Reshaped By Discipleship
- St. Aidan's
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
Proper 18C: Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
The Rev. Cameron Partridge
September 7, 2025
When I was in divinity school, one of the first batch of nouns my ancient Greek class was asked to memorize included μαθητής, disciple. Our professor pointed out that fundamentally the meaning of that word was ‘one who learns.’ A student. The word “math” helped me remember it. But so did its contrast with the word for apostle (ἀπόστολος, handily enough) which means ‘one who is sent out.’ I found it intriguing that the word that applies to the more rarified group – the apostles, of whom only twelve were appointed – doesn’t necessarily mean expert, or some form of big shot. What ἀπόστολος suggests is movement outward. Meanwhile the rest of us disciples, those who seek to listen to Jesus, who puzzle over his sayings and stories, who may find ourselves baffled, horrified, and inspired in turn by the twists of his life and ministry, his death and resurrection – we are by definition learners. Lifelong students. Students of life. Learners called perpetually to hear Jesus’ teachings with what strikes me as something like the Zen Buddhist concept of beginners’ minds, to open ourselves to what Jesus teaches us of discipleship, not only of doing particular things in the world but also of the process of learning in that world.
In this morning’s gospel passage, the lesson is a difficult one: discipleship costs something. But what exactly? Jesus’ explanation is the sort that inspires a turn at Wrestling with the Scriptures Bible Study, our every fourth Tuesday Zoom session where we try to make sense of emotionally, spiritually, and/or intellectually challenging scriptural passages. We hear, “Whoever 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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-27). What are we supposed to do with such words? Hating one’s family as a requirement of being a Jesus learner? This morning’s phrase is one of what scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity have called Jesus’ “anti-familial” sayings.[1] Put simply, contrasting recent statements by U.S. politicians on so-called Christian “family values,” Jesus was not a proponent of prioritizing one’s family of origin over the community of his followers and their shared ministries.[2] Those disciple communities became family to one another. They created the relational unit we call “family” afresh. That expansion was essential to their learning. In the most poignant example of this pattern, as Jesus died on the cross in the Gospel of John’s telling, Jesus turned to his mother and the one simply called “the beloved disciple,” who stood together at the foot of the cross, and said, “woman, behold your son… behold your mother” (John 19:26-27). He gave them to one another, even as they were already bound. All of them were, by following him—whether their families of origin were among this learning community or not.
In the decades after Jesus, authors of the later pastoral epistles did go on to develop theologies that accommodated Christian practice to imperial Roman familial and household mores.[3] As Christianity grew closer to centers of power, that pattern of accommodation – some would say imperial cooptation – continued and grew.[4] We are increasingly witnessing its imposition in our own country in so many forms, including bans on children’s books that portray LGBTQIA+ people positively, or restrictions on bodily autonomy for women and gender minorities in access to healthcare.[5]
But Jesus’ own approach contrasted discipleship with the social expectations of his world. He does not hesitate to use deliberately provocative language to get our attention, to unsettle us. Yet the emotion of hatred is not the intended outcome of our learning. Jesus is not advocating division and estrangement.[6] He is calling for our relationships to be centered on, ordered and strengthened by, the nearness of God’s reign, the kingdom, indeed the kin-dom. In that reign, power flows differently. As Justo Gonzalez writes in his theological commentary on the Gospel of Luke, “…The new order of the kingdom… reverses the present human order: ‘for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’”[7] This exaltation/humbling reversal comes from the parable just before our passage. In it, Jesus tells of a wedding banquet at which the initially invited guests had all made excuses not to come – excuses that center the rules of this world and its hierarchies of relationship (Luke 14:16-24). Gonzalez comments, “A disciple of Jesus will not use supposed family responsibilities to avoid” what God has called them to do.[8] For Jesus, being a disciple means unlearning the order of this world.
