Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

June 27, 2010

Sermon by Rev. Dr. Marcus Pera

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 9:51‑62)

When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

The Gospel of our Lord.

In the name of Jesus, sisters and brothers, grace, mercy, and peace be unto you. Amen.

One of the ways in which we speak about life is “life as a journey.” We talk about its unfolding in this kind of way. In fact, we also talk about segments of that life journey, and sometimes we say, for example, when that segment has been completed, “That really was quite a ride.” Or we say, for example, when we finish work at a place for many years, we use the same phrase, “That was really quite a ride.” What we’re suggesting in that is that there is a certain progression to that life journey. We don’t go around in circles, or at least we like to think that we don’t go around in circles. And when we talk about it from that progression standpoint, there are a couple other things that come to mind. And one is, “If you don’t aim at it you will never hit it.” Or another phrase that is used by Stephen Covey in his book, “The 7 Habits of Effective Peope,” he says that “If you’re beginning something, start at the end.” Start at the end; look at where you’re going, where you’re wanting to be going, in order that your path might follow in that direction.

Now, if we put that into the perspective of the Christian journey, the way I would sure use the reference point is baptism. We talk about baptism as a journey. Baptism starts us on that journey. Baptism isn’t complete until one experiences the fullness of eternal life. And on that journey, we are attempting to determine what it is, the progression of life, how it unfolds for us. And we try to understand what it means to be a member of the family of God’s people; to understand what it means to be a son or a daughter of God. And I think that Gospel Lesson for today helps us to think about those questions and to see what our life’s journey might look like. I’m using the word “journey” for a particular reason. In that Gospel Lesson for today, you didn’t see it written or heard. At the same time, the Greek word, the original word, is also translated “journey,” where it says Jesus is to go to Jerusalem, or to go to the Samaritans, or to go, continuing their journey. The word journey is used there.

One of the collects in the church that I think is one of the most beautiful, and it’s used in evening prayer, suggests something about this. It says,

“God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us.”

And it seems to me that that prayer probably was motivated and stimulated by the words in the call of Abraham. Imagine when Abraham heard those words, “Take your wife and your family, and take your herds and your flocks, and go to a place that I will show you.” And Abraham went. “Go to a place I will show you.” But how do we know if it’s God that is showing us this particular thing? And how do we know how to read the map? And what if there needs to be a course correction, and what is signaling that course correction for us? None of these things seem to be readily apparent, and so that journey is certainly also a journey of faith and a discernment process of reading the signs of God.

Then in that First Lesson, it talks about Elijah getting his successor according to God’s instructions, and of the mantle that gets placed on Elisha. So he says, “Go. The person you just went by, he’s in the field, the one who was following with the oxen.” Elijah goes back and he places the mantle on him. And Elisha says, “Just wait a minute. Let me say goodbye to my family, and then I will go with you,” and that he does. But that notion of the mantle is an interesting one as well. In one sense, I can call this, I suppose, this stole, a mantle. It is placed on people that are called to a word and sacrament ministry of the church, and so it becomes a sign of that. But there’s a symbolic sense of mantle as well.

What kind of mantle was and is being placed on you? And who places that mantle on you? Did you hear some words from somebody that triggered something for you? Did you read in a book somewhere or read in scripture? Did somebody point out something to you that triggers a direction for you in your life, or a way of living, or a way of accenting a particular gift that you have that is yours as well? These are all parts of that. So the mantle that is on Elisha is a symbolic mantle that we try to read as well. So when we talk about the journey in that kind of way, how does Jesus fit into this and help us? What are the questions or what became first in Jesus’ life as he lived out his journey?

I’m coming back to those words in the Gospel Lesson that talk about journey. Luke, in his Gospel, has a well-organized book. He has Jesus’ birth first, and then the call to ministry, and it describes that nature of his ministry. And then he begins the Galilean ministry, the towns around the Sea of Galilee. And then in this Gospel Lesson he begins with the ministry that takes him toward Jerusalem. And for the whole rest of the book now, from Chapter 9 to 19, are going to be lessons of this ministry of going to Jerusalem. It will take us all the way through summer. But, in doing so, Jesus’ journey becomes very clear. It’s almost dramatic. And there is a resoluteness about it when Jesus says, “He turned his face to Jerusalem.” There was a singularity of purpose. He turned his face to Jerusalem. He understood his mission and what he needed to do, and he was about that mission and not to be deterred.

