Luke
9:51-62
The end
of May and the start of June are good times for preachers, because that is when
the media are flooded with quotations from graduation speeches that may be
handy throughout the following months.
For instance, The Huffington Post
cited a commencement speech given at Kenyon College in Ohio.
“Author
John Green admitted to Kenyon College graduates that he’s supposed to tell them
adulthood isn’t so bad. He refused.
‘It is so bad,’ Green said in a commencement
speech on May 21, in Gambier, Ohio. ‘If anything, it is far worse than I could
even have imagined. I mean, have you ever been to a homeowners’ association
meeting? Each of you in the Class of 2016 is wondrous and precious and rare
life in a vast and almost entirely dead universe — imagine devoting two hours
of your bright but brief flicker of consciousness to a debate over whether the
maximum allowable length of grass in your neighborhood’s front lawns should be
4 inches or 6.’”
He did qualify his observation, though.
“And if
you can remember that conversations about grass length and the weather are
really conversations about how we are going to get through, and how we are
going to get through together, they become not just bearable but almost kind of
transcendent.”[1]
I actually tried to keep this in mind two weeks ago as I
sat through a 2 ½ hour HOA meeting myself, of which at least an hour was
devoted to snow removal issues. It wasn’t
easy.
That’s
one reason I appreciate what Jesus told his disciples about being
disciples. It is worthwhile but it is
not always easy, and one of the main difficulties is that the people who are
close to you may not always get what you’re doing or why. If you listen to what he says to people who
either offer to follow him or whom he calls to follow him (both show up in this
passage), he tells them that following will prevent them from having what we
might call a normal life.
The
first one is told that he may never have a chance to settle down and attend HOA
meetings.
“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.’” [Luke 9:58]
The next encounters
seem harsher yet, even abrasive.
“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 plough and looks back is fit for the
kingdom of God.’” [Luke 9:59-62]
I sort of want to explain this away, to say Jesus must
not have meant it quite the way it sounds.
After all, isn’t loyalty to family a key part of simple human decency? I’m just talking loyalty here, not even
mentioning the real and deep love that should be part of the relationship
beyond that.
The
reason I can’t do that is that Jesus himself displayed a different kind of
family values from the very start, where the awareness of belonging to God is
greater than any other.
“Now every year his
parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for
the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to
return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know
it. Assuming
that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they
started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to
search for him. After three days they found him in the temple,
sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and
his answers. When his parents saw
him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, ‘Child, why have you
treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in
great anxiety.’ He said to them, ‘Why were you searching for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ But they did not understand what he said to them.”
[Luke 2:41-50]
When he was older, he did something
similar. Again, Luke tells us,
“Then his
mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of
the crowd. And he was told, ‘Your mother and your brothers
are standing outside, wanting to see you.’ But he said to them, ‘My mother and my brothers
are those who hear the word of God and do it.’” [Luke
8:19-21]
So, no, I cannot say that when Jesus told his followers
or potential followers that they should put the demands of family further down
the list that he didn’t mean it.
If
others say the same thing, we don’t really question it. One of my cousins wrote this on Facebook this
week:
“I
just got 4 letters in the mail from my son who's at basic training. Weird I
can't just call him or text him to see if he's ok. Now I have his address I can
at least write to him. Family if you'd like his address just send me a personal
message & I'll get it to you!”
We accept that military training is going to involve
practices that are designed to create group cohesion and to develop focus that
may mean putting the people back home out of mind for awhile in some
situations. The same may be true of
Christian service in some circumstances.
If
you are visiting people in prison, you need to be aware of your
surroundings. One time I was leading a
Bible study at a correctional facility in Philadelphia when one of the inmates
jumped up and lunged at another, grabbing his shirt pocket. With his other hand, he reached into it and a
puff of smoke rose up as he pulled out a lit cigarette, which he stubbed out on
the floor. What if it had turned out to
have been, as I thought at first, the beginning of a prison fight?
If
you are tending the sick, you probably cannot function well if the only thing
on your mind is, “I hope I don’t catch something and take it home.” Years ago, before we understood that HIV is
not transmitted by casual contact, I saw someone try to minister to a man with
AIDS by standing in the doorway of his room and praying for him from there,
afraid even to stand by his bedside. The
grace of God did not carry across to him very well.
If
you are going to speak about the difficult work of rectifying historical
injustices, you cannot become defensive about admitting that your own ancestors
benefited directly from wrongdoing, and that the advantages they accrued have
carried along through the years in the various forms of privilege that folks
like me (and maybe you) take for granted.
That is letting the dead bury the dead.
Jesus
is honest with us. Discipleship has its
costs, and they may be more than we are aware of until the moment is upon
us. I like to think of it, in some ways,
like getting onto a roller coaster. You
get into the car, knowing that it is, after all, a roller coaster. It’s only as you get toward the top of that
first drop, however, that you have that unmistakable awareness that this may
have been more than you bargained for. A
second later you are plunging down the other side, held in only by the safety
bar, and thinking about what a mistake you have made. Then you begin to whip around and bounce and
you are screaming, but the screams turn from “Oh, no!” into “Whoo-hoo!” and
when you glide into the final curve and then get out with shaky legs you start
wondering if the line is too long to give it another go.
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