So, it’s a good time to be
in agriculture. The government, the
king, is behind the family farm. With
the people being established on the land now, he sees agriculture as being important. Israel doesn’t need to worship that war God
Yahweh anymore who brought them out of Egypt. Ahab worships the god Baal who
brings the rain. He’s also gone as far
as to marry a princess of Sidon, Jezebel who has set up temples and shrines all
over the place to worship her fertility goddess Asherah who makes the crops
grow. Yes, that prophet of Yahweh,
Elijah just killed all the prophets of Baal trying to get people to go back to
Yahweh. But, what do you expect? Ahab and Jezebel will soon have their way
with him.
Well, your family farm is
doing pretty good. You’ve got about
200,000 acres of good land and twelve tractors to work it. Your son, Elisha, manages the workers and
drives the twelfth tractor himself. He’s
a hard-working young man, interested in learning the family business; so
interested that you’ve already turned the business over to him and put the land
in his name. You’re retired.
But, one day the prophet
Elijah comes to Elisha, walks up to him and throws his cloak on him. The next thing you know Elisha dismantles all
the farm equipment and sells them for parts and gives the money to the workers
and starts following Elijah to become his successor as the prophet of
Yahweh. You didn’t see that coming?
You’re sitting on the
roadside outside a village in Samaria.
Jesus and his disciples are leaving the city. You’re neighbours are yelling insults at
them. Usually, Samaritans got along okay
with Jesus because he often preached on the hypocrisy going on in
Jerusalem. As a Samaritan you were often
looked down upon by the Jerusalem crowd because they didn’t think your
bloodline was Hebrew enough. But today
it seemed he had only come to town for some food to eat and maybe a place to
sleep. He was headed to Jerusalem for
something obviously more important than hanging out with some
“half-bloods”. You think to yourself. He’s not a Messiah for the Samaritans. It’s all about Jerusalem.
But you keep watching. His followers are quite upset. Two of his more important acting “servants”
must be thinking they are a couple of little Elijah’s or something because they
said to him, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and
consume them.” You don’t know if they’re serious or just
trying banter back to the crowd. Doesn’t
matter. Whatever the reason, Jesus lit
into them. “Calling down fire from
heaven” on people who don’t accept him just isn’t his way.
Here comes Jesus and his
band of followers. You’re sympathetic to
his cause. He heals people. Casts out demons. Preaches against religious hypocrites. Like Elijah throwing his mantle onto Elisha
something comes over you. You get up and
go to Jesus and you say, “I will follow you wherever you go.” He looks at you and points out that foxes and
birds have it better than he does. Is that
the sort of life you want? Do you really
want to live by faith, hand-to-mouth at the hand of God? Do you really want the way of life that leads
to Jerusalem’s cross?
You’re sitting on a rock
overlooking the road to Jerusalem.
Thinking. Praying. You’re father just died. The family and the family business are now
your responsibility, but you feel like there is something else you should be
doing. You’ve a lot on your mind. Here comes a small crowd. It’s Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet of
God. He’s coming up to you. He seems pretty urgent. What’s he going to do? Does he know your father has died and wants
to come and raise him? That would solve
a lot of problems. “Follow me,” he
says. It’s not a raising of the dead
kind of thing, but it’s a way out. Feeling
like the recipient of Elijah’s mantle you agree, but it would be proper for you
to at least first bury your father. He says,
“Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, you go and proclaim the
Kingdom of God.” Do your family obligations
not matter?
Here comes Jesus and his
followers heading for Jerusalem. For
some reason you want to join with them, but you need to say good-bye to your
family because that would be proper.
After all, you love them. You run
up to Jesus. “Lord, I will follow
you…but first let me go say goodbye to my family and explain what I’m doing.” Jesus says to you, “No one who puts a hand to
the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” You get it. Looking back instead of straight ahead when
you’re ploughing makes your rows crooked and you waste land. You have to go back, fix it, and plough
again. But, seriously is commitment to Jesus
and his Kingdom more important than commitment to family?
