Luke 9:51-62

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. When 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?” But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.

As they were going along the road, 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.” 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 plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Let us Pray:

Almighty God,

You have called us to serve you,

yet without our grace we are not able to please you;

mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(from the New Zealand Prayer Book)

The reading from Luke today presents some challenges, to say the least. When I first read the Gospel lessons I was ready to find something else to use as the basis for my sermon. Anything would do! But, as Barbara Crafton, an Episcopal Priest and keeper of an on-line community called the Geranium Farm, mentioned, “This is another one of those gospel sound bites you'd better not ignore in your sermon, once it's been read out loud in the service -- if you don't unpack it a bit, newcomers are going to wonder what we see in Jesus.”

Our reading from Luke starts out well enough for us. We hear that Jesus is journeying on to Jerusalem. When they entered the village of the Samaritans they would not receive him. James and John are outraged at the lack of hospitality. They want to call down fire to destroy the village and the evil people. James and John probably were remembering the story of Elijah calling down flames to destroy the Samaritans who were sent out to trap Elijah. James and John want the same end for this village. But that is not to be. Jesus does not payback rejection with violence. He moves on. In the new interpreters Bible the author offers this reflection “Does insult entitle one to do injury? Does being right or having a holy cause justify the use of force of violence? Elijah had called down fire on the Samaritans; could not Jesus' followers do the same? Misunderstanding the identity of the one they followed, the disciples mistakenly though they could achieve his ends by violence. How often have those who claimed to be following Christ repeated the mistake of these early disciples? They had yet to learn that violence begets violence, and that Jesus had come to break the cycle of violence by dying and forgiving rather than by killing and exacting vengeance. “

I’m afraid that most of us are probably more like James and John than Jesus in our reactions to being wronged. We want the people who insult or harm the things that are most loved to us to pay a price. We want fire to come down from heaven, or at least the police to come and take the evil doers away! Our reactions when slighted are often for revenge. Jesus is different. Jesus calls us not to bring down fire for insults but to move on towards Jerusalem with him. Jesus reaction is radical. Jesus calls us to offer radical hospitality to others. When we don’t receive hospitality we are called to move on to another place. To someplace that will welcome us.

The second half of our Reading from Luke is the part that is disturbing. We have three little vignettes of people saying that they want to follow Jesus. We are stunned by Jesus responses. After all, can this be the same Jesus who would not call down fire to destroy those who offended? How do we reconcile the Jesus of love with the Jesus that would not allow a man to bury his father or say goodbye to his family? And why did the framers of our Lectionary choose this part of Luke’s gospel for our reading?! It surely is shocking. Perhaps that is the point. Jesus is trying to shock us out of our complacency. Perhaps the compilers of our lectionary wanted to shock us out of our Summer lulls into action, Or at least challenges us to think.

Barbara Crafton says of these readings “Commentators who wanted to temper it a bit have sometimes suggested that the man's dad was in fine health -- he was asking to wait a few years to follow Jesus until he was free of obligations. Okay -- that does calm it down a little, but it sounds a little like a loophole. I think we're talking about a man with a dead father who is still above ground and, by Jewish custom often still observed today, must be buried before another sundown arrives. This is an urgent situation.

And it is the exaggerated urgency which is at the heart of this seemingly heartless exchange. Take the most urgent obligation you have, Jesus says, and the urgency with which you must follow that urgent need and more. Already Jesus himself is marching towards his own death. Everything else is secondary.

We remember that Luke writes decades after Jesus lived and died and rose again. There are churches already, and bishops and deacons making them run. There is organized charity within them. There is liturgy. There are ecclesiastical arguments -- there has even been a church council of sorts, to try and resolve them. Although Luke's is a very different age, the beginning outlines of a church like ours are plainly visible.

And with the institution, the complacency that endangers faith more than any persecution ever can becomes possible. It is now possible to take the easy way. You can be a Christian because your mom was one, and it doesn't have to dominate your life. You can choose how much of yourself you will give to it. People will want to choose the easy way, because the hard way is getting harder, and we have so many easy ways among which to choose.”

Thankfully for me, Jesus does not demand perfection from his followers. The disciples of Jesus both then and today are a rag tag group at best. They and we make mistakes along the way. As Debbie Blue, a pastor at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota wrote: “Maybe the point [of the gospel reading] isn’t so much “you’re not good enough, go away you pathetic failure,” but rather that what we have to do with here, the gospel, the kingdom of God, is so radically alive that anything that has to do with death distracts from it—anything that has to do with hopelessness: lifeless systems, merciless constructs, rigid, graceless standards of purity. The point isn’t that a disciple must be good enough (meet some merciless standard) in order to get approval. The point is the scandalously redemptive, unmanageably living grace of God””

What is it that we are putting before we follow Jesus? Are there behaviors or situations that we need to change in order to follow Jesus? I believe that God is calling all of us to bring the kingdom of radical hospitality and love to earth. I invite all of us to look for the situations that prevent us from following Jesus and see what we can do to remove the barriers to bringing God’s love to our hurting and hurtful world.

Amen.