"Discipleship, Part Three: Irresolute"
Don't put off making the decision
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Text: Luke 9:51-62
I have waited nearly 20 years to say the following: “The Boston Red Sox are in the World Series.” Now, I know that as a Torontonian I should be celebrating the glory days of the Blue Jays, but before the Blue Jays there existed, almost before time, the Boston Red Sox. As someone who lived in the Maritimes and for a while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I used to give my great love and devotion to the perennial losers, the Boston Red Sox.
In fact, on many cold April days I was known to go with friends of mine to Fenway Park and sit and eat one hotdog after another, simply to keep my hands warm and get me through the game, not to enjoy the hotdogs. Such was my devotion to the team. And then, on those meaningless days at the beginning of the season, we would watch great games. I remember a game with two great pitchers, Roger Clemens for Boston and Bret Saberhagen for Kansas City. There was no score until almost the last at-bat and of course the other team scored and Boston lost. Such were the trials and tribulations of the Boston Red Sox fan.
And so, this last week it was with a warm heart and a great sense of pride that I watched the Yankees finally get beaten. And to think that Boston was down three games to nothing and came back! This was the work of legend! This will be recorded in the annals of history! Grandparents will tell their grandchildren about that fateful day when the Yankees lost in 2004!
It's amazing when you listen to the players give an account of what exactly happened. So often many of the sports stars are interviewed after a game such as that, and I'm afraid they don't always provide the most insightful comments. I listened to one not long ago where a particular sports star said: “If our defence outplays their offence, and if our offence outplays their defence, we will win the game.” He deserves an honourary doctorate in the obvious for that one, I think.
This week one Boston player actually used the famous cliché, after his team lost a game: “From now on we must play one game at a time. We must play one pitch at a time.” You feel like saying, “Why didn't you do that at the beginning of the series? Why do you have to do it now when you're in a desperate state?”
But the lesson is clear. What he was saying was, don't let past performances constrain the way that you live now. Don't let disappointments that have been an anchor to you in the past prevent you from doing the good now and in the future. In that there is a lesson with universal import, because we see those very same sentiments in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Today's sermon is the third, and final in a series on discipleship. It is about a disciple who comes to Jesus and says, “I will follow you, but first I must go and say farewell to my family.” Now, although this passage is only found in Luke's gospel and not in Matthew's, in many ways this very last encounter sums up the two that have gone before that both Luke and Matthew write about.
Two weeks ago we heard about the first disciple who was impulsive, who simply said, “I will follow you wherever you go” without taking stock of the importance of what he was to do. The second disciple was diffident, he wanted to put it off for another day. “I want to bury my father first,” he said, “and then I will follow you.” Now we have who I call the irresolute disciple: “But first I must go and say farewell to my family.” All three of them are rebuked by Jesus, because he understood the importance of that juncture in his ministry.
Unlike the call of Andrew and Simon Peter and James and John in the early stages of his ministry, we believe this encounter was later on, after Jesus had passed through Samaria and was going to Jerusalem where he knew he would be rejected and crucified. So he knew the urgency of the moment. He knew that any disciple he would pick up then was going to have to go through the most difficult time in his life, and he did not need to have anyone who was looking back or impulsive or diffident. He needed someone who would make up his mind and be totally committed to the Kingdom and what he was about to do. He didn't want someone to look at past performance and allow it to constrain him, he wanted someone to come with him in total commitment, right then and there.
Matthew Henry, the great Reformation commentator, once said that there was possibly a degree of melancholy in the mind of this third potential disciple. Maybe he wanted to go back to his family and say farewell because he thought that if he followed Jesus he would be going to his death, and this would be the last chance to say goodbye. Or, maybe, Henry speculated, this person simply wanted to go back to his family in the hope that they would talk him out of going with Jesus.
