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"A Confounding and Compelling Mission"
Luke 9:51-62
A sermon preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley
July 8, 2001
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
As I stand here, the car is packed and we are ready for a trip to attend the Baptist Peace Fellowship Conference in Oberlin, Ohio. Oberlin was a major stop on the underground railroad and will host 300 or so of us pilgrims to our annual "Peace Camp" excursion. We’ll see how it goes cooped up in the car for 16 hours or so. I always enjoy going to Peace Camp because it is not only a conference, it’s also a reunion of friends made over the years. A third of the participants at Peace camp are children. Some of them have grown up with this event and its people. Amanda is looking forward to seeing her best friend, whom she calls her "cousin" Anna Burkett from Granville. The two were attached like Velcro last summer. It’s a time to be renewed and revived. We’re also looking at Esther the whole week, so I’ll have lots to share with you when I get back. The trip is even sweeter given that Oberlin is only 45 miles from Cleveland and we will stop by and visit family for a few days.
This is the season for traveling. Many people are off at lakes as we speak and we wish them well, relaxation and no mosquitoes. Traveling is an important thing to do. It reconnects you with who you are and who you long to be.
Today’s scripture marks the portion of the gospel according to Luke where Jesus sets his eyes toward Jerusalem. This is what’s called the travel section. It’s where Jesus sets his eyes toward Jerusalem. His destiny.
The place of religious power and unfortunate oppression of the poor and the outsider.
The place where Jesus will eventually turn over the tables of the moneychangers. The place where he will be strung up on the cross because he dared speak the truth to power.
He set his eyes toward Jerusalem and he had a clear vision for what he wanted to do.
He wanted to open the doors for all people to worship at God’s temple and to eat at God’s table.
He sought to destroy the distinction of rich from poor, men from women, one race from another, one type of personality from another.
He sought to have all of his people welcome at God’s table, to make the rough places plain and walk on that highway for our God. And along the way, he encountered people in his travels that he healed, convicted, liberated, confounded and compelled to join him on his journey for the reign of God. But he also encountered evil. Evil came in the people of Jewish authorities who were not interested in him rocking the boat.
Evil came in the form of Pontius Pilate who refused to accept the truth he saw and rather bowed to the opinion polls and had Jesus executed.
Evil even came in the form of hard hearted disciples who couldn’t get it.
Following Jesus is not an easy thing. Jesus doesn’t make it easy for us, given this scripture reading.
As Jesus begins this travel unit of the Bible, he is met immediately with rejection and opposition. The scripture says that he entered a Samaritan village and they would not grant him hospitality. Why? Because his face was set toward Jerusalem. He was going to Jerusalem where Samaritans were not welcome. He was going to Jerusalem and did not have a destiny within Samaria. But the Samaritans also play an important textual function. They foreshadow Jesus’ own rejection by the very people he seeks to save, those of Jerusalem. The ones who cry "hosanna" one day and "crucify him" by week’s end.
Luke’s Jesus pays attention to the Samaritans. It is only in Luke that the story of the Good Samaritan exists. Jewish historian Josephus said that Galilean Jews often had difficulty passing through Samaria and often went to Jerusalem via Perea (that’s what Mark and Matthew have Jesus do). But not Luke’s Jesus. Jesus makes a point of going to Samaria. He does so to illustrate how difficult it can be to be a disciple when facing rejection. For being a disciple entails rejection and opposition.
Loren Mead in his book The Once and Future Church talks about how the church lost a great deal of its missionary zeal when Christianity became the religion of the Empire under Constantine in 430 CE. It used to be that Christianity was a religion of inclusion which sought to live the ethics of Jesus, embracing the outcast, welcoming the stranger and standing up for the rights of the oppressed, often in opposition to the government. The church was the oasis in a hostile, antagonistic, persecuting world. With the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine, however, the church became the religion of the empire. The state religion. Christians were no longer outsiders. The Apostles Creed reduced all of the ethical teachings of Jesus to a comma. "Born of the virgin Mary, tortured under Pontius Pilate..." The way of discipleship became being a good citizen of the empire. Mead suggests that as we move beyond the empire era, the church has a new and as yet undefined mission.
But what if we took Jesus’ words about discipleship seriously? How would that change our outlook on Christianity? What would our new mission field look like? Are we willing to face rejection because of our faith?
These are important questions to address as we seek to live out our discipleship in the first year of the new millennium.
Jesus is met in the scripture reading with three people who want to travel with him. To be his disciples. But Jesus did not welcome them with open arms did he?
Jesus was not helpful with his evangelism—he might have even failed the class in seminary. When someone said, "I want to follow you", he rebuked them. Let’s look at each one of them briefly.
