Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered July 1, 2007
51When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; 53but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54When 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?” 55But he turned and rebuked them. 56Then they went on to another village.
57As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58And 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.” 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.”
Eighteen Feet
Once Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem, nothing will sway him from his path. It is not so much a geographical path, but a spiritual journey. To fulfill his mission, his calling as Messiah, he must follow the path to Jerusalem, where he will be rejected and crucified.
From the first step of this journey, Jesus shows his disciples that rejection and stiff resistance will characterize this calling. He sends messengers to arrange lodging in a Samaritan village, and they will not receive him. James and John act surprised and angry at this rejection, offering to call down fire from heaven to burn up those damnable Samaritans; they’re eager for any chance to use their firepower against all enemies.
But, Jesus will not be swayed from his journey to Jerusalem; he will not be distracted by anger or derailed by rejection or the emotional need to retaliate. Jesus rebukes his disciples and keeps steady.
Why is it that, as disciples, we so easily get sidetracked? In our own context, we can point to the multitude of distractions – all the consumer pleasures aside, the information society in which we live bombards us with messages to feed our emotional reactivity; to blame instead of understand; to retaliate instead of moving on, undistracted, on our own path of calling.
There is something else, too. The biblical standards Jesus sets forth for discipleship are so high, so radically different from the values of our society, that they seem impossible. An impossible goal, for most of us, can be discouraging. Why put energy toward something we cannot have any hope of achieving?
When I was in Junior High School, I was on the pole-vaulting squad of the track team. I wasn’t any good at it at all, especially at first. At 80 pounds, I couldn’t bend any of the poles my school had, so I couldn’t get the pop you need to spring higher than the pole. But, finally, after weeks of practice, I figured out how to hoist myself over the minimum height to qualify for the track meets. I was in seventh grade, and I could vault over 8 feet. The other three seventh-graders on the squad were not much better than I was, but there was a high school student who regularly cleared fourteen feet. With my lightweight body and lack of talent, fourteen feet seemed like an impossible goal, but William, the high school student, was encouraging. “I couldn’t get over nine feet until last year. Keep at the weight-lifting and the sprinting practice and it’ll happen.”
One day, something clicked for all three of us seventh-graders. All on the same day, we suddenly went from eight feet to nine feet, six inches. When all three of us cleared nine-six, we whooped and hollered and slapped high fives all around. The coach heard us celebrating and came over to see what the commotion was. When he saw us celebrating over nine-six, he said, “let me show you something.” He hoisted the bar up to sixteen feet. “All the real high school competition happens over sixteen feet. Until you get higher than that, you ain’t done nothin’.” Then he raised it to eighteen feet. We could hardly see it because it was hidden in the clouds. “That’s where the world class competition is happening. More than forty men vaulted over 18 feet last year.” He sneered at us, “So don’t let me hear you shouting and distracting real athletes from their workout over nine and a half measly feet. Not a one of you is even in the running.”
That was his version of a pep talk.
But, as you can imagine, it had the opposite effect on us. None of us improved much in the next two years. By the time we were in high school, we all three switched to swim team instead of track.
I wonder sometimes if the hard sayings of Jesus raise the bar so high as to be discouraging rather than encouraging. “Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head;” and “let the dead bury their own dead;” and “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” All those sayings look like the eighteen foot bar. Does it even seem a worthy goal to become homeless, hardened against the grief of losing a parent, or so single-minded on our path of discipleship that we never look back with affection or nostalgia?
If this passage stood alone, it would be truly discouraging. Why would anyone aspire to better discipleship if this is what it means?
The key to understanding this passage is a few verses later, in the middle of chapter 10. The disciples have returned from the first missionary journey, and it has been wildly successful. Not only did they find power over evil, but they found their eyes opened to God at work in the world in a way they could never see before. Jesus says to them, “many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”
[With minimal training, the disciples went ahead of Jesus and experienced amazing power working through them. As the journey toward Jerusalem continues, we find that these sayings of Jesus, like the eighteen-foot bar, act as hyperbole, as a defining principle, a point of focus. Even those who can vault over eighteen feet don’t live there all the time – they spend only a few seconds there every now and then and the rest of the time they spend preparing and training for those critical two or three seconds of flight. Disciples, like athletes, find joy in the strength-training and preparation.]
So, for us who would answer “I will follow” to Jesus’ call, the gospel tells us two things: 1) It is hard; and, 2) it is worth it.
Sometimes it is worth it because of what Christ can accomplish through us. For the team that worked on the Great Days of Service Habitat for Humanity House, yesterday’s house dedication was one of those moments when we felt the satisfaction of being part of God’s work in the world. When the new homeowner stands on the porch and tells us, “God has blessed my family and me through all the volunteers and donors who made it possible for us to buy a house of our own;” we know, as disciples, that we’re on the path; when the chief of the building crew stands up and sheds tears over the joy of the privilege of volunteering for this project, we know, as disciples, that something meaningful and joyful is happening here and all of us who have contributed money or time or energy to it have a share in what God is up to in this world.
