Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 27, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This week the lectionary gives us a passage from Luke that I really don’t like. When I read in that passage Jesus telling a man who wanted to go bury his father before coming to follow Jesus “Let the dead bury their own dead” and then refusing to let another go say good-bye to his family before joining Jesus, I thought: But that is so un-pastoral! That doesn’t sound like Jesus to me! Those good folks weren’t asking anything unreasonable! They had legitimate concerns that Jesus should have acknowledged and helped them to deal with! Yuck! Luke just got this one wrong! That can’t be Jesus talking! Perhaps some of you had a similar reaction.

Well, I don’t know if Jesus ever said exactly these things that Luke reports him as having said or not. The Jesus Seminar thinks he probably said something quite like the words Luke gives him, but that’s just their opinion. They are far from infallible on the matter. And whether he actually said them or not is, I suppose, less important than the fact that they appear in the Gospel of Luke, one of the foundational texts of our faith. So I don’t know if Jesus ever actually said these things, I just know that when I read them I really don’t like them. But since they’re in the Gospel of Luke, and since I was taught that sometimes you really do need to preach on texts you don’t like, I’m preaching on this passage this morning. So let’s see if we can make some sense out of it and maybe even find something of value for us in it.

We start by asking: What is Jesus doing here? Why is he saying these things to these people? Why doesn’t he honor their seemingly reasonable requests to deal with family matters before they come to follow him? To understand why he says these things we start, I think, with the assumption that he must have some important point he wants to make by saying these things. Almost everything in the Bible is there for some reason, to make some point. What might that point be here? The people Jesus says these things to are asking permission to do something else before they follow Jesus. They are putting some personal concern ahead of following Jesus. And Jesus gives them an emphatic “No!” No, you may not put something else ahead of following me. Jesus is saying that for the person of faith, following him comes first. Always. No matter what. Everything else must be subordinated to God’s call to follow Jesus. Jesus always comes first. That seems to be the point that Jesus is making when he says these things to these people.

Luke wrote those things over 1,900 years ago, but they express an insight into the nature of faith that has also been expressed much more recently in more modern language, in the language not of story but of high theology. The great twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich defined faith as “ultimate concern.” He said that we have faith in whatever it is that is our ultimate concern. Our ultimate concern is that thing, whatever it is, to which we subordinate everything else in our life. That thing, person, value, or belief that we will put before everything else. For which we will sacrifice everything else. That is more important to us than anything else. That ultimate concern, whatever it is, is nothing less than our god. Small g god, unless our ultimate concern is that which is truly ultimate, which is capital G God. Jesus is saying to the people in this story that either God—capital G God—is your ultimate concern, is actually your God, or God isn’t your ultimate concern, something else is. If you put anything else before following God, then God is not really God for you. That thing that you put before following God is god for you. That, I think, is the point that Jesus is trying to make here.

And it strikes me as a very difficult teaching. To be a Christian do I really have to subordinate everything in my life to God and to Jesus Christ? Do I have to say that God is more important to me than my family, than my wife, children, and grandchildren? How many of us are really prepared to say that? I’m pretty sure I’m not. Maybe Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son at God’s command, but I’m not. I doubt if any of us are. So are we faced with an impossible demand here? Are we given a story that says to us: You aren’t really Christians because you won’t sacrifice everything else in your life to the call to follow Jesus?

Well, it sure can look like that. And if it does look like that to you, just remember that while God may demand our ultimate allegiance, God also forgives us when we don’t measure up to that very high standard. But let me suggest another way of looking at the matter that may help some. Jesus is not telling us, I don’t think, that we have literally to abandon everything else in our lives in order to follow him. He is not saying that following him must be the only thing in our lives. What I hear him saying, here and in other difficult passages such as the one in which he says "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple,” (Luke 14:26) is that we must align the other values in our lives with our faith in him. We must harmonize all the things in our lives with our faith so that we express our faith in everything else that we say and do.

Perhaps a metaphor will help. Back when I was an undergraduate in college in the nineteen sixties I did a couple of years of Army ROTC. In those days we were all sure to be drafted upon graduation and sent to Vietnam, where none of us wanted to go; and being an officer seemed better to me than being drafted. Whether it was or not, in ROTC they were teaching us such valuable life skills as how to stand at attention. One drill instructor told us to do it this way: Take the top of your head, the highest point, and push it up as far as you can. With the top of your head up as high as it will go, the rest of your body will naturally move into place, into proper alignment. Go ahead. Try it. Sitting down if you want, or better yet standing up. When I push the top of my head up my shoulders fall into place, my back aligns properly, I stand squarely on my feet. If I slouch back down, my posture gets bad and things are out of place again, as with me they usually are.

That’s what putting God first does. That’s what making God, the truly ultimate, our ultimate concern does. When we put God first, family and other values don’t disappear. They fall into proper alignment. Everything else we do, everything else we value, becomes a vehicle for expressing our faith in God. When we make something else our ultimate concern, things get out of place. Things that are not truly ultimate become ultimate for us, and our values get skewed and distorted just as our posture gets skewed and distorted when we slouch down and don’t hold our head as high as it will go.

We aren’t Biblical literalists here, so we don’t have to take Jesus’ words in this story literally. We know, for example, that Jesus wants us to honor our mother and father. He repeated that commandment in his own teaching, and giving them a proper, decent burial when that time comes rather than “leaving the dead to bury the dead,” whatever that means, is surely part of honoring them. Many of us here this morning have done that, myself included; and more of us will one day. When we do we aren’t being unfaithful. We aren’t following Jesus’ words here literally, but the powerful metaphorical meaning of the story remains. Put God first, and everything else will fall into place. Don’t put God first, and everything else will get distorted and out of place.

That, I am convinced, is the lesson for us in these verses that on first reading I so dislike. It’s a really good lesson, and a really important one. Thanks be to God. Amen.