Eyes Front

Luke 9:51-62

Ordinary 13 Year C

June 30, 2013

First and Harmony Presbyterian Churches

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            “More than anything else,” Shug explains to Celie, “God love admiration.”

            “You sayin God vain?” Celie asks.  “Naw,” says Shug, “not vain, just wanting to share a good thing.  I think it makes God anry if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

            Alice Walker, without realizing it, summed up this text from Luke in this short exchange in her epistolary novel The Color Purple. 

            God is not vain, but God does desire and even demands our attention.  But how often do we walk right by God’s call- God’s outstretched hand- without even noticing?  How often is God our color purple?

            Jesus was certainly that unnoticed color to the Samaritans. 

            Knowing that his time was coming, Jesus set his face to Jerusalem and determined to set out to David’s city.  For whatever reason, that decision alone was enough for the Samaritans to reject him.  We do not know why they reject him, or at least why his decision to go to Jerusalem is enough to make them reject him.  But that is exactly what they do.

            It is as though they are willing to welcome Jesus but only if he is willing to come on their terms.  No passing through.  No stop along the way.  No here today off to Jerusalem tomorrow.  They will welcome him but only on their own terms.

            Some days I am such a Samaritan; ready to welcome Jesus in if only he will stay on my terms.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you probably have those days as well.  Days when faith in Jesus Christ is the thing we long for the most as long as it fits neatly into the lives we have made for ourselves.

            David Lose, professor of preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul puts the question we have from Luke this way:

Does the grace, mercy, and love of God made incarnate in Jesus trump our plans and shape our lives, or do we shape our faith to fit the lives we’ve already planned?

            The answer for the Samaritans was pretty clear.  They were willing to let Jesus in, but only if it fit their already laid plans, perspectives, priorities.

            But, hey, they were Samaritans.  They might as well have been Pharisees, right?  Sure there was that one kind and helpful Samaritan, but for the most part they were a clueless bunch always missing the point and getting things wrong.  Unlike we who are in the church/ in the know...right?

            If Luke would just leave it there, we could shake our heads at the Samaritans and their willful blindness to the Word of God; the color purple that they walk on by without noticing.  If Luke would just leave it there we could tsk tsk tsk at the poor Samaritans and go on about our business.

            Of course Luke being Luke could not leave well enough alone.  After Jesus faces down the rejection of the Samaritans, shakes the dust from his feet, and gets on the road to Jerusalem, Luke recounts one instance after another when Jesus challenges the illusion of control in the face of the call to discipleship; instances when disciples and would be disciples are called upon to let Jesus and the calling of God trump their well-laid plans.

            Someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds in the sky have nests, but the Human One has no place to lay his head.”

As someone who travels quite a bit, I have learned a few lessons.  

Pack light.

            Don’t rely on airline timing.

                        Keep your toothbrush in your carry-on just in case you wind up in Dallas and your bag goes to Delhi.

And…there’s no place like home.

Even the most extraordinary trip to the most exotic locale cannot take away the pure comfort and joy of coming home. 

There’s no place like home.

What, then, do we make of Jesus’s reminder that for the Human One- the Son of God- there is no place like home because, well, there is no home; there is no place of safety and comfort to which he can retreat after a long journey?

If the first thing Jesus trumps is our expectations and plans, the second trump card costs us comfort; the comfort of a retreat from our calling.  Following Jesus is not a weekend getaway with home sweet home waiting at the end.  When we pack our bags to follow Him, we are, Luke reminds us, signing onto a lifelong journey.  When we follow Jesus, home is not at the end of the journey; home is wherever we find ourselves with him.

Now to be sure, I am guessing that there is great blessing in laying your head wherever our savior has called us to be, but for my part, I like having my own bed, my own home, my own place to retreat when things get to be too much or when I am just plain tired.

Yet…

“Foxes have dens and the birds in the sky have nests, but the Human One (and by extension we who follow him) has no place to lay his head.”

Then Jesus said to someone else, “Follow me.”

He replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead. But you go and spread the news of God’s kingdom.”

My to-do list is never past tense. 

In my life, I do not think I have ever had a done to-do list!

Whenever I get near the end of it, I find one more project; one more must do item; one more thing that simply cannot wait that must be done.