The first one says, "I will follow you wherever you go." Does Jesus say "Good! Come along with me and join the party?" Did he say, "Come to the membership class and give your testimony before the congregation?" No, he says, "foxes have holes and birds have nests but the human one has no place to lay his head." What the heck does that mean?
Remember, Jesus has just said earlier in this chapter that "if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." (9:23). This spells it out. Foxes and birds have places to sleep, but whoever follows me has no place to sleep. The rejection of the Samaritans is the way it’s gonna be from here on in. The animals are better off than you. This ain’t a happy existence by the standards of this world. Joseph Fitzmeyer in his commentary on Luke says "A decision to follow Jesus cannot be merely the result of enthusiasm; it calls for resolute determination."(Fitz. 837)
There is a church in Washington DC called the Church of the Savior. It is a small church that has done a lot of big things like house the homeless, set up restaurants, set up a free clinic. In order to join this church, it takes two years of prayer and commitment to the work of the church. It takes a lifestyle commitment. It takes a reworking of your priorities. And it takes time. Each person needs to be committed to an inward journey with God and an outward journey for mission. Small mission groups do all of the ministry, but it is with people so committed that it is their way of life. I saw some of that here this last week as so many people gave of themselves for Families Moving Forward. You know that following Jesus means making a place for people to lay their heads.
The second person responds to Jesus invitation by saying. "Let me first go bury my father." This could mean that the person needs to wait until his or her father has died. Could be next week or 40 years from now for all we know. Family obligations run deep. It’s certainly important to look after family. But Jesus shoots back with a stinging response which makes our hair stand on end. "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you go and proclaim the kingdom of God." v. 60 is very harsh indeed. It is in direct opposition to Jewish morals and piety. It is in direct opposition to ours, too. Now this could be referring to the dead as the spiritually dead. Let the spiritually dead take care of themselves. Remember that Jesus redefined family on his own terms. 8:21, 14:26 "those who hear the word of God and do it are my family". Those are the ones who are spiritually alive. He is clearly saying that your obligations to God’s work is more important than family duty. If you think this is a hard pill to swallow, it gets more intense with the third person.
The third person says, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus responds, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." This is starting to sound like cult tactics. Trying to soften these words don’t really help. Jesus wants people to make a clear break with the past if they are to be a part of his movement. Walter Wink, in his book Engaging the Powers p.119 writes, "The first person to squelch any act of courage, defiance, or revolt is often a family member. So deeply is the family enmeshed in the values of the Domination System that people’s own flesh and blood may even betray them rather than see society’s values jeopardized." I can understand how that can make our plow lines awful crooked and our seed may not grow as intended. As the old gospel song says, we are to "keep our hands on the plow and hold on."
Jesus was tired of all the excuses. His eyes were set toward Jerusalem. He knew it was time to fish or cut bait. There was no time for clowning around.
Following Jesus involves:
3. A clean break with the past (No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the reign of God)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship "discipleship can tolerate no conditions which might come between Jesus and our obedience to him." If we are to be disciples, we must: cut the disciple off from his/her previous existence. Jesus’ "word is not an abstract doctrine, but the re-creation of the whole life of man." (pp.66-67)
The Samaritans had it right. Christianity is to be feared and rejected by those who want to keep their power and domination systems in tact. Christianity calls us to turn over the tables, to be rejected by the rulers of this world and to receive rewards based upon how much we love, not by how much we have.
But it also calls us to do things that might affect our family relationships. It might cause us to do things that break with the known world. And when that happens, we are somehow freed to do what God has called us to do.
I remember as a twenty-something young adult telling my parents that I was going to Nicaragua. It was the mid eighties and it was at the height of the US-funded Contra War. My parents were rightfully concerned for my well-being and tried to dissuade me from doing something so dangerous. I was head-strong and arrogant back then. I remember sitting in the back yardstrumming my guitar singing a Holly Hear song, "…if you can live for, work for, sing for, die for freedom, I can too." Head strong. I went not once but five times in my 20’s. It changed my life and solidified my call to a justice-based ministry. As much as my parents tried to be supportive, they were rightfully sacred for me, too.
Fred Craddock’s statement is most helpful here: "Jesus never said to choose him over the devil but to choose him over the family. And the remarkable thing is that those who have done so have been freed from possession and worship of family and have found the distance necessary to love them." (Craddock, 1990:143)
I hope as we travel this summer, that we might find ourselves freed from burdens that confound and confuse us. I hope that we can free ourselves from the guilt and coersion that auses us to compromise our convictions. I hope that we can come back renewed and empowered to see our mission with new eyes. I hope and pray that God will use the encounters we have on our travels to show us how to follow, how to live, how to walk this journey of faith.