What’s In The Way?

Sunday, June 27th, 2004
Proper 8 (13)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton, VA
Luke 9:51-62

51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; 53 but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 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?" 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village. 57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." 58 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." 59 To another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." 60 But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." 61 Another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." 62 Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

Wherever He Leads I’ll go
Wherever He leads, I’ll go
I’ll follow my Christ, who loves me so.
Wherever he leads I’ll go.

That was the invitation hymn the evening I made my public commitment to missions in July of 1984. Keith Parks, then president of the Foreign Mission Board, was the speaker. He spoke about rope-holders and risk-takers. My family and I were attending Foreign Missions Week at Ridgecrest, outside of Asheville, NC. For the previous 3 years I had been wrestling with what seemed to be the ever-diminishing prospects of fulfilling that call to ministry as changes were coming about in the course of the Controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention.

I still had a year to go before graduating, and had known since before college that God was calling me to serve in some full-time capacity; one which I thought would eventually put me on the foreign mission field. I had gone through college pretty much assuming that, once done there, I’d go directly to seminary, and from seminary, knowing there was a requirement of at least 2 years’ experience in ministry, I had calculated that I’d be on the field by the time I was … 26. Unless I overlapped my two years’ experience with going to seminary, in which case I WOULD tie for youngest appointed missionary to that point, which, as far as I know, remains at the age of 24, but may have gone lower in the last 20 years.

What’s the phrase? The best laid plans?

Our text this morning is about that … about plans … hopes, dreams, even … and how we relate them to Christ’s call on our lives. We have Jesus traveling through Samaria, heading for Jerusalem, with his disciples in tow, as usual. Samaritans and Jews didn’t exactly relish each others’ company. There were longstanding differences having to do with, surprise! Matters of faith and practice! In this case, they began with where the ‘real’ place to worship was – “JERUSALEM”, said the Jews, ‘NOT’, said the Samaritans, who preferred Mount Gerizim as the correct place of worship, since that was where Jacob’s well was.

It seems almost a passing comment at the beginning of the story, at least in relation to what he says in later verses. Jesus has sent messengers ahead of the group to get things ready for them – a kind of first century version of today’s “advance teams.” Anyway, the messengers go into this Samaritan town and are apparently told in no uncertain terms, “thanks, but no thanks. We don’t want his business here.” and pretty much kick them out. The text doesn’t say exactly if the messengers WERE James and John, but it DOES report their reactions – and it actually sounds more like something you would hear Peter say –

"Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?"

Jesus rebukes them (again!), just tells them to drop it and move on. So they do.

As they keep moving along the road, someone comes up to Jesus and lays it out on the line for him:

"I will follow you wherever you go."

This seems like a pretty clear-cut statement. It could be, in the right context, I suppose. But Jesus’ response seems to be getting at the heart of the matter, or at least beginning to. Does it seem disproportionate, or even, slightly inappropriate to you that he answers like he does? Someone comes up to Jesus and pledges loyalty to him, and his answer is … that, unlike animals in the wild, he has no place to even call home. What’s he trying to get across? Here we come to the first obstacle to be overcome in following Christ. The obstacle of personal comfort.

There are studies that have been done in the aftermath of evangelism campaigns, crusades, and campground meetings, even youth retreats; spiritual highpoints of all kinds, to try to track the level of commitment that is maintained in the aftermath of one’s having made some sort of significant decision about his or her faith.

I don’t know the exact numbers, but I will say that they are nowhere near 100%. So the question becomes, if you made the commitment, what is standing in the way of carrying it out to completion?

If we look closely, Jesus isn’t turning the man away. In the account of this encounter that we find in the Gospel of Matthew, the man is identified as a scribe. The understanding behind that is of someone who knew the meaning of the word ‘commitment’. His words were not for show. They were meant. So this becomes a peek into a heavy deep and real conversation between Jesus and someone who wants to follow him. Jesus is essentially saying, “Do you really know what you are saying? Following me means giving up the comforts of home, and security, and wealth, and position, and standing, and respectability, and so many other things … you’ll more than likely be Uncomfortable a greater part of the time than you will be COMFORTABLE. Is that what you truly want? Because that is what truly following me entails.” While in many Western countries Christians have not experienced the loss of personal security and possessions that many of our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia have faced, those who sincerely follow Christ can expect to pay a price for their discipleship. The reality of the cost needs to be set forth clearly. Some follow Christ too quickly, moved … by an emotional decision to become a Christian. One Scholar, Richard Lenski, observed that such a person “sees the soldiers on parade, the fine uniforms, and the flittering arms, and is eager to join but forgets the exhausting marches, the bloody battles, the graves, perhaps unmarked.” (Richard C. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Luke’s Gospel (Minneapolis, Minn.; Augsburg Fortress, 1961), p. 559.)

