Here's all the rest of the words that the cloud didn't show!
Marvin
Lindsay
The
Gayton Kirk
Luke
9: 51-62/Year C, Ordinary 13
June
27, 2010
It’s summertime. A lot of us are
traveling. Pastor Janet and others have headed for Montreat this weekend. My
family and I will be spending a week in August at Virginia Beach, and with
temperatures already topping 100 degrees, I can hardly wait.
Interestingly enough, we find Jesus
and his disciples setting out on a trip in today’s gospel lesson. Luke tells us
that at the end of his journey Jesus will be “taken up.” Without a doubt this
refers to his ascension into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Father.
And so we are envious. You may be going to Virginia Beach, or Disney World or
Vegas, or Europe, but none of those destinations can compare with the Jerusalem
above, where the streets are paved with gold, where the tree of life bears
fruit every month of the year, where the soul is ravished forever by visions of
God’s pure love.
But wait. If you’ve been on vacation
before, you know that the trip itself can make even the best destination more
trouble than it’s worth. Canceled flights. Flat tires. Hungry, thirsty kids
fussing and fighting in the back seat. “Are we there yet?” “I’ve got to go to
the bathroom!” So too Jesus, before he can ascend the Jerusalem above, must
spend time walking the streets of the Jerusalem below, the city that stones the
prophets. Before he is taken up, he’ll be taken out--out of the city--and
lifted high on a cross. The road to glory is paved with suffering. That is why
Jesus “sets his face” as Luke puts it, toward Jerusalem. Jaw firm, eyebrows
narrowed, he is steeling himself, for he knows that the way ahead of him is bumpy
and dangerous.
As they set out, they pass through
Samaria. Although Samaria lies between Jesus’s home district of Galilee and
Jerusalem, it was something of a foreign country. Samaria was Elijah and
Elisha’s old stomping grounds, but their fellow Israelites failed to listen to
them, so Samaria was overrun and resettled with gentiles. By the time of Jesus,
the residents of Samaria were those who’d descended from intermarriages between
Jews and Gentiles. Their brand of Israelite religion was different than the
Jewish brand, which was centered on the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus sent messengers
ahead of him announcing his intent to pass through, making this something like the
first Christian stab at what we’d call foreign missions.
So too, Jesus sends us out before
him today, no less than he sent the twelve before him in the first century. Right
here, not only to foreign countries, for the Samaritans live right here among us,
just as in Jesus’s day, they lived smack dab between Nazareth and Jerusalem.
Who are the Samaritans? Anyone who isn’t
on the same road we’re on. We’re following Jesus to the Jerusalem above, but
others offer sacrifice only on the altars of reason and science. Still others are
on that long pilgrimage to the 18th hole this and every weekend morning.
To these and other Samaritans Jesus sends us to announce his imminent arrival.
To these and other Samaritans Jesus sends us to invite them to join us on the
journey of discipleship.
Now, we have to be honest. Jesus’s first
foreign mission was a flop. The Samaritans in one village were not at all
interested in showing hospitality to someone on their way to that place,
to worship in that way.
What if we flop? What if they slam
the door in our face? What if they scoff? What if they politely decline to join
us in our parade? Shall we call down a bonfire on their heads like James and John
proposed? No, we modern Christians are too passive-aggressive for that. We’d probably
just threaten to pray for them instead.
Notice that Jesus doesn’t rebuke the
unbelievers; he rebukes the disciples for wanting to stand in judgment of
unbelievers. In that respect Jesus is different than Elijah who preceded him,
who once called down fire on a posse that the king sent out to round him up.
And here lies the main difference between Jesus and the prophets who prepared
his way. It’s not that they were all about wrath and Jesus was all about love.
I imagine that there was no small amount of wrath in Jesus’s voice when he
rebuked the sons of Zebedee. No, the key difference is that Jesus is easier on
his enemies than Elijah was, and harder on his friends than Elijah was. Judgment
begins with the household of God, not the outside world, and what we will be
judged harshly for is, paradoxically, our judgmentalism.
Judgmentalism may also close off
possibilities for second thoughts. Long after Jesus was taken up into heaven,
the first disciples found themselves having to flee for their lives from
Jerusalem, where a persecution had broken out. One of them wound up in, you
guessed it, Samaria, and this time around, he got a far more favorable reception.
Today’s No may be a harbinger of tomorrow’s Yes. One can never tell.
At any rate, there’s no such thing
as mission when we are surrounded by people who are on the same journey that
we’re on. I think that’s a problem for us Christians these days: too many of the
people we associate with are also Christians. But it’s not an insurmountable
problem. Either Jesus or circumstances will send us to the Samaritans.
