Sermon at Saint Margaret’s Anglican Church, Budapest (2025.09.05)13th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C

Discipleship means surrendering identity, wealth, and security; Sabbath and tithing are spiritual disciplines designed to expose the false god of self-sufficiency and invite us into a deeper trust in

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

Sometimes the lectionary hands us comforting passages. Other times, it throws out challenges. Today’s readings fall into the latter: God’s judgment, slavery, hating your family, money and possessions. Not exactly light topics for a Sunday morning.

But before we face Jesus’ hard words about identity and possessions, we need to set the stage.

Living in community is never easy – whether in our families, neighborhoods, or the wider world. Competing priorities create tension, and instinctively we look for allies.

This past week, students across Hungary began school. For those entering a new environment – like my own children – establishing an “in-group” feels paramount. To use a big word, establishing our social identity is an existential concern. It shapes our sense of safety, belonging, and long-term security. We instinctually feel stronger ehen we belong to a group than when we stand alone.

Yet social identity is complex, woven from layers of race, gender, age, education, religion, politics, and more. For minorities, solidarity can be a way of survival and leveraging influence. For majorities, it comes with privilege and helps ensure the continuance of a way of life.

Next Sunday, Fr. Frank will baptize two Slovenian teenagers who recently decided to follow Christ. Fundamentally, baptism is about identity. It symbolizes death and resurrection – dying to our old selves and being raised to new life in Christ. We die to striving for meaning and fulfillment outside of God and are given a new identity in him.

This identity reshapes everything – our allegiances, our values, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to others. In the church, Paul reminds us, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. All are one in Christ Jesus.

But that is not how the world operates. In the world, social identity creates hierarchies, divisions, and power struggles.

God’s consistent message throughout Scripture is that the security offered by social identity is counterfeit. It often becomes idolatrous because, as we increasingly locate our well-being in these social structures, our primary allegiances shift to them. Over time, we invest more and more of our heart and time serving our in-group than God. It is subtle and gradual, but like all idolatries, they eventually demand sacrifices.

Even religious identity can become a stumbling block. In Jeremiah, the prophet paints a vivid picture: God is the potter, Israel the clay. Israel was chosen not for superiority but to be a light to the nations. But over time, they grew complacent and self-righteous. Jeremiah warned that, like a potter reshaping clay, God could set them aside and begin again with a people who would walk faithfully with him.

That warning echoes to us as Christians. Having been grafted into God’s family, we, too, are tempted to become complacent, to assume our religious identity insulates us from judgment, and to become self-righteous – seeing ourselves as superior to other Christians – whether they are the “fundamentalist evangelicals” or the “woke progressives”.

We find safety and security being on the “right side”, but it is just as dangerous as other expressions of social identity.

Paul’s letter to Philemon makes the challenge of our new identity painfully concrete. He appeals to a slave owner, asking him to welcome back his runaway slave, Onesimus, now not as property but as a beloved brother in Christ.

It’s tempting to sanitize this story. After all, Philemon was also a Christian, so surely he was a good slave-owner, right? But let’s be honest: Slavery has always been exploitative, and Onesimus was legally his property, a significant financial asset.

Two radical challenges collide here. Socially, Philemon held wealth and status while Onesimus, as a slave, had none. Yet in Christ they were equals. And economically, Paul was asking Philemon to take a substantial financial loss for the sake of the gospel.

Then comes our Gospel passage, where Jesus raises the stakes even higher. 

Luke shows us three groups:

• those uninterested in Jesus’ teaching,

• the curious crowd who followed him,

• and the disciples who devoted themselves to becoming like their rabbi.

So what distinguished disciples from the crowd? 

Jesus answers with startling words: “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.”

His language shocks us. It echoes moments in Israel’s history – like Exodus 32, when loyalty to God demanded painful choices, even against kin who turned to idolatry. Jesus presses the same truth: loyalty to him must come before all other ties.

He goes further: his followers must carry their own cross, laying down personal ambitions and even life itself. And he concludes with the uncompromising demand: “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Hyperbole? Yes. But intentional. 

Jesus uses jarring words to shake us from comfortable assumptions. He warns us that social identity and material wealth easily become idols – counterfeit sources of safety and peace.

Luke places this teaching at the start of Jesus’ long journey to Jerusalem, where he himself would embody it, giving his very life for the sake of others. And he calls us to the same arc: “Not my will, but yours be done.”

God knows how prone we are to idolatry. That is why from the beginning he gave Israel practices like Sabbath and tithing.

Sabbath rest trains us to remember that self-sufficiency is a fiction; our well-being does not depend on endless work but on God’s care. 

Tithing trains us to remember that our security does not lie in our wealth but in God’s provision.

We Anglicans may not like talking about money, but Scripture does. Wealth and possessions surface hundreds of times in the Old Testament. Nearly half of Jesus’ parables deal with them. Scholars estimate that one in ten New Testament verses touches on money. 

Why? Because wealth so easily becomes an idol. Whether we fear not having enough or we quietly trust too much in what we already have, money competes for our hearts.

Tithing helps recalibrate our hearts. It is not that God – or even St Margaret’s – needs our money. It is that we need to loosen our grip on it, so we can learn to increasingly locate our identity in God.

So as we close, let me offer a gentle but searching invitation to reflect on your own practice of tithing. For most of us, the very thought stirs resistance. And precisely because it often touches a raw nerve, that response signals that God may be calling us to grow in this area.

The disciplines of Sabbath and tithing are not burdens but training aids. They prepare us for moments of testing, when God’s call clashes with our desires, when we are asked to pray, “not my will, but yours be done.”

Ultimately, Jesus does not call us to poverty for its own sake. He calls us to freedom – the freedom that comes when our truest identity and deepest security are found not in what we own or who we are socially, but in Christ alone.

As Jim Elliot, the missionary martyred in Ecuador, famously said: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Amen.

The Rev’d) John D. Wilson, Curate

Saint Margaret’s Anglican Episcopal Church, Budapest