I think it would be safe
to say that for the majority of us our lives are “family focused”. With respect tot he Christian faith we teach that being committed
to "family" and being “good” families are at the heart of being “good”
Christians. Jesus and church are things
we fit into our family lives for the benefit of a strong family. But, to be honest we should admit that our commitment
to Jesus is still only second seat to family cohesiveness. We’ll put our hands to the plough as long as
it’s ploughing in the family field.
It is very hard to read
these passages and not hear Jesus saying that commitment to him must supersede
even the commitment to family. Speaking from my own warped and jaded perspective,
I know what it feels like to have your parents and siblings think I’ve gone
crazy because something like Elijah’s cloak had fallen on me and began to
rearrange my priorities around Jesus and following him. I really got some looks when the ministry
became my career path. I know what it
feels like to have a wife of ten years divorce me and the final reason being
she didn’t want to be a minister’s wife.
I know what its like to have people treat me different not because I’m
me and I’m strange but because I’m a minister.
God has been good to
me. Now I have an understanding wife
(she’s a minister too) and two kids.
Things are different now that I have a family. I was talking to a man several weeks ago, the
son of a prominent Presbyterian Church in Canada minister. If you go to the national office in Toronto
you will see his father’s name on plaques and pictures. This man was quite embittered with his father
and the church. He said, “My father did
a lot of good for the church, but he was never there for us.” I don’t ever want my kids to feel that way
about me, Jesus, or his church. Yet,
that day will come…and all the while I won’t get paid the overtime hours it
took to write this sermon that was written at the expense of time with my
family. Poor, pitiful me. Ministers have an idol that we dutifully serve
and it’s obviously not family. It’s the church.
Church members tend to put
family needs before the church.
Ministers tend to put church needs before their families. There’s something wrong with this picture. That something wrong is that we tend to
equate following Jesus with participation in the church as an institution that
is a core element of a society. This is
not what following Jesus is.
One message that is clear
in the New Testament that Paul spells out very adamantly in Galatians is that following
Jesus does mean following him into a cultural, ethnic expression of a
religion. In our case, it is cultural
Christianity as an institution with its buildings, paid leaders, and club-like
patterns of behaviours. Following Jesus
is the expression of a new form of human existence – new life in Christ – where
everything about the old life is dead and we are dead to it. Yet, God has raised us in Christ by the Holy
Spirit coming to live in us that we may live as a new humanity. Everything about the old life is dead
including “family values” and “institutional” church.
Paul says in Galatians
2:19-20, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live,
but it is Christ who lives in me. And
the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith/faithfulness of the Son of
God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Jesus has clothed us with Elijah’s mantle, which is a metaphor of the
Holy Spirit. We like Paul are dead,
crucified with Christ. The lives we now
live, we must yield to Jesus living through us because the Holy Spirit has
bonded us to him.
Paul says “If we live by
the Spirit…” Live means whatever it is that gives us biological life,
consciousness, relationships, and a relationship to God. If we live by the Spirit, then human life in its
totality now is by and in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the very life of God in
Christ. “If we live by the Spirit, let us
get in step with the Spirit.” The fruit
of the Spirit will naturally grow from us the closer we draw to Jesus and yield
our lives to him – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
When we seek to follow our Holy Spirit instinct to love our neighbours
as ourselves rather than “call down fire from heaven” in judgement upon them, we
are walking in step with Jesus.
The Greek word for “in
step” (guided –NRSV) means “get in a row with” like ducks in a row. There’s a true story of a tractor-trailer on
the 401 in Toronto just creeping along at an absolute snail’s pace. Drivers in their cars were zipping by it only
to receive what would probably be the greatest surprise of their lives. This ginormous eighteen-wheeler was giving
protection to a mother duck and her line of ducklings that for some bizarre
reason thought the 401 was en route to their pond. The New Life in Christ, life
by the Spirit is like that. Those baby ducks
followed their mother instinctively and because of the love of that truck driver
they will grow up to be just like her.
So we must remember that our call to follow Jesus is not the call to
family values or the institution of the church.
It is to follow Jesus and our Holy Spirit given inward instinct to become
like him. That task surpasses any other
even being good family people and good church members. Amen.