In other words, to go home to hear a sober second thought that would say, “Dear, stay with us, don't go with that Nazarene! He's going to a dangerous place and doing difficult things.” We don't know what was in the mind of that person and Jesus gives us no clue. What we do know is that it was a delaying tactic. He was irresolute. He didn't want to put his fate firmly in the direction that Jesus wanted to go, but rather to return to his home and family first, before he committed himself to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I ask myself, “What does this irresolute disciple teach you and I about the Christian life?” The first lesson is very simple: Namely, that a faithful decision happens now! It is an immediate thing. Jesus knew that the Kingdom that he was going to inaugurate was coming soon. His journey would culminate in his death and resurrection, and so there was a sense of urgency. The now was very important. The immediate was pressing and Jesus wanted whoever was going to follow him to know the importance of the moment. But this person, whoever it was, decided that he or she would look back before following Jesus. This would-be disciple wanted to put off making the decision.
Sometimes, my friends, putting off important decisions can be very dangerous, as I said last week. There is an old Arab tale told in many and various guises throughout the years, that bears a powerful message no matter how you interpret it. One version has a young man walking along a beach one day, when he sees a jar washed ashore. He opens the jar and out pops a genie. The genie says to him, “You have one wish left in this bottle. That's all there is, one wish. You may now have it.”
The young man thinks for awhile and asks the genie for a newspaper dated 12 months down the road, so that he could look at the stock pages and, on the basis of where stocks would be in a year's time, make his investment decisions right then. (Clever man.) So the genie says, “Your wish is granted,” and out of the air pops a newspaper, and drops onto the young man's lap. He looks and sees that certain shares would soar in the coming months. He's all excited about the money he's going to be making, but as he drops the paper to the ground, it opens to a page near the back - the obituary page - and there he sees a name that he recognizes: his own.
In other words, my friends, you might think that you can plan for the future or know what the future will hold or make your decisions or plan for your wealth in the future. You can put off all manner of important things if you wish, but you never really know what the morrow will bring. Decisions of importance, decisions of faith are today, they are now. When you look at the Christian life you see that it is a life of making decisions daily, now. I don't mean the one-time decision to follow Christ. I mean that being a disciple is a daily activity of making decisions in the now to follow Christ and his way and his example and his life.
Yesterday I got up and went out to a coffee shop early in the morning with my newspaper. As I was sitting there having my coffee, a gentleman came in, very obviously agitated. He had a hood over his head and newspapers under his arm and it looked like he'd been out all night. It appeared he didn't know whether to sit down or stand up. He put down newspapers on the seat, just as homeless people sometimes do. You could tell that this man was distressed, was mentally unstable. He was muttering to himself. At the height of this man's agitation, the man in the booth next to me got up, went to him and asked, “Is there anything I can get for you?”
The homeless man looked at him and with great joy told him: “I would like a cruller and a Boston cream.”
So the man gave him the money, and the agitated man went over and got his cruller and his Boston cream and came back to his table. He sat down and got up and sat down and got up. He ate half of his meal and got up again. Then the woman who was sitting with the man in the booth next to me told her husband off. She said to him, “Why did you do that? You know that you have now ruined our peace and quiet this morning. We just came in here for a simple cup of tea. This man is now going to bother us.”
Her husband's response was prophetic. He said, “My dear, tomorrow we can come back in here and have our quiet time, but today we have this man.”
Discipleship is making the daily decision. Discipleship is facing the temptations and the trials and the tribulations of the world and saying, “Now, I am going to be a disciple.. I'm not going to look back, I'm not even, for a moment, going to look forward, but in Christ's name I am going to follow now. Where I am, with whom I am, when I am.” That is what Jesus wanted of that disciple: a resolve to be faithful.
Sometimes, though, we get caught up with ourselves, so worried about what other people think, so constrained by our desire to be successful that we don't act in the now, but put off being a disciple.
Silesius, who was a writer in 17th century Germany once said, “The rose has no why, it blooms because it blooms. It doesn't watch itself or wonder why anyone sees it. The rose has no why, it blooms because it blooms.” Discipleship is like the rose. It does not wonder whether it's being seen, it does not care about the consequences of doing it. It follows and in following, simply is and it happens today and it happens now, whenever that now might be.
There is a second side to what Jesus said. Faithful decisions must look to the future in hope. Jesus used an illustration that anyone in Galilee or Samaria at that time would have understood. He said, “No person ploughs a field and looks back.” The reason is because if you look back when you are ploughing, you never know where you are going to end up. You will probably not plough your own fields, because the fields were very narrow in Galilee - you might actually encroach on someone else's field. If you are going to plough, you must make your furrows straight and deep on your land in order that you might raise a good crop.
