Sermon Tone Analysis
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*TITLE: * The Unexpected Call
*SERMON IN A SENTENCE: * Jesus calls us away from excuse-making and addictive behavior to true discipleship.
*SCRIPTURE: * Luke 9:51-62
*SERMON: *
* *
Let's consider why sometimes, when Jesus calls, we don't pick up the phone.
There may be somebody sitting here this morning who thinks like this:
"I'm not a bad person.
In fact, I'm a pretty good person.
I don't abuse my spouse, children, or anybody else.
I don't shortchange my employer or cheat on my income tax.
I'm not a substance abuser and I don't have a criminal record.
I keep my lawn mowed, and I help people in my neighborhood.
I get to church pretty often, even on a humid summer Sunday, and I give to charitable causes.
"I'm not a bad person.
In fact, I'm a pretty good person.
And because I am, Jesus has the sense not to ask me to do anything different than what I'm doing.
"Besides, Jesus must be plenty busy trying to drag home people who have gone astray.
Wife beaters.
Prostitutes.
Drug dealers.
White-collar criminals.
Derelicts.
"The pretty good life that I live amounts to an insurance policy that Jesus is not going to go poking his head into my business and ask me to do something different than what I'm doing.
He may even send me a thank-you note for my good behavior."
Somebody sitting here this morning may well be thinking like this.
But thinking like this is WRONG.
Jesus has the annoying habit of calling people, whether their life is a moral disaster or a moral example.
This is because he is interested in something besides improving bad people's behavior.
What interests him is more personal.
He wants all people, regardless of their behavior, to become his disciples.
Sometimes this calls for setting aside behavior that is unethical, even criminal.
This is the stuff of dramatic conversion stories.
The murderer, the drug dealer, the gang leader -- all of them come to faith and live a different life.
Here Jesus asserts his priority over the worse in human experience.
Drop the switchblade.
Lift high the cross!
But for other people, answering the call to discipleship means setting aside what is good, or at least what is legal and respectable.
The parent, the doctor, the business leader all come to faith and live differently than before.
Their old lifestyles have been scrambled.
Jesus asserts his priority, not only over the worst in human experience, but over the rest as well.
Drop the golf clubs.
Lift high the cross!
Today's Gospel offers us insight on this disconcerting process.
Jesus is interviewing candidates for discipleship.
One candidate asks permission to return home and bury his father.
The father may be dead already.
More likely, the candidate wants to put off discipleship until he has seen his father through old age and into the cemetery.
In any case, Jesus does not give permission.
Discipleship has priority.
There is somebody else to care for this father; somebody else to bury him.
The one invited to discipleship must follow.
Another candidate makes a similar, but less dramatic appeal: "Let me first say farewell to those at my home."
Here again, Jesus gives a thumbs-down.
This person too needs to hit the discipleship road, and do so immediately.
What Jesus says at this point sounds perplexing.
"No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."
But consider: when an animal is pulling the plow, the farmer must watch a fixed point ahead in order to plow a straight line.
Looking back when plowing causes the farmer to swerve.
The result is a crooked furrow, the mark of an amateur.
The furrow remains for the entire season, and makes the farmer look foolish.
To look back while on the discipleship road is no less foolish.
Jesus respects marriage, speaks out against divorce, pays attention to children.
He honors the family -- but he does not make an idol out of it.
For him, family arrangements stand or fall on whether they promote or hinder discipleship.
Jesus may call us out of the wreckage of our lives.
Yet he may also call us out of what we regard as good, the American dream fulfilled.
In each case, he's inviting us into a deeper allegiance to himself.
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Jesus wants to break down our addictions, whether to drugs, alcohol, material possessions, success, or respectability.
He wants us to find our true freedom in him.
It is to this he calls us, invites us.
Our way is to follow him--to Jerusalem, to the cross, and beyond.
But whoever we are, it's easy to come up with excuses.
Some excuses sound profoundly moral.
But what we call love and duty is sometimes what Jesus knows to be the voice of addiction speaking, our fear of a different future, our refusal to die so that we may live.
We may not want to stop our slavery to possessions.
After all, if we stop, we may end up thankful to God for simple gifts.
If we stop, we may want God more than we want to go shopping.
It can unsettle us to follow Christ in a consumer culture.
We may not want to stop our worship of our family.
After all, if we stop, we may recognize members of our family as people in their own right, living lives outside our own.
If we stop our worship of who we think they are, then we may struggle to love them for who, in fact, they really are.
It's unsettling to follow Christ in a culture that debases the family and yet puts it on a pedestal.
But the most insidious addiction is not to fantasies about the family or to alluring, expensive stuff.
The most insidious addiction is to cheap religion, Christianity without a cross.
There have been times when Christianity has focused on the cross to the neglect of the resurrection, on penitence to the neglect of forgiveness, on the need to die to self to the neglect of God's grace.
That's not the problem now, however.
Now the problem, the distortion, is a friendly Jesus with no wounds in his hands, a religion that denies suffering rather than travel through it.
And so in today's Gospel one candidate for discipleship pipes up and declares: "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus answers him in a funny way.
He doesn't accept or reject him.
Instead, he counsels him.
"Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."
Jesus talks about accommodations.
Wild animals have their places to stay; he does not.
Jesus talks about accommodations because he doesn't take this candidate's sweeping statement at face value.
This one won't follow Jesus just anywhere.
He will follow Jesus wherever he, the candidate, want to go, some place with comfortable accommodations.
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And so Jesus lets him down gently.
He knows he and this candidate aren't following the same road.
The candidate wants to go where he wants to go.
Jesus wants to go where his Father wants him to go, and soon Jesus will have a place to rest his head--inside a borrowed tomb.
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