It is not always like this. There are moments of discouragement – many of the people who began Great Days of Service with us years ago have died or dropped out; the rain pre-empted our plans; our muscles hurt and so do our insect stings and bites. Sometimes the time we spend on serving others in the name of Christ prevents us from doing things we would like to do for ourselves.
The promise of this challenge to discipleship is that there is a liberation that comes with a commitment beyond ourselves. When our lives belong to Christ, and all that we do is in his service, we are never alone; and, that insatiable longing within us for self-satisfaction is no longer our defining emotion.
[Warning; abrupt change from athletic illustration to musical illustration!]
Chris Smither is a folk musician who has been performing professionally for nearly forty years. He tells in an interview of a defining moment in his career as a performer.
There was a turning
point 10 years ago where the whole thrust of what I was doing and the way I
thought about it changed entirely. I remember this specific instance.
Twenty-seven years of playing music for a living built up to this one moment.
I was at a festival in Canada. It was a big event and I was feeling cheated
because I had been promised a spot on the main stage and didn’t get it. I had
been led to believe that I would get at least 20 minutes of my own, you know?
But instead, they sort of loosely collected everybody who did anything that
remotely resembled blues and put ‘em all up on the stage together. There were
four solo acoustic artists and one band up there together. Of course the band
sort of overshadowed everybody, you know? The whole thing wasn’t very well
thought out. I was annoyed. They wanted us to just jam together on all these
songs — one after another. It was irritating. What if you put Brahms and
Beethoven and Bach all together? Would you just say, “Well, they’re all piano
players. They can jam. They can play things together?” “No!”
It came my turn. I played the song. There were ten to fifteen thousand people
out there — a big deal for me! After I played my song, the others had their
turns. As it went further down the line and I was just waitin’ for my turn to
come around again, inside I was just seething. I thought, “This is so unfair!”
But a change came in the time that it took for my turn to come around again. It
suddenly dawned on me, and I don’t know how this happened. It was like a little
window opening someplace in my brain. I guess it was the culmination of a lot of
lessons that I’ve been learning over the years. And I said to myself, “You know
what? This isn’t about me. This is about music. This is about the music! And the
only thing that I have to do is play the song, just lay the song out the best
way I know how. And what happens to it after that is beyond my control. It has
always been beyond my control. I’ll never be able to make it happen. There are
all these little conditions that I’ll never be able to touch. The only thing
that I can control is what I do and my attitude towards it. That’s it. And as
long as I keep thinkin’ that this is about me, I’m gonna be unhappy. And as soon
as I think that it’s all about the song itself, and what happens to the song,
the better off I’ll be.”
“There is a service
to the gift itself, you see? You have to serve it. It does not serve you.”
Shortly after that interview, Smither wrote an anthem to middle age that includes the line,
The race we’re running now is never-ending,
Since space and time are bending, there’s no finish line.
Giacomo Puccini, too, reached that point in his life when the gift of music became larger than himself. He grew increasingly anxious as he composed the opera Turendot, for he knew he was dying faster than he could compose. Finally, he reached a point at which he realized that the music was larger than his own life. Puccini said to his students, "If I don't finish 'Turandot,' I want you to finish it for me." Shortly afterwards he died. Puccini's students studied opera carefully and soon completed it. In 1926 the world premiere of "Turandot" was performed in Milan with Puccini's favorite student, Arturo Toscanini, directing. Everything went beautifully until the opera reached the point where Puccini had been forced to put down his pen. Tears ran down Toscanini's face. He stopped the music, put down his baton, turned to the audience and cried out, "Thus far the Master wrote, but he died." A vast silence filled the opera house. Toscanini picked up the baton again, smiled through his tears and exclaimed, "But his disciples finished his work." When "Turandot" ended, the audience broke into thunderous applause.
The discipline of discipleship – the daily prayer, the Sabbath-keeping when we’re too busy to set aside time for something Holy, the tithing when we have other things we would rather use that portion of our hard-earned money to buy – all those things are impossible if we were to do them in service of self.
It is when we trust what Jesus promised, that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we find our sense of purpose, our calling, our joy. And even if we never soar over eighteen feet, or complete what God has called us to do, we know that what we do not accomplish in this life, Christ will complete.
So, here is the good news of this passage. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid of what we cannot do, what we have failed to do, what we do not have enough years in one lifetime to accomplish. Let us instead find our joy in the day-to-day faithfulness to Christ, who will complete in us and through us all that he intends. Thanks be to God. Amen.