So the first thing that happens is the disciples go ahead, and they’re preparing the way for him to come into Samaria. But the Samaritans reject him. Now, why is that the case? A little background, real quickly, to help understand that reaction. The Samaritans were people, first of all, who had Mount Gerizim as their holy mountain, not the mount in Jerusalem. And thus they continued their worship at that mount. That might remind you of a different scripture story as well. It’s also true of the Samaritans that, when there was the Babylonian exile, many of them stayed back. Assyria repopulated that area, and because of that there was a lot of intermarriage, and in that intermarriage they became half-breeds, so to speak. And because of that there was a great amount of antipathy between them. And so you have the Samaritans; Jesus saying they’re going to Jerusalem; they rejecting Jerusalem as the primary place of worship. And also hating the Judeans because of and for political reasons, and the Judeans not liking them because they weren’t pure in their race strain, and thus you have that kind of anger and conflict between them.

Well, they were rejected, and then Luke and John say some interesting things. They want to torch him. “Shall we call down fire, like Elijah did?” “Shall we get rid of them in that particular way?” And, of course, the disciples again don’t understand. Jesus is in the strain of the prophet, the great prophet Elijah, as well. But his kingdom is not a kingdom of violence. Neither is it a kingdom of vengeance, but it is a kingdom of love; and so Jesus rebukes them. And so they continue on their way.

Jonathan Swift said at one point that “people have just enough religion to hate others and not enough to love one another.” It’s an interesting quote, is it not? And don’t the pages of history document that very reality—so often just enough religion to hate one another, and not enough to love one another. We get a picture of Jesus’ mission and what comes first in his beginning of his journey.

Now what about us? Where do we fit into that journey? Let’s hear about three would-be followers of Jesus that are in that Gospel Lesson. The first one says, “I will follow you.” And Jesus sees the eagerness, but he says, “The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” It’s kind of saying if you’re going to be a follower, it’s not following for what’s in it for you. It’s saying that you’re going to have to let loose of all self kind of advantages that might be there, and it’s going to have to follow in terms of taking on the mission of Jesus.

For another one who is ready to follow, he says “Let me bury the dead, my dead father.” And Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury the dead.” It seems like an extreme statement, does it not? There are sacred obligations that are part of that culture for them to bury the dead. And at the same time Jesus is saying something about what comes first and where kin comes in all of that.

And then there is yet one more that asks the question and says he would be a follower, but he says, “Let me first go and say goodbye to my family.” It’s interesting that Elijah let Elisha go and say goodbye. Jesus says, “No,” and then uses an interesting parallel or picture when he says, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” My goodness, we hear all of those statements, and it’s like elsewhere in scripture where it said, “Who then can be saved? Who then can be a disciple?”

That image of the plow, I didn’t do all of that much farm work but I did work on a farm for a little while, and I think this goes back to almost seventh and eighth grade. Crazy enough, one farmer let me do some cultivating of corn. And I recognized the importance, and he told me the importance, of driving down and maintaining a very close and direct path down, otherwise you’re going to pull out the corn, and so you have to keep your eye fastened on that. But every once in awhile you kind of look back to see that nice fresh dirt rolled over and the green coming with the rows of corn, and before you knew it you were just plowing out the corn. It’s the image that’s drawn there, looking back.

Sometimes individuals want to do that, and congregations want to do that—look back to the glory years, look back to the time when it was so good—rather than looking forward to what Jesus is talking about, his mission, which comes to us from the future into our present, and gives us a way of saying, “How do we go about that? How do we grasp it? How do we, in turn, live that in our everyday life?”

Yes, we’re baptized sons and daughters of God; we’re fed in the Holy meal, for power for our Christian life. But when we talk about the specifics of that discipleship, one thing is interesting in that lesson. In the first place, we aren’t given the names of those would-be disciples, are we? We don’t know who they are. The second thing that’s interesting is, we don’t know their response. We don’t know if they shook their head and went walking off, or if they said, “I’ll try,” and followed. It’s left as an open kind of question. And I’m guessing that Luke left it as an open kind of question for the reader to hear in that way. And I am thinking that it’s left like that for us today as well.

The call to discipleship is there; the journey we’re committed to. We ask the question, “What comes first and needs to come first?” And that’s a lot for us to think about.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

(This is an unedited transcription from a tape recording of a sermon given by Pastor Pera.)