The Cost of Discipleship

Jacqueline WayneGuite

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

September 7, 2025—Proper 18C

One of my friends is in the midst of a serious and maybe relationship-damaging fight with one of her family members. After the school shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, many people began to blame the trans community for this tragic event, because the shooter in this instance is trans.

My friend overheard two of her family members talking — one of them remarking how it’s becoming a trend that trans people are becoming mass shooters and was questioning if trans people are mentally unstable.

That rhetoric has been rising for some time now. Too often, when there is a mass shooting, conspiracy theories take hold that the shooter was trans. It doesn’t matter that they get debunked in a matter of days or even hours. That narrative keeps circulating, falsely claiming that the trans community is disproportionately violent and mentally unstable.

And it happened again after this Minneapolis school shooting as prominent politicians, influencers and commentators posted on social media and took to their cable and podcast platforms.

That’s despite the overwhelming evidence that the vast majority, honestly, vast majority is an understatement, are cis men or boys, people who were assigned male at birth. 

The U.S. Secret Service National Threat Association Center released a report in 2023, analyzing mass public attacks over a five-year stretch. From 2016 to 2020, they found 96% of mass shooters were cis men.

Americans who identify as transgender do not attack and kill people at a disproportionate rate, either. Trans people are much more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. 

There is no evidence that the shooter at Annunciation had any gender-related motive for what he did. What has been discovered is that he idolized other mass shooters and white supremacist ideology, something that is a growing trend.

And so that leads me back to my friend. She is an LGBTQ+ ally. She has friends who are queer and/or trans, and she knows attacks on trans people are a way to scapegoat the real harms in this country — easy access to and glorification of guns and white supremacy. 

So she posted on social media defending the trans community. She spoke up at this critical moment when the trans community is under attack from so many directions.

Well, a family member saw my friend’s social media posts and was personally offended. She told my friend that my friend had no morals and that the only correct response to the shooting was to demonize the shooter and their identity.

My friend tried multiple times to have a conversation with her relative. She tried to explain how she can both think the shooting was tragic and that her heart is grieving for the children, staff and their loved ones, and that she also feels empathy for the trans community, who are experiencing yet another blatant transphobic attack that has no basis in truth.

Her relative’s response was to say that my friend was no longer welcome to be around her children, because, in her view, my friend supported mass murder.

It’s no surprise that my friend was gutted. To have a close family member tell her that she supports mass murder, has no morals, and is not allowed to be near that relative’s children, hurt her so deeply. She confided in me that she was questioning whether to continue speaking up. She wondered if it was worth it when she was being cast as the bad guy in her family and was told that she was the one causing a rift — not the relative.

And that’s when I remembered a passage of Luke’s Gospel we read a few weeks ago when Jesus said, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

Today, Jesus underscores that message again. “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.”

Um, excuse me, Jesus? 

If you came to church this morning a little sleepier than usual, hopefully that line jolted you out of your pew a bit. 

Hate? Jesus is talking about hating one’s parents? Um, isn’t there a commandment to honor one’s mother and father? Also, hating one’s spouse and children? Hating one’s siblings? And even hating one’s own life? What on earth is going on here?

The Jesus we normally read about preaches love. He commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and He says you must love your enemy. 

So there must be more to this passage than is on the surface. Right? Right?!

Time and again, Jesus tells us stories and parables intended to reorient our thinking about society, upsetting our social structure. We are told the wealthy will have a hard time entering the kingdom of heaven. The powerful and popular must humble themselves and take the seat of someone of a low social station when they approach the banquet table. Jesus tells us the poor and the sick and the lowly — they will inherit God’s kingdom. 

And here, that’s what Jesus does again today’s Gospel — he upends the idea of what being a “good person” means. 

In Jesus’ culture, and in our own today, family is one of the most important units in our society. How many have heard of the phrase, “God, family, country?” This is a pretty standard traditional value structure. 

One’s allegiance to God comes first, followed closely by family, and then one’s country. A “good person” values their family and stands with them no matter what.

You might disagree, but family is family, and you never give up on your family.

Well … Jesus challenges us today, questioning this traditional value. If one’s family harbors transphobic beliefs, or maybe racist, sexist, or other intolerant views, do you stay silent to keep the peace? 