That unlearning represents a constant form of resistance to the power structures that we humans repeatedly set up around our societies. Discipleship self-consciously seeks to model the relational patterns of God’s reign: liberation of the captives, healing of wounds, clothing and feeding of those without food or covering, the re-creating of family as communities of care, mutual encouragement, freedom and respect. It has a cost, and that cost is assured social stability, security— which was always an illusion in any case. It costs the safe anchor points of the worlds humans construct—which were always false to begin with. Discipleship relinquishes our attachments to those things. It ends their reign. It costs dearly. It is not without pain, even as pain is not its purpose. Its purpose is life abundant. Life beyond our imagining. Life transformative. Not all at once, devoid of process, but step by step, emerging like clay being fashioned anew on the potter’s wheel, to evoke the central image of our first reading from Jeremiah (18:1-11). And this is why, ultimately, to be anchored in God’s reign and not this world’s, to take into one’s heart the sure and certain knowledge that we will always be learners in a world we cannot predict, can be paradoxically grounding even as it remains unsettling. The cost of being a disciple, the loss we might associate with it, is simultaneously our gain. It is, as a favorite prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book puts it, a process of “watching and learning, loving and trusting, until your kingdom comes.”[9]
Last summer we joined communities throughout the Episcopal Church in honoring the 50th anniversary of the first priestly ordinations of women in our denomination. We watched the documentary The Philadelphia Eleven, released to honor this celebration and the struggle that these pathbreaking women and their allies took up to transform the church and equip it to fulfill with greater integrity its own transforming mission. As you may recall, the Philadelphia ordinations were canonically “irregular,” pushing our triennial synod, the General Convention, to clarify that women were indeed able to be so ordained. But the Philadelphia ordinations were not the only ones. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the ordinations of a second group of women at the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington D.C. The “Washington Four,” as they became known, signaled to the General Convention and the church more broadly that Philadelphia was not a one-off, that these sorts of ordinations were going to continue until the church acted. As Darlene O’Dell, who wrote the book The Philadelphia Eleven,[10] was quoted at the fortieth anniversary of the Washington ordinations ten years ago, “The institutional church needed to see that these women weren’t going to go away.”[11] All of these women took tremendous personal and professional risks in moving forward with these ordinations. In Washington the bishop, who supported the ordination of women, but only once General Convention had acted, sent a letter to all the congregations of the diocese asking them not to attend. But a thousand people poured into the building, with over fifty priests joining in the laying on of hands. There was a collective sharing of risk, a communal bearing of the cost of discipleship, that unfolded. As one of the priests ordained that day, the Reverend Elizabeth Powell, shared in a video this past week, there are lessons in this communal approach for us in this moment: “as we bond together in community, we are so much stronger than we are alone, and when we are on a mission together, we are so powerful…The world needs us to join together and make so much change. Let these anniversaries – last year, the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia 11, and this year, the 50th anniversary of the Washington 4 – let our stories be a reminder.”[12]
Discipleship is about learning – learning from the wisdom, the example, the presence and gift of Jesus Christ. Not once, not twice, but ongoingly, all our lives. It is costly because it calls us to relinquish our grip on the tantalizing securities of our world, to lose its easy legibilities, to confound its hierarchies. Why do we do this? To embrace the in-breaking of God’s reign. A kin-dom of family rendered afresh that promises the paradox of gain amid loss, of life out of death.
In his 1973 poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry evokes the tyranny of a hyper profit-driven world, and invites what sounds very much like discipleship to me in response.[13] I will close by reading excerpts from it.
Friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embracethe flag.
Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
…
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
…
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a signto mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
[1] E.g. Elisabeth Clark Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Dale Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). Martin writes, “Contemporary Christianity in the United States – whether Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative – has so closely aligned the basic message of Christianity with the family and ‘traditional family values’ that it is currently in a state of idolatry” (p. 103).
[2] James Martin SJ has a great summary in this post: https://x.com/JamesMartinSJ/status/1885832788483412424 Another reflection can be found here: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/francis-trump-vance-migration-usccb-oleynick
[3] E.g. 1Timothy, 1 Peter
[4] An early, ground breaking critique along these lines is Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), especially Ch. 7, “Christian Mission and the Patriarchal Order of the Household,” pp. 251-284.
[5] https://glaad.org/releases/breaking-supreme-court-censors-books-and-attacks-public-education-in-mahmoud-v-taylor-book-ban-case-glaad-authors-and-illustrators-respond/
[6] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theologica Account (Louisville, KY: 2010), p.183
[7] Gonzalez, p. 180
[8] Gonzalez, p. 183
[9] A New Zealand Prayer Book (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989, 1997), p. 465. https://anglicanprayerbook.nz
[10] Darlene O’Dell, The Philadelphia Eleven (New York: Church Publishing, 2024, second edition)
[11] Darlene O’Dell, Sojourners article, September 2015. Quoted in Melodie Woerman, “Washington, DC church that was site of ‘irregular’ ordinations of four women in 1975 to host 50th anniversary observance.” Episcopal News Service, September 4, 2025. https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2025/09/04/washington-dc-church-that-hosted-irregular-ordinations-of-four-women-in-1975-to-host-50th-anniversary-observance/
Comments