First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
27 June 2004
Follow Me
If you've ever wondered whether Jesus would be a reliably-pleasant person to be around, today's reading may compel you to cross him off your list of prospective chums.1 Watch him in today's gospel reading. In eleven short verses, he rips into two of his most trusted friends, waves off an eager volunteer for the corps of disciples, and practically orders two recruits to break the 5th commandment. As Garret Keizer once said about Jesus, he may be with us to the end of the age, but you still can't take him anywhere.
Jesus, we read, has "set his face towards Jerusalem," which is a biblical expression you don't have to be particularly biblical to appreciate. If you have willful kids, an opinionated spouse, or a stubborn friend, you have seen it—the look that tells you that nothing will change a made-up mind. It'll take Jesus ten more chapters to get to his destination, but his direction is sure, and nothing will deter him from Jerusalem and the cross.
Not even Samaria, a region inhabited by people with religious convictions very different from their Jewish cousins, whom they despised (and who despised them in return). Jesus can avoid the possibility of a nasty confrontation by taking a wide detour around Samaria, but to do so would lengthen his journey, and when your face is set, you don't do detours. He wants to go straight through. And so he sends advance-men into a border village to arrange for hospitality, but they are rebuffed and hurry back to Jesus with the bad news of rejection.
Now, we know what Jesus thought disciples should do when a village did not welcome them, which was simply to shake its dust from their feet, and go on to the next one; but the disciples come up with a different plan—violent retribution. Jesus was always asking them to have faith in him, and it turns out that they do; they believe in him so much that they are eager to hate those who don't. And what could be more natural than to punish the unbelievers, to bring ruin on those who reject your guru or your God (or whatever else you hold divine and inviolable—an idea, a way of life, a flag)? If there's anything that makes the world go 'round, it's sacred violence.
But Jesus will not allow love for him to inaugurate a round of blood-letting. He rebukes the disciples. "Rebuke" is a special word in Luke's gospel used exclusively for mastering chaos and casting out demons. When Jesus rebukes his disciples, then, we (who are also often zealous, crusading types) are suddenly faced with an uncomfortable possibility—namely, that this impulse to make people pay that comes so naturally to us is a product of our "chaos," something demonic. It is based on a lie, as all things demonic are—the false conviction that we are innocent; that if we do violence, it may be sad, but it is not wrong, because in the end, imposing what's right on others, even by force, is a benefit ("You will thank us for it some day"). If we shed blood, the demon in us says so persuasively, it is only because we are trying to be helpful. By rebuking James and John, Jesus says, in effect, "To hell with your help."
The illusion of innocence is not the only misapprehension Jesus corrects in this passage. Consider that eager-beaver volunteer, who exclaims, "I will follow you wherever you go!" You can just see him down on one knee, proposing to the Lord. "Wherever, Jesus! Anywhere! Really! Take me!" He is so generous, how could Jesus refuse? "Sign him up," the other disciples are probably thinking. "There's an open slot on the Board of Deacons! And while you're at it, give him a pledge card." But Jesus does not embrace him. Instead, he says, "Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but I have nowhere to lay my head."
The man says, "Everywhere," but Jesus says, "Nowhere." It turns out that a disciple has to be more than a happy vagabond, following Jesus to exotic places—places that, although strange and requiring courage and trust, are still in some sense known. The disciple has to follow Jesus also into the unknown, accepting a life that is a kind of nowhere-ness, a homelessness that is profoundly spiritual, social and ideological. It's not for nothing that Jesus names the foxes and the birds as examples of creatures who do have a home. He is alluding to nature, of course, and to God's providential care for all creatures, a care into which Jesus insistently invites us all. But foxes and birds are also allusions to the crushing worldly powers-that-be, and thus this cryptic line is also a reminder that to go with Jesus is to refuse to be at home with them. It is to embark instead, as John Dominic Crossan often says, on the historic collision course between God's "Kingdom" and the human enterprise of Empire.
This means all the things we think it means—that Christians may find themselves on the wrong side of those powers, hounded like the prophets and witnesses of every age, unloved by "the world." But it may also mean consequences that are far less grand, but no less lonely. For example, you could find yourself, as many thoughtful Christians do, on no side of an issue, or on several sides at once. You could discover that the forced choices of the typical public debate are no choices for you in light of the rich, complex realities of your faith, and so you have nowhere to stand that makes any sense to the sea of pundits and partisans who reason in slogans and sassy one-liners. Because you are following a Jesus of no easy answers, you could end up in a tough and lonely ideological spot, suffering misunderstanding and disapproval from what is supposed to be "your own side," as well as from the "other side."
