Luke 9:51-62

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So this Jesus guy, sometimes he isn’t so easy to like.  Most of what he says seems to make sense, but every once in a while he lets loose with a doozy.  Take for example when he gets to talking about divorce.  At first glance, he seems rigid and unforgiving, but then, maybe he’s up to something that takes some more thought.  

Then there’s that interaction he has with the Canaanite woman.  “Canaanite” is Biblical lingo for “stranger,” “foreigner,” or “outsider.”  She approaches Jesus to beg him to heal her daughter who is suffering.  Jesus answers her with what sounds like a racial slur.  Really, Jesus?  

It appears that the Canaanite woman has to correct him and remind him that God’s love draws a circle that’s wide enough that no one has to be an outsider.  But then again, maybe he was up to something in this interaction.  It’s hard to say without really wrestling with the text.

Then there’s our text for today.  At first glance it seems like Jesus is an either/or kind of guy, that he’s saying you have to be willing to give up your home and comfortable living, familial relationships, and all daily responsibilities to be his follower.  Great sales pitch, right?  That’s bound to draw a crowd.  

Longtime pastor and preaching professor, Brett Younger writes of this, “I would like this passage more if when prospective disciples tell Jesus they want to follow, Jesus said, ‘Wonderful!  Glad to have you in the family” and everybody hugged.  Instead, Jesus confronts us with the truth that we’re not as committed as we’d like to believe.  Our desires for comfort, wealth, even family, get in the way of our promise to follow.”

Like Brett Younger, our struggle is often between what we want Jesus to say vs. what he actually says.  There’s the Good News-love-and grace-Jesus, you know, the one we learned about in Sunday school.  And then there’s this Jesus, the one that demands much, pushes us to uncomfortable places, and calls for some radical rethinking our lives and some serious self-sacrifice.

So which is the real Jesus?  How do we know whom to follow?  Is it the Sunday School Jesus or the Extremist Jesus?  Well, yes.  Let’s think together a bit on how these two might co-exist, how they might actually be the same Jesus with the same message, and what that might mean for our lives.

Extremist Jesus, who seems to show up in our text for today, often doesn’t sit well with us.  What he says is capable, I would imagine, of shutting us down pretty easily.  We read this passage and perhaps start to think, “Well, if this is what Jesus requires, there’s no way I can follow.”

That’s when it’s important to remember that Luke’s whole gospel story is about salvation—that everything he writes about is meant to point towards his message that Jesus came to bring embracing love, forgiveness, and healing for all.  So which is it, Luke?  Sunday School Jesus or Extremist Jesus? Well, yes.

Luke’s theme of generous love and salvation taken together with the content of this story forces us to stand in a precarious place—with one foot in God’s deep pool of grace and one foot on the path of discipleship.  To lose balance and fall in the pool is miss the whole of Extremist Jesus’ message.  Likewise, if we ditch the depths of grace for the path alone, our journey drains us, leaves us dry.  Turns out, we need both.  We need to live this balancing act.

Jesus and the disciples are attempting this on the road in today’s story.  In the original language of this text, the words for “road” and “way” are the same, and “The Way” is what the early church is called in the continuation of Luke’s story in the book of Acts.  So this story is about Jesus and the disciples on The Way, trying their best to be God’s love for the world, and figuring it out on the journey together.  

As they walk together, they come to know living The Way means sharing a radical welcome, healing, forgiveness, grace and more grace.  But, they also learn it’s going to make them some enemies, disrupt theirs and other people’s lives, and cost them something significant, maybe even their lives.  Seems like Sunday School Jesus and Extremist Jesus might be holding hands here, doesn’t it?

You see, the love and grace part requires the rabble-rousing and overturning part if it’s going to mean anything significant.  This is also true in reverse.  What’s the point of stirring the pot if it won’t cook up something meaningful and life-changing, like the love of God and the power of grace to change lives?

Maybe we’re beginning to see that this story isn’t just another Jesus doozy.  The would-be disciples didn’t just catch Jesus on a bad day.  Turns out, it’s less about forced rejection of the homes and things and people we love and value, and more about balance, about the whole of Jesus’ message.  It’s less about either/or and more about a journey with Jesus, one that requires thoughtfulness and sacrifice, but one that is fed by the depths of God’s grace and love and presence in our lives.  