In other words, you can't keep looking back all the time, you must look forward. Make a decision now, he is saying to this disciple, don't turn around and look back and be constrained. When it comes to the Christian faith some people (and I do understand this), look back and are constrained. Many people look at the history of the Christian church and say, “I'm not sure that I'm ready to make a decision to follow this Christ, because as I look back on the Christian tradition with all its problems and all its warts, I'm not sure that this is for me.”
Some people are held back from making a commitment to be a disciple daily because they really feel that Christianity has become nothing more than a watered down, once-a-week affair.
George Bernard Shaw put it so simply, profoundly and so cynically: “Christianity never got any grip of the world until it virtually reduced its claims on the ordinary citizen's attention to a couple of hours every seventh day and let him alone on weekdays.” I resolutely disagree. The call to Christ might not have a grip on the ordinary, everyday person, but to be a disciple is not just for the ordinary, it is for those who in their hearts are truly willing each day, in the now, looking to the future in hope, to make a decision that from now on, that they will follow Christ. That is the power of the Christian faith.
My friends, when it gets reduced to its lowest common denominator it is precisely then that it loses its power and conviction. It becomes full of people who say, “But first let me do this, then I will follow.” The disciple says, “I will follow first and then I will take care of the other things.”
This is not only about having a sense of resolve and dedication. It applies to our own lives very much. It seems to me that the Christian faith is something that we need to remind ourselves of over and over and over again. It is so powerful that it becomes a daily thing and as such it enables us to live our lives in all their fullness.
Many years ago, before the age of computers as we now know them, Life magazine had a crisis trying to get people to renew their subscriptions. So the publisher, Time-Life, hired 350 writers who wrote letters to all the people who had subscriptions, making emotional pleas to them to renew. They wrote things such as: “Just think how your children will feel if they wake up some day and find that the Life magazine is not on their doorstep. Can you live with that?” Or, “Have you thought that the subscription you bought for your mother will no longer be going to her and how she will feel if she no longer receives Life magazine?” They made up all these myriad, sentimental letters to try to get people to renew but they were still falling behind so they decided to hire IBM.
IBM came up with an idea to put everyone's records into this special machine. Six weeks before the time of renewal, certain little dots would appear at the top of their cards and then those particular cards would be pulled out of the file and a letter asking them to renew their subscription would go out automatically. IBM designed this machine and Life magazine followed the plan with great excitement, until one humid day in New York when the machine caused all of the different cards to stick together. As a result, 12,634 renewal notices went to one farmer in Montana.
Not used to getting much mail, as a farmer in Montana, and thinking that every letter was important, this man opened all 12,634 letters, all of which asked him to please, please renew his subscription to Life magazine and if he didn't just think of how sad his children and his mother and his grandchildren will be, etc. After having read this now 12,634 times, he made a cheque out for six dollars, filled out his renewal notice, and sent it back, saying, “I've had it, now you're going to get my money, send me the magazine.”
The Christian faith is a bit like that. It's a bit like the resolve that says, “No matter what, we are going to live this discipleship and we resolve to be a disciple no matter what the world may throw at us. No matter what may come, no matter what baggage is behind us, no matter what things are holding us back, we'll let that go so we can faithfully say, day by day, ”˜I will follow.'”
My friends, this series is so dear to my heart I believe it speaks to the very depths of our souls, because the mission and ministry of the church is always the ministry and the mission of Jesus Christ. It is always to proclaim and to live God's Kingdom in the midst of the world daily, daily. And it takes time for us to take stock of what that means. We cannot procrastinate, but we must have the resolve of faith, the resolve that says, “The Kingdom of God is more important than anything else.”
There is a poem written about a man, but it applies to us all and it sums it up beautifully:
Not, how did he die... but how did he live.
Not, what did he gain... but what did he give.
These are the merits to measure a man as a man,
regardless of birth.
Not, what was his station... but had he a heart.
And how did he play his God-given part.
That is a disciple. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.