Falling closely on the heels of the
mission failure in the Samaritan village are three non-call stories. In the first,
a man offers to follow Jesus wherever he will go. He would seem to be an ideal
candidate for discipleship, what with his open-ended commitment to Christ. But
Jesus refuses to take him up on the offer. Rather, he disabuses the man of any
romantic notions about this journey to Jerusalem. “Foxes have holes in the ground,
but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Jesus once called King Herod a fox,
and Herod did have places to lay his head all over the place. A palace by the
sea. Another one at Masada where the Jews would make their last stand in the
revolt against the Romans. Herod would move about his kingdom, living large and
checking up on his subjects. “If that’s the kind of king you think I am,” says
Jesus, “well, you need a reality check. The road is long and hard, and there is
no crown of gold for anyone who’s unprepared to wear a crown of thorns. Still
want to hitch a ride with me?” The man’s subsequent silence speaks volumes.
Exchanges like this make me wonder
if we don’t make membership in the body of Christ too easy. What if churches everywhere
posted signs at their front doors saying, Warning: the people who gather
here are on a long painful journey of transformation marked by a life-and-death
struggle with demons within and enemies without. Maybe before we jump on
the fresh meat that wanders in the sanctuary every so often with pledge cards
and committee memberships, we ought to have an honest-to-goodness come-to-Jesus
meeting with them. “Do you really know what you’re getting yourself into?”
Maybe we should have that conversation
with ourselves. Do we know what we’ve gotten ourselves into? Pain.
Suffering. The enmity of the powers that be. That’s what he got, and as Jesus
himself pointed out, if they treated me like this, what do you think
they’ll do to you?
The second and third non-disciples
are quite similar. Both will follow Jesus, just as soon as they attend to
something very important. One has to bury his father; the other has to kiss
someone goodbye. In a sense, both seem to want to close the book on the past
before they embark on a future with Jesus, but from Jesus’ point of view, both gestures,
far from effecting closure, really betray souls held hostage to the past.
“Let the dead bury the dead, as for
you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” There is much in our history that is
dead, rotten and stinking, but like the dog that returns to its own vomit, for
some strange reason we keep returning it. We pick at those scabs, and the old wounds
never heal. We keep visiting the cemetery to give the grave that tongue-lashing
we could never give the person who deserved it when he or she was alive. Jesus
has rolled away the stone from the tomb in which we find ourselves, but we
refuse to follow him out.
“No one who puts a hand to the plow
and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” We want to follow Jesus to our
new home in that Jerusalem above. We may even be willing to pay the price that
the Jerusalem below will exact from us. But the comforts and pleasures of our
old home in the world still tempt us. One last kiss. One last drink. One last
look. And then we’ll follow.
Nope. Not possible. With Jesus, it’s
all or nothing. Plowing while looking over your shoulder leads to a crooked furrow.
Drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror, and you’ll never get where you’re
going. How can you be a family man if you’re always reliving that last one night
stand? How can you be clean and sober if you fondly recalling the taste of that
last drink or that last drag? How can you live generously if you’re longing for
the old days when you were living large?
Now, I have interpreted the home
situations these would-be disciples want to attend to metaphorically, and
perhaps that makes the demanding, uncompromising nature of Jesus’ reply a bit
more palatable, but what if we take them literally? What about the fact that a man
really had a funeral to attend, and not just any funeral, but his father’s?
What if there’s a real mother at home who needs a goodbye kiss? In Luke’s
gospel it takes Jesus and his disciples nine whole chapters, a third of the gospel,
to get to Jerusalem. Obviously they weren’t in any hurry. Couldn’t they have
waited till the funeral was over?
Here’s the hardest part about
following Jesus. For many, being a disciple isn’t so much a choice between good
and evil as it is a matter of prioritizing the many goods in our lives. Our
family commitments, if we are blessed, are certainly a great good. And yet
there is a higher good than even that of loving parents, children and spouses,
and that is a love for Jesus Christ that is willing to bear the abuse he bore
when he was taken up, so that we might be taken up with him to the Jerusalem above.
When Jesus calls, do we acknowledge the surpassing value of following him with
a Yes right then and there? “In a minute, Jesus,” is an answer that says we
don’t. If you’re like me, you say “In a minute, Jesus,” most every day.
So we come to the end of a story that is in many ways about mission and the call to discipleship and we find that Jesus has netted zero new disciples. Disappointing? Maybe. But this passage is less about laying out a church growth strategy and more about laying bare the costs of discipleship. While the destination is worth it, the journey is long and hard. Whether you’re on the road this summer or at home in Richmond, remember that if you’ve decided to follow Jesus, it’s gotta be his way or the highway.
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