Don’t get me wrong, I do very much think Jesus means to challenge the would-be disciples (and that includes us) to consider the real cost of following; to stretch themselves further than they think they can; and to continue to think and rethink how they are living, who they really trust, and what is of ultimate importance.  

I do think Jesus means for us to squirm, to be uncomfortable, and to carefully consider if how we are living is really The Way of God.  I’m sure he’s calling us realign our priorities and examine the lenses through which we see the world and God’s people in it. I think Jesus wants this for us because he loves us just like we are now, and because he knows we can be the so much more that the world needs us to be.

So what will all this take?  How do we hold both the pool of grace and love and the challenge to kick up some dust on The Way?  How did Jesus do it?  He had some serious focus.

Luke tells us this at the beginning of the passage.  Never underestimate the power of the first line. Remember how the story opened?  “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.  Set his face to Jerusalem—to the center of the old realm, the way it is, the powers-that-be that have neglected and abused the people.  The old realm is more about legalism and stifling rules and less about real, abundant life together, the kind of life that Jesus came to make possible between us.  The kind of life that happens on The Way.

Jesus setting his face to Jerusalem recalls Isaiah 50 when the prophet says, “The Lord God helps me…therefore I have set my face like flint... Who will contend with me?”  

It also echoes the prophet Ezekiel who says, “The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, set your face toward Jerusalem and preach against the sanctuaries; prophesy against the land of Israel.”  Ezekiel goes on to cry out about the brokenness of the people and the corruption and oppressive deeds of those in power.  He says, “things shall not remain as they are.  Exalt that which is low, abase that which is high

Things shall not remain as they are.  This is why Jesus sets his face to Jerusalem.  He has to keep his eyes on the center of power, on what needs changing, on what must give way so that life and love can flow forth for all God’s children.  He knows what he’s facing there—opposition, violence, even death.  

Those in power don’t relinquish it willingly.  Old structures that oppress, manipulate, and exploit the weak don’t give way without massive effort.  Establishing a whole new way of living together is hard and uncomfortable and requires sacrifice.  And, it requires love and grace, loads of both.

Is this Extremist Jesus or Sunday School Jesus?  Well, yes.  

He’s saying things must change, and it’s not going to be pretty or easy at first, so make sure you’re up for it.  Yes, the message of The Way is one of grace and forgiveness and salvation for all people, but change and upheaval is hard, and not everybody’s going to like it.  Jesus warns his would-be disciples about this.  Isaiah knows there will be those who will contend with him and from where he must draw his strength.  Ezekiel knows things cannot remain as they are.  People get ready.  People get focused, set your faces to Jerusalem.

Focus is what it will take for those on The Way to remain both steeped in God’s grace and love and steadfast on the rocky journey to the new kingdom.  Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem and so sets the stage for conflict.   He reminds us that being in love with God and choosing to walk The Way set up a new horizon that revalues our values and transforms our knowing.  Remember what he said about the plow?  We have to keep focus or our path becomes convoluted and we find ourselves farther away instead of closer to our goal.

The conflict on the horizon for Jesus grew out of the way he chose to live, the people he chose to see and heal and love, and the conventional wisdom and social structures he challenged and ignored and tore down.  

Jesus threatened the religious and political authorities of the day simply by living by the law of love and answering first to God.  It meant lifting up the downtrodden and refusing to let fear squelch his courage.  It meant speaking up and taking action, and it also meant Sabbath and prayer.  It meant drawing from the well of grace and love God had filled to overflowing, but it also meant walking the hard road, because it was right, life-giving, and pleasing to God.  It meant determination and focus.  It meant letting The Way be his life, the lens through which he saw the world so that everything else he saw was in relationship to it.

That’s what Extremist Jesus meant when he seemed to shake off those would-be disciples.  His words can seem abrasive or alienating or defeatist, but what he’s trying to do is to shake the disciples loose for the living of the new reality he is bringing into being—a reality that lifts up the marginalized and the outcast, one that defies the legalism of established religion, and one that overturns human expectations.  

And don’t forget that’s love too, says Sunday School Jesus.  

Establishing this new reality takes some rebellion against conventional wisdom and some redefinition of what is what in the kingdom of God.  Jesus knows, and his disciples are starting to know, that this new reality is going to require much of them—generosity, sacrifice, discomfort, thoughtfulness, work, grace, love, more love, and some serious focus—set your face to Jerusalem kind of focus.

