6-30-19 Readings & Sermon

This is a reading from the first book of Kings.

The Lord said to Elijah, Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazel as king over Aram.

Also you shall anoint Jeru, son of Nimshe, as king over Israel.

And you shall anoint Elisha, son of Shaphat, of Abel Manoah, as prophet in your place.

So he set out from there and found Elisha, son of Saphat, who was plowing.

There were twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him, and he was with the twelve.

Elisha passed by him and threw his mantle over him.

Elisha left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.

Then Elisha said to him, Go back again, for what have I done to you?

Elisha returned from following him, took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered them using the equipment from the oxen, boiled their flesh, and gave it to the people, and they ate.

Then he set out and followed Elijah and became his servant.

The word of the Lord.

I will cry aloud, and God will hear me.

In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord.

My hands were stretched out by night and did not tire.

I refused to be comforted.

I will remember the works of the Lord and call to mind your wonders of old time.

I will meditate on all your acts and ponder your mighty deeds.

Your way, O God, is holy, who is so great a God as our God.

You are the God who works wonders and have declared your power among the peoples.

By your strength you have redeemed your people, the children of Jacob and Joseph.

The waters saw you, O God.

The waters saw you and trembled.

The very depths were shaken.

The clouds poured out water.

The skies thundered.

Your arrows splashed to and fro.

The sound of your thunder was in the whirlwind.

Your lightnings lit up the world.

The earth trembled and shook.

Your way was in the sea, and your paths in the great waters.

Yet your footsteps were not seen.

You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses.

A reading from Galatians.

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, amenities, 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.

The word of the Lord.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke.

Now the priest put the wrong reading in the bulletin today, so you're just going to have to listen.

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 Jesus, 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 Jesus turned and rebuked them.

Then they went on to another village.

As they were going along the road, someone said to Jesus, 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 Jesus said, Follow me.

But that one 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 first let me say farewell to those at my home.

Jesus said to that one, No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

The gospel of the Lord.

See, in the ancient world, there was this enmity between Jewish folks who worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem and the Samaritans who believed themselves to also have a good faith but worshiped at a different location.

For them it was Mount Gerizim.

I don't have a map, but you don't need to know this factually, but I want you to know if you were in the Galilee and you wanted to go to Jerusalem, the fastest way is through Samaria, which is a geographic region.

Jewish people didn't like Samaritans, and so they disliked them so much that they would really not even go on the soil because they thought they'd get the Samaritan cooties.

So what they did is they went way out of their way around Samaria, and Jesus takes a shortcut today.

Some of this enmity is really hard to express, and the best thing I can do is say, and listen, I'm not trying to be ugly here, but um, like I say, they have different sanctuaries.

It's sort of like when I grew up Southern Baptist, how we felt about Catholics.

Well, they were kind of Christian-y, but they just weren't Catholic.

That's sort of the deal.

But you've got to like multiply it a little bit, because like I said, if you were Jewish, you wouldn't touch a Samaritan person.

You thought that could affect your relationship before God.

So Jesus is apparently not worried about that, and he's going through, and look, the Samaritans know he's not one of us.

And they know he's not coming to get to know them.

His face is to Jerusalem.

He's in the HOV lane, he's not going to be taking, you know, any detours.

So, no surprise, they don't set out a banquet for the guy.

His disciples, James and John, say, should we call down lightning to blow them up?

Now, when you hear fire from heaven, that's really code speak for lightning.

Should we have lightning strike these people?

That probably seems like a really weird response.

I hope so.

Except if you've read the stories about Elijah and Elisha, that's one of our stories today.

In other stories involving those two prophets, they do that.

If somebody's disrespectful to them, God will smite them.

If somebody doesn't bow or use the proper etiquette or greet them with hospitality, they ask God to shoot them with lightning.

And please notice, Jesus rebukes them for living into this old understanding that the way God treats people with different minds is with revenge and retribution.

If you don't hear anything else, this I think is a challenge before us is to undo this idea that God looks to get even with you or anybody else.

That God is a God of vengeance.

Let Jesus rebuke that out of you today.

I'm working on it myself, and I'm going to tell you about that in a second.

What follows then, I think, are three stories that really try to push that point home in some different ways.

And before we look at those, I want to say, look, Jesus was a great guy, but I'm not sure he was the kind of guy you'd want to have at a party because he said difficult things a lot.

You know?

And here comes this difficult one.

This guy says, Hey, Jesus, I'll follow you wherever you go.

I'd love it if he said, hey, thanks.

That's cool.

Instead, he says, Yeah, look, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but I don't have anywhere to lay my head.

Oh man, here he is asking me to be serious again.

Sometimes we hear a story like this and we say, oh, son of man, that's like Jesus talking about himself.

But folks, son of man really just means like our kids.

We don't have stage directions in the gospel.

We just have dialogue.

We don't have tone.

I don't know if you ever notice this.

We have no idea how these words were said.

So if you'll bear with me for a second, I want you to imagine this guy comes up and says, I'll go with you wherever I'll go.

And what if there's a beggar right there sleeping in a ditch?

And Jesus says, Okay, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but that human being has nowhere to lay his head.

