Luke 9:51-62
People often struggle with this
passage from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus
seems a little insensitive. He’s not
quite as insensitive as the disciples who want to command fire to come down
from heaven and consume an entire city because they were inhospitable, but
still insensitive. In this story, he
had three people who wanted to follow him.
The first person said that he would follow him wherever he went. Jesus
did not say no, but his response was less than affirming. He said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the
air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The second person wanted to follow Jesus but
wanted to bury his father first. Jesus
replied, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the
Kingdom of God.” The third agreed to
follow Jesus but wanted to say goodbye to his loved ones first. To that Jesus essentially replied, “You can’t
follow me when you are constantly looking back.
When proclaiming the Kingdom of God, you have to look forward.”
The response that troubles most
people is to the man who wants to bury his father. Anyone who has experienced
the death of a loved one knows how important the grieving process is. And even if we set aside the emotional needs,
what about the very practical needs?
Someone has to make the necessary arrangements for a funeral. It makes perfect sense that it would be the
son who would do that. Why would Jesus
be so unreasonable as to not let someone bury his father?
In order to answer that question, we
need to take a couple steps back to the beginning of the reading. “When the days drew near for Jesus to be
taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
It seems like a benign enough sentence; but it was anything but that. Remember what happened in Jerusalem: that is
where Jesus was crucified. For the
author of Luke, this sentence marked a turning point for Jesus. If it was a
movie, the music would have changed and the screen would have darkened. There would be a close up of Jesus’ face and
things might switch to slow motion, because slow motion always adds drama. This
was Jesus’ walk to his death. It is when
things got very serious. When the first
man said that he would follow Jesus wherever he was going, Jesus knew that he
had no idea what he was talking about.
Even the disciples who had been following him all along did not
understand where this journey would lead them.
For Jesus, it wasn’t just that
things got more serious at this point-- there was an urgency to his
actions. He could not wait for people to
say good bye. He could not wait for
people to make funeral arrangements.
His task was to follow the will of his father. Nothing else mattered in comparison. Jesus understood the importance of his
mission, the urgency of his journey, but it must have been difficult for him to
convince others of that. Even when he
started talking to his disciples about his death, they did not really
understand it. They did not understand
it until he was arrested.
About five years ago, I was able to
take a month long sabbatical. I had been
studying something called the Emerging Church for several years at that point. It is essentially a movement in modern
Christianity to revitalize the church and find new ways of being the
church. What I learned was that the
roots of this emerging church were in England.
The Church of England had begun working on initiatives like this decades
before and had even started funding the process long before the Episcopal
Church even acknowledged that there was a need.
I was able to visit places in England that had been engaged in this kind
of work. They had an entire facility devoted to all kinds of church
revitalization.
I sat down with one of the leaders of
the organization as he described all of the things they were doing. At one point I said, “I don’t understand why
you are so far ahead of the American Church in this conversation.” He said, “We
hit rock bottom before you did. The church over here has been in decline far
longer than the church in America. You just
aren’t desperate enough yet. However, it
looks like you are getting there.” This
past year at General Convention, the church dedicated millions of dollars to
exploring new ways for the church to grow and thrive in this day and age
(essentially engaging in the very same things the Church of England has been
doing for the last 10-20 years). It would appear that we finally got desperate
enough.
Sometimes that is what it takes for
there to be change in the life of a person or an institution. There needs to be a sense of urgency and desperation. We have to be prepared to make our faith and
even our church a priority in our lives.
You can see it in the history of St. John’s as well. It was not until
the church was in ruins after the Civil War when people discovered a renewed
energy for the church. The church had
been in decline since the American Revolution, but it was only after the Civil
War when people got serious. The need
was obvious as the building was complete rubble. Our building is not in ruins, but our church
is facing hard times in more ways than one.
There needs to be an infusion of energy and hope for it to have chance
to make it to year 500, or even 420. We
can’t assume that someone else will do it, someone with more time and more
money. It is dependent on each one of us
to make following Jesus our priority.
Unlike Jesus, we are not marching to our
death, but we should still be marching somewhere, with that same determination
that Jesus had. There comes a point in
our lives when we have to decide what our priorities are---what really matters
in our lives. What we will see time and
time again is that how we spend our time, points to our priorities.
We don’t need to look very hard to
know that the need in our lives and in our world for disciples of Jesus is
urgent and desperate. In our baptism we
have been saved, but it is up to us become disciples, to live into that
call. There is no better time than now
to commit to follow Jesus.
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