Setting Our Faces to the Future
By Rev. Daniel Smith
June 27, 2010
Setting Our Faces to the Future
Rev. Daniel Smith
At First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, United Church of Christ
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Lesson: Luke 9: 51-62
If you’ve been coming here for a while, you may have noticed a common element in the Words of Welcome we say at the beginning of every service. Some of you have shared how meaningful it is for you to hear it repeatedly, week after week. Terry said it this morning. “Wherever you are on the journey of life or faith, you are welcome here.” This line has become something of a mantra in progressive churches in our denomination. Here at First Church, it gives crisp expression to our fourfold vision of hospitality. It’s a reminder that we have been called by God to be a church of Open Doors, Open Spirits, with a wide Open Table, always striving to be out on the Open Road.
I’ve noticed that folks like us in churches like this one tend use the word “journey” a lot, and not only in words of welcome or in vision statements. You hear it in prayers and blessings. You hear it when we offer Communion. You just heard it when we baptized little Oliver Paul not once but twice. And of course, we sing it as well, as we will do at the end of the service today. “Bless, now, O God the journey that all your people make.” Indeed, “journey” is a common contemporary metaphor for faith, and for good reasons.
For one thing, I think we like the sense of spaciousness that this notion of “journey” evokes. The very idea of a journey includes a certain expanse between a beginning point and an end point, whether in space or in time. We don’t usually speak of journeying to the bathroom or journeying across the lawn. Instead we use it when there is some significant ground to cover. In our journeys of faith, we are comforted to know that in that ground there’s ample room for our questions and doubts. There’s ample time to meet up and be influenced by all kinds of fellow travelers. Our journeys may well intersect with those of people of many faiths and no faith. Along the way, we may come to understand that God, whose love is patient, whose grace is vast, whose hospitality is abundant, is ready, willing and able to meet us wherever we are.
I think another reason why churches like ours have adopted this metaphor is because it involves a sense of commitment to a particular path while remaining open-ended. Just compare the open-endedness of a “journey” with the prevailing metaphors of prior generations who spent a whole lot more time considering the destination. For us the question is, are you going somewhere in your faith? Are you growing as a moral and spiritual being? Are you being changed and transformed by God’s love? For them, the questions, whether uptightly or uprightly so, were more pointedly ‘are you going to heaven?’ or ‘are you going to hell?’ These days, there’s a far more appealing, laid back, California-style, looseness about our journeys. As compared to the goal oriented metaphors of the pasts, our contemporary faith journeys sometimes remind me of what my 35 year old friend tells him self when he gets sad about not having a girlfriend with whom he can settle down. He reminds himself it’s all about the patience and playing the ABC’s. “Eh. Let is Be. Wait and See!”
Whether we consider ourselves searchers or seekers or card-carrying pilgrims of the Christian faith, the fact remains that being on a journey usually means that we have made some initial commitment. We have chosen to set our feet on a path. With each step, we learn that commitment opens more doors than is closes. We encounter greater responsibility but with that responsibility comes a more lasting sense of joy, freedom and purpose. But, let’s face it. Most of us prefer to keep our long-term options as open as possible. We cherish the freedom to step on and off the path when it suits our schedules, our work, our relationships and countless other competing commitments. As such, we may well find ourselves adopting the wisdom of the science fiction writer, Ursule LeGuin, who said, “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
Here’s the thing though. What often raises the stakes of our journeys, what makes them more challenging to abide, is precisely an awareness of the destination. In other words, how much the journey matters is related to how much the end matters! I think this is why Christians experience a lot of spiritual growth in Lent. The sense of the journey and its parameters are abundantly clear. 40 days. Hard stop. With Jesus, we begin in the wilderness. We end at the cross and the empty tomb. After Easter, and having stepped outside of intensity and intentionality of Lent, we may well feel like our faith lacks focus. For many, that increasing sense of urgency we feel during the Holy Week rush of events may languish and fade. Having just been in the driver’s seat of our spirituality for a whole 40 days, having made it to Easter we may find ourselves ready to buckle in and conk out for a long nap in the passenger seat. “Wake me up again when you start seeing signs for Ash Wednesday!” You know who you are! For a whole 40 days, we have a crystal clear sense of the destination of our faith journeys, but I wonder. How often do we consider the destination of our journeys the rest of the time?
Our gospel lesson finds Jesus taking up this connection between the journey and the destination in no uncertain terms. If we read the entire Lucan narrative as a dramatization of Christ’s journey, we could break it down into four sections. Act 1, Chapters 1 and 2, begins with Jesus’ Birth in Bethlehem. Act 2, Chapters 3 through 9, takes us through Jesus’ Public Ministry in Galilee. Act. 3, chapters 9 through 18, almost of which is unique to Luke, covers Jesus travel to Jerusalem, and all the teaching he does on the way. Act 4, chapter 19 to 24, is all about what we might consider his ultimate destination, namely persecution and passion, crucifixion and resurrection. All of this takes place in Jerusalem.
Luke 9, verse 51, begins Act 3, with this foreboding line. When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to Jerusalem. In other words, he set his face to his destination! In this line though, there’s both a passive and active tense. Jesus is about to be taken up, presumably when he ascends to heaven after his resurrection, a supposedly pre-ordained event, and yet in the very same line we get a clear sense of Jesus’ deliberate and intentional resolve. When he “sets his face to Jerusalem,” he is both accepting and choosing his fate. This interplay is maintained throughout the rest of the gospel.
