Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, "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."

Luke 14:25, 26

We do that because we need to hear those stories, and to know what the Hebrew Bible actually says.

But to be honest, as a lectionary preacher primarily I find it difficult to link up the two given readings for the day. They often have very little in common and it seems a stretch to try to make them work together in a single sermon.

But today is different. It seems to me that the story Barbara just read from Jeremiah is integrally tied to this unsettling commentary on discipleship given to us by Jesus.

How that is so - how a story about God as the potter and Israel as the clay relates to the idea and practice of discipleship - well, that takes some 'splainin' as my friend Brad used to say.

First some background on Jeremiah. Along with Isaiah and Ezekial, Jeremiah is one of the true prophetic giants in the history of Israel.

Often called "the weeping prophet," Jeremiah is stereotypically known as a purveyor of doom and gloom, doling out warnings about God's judgment on the house of Israel.

Of course the reality is more interesting than that, and more important than that. And it may even be relevant to our contemporary situation.

Just before Jeremiah assumed his prophetic office, Israel perceived itself to be on the cusp of a Golden Age. The ruler of the era, Josiah, had helped usher in an era of social reform supported by a wave of nationalism.

The mood of the country was buoyant, optimistic. But this patriotic bubble burst when Josiah died an untimely death and parts of the population were suddenly and shockingly carted off into exile by Nebecanezzer, the king of Babylon.

But the optimism and nationalism of the era were slow to wane, even as the facts on the ground told a different story. Local, minor prophets flourished by preaching a kind of false peace, conveying a sense of security to the populace in a time when neither peace nor security was guaranteed.

Which is essentially when Jeremiah enters the picture. He is a hard prophet, for in the words of biblical scholar Bernhard Anderson, he "summoned people to face the realities of their history," and maybe more to the point he summoned them to face the realities of their present.

We hate that, don't we, when people summon us to face the realities of our histories, of our present. Especially when there is pain involved, or embarrassment. Or something darker, something more dysfunctional.

For Israel, that dysfunctional thing was faith in things that were not God; it was misplaced trust in institutions that promised false security.

Jeremiah's message to the country was thus like a message delivered by one's best and most trusted friend, someone who knows something is amiss and cares enough to say so.

It was a diagnostic message, yet ultimately loving. It sounded harsh but only because it was true. Look there's something wrong here and if we don't turn the ship around it's only gonna get worse. But we can get things turned around.

Which is when Yahweh enters the picture. I'm the potter, you are the clay , says the Lord. Let me re-shape you. When life has roughed you up, let me re-remake you; let me restore you to who I created you to be, who you are meant to be.

In the NT, the word for that shaping, that remaking, is discipleship. Nowadays "discipleship" is at best an anachronistic word - a word that has very little contemporary meaning. At worst it's a scary word that conjures up notions of people who blindly follow religious nutcases to their death by kool-aid.

But it's one of those words that's worth reclaiming. A word that bears rich meaning, meaning which we should not be ashamed of.

The word itself is innocent enough. It comes from the Latin for "one who learns." So in general a disciple is a student. But in the context of the gospel it has a very specific meaning.

In the 1 ^st century rabbis generally did not call disciples to follow them. Would-be disciples sought them out and more or less applied to be their students, sort of like applying to go to a particular college.

Moreover in that time, as it still is today, the best way for a religious professional to enjoy a long, prosperous career was to play it safe, keep your head down, mind your own business and obey the rules of empire.

You taught your students to read, not to rock the boat. You taught them how to interpret the law, not how to break it redemptively and re-write it. You taught them to bury, not raise, the dead.

But that, of course, was not his way. In a phrase made famous by Deitrich Bonhoeffer, when Jesus called disciples to follow him, he called them to come and die. He insisted that if they did not hate father and mother and even life itself, they could not be his disciples.

