Scripture: Luke 14: 25–33
The spirit is activated when your whole soul is directed into a group effort. Working on a campaign and other idealistic efforts can have this magic. Playing in a band or singing in a choir have it too. Starting a business with partners, or group fundraising for an important cause. Living out the teachings of your faith with your fellow disciples. All these can bring us alive.
But it’s also true that emergencies motivate people in even more powerful ways — when 54 unhoused people died in 2024 in Rhode Island, a coalition of people started Operation No One Dies with the goal of preventing deaths as a result of homelessness community groups; when ICE agents in Minneapolis earlier this year started targeting people at bus stops and public transit lines, community groups organized to help walk and drive kids to school; when a group of tenants in Chicago in 1966 took over their rundown apartment building and instead of paying rent to their landlord, all start paying their rent toward emergency plumbing, patching, and painting repairs to their apartment building, people around the country began to take notice.
How are we to organize ourselves as idealists with all the urgency of an emergency? Jesus shows us the way.
The front page of the Providence Journal this week had a story this week about the Regency Plaza apartments in downtown Providence. When the 444-unit complex was built in the 60s and 70s, it was the biggest apartment building in Rhode Island. Today, the Regency is worth talking about for one specific reason — when it was built, the management was afraid of what was happening in Chicago with tenants unionizing and organizing their collective power, and so here in Providence they intentionally made this giant Regency apartment complex without any shared or gathering spaces. On the first floor of each building is a concrete-walled hallway leading directly to an elevator that leads up to apartments — there’s nowhere to gather as a group to talk about how to make things better.
History shows us time and again that people trying to hold power will try to keep people from organizing with each other — and in the fullest expression of the idea, will actively turn people against each other as informants and enemies — because when people are coordinated and inspired by a shared purpose, they have all the power.
It’s not just true in the case of apartments buildings. It’s true of states and nations. It’s true of Jesus.
The Gospeler Luke writes that Jesus by this time in his ministry was traveling with large crowds — he’s popular with a growing segment of his society. But rather than trying to grow the crowds to the biggest ever, it’s not the pursuit of numbers that motivates Jesus . . . it’s the organizing of people who have converted their way of thinking.
In a serious tone, Jesus says there’s a cost to following in his way and being his disciple.
When Jesus says that his followers should “hate” their family members — I believe that’s not about needing to be angry or dislike your family — which would contradict a lot of others things that Jesus teaches — It’s about being willing to decenter your traditional loyalties to your family or kin or neighborhood groups, and to create familial loyalty to Jesus and Jesus followers. The cost of discipleship is learning how to love in bigger circles, in new ways. Not everyone will be able to do that, says Jesus. There’s a cost and a joy to this new way of thinking.
Jesus is making it harder for people to follow him, rather than easier . . . maybe this has to do with this same dynamic that emergencies bring people together — Jesus raising the stakes of discipleship is the equivalent of ringing social alarm bells.
In the post-9/11 era, many of us have found that gathering as groups of people is increasingly hard to do — the pre-existing trends of social fragmentation have been amplified by the trauma of the attacks that day, and the wars that followed, and then decades of polarization instigated by those who break people into opposing factions to prevent the exercise of collective consciousness and organized power.
Jesus says the cost of discipleship — of gathering with him and with his other followers — is hard. But making that commitment is an important as responding to an emergency. Mao tried this in China in the Cultural Revolution, but it instigated the deaths of millions; Jesus on the other hand is part of Operation No One Dies. He is teaching us a new movement that will not fall like Babylon, nor crumble like Rome, but one that is built through love and can spiritually last forever. In order to do this, something in one has to acknowledge the value of the old world that you are letting go of in order for a new commitment in Christ to matter and to make a difference in the world.
Which brings me back to Geoffrey Green. In his time at Newman Church as Minister of Music, Geoff has created new and many ways for the people to gather together and find their common humanity, and their power, through music.
This past January, Newman Church Choir and RPM Voices of RI hosted a concert here at the church in honor of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. on the occasion of King’s birthday. After Becky Bass had brought the house down and everyone to their feet in the closing song of the concert, she invited everyone to come to Memorial Hall for food, and joy, and celebration, and love.
As Geoff burst out of the sanctuary door, into Memorial Hall, eyes and smile alive with the spirit, he said “we’ve got ourselves a revival in there.”
I think this is exactly Geoff’s ministry, and his magic. Everywhere he goes, there’s some kind of revival taking place — some type of invigoration and new life. With his deep bench of beloved collaborators, Geoff creates opportunities for community to gather, for people to connect and generate new ideas, for classical music to become contemporary, for people to hone their craft together, and for spirits to be transformed. This Newman community is all the better for having had Geoff come into its midst and accompany it along the road of discipleship — with its joys and its costs.
We’re on this road with all who have traveled before us.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Chicago with the housing activists who told tenants living in dangerous apartment buildings to stop paying rent to landlords and instead start paying rent toward repairing their buildings.
King famously said about the tactics, “we aren’t dealing with the legality of it, we are dealing with the morality of it.”
There is something in all of us that is animated toward the moral path — which is the path of Christ — the one that costs something, and by which we gain the world.
Where will we go together, today?
What will we give up so that all of us might receive, today?
What song will animate our journey, today?
What friends will give meaning to our lives, today?
How will we make today into every day?
With Jesus bringing all creation together, no one can keep us apart forever.
Together, we would be building . . .
May it be so. Amen.
