third sunday after pentecost
the gospel of luke 9:51-62
for St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square, June 30, 2019
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We are in the midst of what the church calls “ordinary time”, marked by the color green in our worship space, and a focus on the everyday work of faith in our texts. We have moved out of the festival season, and have turned back to the work of planting, growing, and harvesting the fruits of our communal faith lives. This is the bulk of our year, and while it isn’t as flashy as festivals, the work we do in this so-called “ordinary time” supports our celebrations and gives us a foundation for when life is hard. It is apt, then, that we spend this time traveling with Jesus, spending time with him, learning to pattern our lives after his.
As he often is, Jesus is heading towards the cross. The cross is where the reality of our sinful, violent, social structures encounters and falls to the Divine mystery and grace of God, who transforms for the sake of the Kin-dom. Jesus is a liminal actor, between Divine and human, between death and life, between the world as-is and the world as-it-could-be. This is a challenging place to be, and Jesus is an agitator, trying to bring his disciples into this liminal space with him. He isn’t satisfied with leaving people stuck where they are, but instead deeply wants us to live into the life God wants for us, a life of community, of abundance, of fearlessness. He meets us where we’re at but then challenges us to love deeper. His reality is antithetical to the oppressive systems we live inside of, and the tension between these two realities is evident in our text.
A true thing about Jesus is that he practices a radical hospitality that doesn’t leave anyone out. He shares meals with sex workers, tax collectors, people living in poverty, who are experiencing homelessness. He inverts the power dynamics of who serves and who receives, and builds a table big enough for over 5,000 people with broken bread. And yet, today, he is denied a similar hospitality on his journey. The Samaritan village he passes by on the way to Jerusalem doesn’t extend even the basic hospitality for travelers towards him, and Jesus keeps going with nothing. It’s too easy, here, to say that we would do something different. To villianize the Samaritans, to rain down fire, but that’s not what Jesus would have us do. In the larger political framework, at this point in Jesus’ ministry, it’s obvious that there is going to be a clash of power at some point – he is too controversial, loves too radically, for there to be any other inevitable result. The Samaritans might not want to be associated with that clash, with sheltering Jesus, because of the risk it poses to their own security within Empire.
For that village, the cost of discipleship is too great – fear was more powerful. And Jesus understands that fear, I imagine him saddened by it, but he is compassionate towards their fear and keeps moving.
Even those who seek Jesus out can be unprepared for the reality of discipleship. It is not an easy road. There are risks – we are asked to let go of the patterns and systems we know for something else. Jesus asks the disciples to do hard things that will allow them to live into life God dreams of, including the series of striking and shocking mandates we just heard. Following Jesus will mean not having stability. It will mean moving on from the trauma of our past. It will mean not turning back. Outside of God, nothing is guaranteed on this journey. There will be places the disciples aren’t welcomed, and Jesus doesn’t stay to try to convince those places, but instead moves forward, hoping that his example will send enough ripples for them to transform and turn towards God. There will be times we are called towards life, even in the midst of death. The burial referenced in this passage most likely isn’t the initial burial right after death, but instead a ritual marking the time since death – a year, three years. Grief work is holy work, and our faith gives us the gift of the resurrection narrative. Jesus mourns with us, heals with us, and pulls us towards life. In these mini-conversations with possible disciples, Jesus knows he cannot convince them to let go of the patterns that keep them bound – only they can do that work, but he can model another way. The excuses, that really boil down to, “can I follow you tomorrow instead?” are things that Jesus has heard before. All he can do is hope that the disciples will journey with him to the cross. That they will be present with him. He knows the cost his followers incur, but he also knows the possibilities.
In preparing today’s sermon, I was especially struck by the image of the plow. The work that it takes to sow a field and to harvest with a manual plow. How many rocks need to be broken, how many weeds pulled, how much mud to slog through. Keeping the furrow on-track, resting the companion animal, sowing seeds – what seems to be a straightforward task is actually really complicated. There are a lot of steps. I have been blessed by always being a member of faith communities that affirm my existence, my identities. So for a while, my relationship to God and discipleship was really easy – to continue the metaphor at hand, it was like I was plowing a field with a high-powered, motorized tractor. But the messages we absorb in our day-to-day lives are insidious, and at a certain point, even though I was still in affirming faith communities, I was hitting a lot of rocks, wondering, doubting, questioning whether I was actually a beloved child of God. Whether folks with mental illness were also beloved children of God. Whether queer folks were. Whether trans folks were. And it’s vulnerable to be sharing this, in an open and welcoming community, because it means that even here we are not safe from the harm that comes from the oppressive systems we encounter on a daily basis.
