Life in the Soil of Discipleship

Are you following Jesus in the midst of a challenging life or are challenges arising in the midst of following Jesus?

Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

 

©2025 The Rev. Seth Olson

This sermon was preached on September 7, 2025 at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in Hoover, AL. A video of the message may be found here. 

 

Holy God, may my words be your words and when my words are not your words, may your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen. 

 

Holy Apostles, let me just say it from the start: this Gospel lesson is a doozy. It’s one of those moments when you half-expect me to stop reading, look up at you all, and say, “Wait, do we really want to keep going with this ‘Good News’?” Jesus tells the crowd, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—cannot be my disciple.” Yo, Jesus who soured your wine? Who burnt your bread, buddy? It appears that Our Lord is coming in hot.

 

This instruction to hate is not exactly the stuff of inspirational posters. It’s not the message one should take to this year’s Thanksgiving dinner: “Pass the turkey, Mom… also, Jesus told me to hate you now.” Awkward, right?!

 

But, this passage is here, which brings us to a larger question: how do we read Holy Scripture? It might be tempting, but as faithful followers of Jesus we don’t get to skip the challenging verses, we don’t soften them, nor do we pretend they aren’t there. Instead, we do what disciples have always done: wrestle with the difficult stories, pray for God’s wisdom, and ask each other what God is saying to us here and now. And sometimes—thanks be to God—together we receive deeper understanding and even get to laugh along the way.

 

A further insight about how we engage Holy Scripture before refocusing on this particular passage. As ones who follow the Revised Common Lectionary, over the course of three years on Sundays we get most of the books of the Bible. This means that if you show up for 156 straight Sundays you’re going to have heard the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of our most sacred text. We cannot hold all of it together without some of it contradicting itself. Our work, with each other and most importantly with God’s help, is to carefully discern how Holy Scripture molds, shapes, and directs our lives. 

 

Think of it this way: We cannot take a cafeteria line approach to reading the Bible where we pick and choose what we want to follow. Instead, together we use our hearts, souls, strength, and yes our MINDS to determine what the Spirit is saying to us the Church through the Living Word of God. 

This means we take the Bible far too seriously to simply take it literally. It’s not an instruction book—it’s a series of varying books about God’s love affair with Creation, specifically human beings. And, it requires the love of Christ (self-giving, sacrificial, extravagant, eternal, and unconditional), it requires this love to serve as the interpretative key. Without Christ’s love it’s not going to make sense! Now, back to our passage, which seems to be lacking in love.

Jesus gives us two little parables about “counting the cost.” A man about to build a tower first sits down and figures out if he has enough to finish it. A king about to go to war first checks whether he has the soldiers to stand a chance.

 

I’ve built a few things in my life—not towers, mind you, but Ikea bookshelves. Even with those, I usually end up with a few pieces left over and a slightly lopsided shelf that looks more like modern art than storage furniture. If even Ikea requires counting the cost, what do you think about the cost of following Jesus? 

 

What Jesus is saying is clear: discipleship (being a student of His Way of Love) is not something you stumble into by accident. Maybe it starts that way, but eventually it takes intention. It takes sacrifice. It takes putting him at the center, so that everything else in your life—family, work, money, politics, even your identity—lines up around him.

Now, that we understand those mini-parables a bit more, what about that “hate your family” line? Jesus is not giving us permission slips to bail on family dinners or to ignore our kids’ soccer games. The Greek word here could be rendered “love less than.” It’s a way of saying: your ultimate loyalty belongs to God. Even the most precious human relationships cannot outrank the call of discipleship, and I always think it’s important to point out: one way to love God is to love your family well. They aren’t mutually exclusive!

 

So, no Jesus isn’t anti-family. He’s pro-clarity. He’s saying: be clear about what’s first. If the Great I AM is first, then everything else finds its rightful place afterward. (Watch this from Stephen Covey about "Big Rocks First" for a visual example of this!)

And, here’s where this hits home. You don’t need me to tell you that life is complicated. I look out at this congregation, and I know:

• Some of you are caring for aging parents, juggling doctor’s appointments, prescriptions, and your own fatigue.
• Some of you are living in the tension of strained or complicated relationships.
• Some of you are raising children in a world that feels less certain, less safe, than the one you grew up in.
• Some of you are working so hard just to make ends meet, and wondering if it will ever get easier.