Maybe you don’t “give up” on your family members, so to speak, but when you recognize prejudice and intolerance have taken root in their hearts, as a Christian, you may find yourself choosing to live your life differently — and “hating” the life choices and beliefs they have chosen and condoned.

There’s a tremendous cost to following Christ. Living as one of Jesus’ disciples is not easy, and it’s not supposed to be easy. If you find being a Christian is easy, it may be time to self-reflect and ask yourself some hard questions. 

Jesus says quite plainly, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

That cross can look very different to each of us. There is a cost to being a disciple. In our second reading, St. Paul pays dearly. He’s in prison once again for proclaiming the Gospel.

Jesus offers us some analogies about the cost of following Him — about a contractor determining whether he has the finances to build an expensive structure and a king evaluating the human cost of going into battle. Neither comes cheap. These might be metaphors, but the message of both tells us we must expect to pay in some way or another. 

Is Christ asking you to build something? Or are you being asked to work to defeat something?

Jesus says nothing is off limits. Even one’s life is on the table, which might mean a full life pivot in a way you never expected. When God calls, sometimes that means rejecting the life you lived or the life you thought you were going to live.

I have another friend who was building a successful life as an engineer. He had received a good college education and had a job as a mechanical engineer when he heard a calling to the priesthood. Not only did this mean giving up a high-paying salary for a priest’s salary, but converting to Episcopalianism when his own faith tradition refused to consider him, all because of his gender identity as a trans man.

God’s call upended his life as he knew it in ways he never expected. Even once he found his way to the Episcopal denomination, it was still a tough journey, with obstacles and delays at every turn, including clergy and bishop changes and a global pandemic.

I know he had doubts along the way. Was his old life the better path? It certainly was easier. Could he still do some good in the world as an engineer without fully upending everything he had built? But he’s continued to follow God’s call, even when it felt like a cross.

Now we aren’t all called to upend our lives and become priests or risk a relationship with a family member who carries small-minded views. But we are all called to change in ways that will be challenging and will cost us in consequential ways.

Here in this place, together at St. Luke’s, we sit and think about the ways we must change. We can lean on each other to make those changes. For we are stronger together than we are as individuals. We have a community that encourages and supports us in the things we need to shed in order to walk closer to Christ. 

Isn’t that glorious that we have each other as we do these hard things? 

And of course, it gets better, because not only do we have each other, we have the Holy Spirit, who is ready to be called on in those challenging moments when we are weighing the costs, whether we can afford whatever Christ’s path is going to cost us. 

Jesus didn’t say, do it alone. We have the Holy Spirit, and we have each other.

Ask yourself, what allies, resources, prayers, and partners do you need to build something new — a new ministry, a new way of relating to one another, a new social structure? That tower that seems impossible to construct, isn’t with the Spirit’s love.

What battles do you need to fight to overcome the evil powers of this world? Again, the Spirit will give you the tools, the fellow “good trouble”-makers, and the armor needed to conquer that which seeks to destroy, divide, weaken, and hurt us.

Living the Gospel out means standing up for justice, living in solidarity with the marginalized, and risking the wrath of those with power. 

There may very well be an interpersonal cost of speaking uncomfortable truths out loud and refusing to stay silent when we see wrong being done in the world, in our communities, or in our own families.

Taking up the cross also means giving up comfort and control. When we commit ourselves to taking action to show up for the marginalized in our communities, almost anything is possible. 

The Holy Spirit is not predictable and certainly not controllable. When we agree to carry the cross, we also agree to living a life of uncertainty. We’ll make mistakes along the way, and for many of us, it’ll be a struggle to give up our own agendas.

Carrying the cross requires us to have courage and endurance, but it won’t last forever. God doesn’t ask us to suffer and toil for no reason. Remember, on the other side of the cross is redemption, healing, and resurrection.

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

There is a cost to following Christ’s path. It will require loads of courage and fortitude, each other, and the Holy Spirit.

But on the other side of the cross, we will be at one with God and with each other — reborn, wounded but whole. We will know we lived as Christ’s disciples, and we won’t want it any other way.

Amen.