“On the Road with Jesus”

June 27, 2010

Luke 9: 51-62

As you probably remember, we’ve made this the “Year of Luke” here at Congregational UCC. We’re reading portions of Luke’s Gospel in many of our worship services and encouraging everyone to read through this book sometime this year.

If you haven’t read the Gospel of Luke yet, this might be a good time to start. In the coming weeks we’ll be reading through a major section of this gospel that is unique to Luke. As you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke share a lot of stories in common. Starting with the verses from chapter 9 that we heard this morning and continuing into chapter 18 we have a travel narrative, of sorts, that is found only in Luke. It presents the journey of Jesus and his disciples from Galilee to Jerusalem. Don’t try to follow this on a map, however, as the stories we will hear are not arranged in an orderly geographical manner.

This “journey” is, as one person put it, “one of the most leisurely literary trips ever made.” It becomes for us who hear it today a pilgrimage of sorts, drawing us ever deeper into the way of Jesus Christ.

We are invited to go on the road with Jesus.

With Luke, a lot of important events happen on the road.

It is on the road to the village of Emmaus on Easter that two disciples meet the risen Christ, who walks with them but goes unrecognized even as they talk together.

It is on the road to Damascus that Saul, the persecutor of Christians, is called by the risen Christ and becomes Paul, the leader of the early church.

It is on the road that we come to know what it means to follow Jesus.

So read along.

And listen to what Jesus says this morning about what we will find if we follow.

Following Jesus is no easy task. You know that.

But as we follow on this road, it will help if we travel lightly.

Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem—toward the place that will be the end and a new beginning, toward the place of both crucifixion and resurrection. The road to Jerusalem goes through Samaria.

Now, you remember Samaria. The people of Samaria and the Jewish people had long-standing and deeply held religious differences. Both peoples considered themselves followers of Moses. But Samaritans worshipped on Mount Gerizim while the Jewish people—including Jesus and his followers—worshipped in Jerusalem. Indeed, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover.

Samaria is the place we would avoid.

Samaritans are those whom we despise.

As he does so often, Jesus intends to take his ministry to those on the outside, to the despised. He sends people ahead to prepare for his arrival in a Samaritan village.

When the Samaritans refuse to welcome these pilgrims to Jerusalem, James and John have a wonderful idea: “Lord,” they say, “do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” These followers of Jesus doubt neither their power nor the righteousness of their cause.

We see enough of this on the Christian right today that a lot of us are uncomfortable even calling ourselves “Christian” anymore. At what is arguably its worst manifestation, Fred Phelps and his small band of followers assures us that “God Hates America” and with vile language singles out gays and lesbians as those upon whom he would command down fire from heaven.

Recently other “Christians” have voiced their opposition to the building of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. “We have a duty to investigate anyone under the banner of Islam,” said Allen Jackson, the pastor of World Outreach Church.

Almost weekly one can find a new example of the righteous fury of such people against those whom they despise.

There are always Samaritans.

Of course, in a United Church of Christ congregation in Iowa City, it’s easy to point out the flaws of our sisters and brothers on the right—running the risk of turning them into a new group of detested outsiders. And it raises the question: on whom would we call down fire from heaven?

‘Lighten up,” was Jesus’ response to his followers as he went on to another village. A scribal addition in some ancient manuscripts of this story has Jesus saying: “You do not know what spirit you are of, for I have come not to destroy the lives of human beings but to save them.” Everyone who bears the name “Christian” should hear those words and take them to heart.

Don’t take everything so seriously. Don’t take yourself—or even your faith—so seriously that you are ready to destroy those with whom you disagree. 

Following Jesus is no easy task. But we make it all the more difficult if we are carrying the excess baggage of inflated self-importance or a clumsy and unattractive satchel of self-righteousness. G.K. Chesterton, said that angels are able to fly because they take themselves so lightly. He may be right.

We can travel lightly because we do not travel alone. Others are there to help bear our burdens and we can help carry theirs.

Jesus encourages his followers, encourages us, to lighten up.