Every now and then someone asks me why I don't preach more on particular social and political questions. Well, I have done so and will do so again; but no, I don't make a habit of it. I think it is a difficult thing to do with integrity, and I find that in trying to preach on issues, I am (as Martin Copenhaver has said) more skilled at getting Jesus to follow me than I am at getting myself to follow him. It is uncanny, is it not, how often a Democratic Jesus shows up in the gospel preached in Cambridge and a somewhat more Republican Lord makes his appearance in the churches of Beverly and Manchester-by-the-Sea? In preaching issues, one always runs the risk of allowing the gospel's unique angle of vision to assume the more pedestrian shape of a particular ideology, and of submerging its distinctive language into the common-sense speech that dominates the ordinary public give and take.
I have noticed, for example, that in the debate over gay marriage, most liberal Christians, including me, have mostly latched onto secular vocabulary to make our cases. We speak of rights and equality, we champion the notion of romantic love, and we can even put forth the (rather un-Christian) idea that individuals should be totally free to do whatever they choose with whomever they choose, however they choose to do it. The loudest Christian voices on the other side claim to offer a unique counter-cultural witness by appealing to biblical law, but most of the time the law they cite only shows that they are as culturally-captive as the next person. They have succumbed to the idolatry of the nuclear family that Jesus repeatedly rejects.
Voices that offer a truly distinctive and thoughtful biblical word to the controversy are few and far between, but what refreshing words they are, and how they shift the ground of the discussion when you finally hear them—words like vocation and holiness and discipline and gift and the well-being of God's shalom. We should say more about these distinctive words and approaches at another time. For now, I want only to explain that I don't often preach explicitly on current affairs because I believe that it is far more needful to speak bracingly to each other and the world in the peculiar language of our tradition about the gospel's challenge of life and death, courage and companionship, grace and hope, hospitality and truth, generosity and inclusion, than it is simply to "preach the issues." It is much more radical in the long run to urge upon us all the ultimacy of the Kingdom of God than to say pretty much the same things about the trade deficit, war, AIDS and homelessness that you can hear at a rally or read in a Globe editorial.
We are always shaping the message of Jesus to peculiar ends, and sometimes the shaping we do is just right. I do believe that God is "on our side" (and we on God's) in many cases! But it more faithful for us to resist shaping the gospel and instead to let it shape us. And that begins to happen, it seems, when we are willing to follow Jesus not only to anywhere and everywhere, but also to nowhere; that is, into a relationship with God that is beyond the expected and the conventional, beyond the ideological and the tribal, beyond forced choices and common sense, and into a place that is not so clear and evident—a wilderness in which by grace we are able to lose our old threadbare lexicon and generate a fresh word for politics, social life, and even religious belief and practice
We are called to follow Jesus on a road to a kind of nowhere that is also a kind of newness, a divine relationship that resists forced or common-sense choices and embraces opposites. Knowing this may help us grasp a little better what is happening in those two rather off-putting encounters Jesus has with new recruits at the end of this passage. Notice that each of the two people Jesus calls to himself wants to do something that is pious and right and conventionally good before they accept his invitation. One wants to arrange his father's funeral; the other wishes to say a proper farewell to his family. But Jesus seems to criticize these filial desires. He says that the dead should bury the dead, and that once your hand is on the plow you mustn't look back.
We could take this as a simple competition between a self-centered god (who expects exclusive devotion, or else ) and blood kinship (that demands of us a similar allegiance, or else), and we could conclude from what he says that Jesus wants God to win out over every "challenger" to God's claims on us. But that sounds a lot like the with-us-or-against-us theology that Jesus rebuked in James and John earlier in the passage. I'm not sure that Jesus meant to require a forced choice so laced with guilt and implied threats—Naughty you for following the world and not Christ! Selfish you for loving your family more than Jesus! Damn you for choosing the wrong path! Christ is not opposed to the world. He is, as another preacher wrote, a deeper face to the world. There has to be something else going on here.
It could be as simple as a shock tactic. Maybe we are so stuck in convention that Jesus needs to say terrible things just to get us riled up enough to pay attention to whatever comes next; to loosen our soil, as it were, so that plow he speaks of can begin to make a deep straight furrow in our hearts. I think he is impatient for us to get on the road because he knows that it is only on the road in his company that we have a chance to find a life beyond dichotomy and competition, beyond priority and balance—a deeper life in which God's great passion for us and for the world is always calling into question all other calls to caring, but without ever diminishing any of them—a "both/and" kind of trick only God can pull off, and one Jesus may be saying God wants to show us, for our good and the sake of the world.
The gospel says you get this deeper life on the journey to Jerusalem with Jesus. What that means in practice for each of us and for the congregation as whole, I can't say. All I know is that the scriptures are always declaring that God is up to something new that is integrative and inclusive and not disjunctive and oppositional; a kind of wholeness that is hard to imagine because we haven't seen it much (except in Jesus himself and the way he loved). But if we trust in things unseen (St Paul's definition of faith) and set our face towards it with Christ, the gospel says it will be ours.
1Some thoughts in this sermon were prompted by the reflections of William C. Loader ("First Thoughts on Gospel Readings for Year C") and Martin Copenhaver (To Begin at the Beginning), as well as a comment or two by Donna Schaper, in a sermon of hers I read long ago.
© 2004, J Mary Luti