Lest you think that Jesus was himself a kind of nutcase, asking things only a cult leader would ask, let me point out that much of that rhetoric was hyperbole. In that time, hyperbole was a well-established teaching tool, a dramatic way of illustrating the gravity of a particular point.

But it had to be said. For when Jesus called his disciples, he wasn't asking if they wanted to learn how to parse Hebrew verbs. He was asking them to join his mini-revolution. To practice his teachings was illegal. If you were gonna follow him, you were gonna get in trouble, no two ways about it. He simply wanted people to know what they were getting themselves into.

Because the goal of discipleship was not to become some nice person. The goal was to become something, someone, new. One who learns, who is made, re-formed, re-shaped into God's image. Someone who practiced new values, who embraced new priorities; someone who saw the world through a new lens, who saw tradition enemies as human beings; who saw the "unclean" as bearers of God's own image. Someone who saw impossibilities as opportunities.

I mentioned Deitrich Bonhoeffer a moment ago. Bonhoeffer was a member of the Confessing Church --- a group of German Christians who broke with the National Church in Germany and actively resisted Hitler.

He's a man who understood the cost of discipleship. He documented that cost in a book by the same name. The book was rooted in his experience of putting his faith into practice in the real world, his experience of imitating Christ by resisting evil as he saw it. His resistance cost him. We was jailed and eventually killed for resisting Hitler.

It was cutting-edge discipleship, and Bonhoeffer wasn't alone. The Confessing Church was full of men and women who risked their lives in the service of peace, people like Karl Barth and Martin Niemoller. More than a few of these brave souls were sent to concentration camps for acting out their resistance. For practicing their discipleship. For breaking the law of the land.

And then the war ended, and the world began to prosper. And perhaps as it happened in Jeremiah's time, people forgot God. Or they domesticated God.

Discipleship became mainstream. Churches held art exhibits, rather than demonstrations. In Sunday school, we taught our children crafts rather than the meaning of justice.

And so the meaning of discipleship steadily became lost. Now we've reached the point where anyone who publicly identifies themselves as a Christian is immediately suspect as yet another nutcase.

You've probably heard of the film Dead Man Walking. It's a film by Tim Robbins about the work and ministry of Sister Helen Prejean's among death row inmates.

In an interview about the film, someone asked him about Sister Helen's faith. Robbins was obviously embarrassed by the question. "I believe . . . um . . . that there are people who are on earth who live highly enlightened lives and who achieve a certain level of spirituality in connection with a force of goodness. And because these people have walked the earth, I believe that [they] have created God" (quoted in Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris, pg. 240).

I've never met her but I'm quite sure Sister Helen Prejean would be astonished to discover that she had created God. My guess is that she would insist, rather, that God had created her. That she was not highly enlightened, just an ordinary, faithful woman. And that a hundred small acts of discipleship shaped her such that, finally, she was able to minister without fear to the hardest convicts in the American prison system.

I guess the simplest way to put it is that a disciple is someone just like you and me. An ordinary church-goer who believes that lives matter - American lives, Iraqi lives, Muslim lives, Jewish lives, Sunni lives, Shiite lives. The lives of prisoners; the lives of immigrants.

A disciple is one of those church-going weirdos who believes that truth matters in personal and public discourse, someone who's willing to summon people to face the realities of their history, and to regularly examine their own history.

Someone who's willing to minister to prisoners on death row and visit the sick and homebound. Someone who's brave enough not to let the church continue to discriminate against its gay and lesbian members.

Another nutcase like Jeremiah and Jesus, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helen Prejean who believes that the world is worth saving and that God may have something interesting and relevant to say about how to do that.

Another oddball who's willing to come to Sunday school, of all things, to hear what some of the bravest people in the theological world are saying about the new truth that God is leading them into, a truth that is setting them free and promises to redraw the boundaries of what it means to have faith.

Someone who's willing to come to church - and I mean, how old-fashioned is that! - to be met there by God, to be re-shaped and re-made like clay in God's own hands.

Amen