Back in Rockton, Donna and I got acquainted with a young
woman named Darcy, who was engaged to the son of one of Donna’s co-workers.
Everybody at Donna’s work place was crazy about Darcy. They told us that she and Eric were very much
in love, very hard working young people. At the time, they were saving up for a
house.
Eric was an apprentice carpenter and Darcy made her
living cleaning other people’s houses. Even though we couldn’t always afford
it, Donna and I decided to give Darcy a break—and give Donna a break by having
Darcy come in once in a while and clean the Parsonage.
As a result, we got acquainted with Darcy. She was indeed
an utterly charming, hard-working, cute-as-a-bug’s-ear, sweet-as-she-could-be,
funny young woman. She was a big-time Chatty Cathy—but after all these years with me, Donna’s used to that. Darcy
would talk about anything to anybody, while still working, without missing a
beat.
One day, she mentioned that she and Eric were going to
get married in the coming Summer, and invited us to the wedding. How nice, I
commented. Then I asked, where were they getting married. At the
Arboretum in Rockford
“Well, that’s something of a problem.” She confessed.
“Eric and I have been calling around, and we simply cannot find a judge willing
to come out to the Arboretum and marry us on a Saturday afternoon. I had no idea it would be so difficult.”
“Uh, Darcy, you know that I’m a minister, right?”
“Oh yes.”
“Well, I’m not trying to put any pressure on you, and
you’re free to say no, if it would make you uncomfortable, but I’d be
willing to marry you and Eric.”
“YOU can marry people? YOU CAN MARRY PEOPLE!” she
exclaimed. “Wow, I didn’t know ministers could marry people.” And then she gave
me a big hug.
The Arboretum was indeed beautiful and the wedding was a
lot of fun. After Eric had kissed the bride, he literally picked Darcy up in
his arms and carried her out.
The reception was great fun
as well. But what was really enlightening for me was the pre-marital
counseling. Without divulging any confidences, Darcy was twenty years old, and
had never been to church. She told me at one point,
“I ‘m not all that religious, but I am a very spiritual
person.”
It is said that we are living in a time of great revival
of the spiritual. There’s a whole generation of Darcy’s out there, hungering
for truth and meaning to build their lives around. If the church cannot or will
not furnish it, they will go looking on their own.
“Religious”
has become a word with negative connotations for many people. But there is lots
of interest in meditation, noble spiritual thoughts, angels, the after-life
books on how to develop your spiritual potential, and gurus who will enlighten
you on matters of the spirit. And
we ought not dismiss all that out of hand. The truth is there is much out there
of value for the discerning Christian reader who is well grounded in the faith.
But a lot of what is being peddled as “spiritual” seems
rather mushy and vague to traditional church people like you and me. Part of
the appeal of some of this “spirituality” may well be that it is vague.
“Spiritual” becomes whatever we want it to be, whatever “meets our need.”
That’s quite different from today’s Gospel. Luke tells us
Jesus “has set his face” toward Jerusalem
“I will follow
you wherever . . .” But then Jesus confronts them with the specific demands
of discipleship.
“Lord, I find you fascinating, and I have a keen interest
in spirituality..” “Are
you prepared to risk parents, family, home for me?” Jesus asks.
I heard about a couple being interviewed on TV. They were
in great grief, having just lost their beloved adult daughter in the terrible
disaster of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 . At the end of the brief exchange, the reporter,
perhaps sensing that he ought to say something before ending the conversation,
said, “Well, er, I guess that you will be going to your place of worship this
weekend to receive some consolation.”
The mother replied, “No. You see, our religion teaches
that we ought to forgive our enemies. And we are just not ready for that right
now.”
Now there was a woman who knew something of the
perils of worshiping a God who has come to us specifically, concretely as a Jew
from Nazareth
I’m thinking about today’s Gospel in which Jesus says
some tough things to those who would be his followers. How many were there who
swaggered up to Jesus with, “Lord, I will
follow you wherever you go!” But then when Jesus specifically told them
where he was going, no doubt many of them, having first put their hand to the
plow, decided they really weren’t fit for this kingdom (9:62).