So would you follow me under an overpass if I was going to go there and talk to somebody who's illegally camping out?

Would you go with me to places you know better than to go to?

Maybe that sounds a little extreme.

So what if I dialed it down a little bit and said, is following God's plan and discerning God's imagination for the world, is it important enough to you that you'd be willing to lose sleep over it?

I don't like losing sleep.

I get really cranky.

And um, you know, we read this list in Paul about the fruits of the Spirit, and those are contrast, frankly, to the thorns we often settle for, things like judgment and discord.

So losing sleep, thinking about what God wants might make me thorny.

So maybe I should get some rest.

But I think Jesus is asking us, are you willing to take this seriously enough to go to different places?

I had a teacher who told me one time, sometimes we worry about being preoccupied.

Like I'm preoccupied with this, I'm not all the way there.

And he said, you know, it's not that it's wrong to be preoccupied.

The question is, are we preoccupied with the same things God is preoccupied with?

Does God lose sleep over people sleeping under bridges?

Does God lose sleep over people who don't have enough to eat this week?

Does God lose sleep over people who aren't sure whether or not they're good enough to go to church?

I know what you're thinking, my God doesn't need sleep.

Of course, it's all just figurative speech.

Does it bother God and do we let it bother us?

It would be a lot more convenient to just shoot lightning at it and make it go your way.

And maybe that's what Jesus is saying.

That's not how it works.

And when we demonize or reject because they don't welcome us who have this great truth, whether that's our politics or our religion or our cooking strategy, maybe the invitation is to lose a little bit of sleep over how to be in relationship with these folk.

There's this next phrase.

Because after all, burying your father seems like really important.

I'm pretty sure God wants you to do that.

What they say is, well, this person, um, his father is probably interested in declining health.

So he's kind of wiggling out of taking Jesus seriously, and then when it won't be hard for him to follow Jesus because he doesn't have any family to take care of, well, well, then he'll come back, and Jesus is saying, Follow me with your family on all.

Um, I think that's really stretching it.

I do think the conclusion is really interesting, and I'll tell you, I realized maybe about a year ago why it is that our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters insist that their priests not have families.

Because it's a lot harder.

Sorry, it's a lot harder.

But again, I I think God didn't imagine that everything would be easy.

God just imagined it'd be better.

I think some of the most important work we do as a parish is we bring honor and presence to people, especially in moments of grief.

So you probably know this.

We have this wonderful ministry here called the Daughters of the King, and they put on funeral receptions to people they had never even met.

You may not know this.

We do funerals here for people who haven't been to church in years.

In fact, we did one about 10 days ago.

Um there was a school family, loved the school, had a great connection with me through the school, and they had somebody die, and and they said, Listen, we just would you be willing.

That's a great question, isn't it?

They come afraid.

They say, would you possibly be willing to do this funeral?

Because we don't have anywhere else to go.

Of course we'd be grateful to do it, you know?

And this I think is exactly what Jesus is talking about.

I don't think he's trying to say, we don't do burials, we don't treat the dead with honor.

I think the question he's asking us is, how is it do we go into places of death?

Do we go will into places of death?

Do we say, that's gonna cost me something to do that for you?

And of course, I'll show up.

In some ways, but maybe it's like, are we willing, like the first one, are we willing to go to places where people don't sleep?

Last week we heard this story about this guy who's full of unclean spirits, right?

If you were here last week, that was the story.

What do we do with people with unclean spirits?

Do we chain them up?

That way we're all safe, or are we willing to risk some contact?

And I wonder if that isn't what Jesus is asking us to do.

How do we go to people who we think are dead?

Like people with criminal records.

Do we say you got a criminal record I want to do with you?

How can they have life?

If we do that, are you willing to just bury dead people?

Or are you willing to say there might be a resurrection?

That's a hard teaching.

That's hard.

I've got kids.

I want them to be safe.

This is hard stuff.

If I took Jesus seriously, I'd probably lose some sleep.

The third person says, hey, let me just go kiss my mom and dad goodbye.

And Jesus says this weird thing, right?

If you touch the plow and look back, you're not fit for the kingdom of heaven.

Well, look, the reason we read the Elisha story today is he does that.

He wants to follow Elijah.

And he says, Well, let me just go kiss my mom and dad goodbye.

And Elijah says, Go home and stay there.

I don't need you.

And Elisha does this interesting thing.

He goes home and he burns up the oxen.

That's like exploding the tractor.

Replacing a tractor is real expensive.

Replacing 12 oxen is really expensive.

In fact, it's so cost prohibitive, he probably won't be able to do it.

So, don't you see what Elisha does in this story?

I don't urge you to do this.

He destroys any possibility of him going back to the way he used to live.

He has sacrificed who he was for the opportunity to be something more.

It's a tough teaching, but I think it's what God asks us to consider.

Hey, do we come for solace and forgiveness?

This is what we're getting ready to pray in the Eucharistic prayer, or do we pray for renewal so that we can be different people, not just comforted ones?

Does that make sense?

I like being comfortable.

And that's why I urge you, if you're like me, to not try to park at Costco.

