The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18C)
7 September 2025
Grant us, O Lord, we pray thee, to trust in thee with all our heart; seeing that, as thou dost alway resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so thou dost not forsake those who make their boast of thy mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. . Amen.
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Philemon 1-20
Luke 14:25-33
It is challenging for me, what with Jesus’ words, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple” sticking out like a sore thumb from today’s Gospel, not to preach on the Cross; especially because I am brimming with excitement about our celebration of Holy Cross Day next Sunday. As I told you last Sunday at the announcements, and as I mentioned in my emails to you this week, the parish has been given a very special gift: a relic of the True Cross. This wonderful object – two tiny pieces of wood formed into a cross, sitting at the centre of a late nineteenth-/ early twentieth-century jewelled setting – will be the focus of our devotion next week as we make our procession and place it solemnly in the tabernacle of the Chantry Chapel, where it will remain for our contemplation and veneration.
Now, such objects may not be your cup of tea, and indeed somewhere deep in your Protestant heart you may be feeling a stirring of mistrust. Is this like so many chicken bones peddled as the knuckle of the index finger of Saint Peter himself by unscrupulous mendicants? I’m thinking of you, Friar Tuck. Perhaps it is. Yet, it is my hope that it will for you, as it does for me, forge a physical link across two millennia with the reality of our Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection.
It can be a focus for our devotion and a reminder that our faith is one that is centred in the dramatic intervention of God into our world, into time and space, into the realm of nature, and of the tangible traces that the past leaves behind. For me, a relic such as this can be that physical trace of the corporeal reality of our Lord Jesus Christ who suffered and died so that death lost its power over us. It shows us that all the theology in the world working to explain our faith, filling our heads with complicated explanations, is rooted in something truly real, something we can touch. As Evelyn Waugh imagined in his novel about Saint Helena’s finding of the True Cross, “Just at this moment when everyone [is] ... chattering about the hypostatic union, there’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against.” (1)
But I won’t steal any more of Schuyler’s thunder, as she will be our preacher next week. For the moment, I want to get you prepared and thinking about the Cross, especially what it means to take up the Cross. What does it mean to embrace the possibility, the likelihood, in fact, that fully taking on our ministry as Christians is dangerous stuff? Last week I talked about how together we form the Body of Christ, about how we cooperate to do the work set out for us, the work of loving God and loving our neighbour (which is really the same thing). I also talked about how the ones standing in our way are the “proud in the imagination of their hearts,” the ones who have put their self-interest and lust for power in the place of the works of love. I also talked about how God promises a reversal of fortune and that the mighty shall be put-down from their seat and that God will have “exalted the humble and meek.” But that day is not upon us, and we must be clear-headed about the cost of taking up that Cross, upon which we shall gaze next Sunday.
“Take up your cross and follow me,” Jesus says, yet he does not ask us to follow him blindly. He demands we consider the consequences. “For which of you, desiring to build a tower,” Jesus asks, “does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? ... Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?” Jesus asks us to make the choice to follow him with our eyes wide open, and he uses examples that require the expenditure of resources, perhaps the expenditure of the lives of others. The stakes are high. The proud seem to be closing in on us, and it is the moment for us to decide; really decide.
As Moses said to Israel:
I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him; for that means life to you and length of days.
Before us has been set “life and death, blessing and curse;” “good, death and evil,” which is to say life in its fullest meaning embracing body and soul, our whole being, seeking the best interest of others not for our sake but for their’s. From this vantage, Jesus ask us to “choose life.” Choosing life – a phrase co-opted by movements focussed on a narrow view of the meaning of “life” – involves giving our whole selves to the works of love, remembering that we are part of a project larger than ourselves, members of the Body of Christ, and that we are not alone. Choosing life means “loving the Lord your God, ... walking in his ways, and ... keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances,” not with a narrow view of love’s power, but with a maximalist view of the range and scope and reach of the Love of God, and our authority to be Love’s ministers. In choosing life, we renounce the powers of death that draw us away from Love, renounce the temptations of self-seeking, power grabbing lives that perhaps allow us to amass great sums or copious property, but are devoid of real Life. This is what Jesus means when he says, “therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German minister and theologian who was murdered by the Nazis in the aftermath of the plot to kill Hitler, called this “the cost of discipleship.” In the eponymous book, written in 1937, he argued that hearing the Gospel and believing were not good enough. He called this “cheap grace.” Being a disciple of Jesus means being willing to risk losing family and friends, means being willing, when it comes to it to risk our lives for the sake of God’s victory over death itself, for the sake of the triumph of Love.
Bonhoeffer likely would have disapproved of our relic of the True Cross, thinking this cheap grace. And yes, of course, taking up the Cross means more than picking up that little jewelled reliquary in your hands and gazing on the two splinters that form the cross at its heart. Yes, it means more than the simple act of will and of imagination to believe that this formed part of the whole apparatus upon which our Lord hung. Yet, it is a start. Let it be the beginning of an understanding of the reality that sits at the heart of our faith, of the historicity of the event two thousand years ago in a place that is as real as it can get. Let it be the beginning, the tiny beginning (like the mustard seed) of our comprehension of the scale of what is before us, and of the choice with which we are faced, a choice between death and the power of Life. I am praying with all our might that, using the strength already inside us, inspired by our physical connection to the past and all who have come before us, we choose life.
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
Barnstable, Mass.
Feria, 6 September 2025
© 2025 Andrew Charles Blume
1. Evelyn Waugh, Helena: a novel (London: Chapman & Hall, 1950), 208-209.