So the question now becomes: What personal comforts are WE willing to give up for Christ’s sake?

Jesus initiates the next exchange the same way he started his conversations with Peter and the other disciples: two words: “Follow me.”

I remember when I first read the man’s response and Jesus’ response to HIM, I thought ‘well, that was rude!’ The man answers asking Jesus to let him go bury his father. And Jesus’

"Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God."

Response seems more than a little cold. After all, on first reading, you’d think the man had just lost his father, and needs to go take care of burial arrangements.

It’s not that simple. This is one of those pieces of information that fill in, or maybe better; fill out, what the text is really saying when we encounter a difficult passage. It’s at times like these that I am truly grateful for what Biblical Scholarship throughout the ages has done for our understanding of scripture.

To “bury one’s father” was a figure of speech, meaning to continue in business with one’s father until the father’s death, at which time the inheritance would be divided. Leaving before that time would mean forfeiture of part or all of the inheritance. So it seems the man was more concerned with financial security than with actually being allowed to grieve his father.

So the question THEN becomes, are we willing to follow Christ if it means changing our vocation, stepping out of our comfort zone, from the predictable and known to the unpredictable and unknown?

The last couple of verses again repeat somewhat the same pattern – what appears to be a reasonable request is rebuffed by Jesus in a less-than-gracious tone. “I’ll follow you Lord, but first let me go say goodbye to my family”.

I need to tell you that, having gone through it from the other side, I never understood what was involved in this until I found myself in the position of having to face the prospect of … not so much moving myself away from family, but for some reason MORE than that, the prospect of moving our children away from family – after they’ve established relationships with grandparents and Aunts and Uncles and Cousins … granted, it’s only a couple of hours to Virginia Beach, and it’s a day’s drive to Kentucky, but that is the part I don’t personally remember, I was too young. The subject has never come up in conversation with Karen, my sister who was 9 when we moved to Costa Rica. The only thing that gave away the fact that she went through some missing of the family is in the fact that, as long as I can remember, she’s always had a better grasp of who was related to whom, and what their names were, when conversation turned to aunts and uncles and cousins and such that were left back here in the States.

Jesus’ reply is harsh. There’s no other word for it.

"No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

He’s talking about ultimate allegiance. We can hold family; children, cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or even church family, brothers and sisters in Christ, the life of the church, involvement IN church, all close to our hearts, but ultimately, we must hold Jesus and our relationship to HIM as close to our hearts as he held us to his. If ANYTHING, ANYTHING else, takes that place, then he is not truly Lord of our lives.

And that is what Jesus is asking for: ultimate position in our lives. Let nothing get in the way of that.

Invitation:
As helpful as the internet is to me, I honestly didn’t think I would ever use something I got in an email in service. I was wrong. If you’ve ever thought of yourself as the primary reason God wouldn’t call you, then hear this list. Some of you may have already heard it, but here it is:

Noah was a drunk
Abraham was too old
Isaac was a daydreamer
Jacob was a liar
Leah was ugly
Joseph was abused
Moses had a stuttering problem
Gideon was afraid
Sampson had long hair and was a womanizer
Rahab was a prostitute
Jeremiah and Timothy were too young
David had an affair and was a murderer
Elijah was suicidal
Isaiah preached naked
Jonah ran from God
Naomi was a widow
Job went bankrupt
John the Baptist ate bugs
Peter denied Christ
The Disciples fell asleep while praying
Martha worried about everything
The Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once
Zaccheus was too small
Paul was too religious
Timothy had an ulcer...AND
Lazarus was dead!
No more excuses now!!
God can use you to your full potential.
Besides you aren't the message, you are just the messenger.

Let’s pray.