If that is what The Way looks like, if that’s what it means to really follow Jesus, then what does that mean for us here at Memorial, in our homes, in our communities, in our families, and as a part of our larger human family?  What is the Jerusalem, or old realm to which we must set our faces?  What new reality of love are we to usher in?  What kind of rabble rousing and prophetic speech and action is going to be required of us?  What must we give up?  How must we be uncomfortable?  What will God’s love look like as it pours forth from us? From where will we draw our strength?

These are the questions that have been rattling around in my head this week, so I’m glad I got to share them with you this morning.  Now maybe they’ll rattle you a bit too.  This seems a most excellent group to rattle around with, after all.  

These questions have been occupying some space in my brain right next to what I’m still working on, considering, and praying about after spending the afternoon with a group gathered by Madison-area Urban Ministry (MUM) a week or two ago.  The group came together to hear the reports from the Taskforce on Poverty and the Taskforce on Racial Disparity in Dane County and to consider what the faith community in this area might do with these reports.    

Celia Jackson, head of the Taskforce on Racial Disparity, spoke passionately about her group’s findings without notes for over an hour.  When a member of the group asked Ms. Jackson what the biggest problem was that the taskforces uncovered in their research, she replied “It’s not poverty or racism, but those who stand seemingly outside the problem and refuse to see.”  She warned us at the beginning of her presentation that she was there to make us uncomfortable, and she did her job with this statement.  

After Ms. Jackson had us stirred up a bit, she dropped some compelling statistics on us.  If you read the Weekly Update from Memorial this week, these will sound familiar.  
•    50% of kids of color in our county will flunk out before graduation.  
•    the Black Commentator’s “2008’s Ten Worst Places to be Black” ranked Wisconsin first because it has the highest racial disparities in incarceration rates in the nation.
•    in the last decade, Blacks in Dane County have been roughly 100x’s more likely than Whites to be imprisoned for a drug sentence.  This is the second highest disparity in the nation.

Sit with those for a minute, and then add the statistics shared by the Taskforce on Poverty that:
•    the latest numbers show that 50% of children in Dane County now qualify for free and reduced lunches through their schools.
•    the unemployment rate in our county grew from 5.2% to 6.5% in 2007, and this is before the full impact of the economic crisis.  This 1.3% growth of unemployed individuals is equal to the population of the entire village of Cross Plains.

Uncomfortable yet?  I am, because I’m one of those folks who can stand seemingly outside the problem and refuse to see a lot of the time.  

Let’s hear those questions about following Jesus on The Way again in light of the reports from the taskforces.

What does all this mean for us here at Memorial, in our homes, in our communities, in our families, and as a part of our larger human family as we seek to follow Jesus on The Way?  What is the Jerusalem, or old realm to which we must set our faces?  What new reality of love are we to usher in?  What kind of rabble rousing and prophetic speech and action is going to be required of us?  What must we give up?  How must we be uncomfortable?  What will God’s love look like as it pours forth from us? From where will we draw our strength?

For all the questions I have rattling around in my brain, I don’t have a whole lot of answers.  I don’t have a lot, but I do have at least one.  I know where our strength is coming from for all these questions we ask and for the work and love that is ours to give to world.  

Here’s what I know… I know we don’t walk The Way alone.  And here’s how I know it.  The Aramaic word for “follow” that Jesus uses doesn’t mean to tail somebody, jogging and breathless and struggling to keep up.  It means to walk “shoulder to shoulder.”  Jesus is saying to all our resistance, our fear, and our doubts, “Do this with me.  Do it in my power.  Do it with my love and support and vision.  I will walk beside you, shoulder to shoulder, even when things get uncomfortable or the road gets rough or you struggle to see where to take the next step.”

And that’s how we’ll walk.  One foot in the depths of God’s grace and love and one foot placed with determination and courage on the bumpy path of discipleship.  Sunday School Jesus will gently take one of our hands, and Extremist Jesus will tug on our other one, and we will walk shoulder to shoulder.  Then we will know where to set our faces, how to birth God’s new reality of love, and what this all will require of us.  And then we will know what the disciples know in the verses that follow our story for today, that “the kingdom of God has come near.”  

May it be so with us.  Amen.