastor; maybe mine had broken down. You have an extra, you agree to lend it to me, and I drive off. Now suppose I wrote you a letter on church stationery with some wonderful words about what a great Christian you are and then explained that I wanted to keep the car permanently; I could mention, \u201cI am more than bold enough in Christ to command you to do the right thing, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a little different, isn\u2019t it? I mean lending a car for a day or two, that\u2019s one thing, but cars are expensive. So are slaves. Paul begins by saying what a loving, wonderful, Christian Philemon is and then gives him something terrible: the chance to prove it in a way that is costly. And beyond the cost, there is the social sanction. The Roman world is built on slavery; Paul is asking Philemon to treat his slave Onesimus not as a slave but as a brother, a \u201cbeloved brother\u201d. Paul wants him treated the same way Philemon would treat Paul: \u201cwelcome him as you would welcome me\u2026 If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that to me\u2026\u201d and then goes on to say, \u201cI say nothing about your owing me even your own self.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t know what Christian faith had cost Philemon to this point; we know that it cost him Onesimus. Oh, he got Oonesimus back\u2014but the slave Onesimus was lost to him forever. Instead, he got a brother in Christ. We don\u2019t know anything about what happened to Philemon, but we do have traditions that there was a Bishop Onesimus who is credited with being one of the ones who preserved the letters of Paul. Without him, we might not have Romans or the letter to the Corinthian Christians or Thessalonians or any of the other letters of Paul. Think what might have been lost. Now, this letter has a darker history also; it was often used in the 19th<\/sup> century to justify slavery itself. Paul isn\u2019t confronting the whole structure of slavery with all its terrible violence; he\u2019s simply advocating for one particular slave, raising him up. So let\u2019s be clear: nothing here is endorsing slavery, whether it\u2019s legal bondage or the terrible labor conditions that amount to slavery that still exist. He\u2019s raising up on particular slave, calling him a brother. And he\u2019s giving Philemon the chance to pay the cost of discipleship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That cost can be steep indeed. Jesus lays out it out plainly: \u201cWhoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.\u201d It isn\u2019t easy to carry a cross; it\u2019s much easier to wear one. In 1942, German leaders met to plan the murder of all European Jews. Today there is a growing movement in some circles to pretend this didn\u2019t happen or that it was exaggerated. It\u2019s taken this long to pretend this because the generation of soldiers who liberated those camps are mostly gone; the survivors of them are gone as well. But the truth is that Germany from the 1930s to the 1940s was a place of arrests by anonymous men, prisons that housed torture chambers, and lawless executions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that time, a group formed called the White Rose. It was small and nonviolent; they published leaflets in Munich denouncing the Nazi regime’s crimes and oppression and calling for resistance. Most were in their early 20s. They were arrested in the spring of 1943; they were subjected to show trials where they couldn\u2019t speak and their leaders beheaded. Others were sent to be murdered at camps like Auschwitz. Many were Christians, and they surely are people who understood what it meant to bear a cross. They bore it nobly, and they remind us today that there is a cost to discipleship, there is a cost that cannot be paid with a check, that can only be paid with life itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes the cross is just that: a death given in memory of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his life. Sometimes it is something hard: treating your former slave as a beloved brother. Sometimes it\u2019s much more simple: helping Christian Churches United or others care for people in need, treating them like children of the same God who loves us all. It\u2019s easier to wear a cross than to bear one, but Jesus has told us that only when we bear the cross can we be his disciples. How much will that cost? Only you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a92025 13th Sunday After Pentecost\/C \u2022 September 7, 2025 Jeremiah 18:1-11 \u2022 Philemon 1:1-21 \u2022 Luke 14:25-33 \u201cHow much is that doggie in the window?\u201d is a silly song from 1952 that reminds us of one crucial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"This is a sermon about bearing the cross instead of just wearing it. \n","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1882"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1885,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882\/revisions\/1885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}