'When the days drew near for Jesus 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."'
--Luke 9: 51-62
'For freedom Christ has set us free.
Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
For
you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom
as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one
another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You
shall love your neighbor as yourself." If, however, you bite and devour
one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
Live
by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the
flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed
to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing
what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the
law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity,
licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels,
dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I
am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not
inherit the kingdom of God.
By
contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against
such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with
its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by
the Spirit.'
--Galatians 5: 1, 13-25
I have something of a history of doing things without completely understanding
what I’m getting myself into. My first
job was working in a saw mill at the age of 17.
I had no idea how long the days would be, nor how utterly exhausted I
would be when I got home. I ended up
quitting that job a lot sooner than I had anticipated. While in college I was a
theatre major, but I hadn’t figured out that that meant more than just
acting. Who knew that I would have to
take technical theatre classes or sew a pair of pants or design lights for a
scene or build a set a steps? Not
me! I didn’t fair so well in those
areas, and so I ended up changing the major to a minor in my last
semester. Maybe I could have done both
of those things more effectively and actually enjoyed them if I had had any
idea going in of what it actually meant to be a logger or a theatre major. I suspect most of us have been in similar
situations.
For the vast majority of us we had no
idea of what it actually meant to be Christians, did we; after all, just about
all of us here were baptized as babies, with a few exceptions. So what happens to us when, say a few years
after our baptisms, we find ourselves wondering what it means to be a
Christian? Unfortunately, so very often our churches, especially Mainline Protestants like the Episcopal Church, end up being reflections
of our social structures, complete with the same expectations that end up
getting levied on us within those social structures. For example, how many of us have felt pressure to join a particular social or charitable organization in our community? That same level of expectation is often transferred onto church life ("I put my time in on altar guild, now it's your turn!"). Thus going to church or participating in ministries become something we do out of a sense of expectation, fearful of the
shame or ridicule we might incur if we don’t.
If only we knew that what it means to be a Christian is not about
expectation, but about hearts and lives that are transformed by the
grace-filled love of Jesus Christ. We do
what we do—come to church on Sunday or participate in a ministry team—not out
of a sense of expectation or fear of ridicule but because those things are
expressions of our faith. We do them
because what it means to be a Christian is, in fact, to be freed from the
burden of expectation.
Both our Gospel from Luke and our
reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians this week highlight what the Christian life
entails and the ways it undermines those social and personal expectations. In the second half of the Gospel we hear of
three would-be followers who clearly have an interest in traveling the way with
Jesus, but they just don’t understand what that means. The first is reminded that he’ll be homeless
if he does so. The second wants to wait until his father dies. And the third wants to run back home to say
goodbye to his family. All three of
these highlight an expectation that society places on folks and the ways that
Jesus frees us from them. The first would-be follower is faced with a loss of
protection, as being homeless means he’ll be, both physically and socially
ostracized, if he follows Jesus. The
second's desire to wait until his father dies is really about him wanting to get his inheritance before going to be with Jesus, something that was certainly expected of him, but Jesus point out the reality that in
order to follow him the man must make a clear choice about his priorities: is it to
follow Jesus or do what he and others expect. And the third wishes to turn back in an act
of somehow clinging his old life, not quite getting that the reality of
following Jesus means a new life and new family that reflects Jesus’ own words
in Luke 8: 21, when he says that those who “hear the word of God and do it” are
his brothers, and sisters. These three
have no idea what it means to follow Jesus, and as far as we can tell, none of
them joined Jesus on the road to Jerusalem.
It’s clear that these three wanted to
cling to the social structures and expectations to which they were accustomed,
not realizing that to be a disciple—that is, to be one that follows— requires
that one let go of those social structures, let go of what the self and others
expect, and cling instead to Jesus. Writing
to the splintered congregation in Galatia, Paul echoes these words, calling the
people to be guided not by their own selfish wants and desires and what they
have been told matters in this life, but instead to be guided by the Spirit of
God, the agent of grace that has taken away the expectations and made us all
worthy to be called children of God.
These words echo in our own ears today, and we need to be reminded of them. Thus whatever rugged
individualism society preaches, whatever voice inside us that tells us to look
out for “me and mine,” is surrendered as we take up the yoke of Christ. A yoke is not an easy or comfortable instrument, just ask an ox. Yet, ironically, Jesus’ yoke
is a light one. It is the yoke of freedom,
and freedom for Jesus, and later Paul, is not the same as freedom for a 21st
century American (something very important for us to keep in mind as we prepare to celebrate July 4th). This is not about
freedom to do whatever one wants, quite the opposite. Instead, it’s freedom from one’s wants and
what others want from us, , the freedom to be in Christ and to live and love
and he does. This is what the Christian
life entails.
Being free in Christ means that it is
no longer our wills or even the wills of our society to which we listen, but rather the will of Jesus. Sometimes we lose sight of this, trying to
reconcile our own desires with what Jesus is actually calling us to do and to
be. Take James and John, who have grown so self-righteous in their time with
Jesus that when they are rejected by a town of Samaritans their first instinct
is to call down fire from heaven to consume them—a callback to a move made by
the prophet Elijah. Surely Jesus
will approve of smiting our enemies, they think. Clearly, they don’t get it, still caught in
their own feelings and their society's expectations for how they should treat the Samaritans, and so they
want to destroy them, forgetting that furiously macho, divine violence is not
the way of Jesus . Later on Paul reminds
the Galatians that the whole law is summed up in the single commandment to “love
your neighbor as yourself,” which we all know as the Golden Rule. It’s as
simple as that. But do we really get
it? Do we remember that this is actually
a commandment, found in Leviticus 19: 18, and that it comes at the end of a
long list of dos and don’ts, including “you shall leave provisions for the poor
and the alien in your midst,” “you shall not render an unjust judgement,” and “you
shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people.” The Golden Rule, the greatest commandment,
actually comes at the end of a list of 17 commandments, all of which are summed
up in “love your neighbor as yourself.” Every
audience that heard Jesus or Paul use this phrase would have known that to love
neighbor as self entailed all of these, a
lot more than lip service.
James & John, who did not love their neighbors as themselves, are ready to call down fire on the Samaritans.
And that’s the tricky part,
remembering that there is a more to following the way of Jesus. We try to
reconcile what we want with what Jesus wants, but it doesn’t really work. It is not enough to want to follow Jesus, we
must understand that to do so will literally change our lives, change our
hearts and our perspectives, maybe even lead to us losing the security of our
friends, family, and social structures.
It is not enough to simply say that we love our neighbor as ourselves,
but we must put that love into action.
Without meaningful action we end up merely reciting the words of Jesus
on our lips but not in our lives, resulting in a kind of faux-empathy that
society expects us to show to those who are broken, wherein we can muster
little more than the obligatory “thoughts and prayers” when we face tragedies
like a mass shooting or the site of children being held in cages. Our social structures may tell us that the
only thing that matters is that we belong to and meet the expectations of that
society, especially relating to compassion, but we Christians are about
something much more, much deeper. We
belong to Jesus, who by God’s grace has made us part of his very body in our
baptisms, that we may put our love into action, who invites us to the holy table to
feast with him and on him, that we may go and set a table before the poor and
alien in our own midst, and who offers not fearful expectation but a
nail-pierced hand with and the invitation, “Follow me!” The question is, do we truly comprehend what
that means?
