Proper 18 (September 4-10)
Texts: Luke 14:25-33;
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
YouTube: https://youtu.be/JwOPcGa9czQ
Sermon Take-Home Notes
BEDFORD FALLS OR POTTERSVILLE? COUNT THE COST
This is the book we’re reading for the Racine Collective Book Study this Fall. It’s titled No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), by Kate Bowler.1 I’ve started reading it and like it very much so far. I hope you’ll join us this Wednesday at 1 or 6 pm. All the details are on page 18 of your bulletins.
I’d like to give you a brief preview. There’s a surprising vignette right in the first chapter. Kate Bowler is 35 years-old, with a one year-old child, and in the hospital following surgery to treat colon cancer. She finally asks the surgeon for the first time about her chances of beating the cancer. He slowly lays out the following diagnosis: It’s already stage four cancer with lesions on her liver, which means she has a 14% chance of living more than two years. It’s devastating news.
But it’s one of her first responses that’s surprising. She heads down to the hospital gift shop, in her gown and towing the I.V. stand with her. She begins pulling books off the bookshelf — not single books to buy, but stacks of books — Just clearing them off the shelves. She asks for the manager. When the manager appears, she pronounces that these stacks of books she has pulled off the shelf can no longer be sold here. She explains that they are unfair, and can even be harmful, to people with serious diagnoses like hers.
Kate Bowler is an experienced writer who’s a professor of church history at Duke Divinity School. In this book, she writes with a beautiful tenderness and wisdom about her battle with cancer. In this first chapter she begins to explain, through recounting the hospital gift shop incident, how her previous experience as a historian and author helps her discern what kind of Christian faith it takes to stand up to such a serious diagnosis. As she explained to the gift shop manager, a previous book she has authored is about so-called Prosperity Gospel,2 popular in many Christian circles. Those are the books she has pulled off the shelf.
Prosperity Gospel books, very popular these days, are essentially self-help books about having a certain prayerlife and Christian lifestyle that can help bring you wealth and health and happiness. These books teach that if you pray hard enough and faithfully enough, God will grant you what you want. Well, for someone battling stage four cancer, prayer is certainly important. But it can also be harmful if you expect that God will grant you all of your wishes. No Cure for Being Human will be about the kind of Christian faith that is both bold but also realistic. It is about a faith in God that helps one to participate positively in one’s healing, but it does not seek to manipulate God in doing so. And it doesn’t create false hope. I’m getting the feeling that it’s going to be like the faith of a long-time colleague here in Racine, Pastor Walter Hermann, who struggled for many, many years with M.S. before finally succumbing to it. He would often say, “There may not always be a cure, but there’s always healing. In short, it is a book about having the right kind of faith to meet the challenge of something like a serious cancer diagnosis. I hope you’ll join us on Wednesdays in reading and discussing this book together.
But starting this sermon with an invitation to the Book Study is also an introduction into today’s Gospel Reading about counting the cost of discipleship. Jesus is trying to guide his contemporaries into the right kind of Jewish faith to meet the challenges of a deadly diagnosis in the face of the ravages of the Roman Empire. Their heavy-handed, authoritarian, nationalistic way of ruling is literally killing their people. In standing up to it, to be a disciple of his, will require one to metaphorically, and perhaps literally, carry one’s own cross. Standing for God’s reign coming into the world might get you crucified. That’s the cost of discipleship to the One who is bringing that reign into a world where humans reign in deadly ways.
Siblings in Christ, we are living at a time when a so-called Christian Nationalist movement is seeking to bring a heavy-hand, authoritarian style of governance into our nation and world. It has already begun to cost people’s lives and threatens to be very deadly. It is ruled by things like filling our city streets with heavily armed soldiers. It features masked storm troopers whisking away law-abiding members of our communities to detention centers. It carves out even more of a share our nation’s wealth for the already mega-wealthy.
