Sunday Sermon - 07/09/2025

Sermon on Luke 14:25-33 07/09/2025 - Transcript

(This Sermon was delivered at St. John Chrysostom’s Church, Manchester on 07/09/2025)

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, peace be with you. May I speak, and may you hear, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This is the first time I’ve ever put together a sermon. It’s a privilege to stand here at the pulpit today and though preparing this homily today felt like entering unfamiliar territory in some ways, standing before an audience IS something I’m familiar with. As I contemplated the theme of this sermon, something stood out to me from the Scripture reading we heard today – an idea, that can be elusive at times and obvious at others. That is right order, right relationship, a hierarchy of priorities. Understanding what it means to put something front and centre in our hearts and minds.

As a musician and a teacher, it’s often my job to help my students understand the underlying relationships of ideas and features in a piece of music. In music, as in life, what we grant our focus and pay close attention to grows in stature and importance. What we ignore diminishes, or may play a discordant role, disturbing the overarching harmony and direction of the music. A bite-size way of summarising this principle is "Where attention goes, energy flows.”

The reading we heard today is challenging – even shocking, almost sickening – to a modern, secular audience: “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.” I should comment here that the word hate is a Semitic figure of speech that means “to love less.” Nevertheless, it touches an emotional nerve. It seems almost an impossible task. How could we live up to this expectation?

But if we come back to the theme of right order and right relationship, we see that this is Jesus’s uniquely radical way of helping us grasp the spiritual ideal that underscores the entire Gospel and is repeated in some fashion time and time again: to live in the world but not be of the world. He is the vine and we are the branches.

When confronted by an expert in the law of Moses about which is the greatest commandment, how does Jesus respond?

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

The core of the spiritual life, by this token, is to love God – and then to love everything else for God’s sake. Jesus knows, however, that as sinners – as the flawed human beings we are – we fall, as St. Augustine says, into the trap of loving the creature and forgetting the Creator. When we treat something less than God as God, chaos and trouble are never far away.

It’s important, therefore, to establish that the Christian life is one lived with Christ, and with God loved first and last. Everything else flows out of that relationship. It is where all other relationships find their gravity and balance. This reordering of our priorities also helps us understand what this relationship promises us – both in the present and in the future.

As our patron, St. John Chrysostom, says: "though Christ commands self-denial and the taking up of the cross, He also calls His yoke “easy” and His burden “light.” This duality shows that He isn’t drawing us into toil alone, nor tem

pting us with comfort. He lays out both challenge and grace for our preparation."

The cost is real; yet the yoke is not crushing. It is manageable when our lives are anchored in Christ. Discipleship means aligning ourselves not with our own will, but with God’s. It means refusing to be caught up in the drama of our own lives, and instead living with eyes to see and ears to hear God’s plan for us – and doing what we can to answer His call. As Christ Himself says in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Not my will, but yours.”

But what does this right relationship look like for us today? In an ever more polarised and secularised culture, ideologies, money, and politics become objects of worship and draw us away from God’s rightful place as the rock on which we build our lives. To worship these competing forces with our attention and affection is like the one who builds his house on sand.

As our lives become ever noisier and busier, we risk obscuring that communication with God which nourishes the soul and allows His peace to enter and guide our life. When we find ourselves anxious or frustrated, how often do we turn to entertainment or scrolling to give us satisfaction? What if, instead, even for five minutes, we chose to pray or meditate on Scripture – taking time to dwell in God and put Him at the front and centre of our lives?

Through this proper attention we can become like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in season, and whose leaves do not wither.

The lesson of today’s Gospel is this: in order to love our family, friends, and neighbours best, we must put God first. When we do, His perfect Spirit orders our lives in harmony, and even heavy burdens become light in His strength. Amen.