If I am really hones with myself, more often than not my to-do list is a distraction from the things I really need to do.

I really need to do my taxes, but first I must get the lawn mowed.

I really need to finish my sermon, but first I must reorganize the kitchen cabinets.

I really need to reorient my life toward Christ, but first I must do X, Y, Z.

To be certain, the to-dos are not always just distractions.  Sometimes our own good intentions wind up standing in our way.

I want to give more time to the church, but by the time I live up to these other obligations there isn’t much time left. 

I want to give more financially to the church, but first I want to tuck a little more away for a rainy day.

I want to follow you, but first I need to bury my father.

Sometimes we use our to-dos to bide our time and sometimes our to-dos just suck up all the oxygen in the room.  Whichever it is, when Jesus comes into our lives, those to-dos get trumped. 

Jesus reminds us that the only indispensable to-do on our lists; the only thing we absolutely must get around to doing is spreading the Good News of the gospel of Christ.  If, when we reach the end of our days, there is one thing we have not left undone, let it be that.

“Let the dead bury their own dead. But you go and spread the news of God’s kingdom.”

Someone else said to Jesus, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say good-bye to those in my house.”

Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand on the plow and looks back is fit for God’s kingdom.”

Of all Jesus commands, this is perhaps the most difficult. 

I can learn to live with Jesus trumping my own well-laid plans; I can deal with Jesus calling me away from the comfort of the known to the unknowns of discipleship.  I can even learn to do without my to-do list.

But to leave everything behind and not even say good-bye?  To just walk away from home, family, vocation, responsibilities and relationships is just a bridge too far. 

Part of me wants to romanticize this text and say, well Jesus doesn’t really mean leave everything behind.  Luke was just trying to make a point. But that would be less than honest with the text.  Luke is in fact trying to make a point, but he is doing it with Jesus’ own words not with some heap of hyperbole. 

Jesus said to him…

That is what the text says.  Not “Jesus sounded like he was saying” or “it was as if Jesus had said…”  No, “Jesus said to him…” The text is clear on the exchange.

Let me say good-bye.

No.

That is tough medicine; tough stuff to swallow.

And that, my friends, takes us right down to the whole blessed truth of the gospel; the truth of the grace of Jesus Christ.

It is tough.

Grace is tough.

The calling of Christ and the grace that abides it are not pliable like spiritual play-dough that we can make and mold into the shape that best fits our lives. 

Grace is tough, sometimes even bitter.

In his classic Christian text The Cost of Discipleship, Deitrich Bonheoffer wrote that the grace of God is cheapened when it is made undemanding, easy, and little more than the moral equivalent of a Hallmark greeting card.  He wrote,

"cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ."

In other words, grace- true grace- is grace that intrudes on our well planned lives, disrupts us from our comfort, calls us to a new way of living and demands of us allegiance to something that is beyond our whims, our desires, our very lives.

            Bonhoeffer knew from bitter experience that daring to follow Christ in a world that can at times, be radically hostile to the Good News is a risky endeavor.  When we answer the call of Christ, when we stop for a moment to notice the color purple right in front of us, we risk losing control; or at least the illusion of control.

            That is the Christian life.  Or more precisely, that is the life of Christ in us.  Because make no mistake about it, Christ still has work to do in the world.  And when we open ourselves to allow the grace of God guide and even take over our lives, we allow the Christ of grace to live in and through us.  That is how we as the church can lay claim to being the body of Christ in the world. 

            Not by any merit of our own as though we have some monopoly on the love and favor of God.

            Not by any special power we possess over good, evil, right or wrong as though we somehow have a monopoly on righteousness.

            Not by any position of privilege we might claim in the sight of God.

            No, we are the body of Christ in the world only by means of the Christ who lives in us.  Because when we let go the illusion of control, when we let Christ trump our plans and take control of our lives, we get a glimpse of what the scriptures call becoming kathos Christos- “like Christ.”

            And when we let Christ live in us; when we stop and notice our color purple; when we become kathos Christos,

            The plans and agendas of this world fall away,

                        home becomes wherever he may lead us,

                                    all those to-dos we manufacture boil down to one command,

                                                and our eyes become firmly affixed on what is to come.

            When we let Christ live in us, we will never look back again because nothing, absolutely nothing, that ever was will compare to what might be with Christ alive in us.

            Amen.