And it should come as no surprise that this Christian Nationalism also coincides quite a bit, though not completely, with the Prosperity Gospel that Kate Bowler has written about. We are in the middle section of Luke’s Gospel where, over eight chapters, Luke will narrate Jesus’s encounters with six rich men,3 seeking to teach us the dangers of wealth — the very opposite of how to orient one’s prayerlife and faith towards accumulating wealth. In short, on Sunday mornings we have been reading our Gospel texts for the right kind of faith to stand up to the Christian Nationalist movement. And, realistically, we need to be able to count the cost of discipleship to this One who brings God’s very different kind of reign into the world. We need to know what kind of faith it takes to meet the very serious diagnosis of the politics and economics of our times. What kind of human being do we need to be in following Jesus to help usher in this very different kind of reign that leads not to prosperity for the few but flourishing for the many.
For God’s reign, you see, stands for the American ideal of all people being created equal. I heard an interview this week with Ken Burns, the videographer who produces brilliant histories for PBS. He began with a series on the Civil War way back in 1990. He has since done series on WWII and the Viet Nam War — and many other things, like baseball. In November, he has a major new series coming out on the American Revolution.4 In the interview this week, previewing the upcoming series, he recalled a quote he had featured 35 years ago in the series on the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was writing to an acquaintance named Joshua Speed in 1855, fully five years before he ran for President. Lincoln wrote these prophetic words in his letter:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings (the other party) get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.5
Wow! Isn’t that prophetic for our time, too? As we watch I.C.E storm troops round up thousands of migrants who are productive members of our communities? As we watch armed soldiers populate the streets of our cities? As we watch things like the Big Morally Repugnant Bill pass, stripping millions of the health care insurance and transferring even greater wealth to the rich? I submit to you that our current leadership simply does not believe in our nation’s credo that all people are created equal. Watch what they do, not what they say.
Let me close this morning by sharing another gem from Ken Burns in the interview I saw this week. He conjured up that holiday favorite movie It’s a Wonderful Life.6 We watch it several times every December. Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, is driven to such despair that he tries to take his own life. Clarence the angel, gives George the chance to see how the world changes if he were not there working for good, especially against Bedford Falls greedy banker Mr. Potter. Clarence shows him how his resistance to Mr. Potter prevents Potter from taking over their town. In a world without George Bailey, Bedford Falls becomes the dystopian Pottersville. Ken Burns asks simply of our moment: Do we want to live in Bedford Falls, or in Pottersville?7 In other words, what will happen to our nation if you and I aren’t among those who resist Christian Nationalism?
Yes, we should count the cost of discipleship to the coming of God’s reign into the world through Jesus. But another way to calculate the cost is to ask: what is the cost to millions of others — to innocent people especially — if we don’t bold stand up and resist? If we aren’t the George Baileys of our time? In my current situation, I count the cost of not trying, with everything I have, to make a better world for my new grandson to grow up in. Will he grow up in something more like Bedford Falls or Pottersville? How do you count the cost of losing our nation to nationalism?
Siblings in Christ, as we go to our Lord’s Table this morning we are reminded of the cost already, our Lord’s body broken for us, his blood poured out for us. But we also know the rewards. Forgiveness of sins. New Creation. God’s Holy Spirit empowering us to be better human beings. So let us so strive for a new birth of freedom in our nation — but decidedly not through violent means of spilling someone else’s blood, but through the costly willingness to nonviolently stand in loving service to our neighbors. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 7, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/JwOPcGa9czQ
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear). Random House, 2021.
2. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford, 2013). Examples of Prosperity Gospel preachers are Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, and T.D. Jakes.
3. My guide for reading Luke 12-19 is Ched Myers’ book Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025).
4. Ken Burns has exclusively produced his numerous series with Public Broadcasting (PBS); see the webpage devoted to his work at the PBS website: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/
5. This quote can be found easily by searching online. A comprehensive site for all things Abraham Lincoln is www.abrahamlincolnonline.org. You can find there, for example, the entire letter to Joshua Speed: https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm
6. It’s a Wonderful Life, a film by Frank Capra, Liberty Films, 1946. Starring Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore.
7. For the complete Ken Burns interview, with both the Lincoln quote and the references to It’s a Wonderful Life, listen to the Nicole Wallace podcast “Best People” for September 1, 2025: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ken-burns-believes-in-our-american-experiment/id1817225413?i=1000723926306