Annie Dillard frames the arc of Luke’s narrative in this way. Her language is worth quoting at length.
“In Luke, Christ’s ministry enlarges in awfulness – from the sunny Galilean days of eating and drinking, preaching on lakesides, saying lovely things, choosing disciples, healing the sick… and raising the dead – enlarges in awfulness from this exuberant world, where all is possible and God displays his power and love, to the dark messianic journey which begins when Peter acknowledges him…as the Christ, and culminates in the eerie night-long waiting at the lip of the vortex as Pilate and Herod pass Jesus back and forth and he defends himself not.
Jesus creates his role and succumbs to it. He understands his destiny only gradually, through much prayer; he decides on it, foretells its, and sets his face to meet it. On the long journey to Jerusalem, which occupies many chapters in Luke, he understands more and more. The narrative builds a long sober sense of crushing demand on Jesus the man, and the long sober sense of his gradually strengthening himself to see it, to cause it, and to endure it.”
For more than a third of the gospel, Jesus ministry has been enlarging – in awfulness, in awesomeness, in determination. Here in Chapter 9, a single-mindedness of purpose comes into focus. He sets his face –and some translations add the modifiers firmly, intently, and steadfastly. The phrase is set his face is common in the Old Testament. The great prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel all were to said to have set their face towards some greater aim. In Isaiah, the prophet “set his face like flint” to any opposition. Luke is clearly trying to emphasize Jesus’ stone-faced determination, his unflinching, resolute commitment. His dedication here is not merely to a wandering journey with many worthwhile interruptions and many possible endpoints. It’s not even a commitment to living his life in the way of compassion, justice, mercy and peace. He is committed to where that way will take him as well, to the destination which in his case is death and an utter emptying out of himself on behalf of others.
What’s more, in the interactions Jesus has with his follower in this passage, there is a clear indication that he is asking for just this sort of resolute commitment from them and from us. The would-be followers of Jesus are made to learn not merely the joys but the cost of genuine discipleship. They want to follow him, truly, but Jesus’ decidedly unsentimental posture in this text tests their resolve.
I want to follow you Jesus.
Alright, but know that you’ll be homeless, more so than foxes or birds.
I want to follow but first I need to bury my father.
Jesus’ response. I don’t think so. Leave the dead to bury their own. We need to be about the work of bringing new life to the kingdom.
I need to say goodbye to my friends.
No way. There’s no time for that now. There’s no turning back.
I told you it was unsentimental!
On that note, I need to apologize to Karin. I promise that I didn’t pick this text for your farewell Sunday, much as I would love to have an excuse to put off saying goodbye! I think there’s something we can all learn here, especially in the midst of ongoing transitions in our journeys. Jesus is suggesting that deaths, divorces, new births, graduations, leave takings, none of these moments should distract us for long. Jesus is asking us to realize that in truth, we already have everything we need for the journey and all of its milestones. We have trustworthy maps that can be found in scripture and tradition. We have fellow travelers on the road here in this community. We have the water of life, the feast of life, the spirit of life to sustain and guide us on the way. All of these elements of faith will ensure that we will survive even the most painful of goodbyes, with or without the proper celebrations. And indeed, in order to make it to the sort of deep transformation, the ushering in of God's Kingdom of Justice, the overturning of the ways of the world, we have to let go of much of what has pre-occupied us to date and give ourselves over to that far larger task of taking up our crosses and following Jesus.
Jesus is asking each one of us to follow him on this journey to Jerusalem. To understand the true weight of this request, we need to look ahead to the destinations of each of our journeys. In other words, we need to consider our own death, to find there the promise of new life, and so a renewed sense of a more courageous and purpose filled vision for our lives in the here and now. And here is where we begin to see some deeper words of welcome, a welcome for us to consider where we are not just on our journeys of life and faith, but on the pathway of genuine discipleship. Here we are welcome to not only walk the journey, but to be driven by it.
What is that single-mindedness of purpose that informs each of our journeys and that enlarges our individual sense of discipleship? And what are the preoccupations we are being asked to set aside in order to set our faces more firmly to that destination? Mary Oliver beautifully captures the tension of this awareness in a poem called “the Journey”.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.
We might wonder if this “one day: came for Jesus at the beginning of Act 3. “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to Jerusalem.” Or perhaps it was more gradual for him and for each of us. What is clear is that the old tugs at our ankles, the old voices of great but relatively smaller needs, must be set aside so that we can hear that new voice calling, the one you recognized as your voice, or perhaps even the voice of God speaking through you, calling you to set your face to a higher purpose, to a higher calling, to a deeper determination to do, to serve and perhaps even to save yourself so that you can save others, before it is too late.
As we journey through yet another time of transition in the life of First Church this summer, preparing to say farewell to our interim minister, Karin Case, and to offer a welcome to our new minister, Ute Molitor, my guess is we could honor both of their ministries by not merely settling for being wherever we are on the journey of life and faith. Indeed, we can honor their ministries, and Christ’s, by setting our faces - firmly, intently, steadfastly - into God’s future. With Jesus as our model, may we each find the strength both to accept and choose the costs and the joys of our journeys and our destinations. Amen.