We so often think about 'counting the cost of discipleship' as requiring people to live in chosen poverties, giving up their luxuries or favorite hobbies because service 'requires sacrifice.' Or, at least, that's the way my Midwestern Lutheranism, grown out of a solid Protestant work ethic, put it when I was growing up. But contrasting the Epistle with the Gospel this week, setting them side by side, I wonder if there's something deeper going on. I know our possessions tend to possess us after awhile if we're not careful. They say the happiest days of a boat-owner's life are the day she buys the boat and the day she sells it. But what about the addictive patterns of behavior we can't let go of? What about the unhealthy boundaries we only sort of keep because of our clinging to reputation or status or expectations set by the cultures we are immersed in?

For Philemon, becoming a disciple meant giving up ownership of another person and learning to see Onesimus as a brother in Christ, rather than as a means of his own comfort and a marker of his own status. Now that I, a transmasculine person, am no longer seen as female when I move through the world, I have inherited a lot of male privilege - what social expectations come with that privilege, and what allows me to keep the white, young, able-bodied, educated male privilege that I now have? How does discipleship call me to lay down that way of occupying space, to return voice and space to kindred in Christ whose voices and bodies have been erased and made 'less than' so that my white male perspective can be lifted up as the 'norm'?

Following as a student of Jesus means a lot of uncomfortable conversations, a lot of hard realizations about the way we have ordered our systems of oppression to serve only a small portion of society on the backs of others. Jesus did not come to maintain those systems, but to break down those structures of inequality and oppression, to lay down his own power and authority, so that those who had been marginalized may be seen and recognized as full members of the kingdom of God. When we are able to follow in his steps, we are freed from bondage to these cycles of death and liberated into the cycles of life everlasting. Thanks be to God, Jesus pulls us with him through those cycles of death and out the other side, to newness of life and daily resurrection.