3rd Sunday after Pentecost

When I was younger, if there was anything momentous I had to communicate to my parents, I would always do so with a letter. So, for example, when in college I changed my major from Pre-Med Biology to Theater Arts, they got a letter. If I found myself having gone through the money allotted for the semester and I needed more, they got a letter. And when I informed them that I was going to be attending seminary? You guessed it! More correspondence. Funnily enough, my mom read that particular letter before my dad got home for the day. When he got home my mom said to him, “Guess what our son has decided to do.” Thinking of the most outlandish, least likely thing possible he said, “Become a missionary.” She said, “You’re close.” So, if there was an envelope in the mailbox from me, and there were no birthdays with any kind of proximity to the date in question, it was a clear undeniable signal that something important was happening.

Luke gives us an equally clear, unambiguous signal at the beginning of our reading for today: “51When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”

Since chapter four, Jesus has been going about the Galilean countryside doing the things that Jesus does: Preaching and teaching. Healing people. He’s cast out demons. He’s raised a young girl from death. He’s been transfigured before Peter’s, John’s, and James’ eyes. He has foretold his death numerous times.

But now, with this one sentence, “51When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem”, the author of Luke is letting us know that this is a major turning point in the story. It’s time, now, to get down to brass tacks. Jesus continues doing all the things that Jesus does, but he does so knowing that conflict and, most likely, death await him when he arrives at his destination. Remember, Jesus has predicted his death twice, now, and will do so a third time before the whole thing is over. All of which helps us to better understand what exactly is happening here, in today’s story from Luke.

This is one of those readings which, when it came up every three years, always made me a little uncomfortable. We have a story about the Jesus that we’re all most comfortable with. You know, the Jesus who tells James and John to not call for fire to rain down on a hapless Samaritan village. But that’s juxtaposed with a Jesus who seems a little less, well, nice.

One person promises to follow Jesus wherever he goes, and Jesus responds by complaining about his lack of adequate accommodations. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58)

Someone else responds positively to Jesus’ call to follow him, saying that he first needs to go bury his father, to which Jesus responds by essentially saying, “Don’t waste your time worrying about someone who’s already dead. Go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Someone else says they’ll follow but says that they just want to go home and say goodbye to everyone first. And Jesus’ response is, “Well, if that’s your attitude, then don’t bother.”

And yet, I can understand where Jesus is coming from. I think we all can, if we take just a moment to focus on his likely emotional state. As noted earlier, he realizes that his work is going to bring him into direct conflict with the religious and civic authorities. To such a degree, I might add, that he’s pretty sure that he’s going to die. There’s nothing like impending death to help you hone your concentration and give you some focus. Now I’ve never been faced with my own death, but I’ve certainly been in situations where some future thing looms so large that it consumes an awful lot of emotional and spiritual energy. Major life changes, for example. Like changing careers or moving an entire household to a new place, for example. They demand so much energy and focus, that a lot of other things fall by the wayside. You have to pare your life down to the essentials. You don’t have time for distractions. You don’t have time for hangers on, so to speak. And that’s where Jesus is now. He needs to devote all his attention and energy to his journey to Jerusalem and the coming conflict. He doesn’t have time for distractions. He doesn’t have time for hangers on.

We, as a congregation, find ourselves in a situation which is not all too dissimilar to what Jesus is facing. A couple of years ago the leadership of this congregation attended a retreat with then DE-MD Synod President John Auger. We came away from that retreat having identified three so-called “Big Rocks”: The three big things that we could focus on that would move us most rapidly towards the Holy Spirit’s mission for us. In the end, the three Big Rocks we identified were the following: Compassion in Action, Deliberate Discipling, and Engaging & Innovative Worship.

I would like to focus on the last of these for this morning: Engaging and Innovative Worship.

I’m going to give you a couple of minute, here, to think. And here’s the question I’d like you to consider. What is one thing we could do differently in order to make your worship experience more engaging and fulfilling? Now before you start there’s a caveat for this question as regards your answer or answers. It has to be something that we can actually do. So that means no answers like “Have more people in church,” because we can’t control what other people do. It also means no answers like “Build a roller-derby rink next door for roller-derby church,” because we don’t realistically have the money to build a roller-derby rink. So the question is, “What is one thing we could do differently in order to make your worship experience more engaging and fulfilling?” And the answer has to be something that’s realistically achievable for us.

As a congregation, we are doing OK. We’re holding our own financially. We’re doing OK in terms of our membership. But Jesus doesn’t call us to just do OK. Jesus calls us to make disciples. And by “us” I mean all of us both in the collective sense and in the individual sense. Jesus calls us to be more than just OK, so the need for a change in strategy and practice is clear. After all, if what we’re currently doing was working, creating a stronger Calvary and being a vital source of God’s love and grace for the surrounding community, I would not be talking about this in this sermon.

59To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. 61Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

It’s important to realize that these sayings are not simply admonitions to have the right attitude. They are also an invitation. They are a call to a very specific way of life. Jesus calls people to himself. He calls people to take on a new identity, one fully embodied in and defined by his very self. It’s an incarnational vocation. In other words, in lieu of the man himself, Jesus calls us to be Jesus to the community where God has planted us. “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” These words, harsh as they may sound to our ears, are not a denigration of the people to whom they are addressed. Rather, they serve to let us know that there will be things that they will need to leave behind in fulfilling their call to ministry in the name of Jesus.

As one commentator put it: “Lastly, Jesus is selling intensity and urgency. … We can’t even say goodbye?  Well, no. Not if it causes us to hesitate. Not if it takes away our sense of urgency for the Gospel and for the world God loves.

Can I even count how many times I’ve offered Jesus a version of this last excuse? “Sure, Lord, I’ll follow you! I’ll give you everything I’ve got, I promise. But, um, not right now. Later. After I…”  

After I what? After I finish these last few super important projects. After I find a spouse. And lose twenty pounds. And get over my dysfunctional past. And finish raising my kids. And spend a few more years cozying up to my boss. And get a raise. And buy a house. And pay off my grad school loans. And retire. And turn forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty…. 

The list is endless, and that’s precisely Jesus’s point. If our to-do list ends with Jesus instead of beginning with Jesus, we’ll never get to Jesus at all. If we keep glancing over our shoulders in nostalgia instead of fixing our eyes on what lies ahead, we’ll never step onto the road that leads to Jerusalem. Spiritual fitness requires a sense of urgency and passion. A sense of the sacred, irreplaceable value of right now.

So, we cannot wait. We cannot wait until we have enough volunteers. We cannot wait until we get the mortgage paid off or do enough fund-raising. Because there will always be something else that we don’t have yet. We cannot allow our lack to define us. What defines us is the call of Christ to costly servanthood.

Jesus’s face is set like stone for Jerusalem. For sacrifice. For the cross. Yes, he bids us to follow. Of course he does. But he bids us, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, “to come and die.” This is a hard Gospel reading. It’s confrontational. It’s demanding. Jesus asks us to surrender absolutely everything, and he does so without apology. Because these are the terms we were created for, and Jesus knows it. He knows how something unrelenting in us aches for a life with purpose, a life with meaning, a life we can pour out in love until we are spent and reborn. This is the life of the Holy Spirit within us. Jesus is hard on us because he knows that our hearts cry out for transformation. For renewal. For resurrection. Nothing else we buy will suffice. Nothing else the world sells can compare. So, Jesus bids us to come and die. So that we can really live.

AMEN