I've said this as a joke, but I want you to know yesterday and never go on the weekends, because I went yesterday and uh and it was raining, and I had these parking lot situations happen.

And if you park your car one of these ways, please don't let me offend you.

What I'm trying to tell you is sometimes when I step back, I realize how I struggle to embody the gospel in just basic situations like parking my car.

So you know sometimes when you're going into a parking lot and every other person is dry has parked their ginormous jacked up pickup truck, and you see that open space, and you're getting ready to turn in, and right when you're turning in, a car from the other side drove through two spaces so they could be facing out.

Do you know that?

I I like to do that too, because it saves me three seconds when I'm ready to leave.

Somebody did that, and I had my kid in the car, and I lost my mind.

I mean, I thought about telling him, how dare you do that?

So mad about them parking this thing, and then same week I go over to the gym, and it's the same people who drive these big trucks.

If you do that, it's fine, but you know, they they want to back into a space so they can save three seconds when they leave, you know, and and they swing really wide doing it, and and like I'm trying to park my little tiny, you know, environmentally responsible car.

There you are, with this giant truck, and you almost hit me because you weren't looking just trying to back into a space.

And something has happened to me because last year I wouldn't have been so mad, but like I was furious about it.

And Paul says, listen, those aren't fruits of the spirit, those are like thorns we produce.

Thorns.

You know, what fruits do is they they nourish and they provide the opportunity for life to spread.

And thorns do things like they choke and they gouge.

And we're faced with the decisions, I think, all the time, whether or not we're going to sow seeds that give new life and nourishment, if we're just going to share the thorns that we've settled for.

Notice in that list the fruits of the Spirit, the things that give life and nourishment.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control.

And then notice the things that choke, and they include things like discord and judgment.

And I hope you didn't mind me saying this, because I didn't think this is us, but I'm just going to tell you a lot of my church life, we talked about the fruits of the Spirit, and what we practiced was being thorny.

We practiced judging and sowing discord.

We practiced, you don't think I like I do, so I'm leaving or you're leaving.

That's what we practiced.

No wonder people don't want church.

There's no life in that.

I mean, the scripture itself says that.

There's no life, there's no nourishment, there's no fruit.

And even worse, we settle for that thorny bush, frankly, that pricks us left and right and pretend like that's what God wants us to do.

And God wants us to be indignantly mad.

God wants us to be outraged.

Probably not.

And that's where this gets really difficult.

If I get outraged in the Costco parking lot, what am I gonna do over national politics or people being actually calculatingly unkind to one another?

And Jesus, I think, begs us to say, listen, you want to follow me?

You really want to follow me?

You willing to lose sleep over this?

Because if you're not, you're actually probably just following yourself and putting my name on who you've settled for.

Instead of being willing to be really uncomfortable.

And I wonder.

I continue to wonder.

I know this is the way it should be.

I just wonder what would happen if we weren't a little more willing to lose a little bit of sleep.

Maybe literally, but figuratively as well, to be a little more, well, uncomfortable, especially when we feel righteous indignation growing in us so much we're ready to call lightning down from heaven to zap our opponents.

And to go to what Paul says, you know, the whole beginning of it is the law is to be summed up in this phrase, love your neighbor as yourself.

I don't want to overpreach this message, but I just think maybe because it's my own struggle, it's worth saying.

Part of the reason I think I'm so lousy at loving my neighbor sometimes is because I'm lousy at loving myself.

There are these moments where I say, God, you're so dumb.

Or you didn't do enough, or you're not enough as a parent, or a husband, or a priest.

Brene Brown says this really interesting thing.

You know, she says, self-compassion is really all about what would you tell a really good friend who came to you in distress?

Like, hey, I had to make this really difficult decision about my career or about how to take care of my parents, or boy, like I said this thing to my kid and I don't know what to do.

Would you say, Well, you made the wrong decision, of course.

How dumb of you.

I didn't think any of you would say that to a good friend.

The question is, how do we talk to ourselves?

Hopefully, most of us to our good friends would say, that's so tough.

If you've been a parent, if you've been a child, you know.

If you've been a spouse, let me tell you.

Let me lift the veil a little bit on marriage.

It's hard.

Staying together is hard.

There are moments where, frankly, it'd be easier to just take your things and go.

Why do we do it?

Because there's more life together.

At least it can be.

If you sow things in your marriage that are thorny, like division and judgment, let me tell you, it ain't gonna work.

It takes work.

I lose sleep in my marriage thinking about how I can sow life.

I lose sleep thinking about how to take care of my parents and to honor them, especially when we disagree.

I lose sleep as a parent, I lose sleep as a priest.

I don't mean I'm a hero.

What I mean is this is what it means to be in relationship.

And Jesus is asking us, I think, to let ourselves be preoccupied with the things God is preoccupied with, even if it means going places we don't want to go, and giving up a little bit of our safety and cutting off exits.

See, if there were no exits in our friendships, we'd have to make it work when we disagreed.

Maybe that's what it means to touch the plow and not look back to say, you can leave if you want to, but I am not leaving you.

It'd be a tough party like this one that Jesus invites us to go to.

But I think it'd be a lot more joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, and gentle.

If we could land some self-control.