For me, it’s not a far leap to connect the costs of discipleship to the costs of coming out as LGBTQIA+. It is risky. There are too many stories of people being kicked out of their homes, fired from their jobs, excluded from family gatherings, denied healthcare, denied marriage by a religious authority, assaulted in public spaces, erased, killed. Family dynamics can be especially challenging – I have experienced a dual commitment to my family of origin, because I love them and we have a good relationship, but also a commitment to my own well-being and wholeness. There is tension when I can’t bring my whole self to my family, because I have been taught to not rock the boat. But what is life-giving is not always easy, or popular. Sometimes we need to set boundaries that protect our identities and keep us safe, and that can mean putting distance between us and harmful relationships, or harmful situations. It can mean saying plainly what you need to thrive. When I think of the person who wanted to bury his father, marking time after death with a ritual, I understand how he is torn – wanting to mourn for the way things were, the people that used to be in our lives, the people we used to be – but at a certain point that prevents us from living fully into who we are now, with the community who is supporting and loving us now, and it can keep us attached to the way-things-were instead of new possibilities.
The systems that keep us from God, that keep us from traveling with Jesus, are strong. We compartmentalize our lives, dividing sacred from secular as though we could divide breath from body. We take in insidious messages of harm on a daily basis, messages that tell us we are only worth what we produce, that our identities make us lesser than, that no one will love us as we are. We fall back to positions of fear. And to unlearn that, to disentangle our bodies from harm – Jesus knows the cost of that hospitality towards ourselves. Because that’s one way I’ve been trying to frame it. If I believe that Jesus shows us another way to exist with each other and Creation, which I do, then the hospitality Jesus extends towards all is the same hospitality I need to extend to myself. And that is often really, really painful.
To hold space for the ways the systems of the world have harmed me, and harmed my relationships with other people and Creation. Which is why we should circle back to the striking and shocking images Jesus used to convey discipleship, because they are so harsh. It is a harsh, and true, thing to say that discipleship can be alienating. It can be painful. It can be unknown. And so here, I imagine Jesus, not speaking sternly as he did to James and John when they wanted to react with violence, but instead, speaking sadly. I imagine Jesus as mourning already – he knows how far the disciples have come, but he also knows how far they still have to go. How far the road to Jerusalem still is. How many people they have passed by, who didn’t come with them, and I bet there are people who left because the cost was too high and hope was too painful. We’ve encountered Jesus as a mothering hen, who wants to protect us from harming each other even as he knows he can’t. But he can agitate us to be in deeper relationship and practice deeper hospitality. He desperately wants us to have abundant life in community. He wants us to experience the deep joy of God.
Being queer gives me a specific perception of liminal spaces. I constantly experience the duality of freedom and fear. Of authentic embodiment and cultural norms. Of extending hospitality towards others and refusing to do the same for myself. Jesus is a queer body – he refuses to stay within the lines of gender norms of his context, he exists in in-between spaces, and as we are all members of the body of Christ – of all races, all genders, all classes, all abilities, all sexualities, so is Christ. Jesus understands that the in-between spaces are often uncomfortable, but that’s what he calls us towards, because those spaces hold so much possibility for growth and authentic life. He calls us towards discipleship, which breaks down the border walls between the mundane and the sacred, between worship and our daily lives, between the world-as-is and the world as-it-could-be. When we travel with Jesus, we are traveling with God, and towards God. Towards the fulfillment of God’s dream – a Kin-dom of radical hospitality and community. It is not an easy path. There are personal and political costs. There’s a lot to unlearn, and to transform. Which is why we need each other.
Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, a Cuban theologian, frames justice as a world where “no one else will die”. Today, on Pride Sunday, fifty years after trans women of color, drag queens, stone butches, sex workers, and their chosen families fought back against police brutality, I know that we have come so far from where we were. Today, on Pride Sunday, roughly ten years after the ELCA voted to affirm LGBTQIA+ leadership, I know we have made progress. But we’re not there yet. And I wonder what the world would be like if we truly believed that no one else has to die from oppression. From insidious trauma. From lack of hospitality. From the lies we have been taught about our bodies and our holiness. Jesus is harsh in this passage because he wants us to be the body of Christ for each other – he wants us to stop hurting each other, to stop making ourselves smaller than we are, and to stop allowing fear to be our strongest motivator. Jesus is mournful in this passage because he knows that this will not come without pain, and will require a transformation of our ordinary lives. Jesus is urgently going towards Jerusalem, taking risks, because we were all made in God’s image, for abundant life, and the Kin-dom can’t wait anymore. We are healing towards something, if we can get out of our own way and follow Christ.
Reed Fowler 