As today’s Gospel so vividly shows us, Jesus is
demanding. He is not infinitely pliable. True, there is a great deal
that we do not know about Jesus, a great deal left unsaid by the gospels. But
there is also a great deal that we do know, that is undeniable,
unavoidable and troubling to our settled arrangements with the present order.
In a world of amorphous, undemanding deity and nebulous
spirituality we are sometimes tempted to weasel out of our encounters with
Jesus, to jettison the particular, demanding God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac
and Rebekkah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah in favor of a more generic, wishy-washy
god of our own making. There’s nothing particularly new in that. Back in the
Nineteenth Century, Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and Theologian
sarcastically remarked,
“Most people believe
that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe – like
setting a clock half an hour ahead to make sure of not being late in the
morning.”
We preachers are tempted to make the faith as broad, as
universal in its appeal as possible. So we too often talk about “love” without
giving “love” the cruciform shape that makes Christian love so demanding. To really
love another means to be willing to place the happiness and well being of that
person ahead of my own.
To really engage
in Christian love means to be willing to place the happiness and well being of
a needy stranger, of the whole world, ahead of my own. How many “spiritual”
people in this world understand that, or are willing to do that? So we preachers call for “compassion,”
“possibility thinking,” “self-fulfillment,” or whatever vague virtues culture
may be in the market for at the moment.
We who claim to follow him, must trust Jesus enough to
create the following that he deserves. The proper object of our worship this
morning is Jesus the Christ – not the “felt needs” of the congregation. Our
challenge, as people who have been called to follow Jesus, is not that we are
busy believing that God was in Jesus-- but that God was in Jesus, reconciling
the world to him.
We cannot make this faith of ours mean anything we want.
There is mystery, room for wonder, doubt, and disagreement. But there are also
these tough demands that make the Gospel unavoidably abrasive, discordant and
so very interesting, so very rewarding.
Rather than attempt to smooth out the rough places
between us and the good news of Jesus Christ, my calling as your preacher
(especially in this so-called spiritual age we’re living in) is to accentuate
the peculiarities, highlight the distance between our ways and God’s way, a
distance that is not bridged by simply smoothing down the rough edges until we
can’t tell the difference between the incarnate Son of God and what Flannery
O’Connor’s called “our own sweet concoction.”
In today’s text, Jesus is in dialogue with his disciples
and also with the crowd around him. The word “Dialogue” means two people talking, a give and take,
honest, two-way conversation. Sometimes, we somehow get confused into thinking that our faith is
mostly monologue – us laying our needs and desires before God, our
saying nice things about God. And then, we assume, it’s God’s job to
respond to us.
But Jesus keeps making Discipleship a matter of Dialogue.
He keeps talking to us, saying things that are difficult for us to understand,
much less put into practice. He keeps telling us to listen and pray.
Jesus keeps encountering us, talking to us, reaching out to us. And that makes
Jesus a most demanding master.
Studying the Scripture in preparation for preaching all
these years, , I have been reminded—time and time again– that when Jesus
pronounces his Beatitudes in Matthew 5,
he doesn’t tell anybody to do anything. He never says, “Go out and be
peacemakers,” which is what I might have preached. He rather says, “God blesses
peacemakers.” It’s not in the imperative (which we “mother-I’d-rather-do-it-myself”
Americans love), but in the indicative.
Jeremiah told suffering Israel
Jesus often provokes conflict with our
most cherished values and widely held beliefs.
When God Almighty chose to get back the world, to reveal God’s own self
in full glory, God did so as a poverty-stricken Near
Eastern male. Why did God choose that part of the world rather than New York London
Martin Luther noted, “A religion that gives nothing, costs
nothing, and suffers nothing, is worth nothing.”
But if
we will dare to come with and follow Him, if we will dare to believe that when
our Lord said, “Follow me,” he was talking to us, he promises us a great
adventure named discipleship. He promises hope, and joy, and purpose and
meaning.
He invites us. Let us lay aside our doubts and misgivings.
Let us be unashamedly religious as well
as “spiritual”, and follow.
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