And in the middle of all this, here comes Jesus with his cross, saying: “Follow me.”

But, when we go about our lives in this way, we are living out of order. For the heart of this Gospel message is this: You aren’t following Jesus in the midst of all these challenges, as though your life is primary and Jesus is the side project. No—the challenges arise in the midst of following Jesus.

 

Maybe it seems like a slight shift, but it makes all the difference. My mom used to have a shirt, by the way it read: Do you have change for a paradigm? This shift means that discipleship is not something we squeeze in around the edges of our busy lives. Discipleship is the soil in which our lives grow. It’s the ground we stand on. Everything else—our families, our work, our challenges—sprouts up from that holy soil.

That means the tough stuff isn’t proof that you’re doing it wrong. Life is hard. And, that difficulty is simply part of life in the soil of discipleship. Following Jesus doesn’t exempt us from hardship. But it also isn't the last word!

Take Paul’s letter to Philemon today. Paul is writing from prison, urging Philemon to receive Onesimus—a runaway slave—not as property, but as a brother in Christ. Whoa, that’s a costly word! That wasn’t the way of the world—Paul was upending social norms, disrupting economic stability, and challenging Philemon to see his life not through the lens of Roman law but growing from the soil of discipleship.

 

This, friends, is exactly what we are trying to live into together as a congregation right now, in this soil of discipleship. We’re entering into a season of envisioning—asking who we are, what values shape us, and what mission God is calling us to in the next three to five years.

 

It might be tempting to think: “Once life calms down, once the budget is easier, once we all agree on everything—then we can get serious about following Jesus.” But that’s not how it works.

 

The Gospel says: we don’t wait for the perfect conditions. We start here, now, with the lives we actually have. Walking the Way of Love is not something we tack on after the fact. Discipleship is the ground on which we build.

 

So as we dream together—about values, vision, and mission—we’re not inventing something new from scratch. We’re tending the soil that’s already beneath us. We’re asking: what does it look like to live more deeply into our identity as students of the Divine, the Incarnate One we call Jesus?

And, y’all want to know the really good news? The challenges you carry—caring for parents, raising kids, navigating brokenness, making ends meet—these don’t mean you’ve failed at discipleship. They are indicators that you are engaging in tilling and tending to that soil, so that something remarkable will grow with God’s help.

 

Think about it like gardening. If you’ve ever planted vegetables, you know: some years the plants thrive, other years they wither. Sometimes you get blossoms and no fruit. But the soil is still the soil. And so, persistent gardeners keep at it—composting, watering, weeding—because they know eventually the soil yields abundance. 

 

So too with us. Following Jesus is about tending the soil of our lives. Some seasons are lean. Some are abundant. But the soil is still holy. And God still scatters seeds in our soil.

Now, does this mean it’ll all be smooth sailing? Hardly! If you think discipleship is easy, try putting together a piece of Ikea furniture with your family. That’ll test the holiness of your soil right quick.

 

But the good news is that Jesus walks this road ahead of us and with us. He carried the cross first. Now He shows us that the way of sacrifice is also the way of life, the way of love, the way of hope.

 

And if Jesus can redeem the cross, then surely he can redeem our family struggles, our weariness, our loooong meetings, and yes—even our half-built Ikea purchases.

So friends, let’s not get spooked by this Gospel’s intensity. Let’s hear it for what it is: Jesus calling us to clarify our lives. To make him the soil in which everything else grows.

 

Let’s count the cost together—not to scare ourselves away, but to remember the amazing gift of what we’re being invited into: life with God, life in Christ, life rooted in love that no challenge, no hardship, no brokenness can uproot.

 

And as we take up our envisioning work, may we do so with that same clarity. We don’t follow Jesus in the midst of our challenges. These challenges arise in the midst of following him. And that shift makes all the difference.

 

So, let’s follow. Let’s have change for our paradigm. Let’s dream. Let’s live as students of the Divine, the Incarnate One, who is our soil, our center, our life.

 

Amen.