And yet, when we first hear Jesus talk about following him, the way seems heavy and harsh, almost inhuman—even impossible given our lives and our loves and our commitments:

The Son of Man has no place to lay his head.

Let the dead bury the dead.

Those who look back are unfit.

But what if we heard these words as gospel—as good news—instead of as prescription? What if we heard these words as descriptions of our own lives and of the new life that is breaking into our world?

The followers of Jesus are unsettled. Foxes have holes; birds have nests. But we follow the One with no home.

There is a tendency to want things stable, resolved. At least I have this tendency as much as—if not more than—most people.

Certainly there is much good in having a settled life. New England Congregationalists call their permanent called pastors “settled ministers.” That’s an appealing title.

But settling can also imply accepting less than what one wants: settling for health care for some, but not others, settling for employment for some, civil rights for some, but not for others.

Sometimes I suspect that rather than being a settled state, following Jesus is more like being in Twyla Tharp dance. Have you seen some of her choreography? A dancer seems stable, set. And then she starts to lean, to stumble, to fall—to move someplace new, perhaps someplace unexpected.

So it is with us.

Yes, there are times when we have a sense of stability, times when we need a sense of stability. But always we start to lean. We start to move once more.

This is why we identify ourselves as a congregation that honors questions—we know that there is much that is not settled. This is why we are open and affirming—we know that God keeps moving us away from rejection and toward acceptance. This is why we put more emphasis on covenant rather than creed—we sense that God still has yet more truth and light to break forth into the world.

The God whom we worship, the God whom we know, however faintly, is the God of the unsettled person, of the unsettled mind, of the unsettled institution. We can follow Jesus, who had no place to lay his head, because we sense this is our condition as well.

Jesus speaks to the unsettled.

He brings us the good news that we are claimed by the future.

In telling a would-be follower, “Let the dead bury the dead,” Jesus is not making some unreasonable demand that breaks the bonds of family. He is speaking to us of the urgency of the future and of our part in it.

Remember the other story that we heard this morning. The great prophet Elijah encounters Elisha plowing a field. Elisha is ready to answer the call and follow Elijah. First, however, his love for his family compels Elisha to go and say goodbye to his father and mother. Going home he uses the wooden oxen yokes to start a fire and prepare a feast for the people before he leaves.

While there is much that is good about the past—as well as much that would cause us to despair—the past does not own us. This is the meaning of the words “In Jesus Christ there is a new creation, the old is past and gone, everything has become fresh and new”—the good news that we hear when we confess our sin together. The wars and the absurd violence of the world, the pollution that seems ever with us, the petty grudges, the deep regret—everything that would trap us in the ways of death and destruction have no ultimate hold over us. The new world that God is bringing into being, the new world of which we are invited to be co-creators, is about life, not death.

All that gives us life—the powerful love of God, the encouraging support of family and friends, the future that we are making each moment—all that gives us life has a greater claim on our lives.

We are unsettled people, claimed by the future.

And we are drawn toward a new horizon.

Once again, in saying, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the realm of God,” Jesus is not reminding us of what miserable failures we can be. He is talking about a simple reality: It is difficult to plow a straight line while looking behind you.

At Rachel Anderson’s wedding here yesterday, the assembled congregation heard those words of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” This is true as much for a congregation as it is for individuals and couples. Following Jesus we discover that form of love that is looking outward together in the same direction. In the words of the spiritual, we keep our eyes on the prize.

Jesus calls us to look ahead to where we are going rather than back toward where we have been.

We are unsettled people, claimed by the future, drawn toward a new horizon.

At the end of his great beat novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac writes of sitting in New Jersey and sensing “all that raw land that rolls…over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars will be out…and nobody, nobody know what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…”

That’s a good description in Kerouac’s Christian/Buddhist way of what it means to follow Christ, all our road going, all our dreaming, not knowing what will happen us or to anybody, but here in Iowa letting the children cry, that is being open to the sadness and the sorrow and the often painful wonder and joy of all of life.