I’ll follow you… in a minute

Let us pray. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

This week marks the 249th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence from England. The word “freedom” has been showing up on boxes of cookies, on red, white and blue bath towels, or plastered on the sides of fireworks stands all over the country for weeks, if not months.

Galatians 5:13 “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters…”

But Jesus doesn’t seem to be calling his followers to freedom in Luke 9 today. He encounters three people who express desire to follow him and challenges each on their willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to follow where he is going.

So what is he doing is these 3 encounters?

Luke 9:57–58 NRSV

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

The life of a follower (not just a fan who follows when it’s convenient but someone who follows no matter what - like the parents of Major League Baseball players that travel with the team and have been to every game in a 10-20 year career) is hard.

Luke 9:59–60 NRSV

To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

“Bury my father” didn’t necessarily just mean hold a funeral. It could mean discharging a variety of family obligations. It might even have meant the man expected his father to die in the near future, and wanted to wait however long that took, wrap things up, then come. Chinese New Testament scholar Diane Chen writes:

I have often struggled with Jesus’ requirements, since filial piety is as highly valued in the Chinese context as in the Jewish world. Would Jesus really make his disciples choose between him and family, when the fifth commandment clearly states, “Honor your father and your mother” (Ex 20:12)? In traditional Chinese moral thought and praxis, obedience, caretaking, burial, and ancestral worship constitute the filial duties of children to their parents, to express gratitude for giving them life and nurturing them to adulthood. Yet Luke depicts Jesus as distancing himself from his earthly family to follow the bidding of his heavenly Father unencumbered (Lk 2:49; 8:19–21; esp. Mk 3:20–21, 31–35). It is not that Jesus delights in tearing people away from their families, but allegiance to the things of this world, even good things, be they loved ones or possessions, is a deal-breaker (see the rich ruler in Lk 18:18–31). Jesus asserts the priority of his lordship in the starkest of terms; he seeks absolute loyalty, not because he belittles human relationships but because the mission is urgent and the salvation of the world is at stake. (The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary, p. 147-148)

Luke 9:61–62 NRSV

Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Jesus had set his face to Jerusalem and knew he didn’t have long left to be followed while he walked on earth. this person may have just wanted to say goodbye or may have been planning to get his affairs in order. Elijah the prophet allowed his successor Elisha to get his affairs in order somewhat and literally look back after putting his hand to the plow. Jesus knew this story and drew a contrast to it, and I very much doubt it was on accident. But then why?

At another critical time, during Nazi control of Germany, a group of theologians and pastors from Lutheran, United, and Reformed churches worked together to craft a statement called the Barmen Declaration which, among other things, rejected the subordination of the church to the state. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Church and Finkewalde seminary in hiding were party to Barmen.

“Those members of the Confessing Church who held fast to this decision of the church walked into an uncertain future. They did so with the same “irresponsibility” with which Peter had stepped onto the water. In that situation it was tempting to have second thoughts and shy away from the initial decision, or, like the third of the would-be disciples in Luke 9:57–62, to add a “but let me first”: I intend to follow, but allow me first to submit myself to the state-sanctioned church commissions (and thus renounce Barmen)….. The Finkenwalde community reacted to such cases not with self-righteous accusations but with a sense of deep concern. What was tragic was the fact that here people knowingly abandoned a path which they had come to understand as the path they were called to follow.” (Discipleship, DBWE)

These short interchanges between Jesus and would-be disciples rub us wrong because they’re meant to. They place unreasonable demands, with promise of little in return.

You might not know it from the translation, but there is an idiom being used throughout the first part of today’s Gospel reading (before Jesus meets would-be disciples). When the day drew near for him to be taken up, Jesus (in the Greek) “fixed his face toward Jerusalem”. He sent messengers “ahead of his face” to the village to make arrangements. The people in the village refused to help because “his face was going on to Jerusalem”.

Jesus, knowing what was coming, fixed his face with that same kind of clarity and determination. He needed to stay oriented himself and likewise keep his disciples oriented. We know from other passages that was no easy task. Jesus didn’t have time to slow down, to call fire on random Samaritan villages nor to wait around on the road for these potential disciples if they needed to take care of other things.

As Christians, we each have many vocations, and each role comes with responsibilities. I am a child, a husband, a father, a worker, a church member, a volunteer, and so on. We are called to love our neighbors in whatever we do. That is part of the freedom of a Christian.

“For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity to indulge your flesh, but become slaves to one another in God’s agapé love.” (Gal 5:13)

Christian freedom costs because it comes through God’s calling in the Holy Spirit.

This kind of call “urgently invite[s] someone to accept responsibilities for a particular task, implying a new relationship to the one who does the calling.” (Louw & Nida 33.312, 1: 423)

Common roles provide a sense of shared Christian call across groups and especially among those living in similar contexts and life circumstances. But we all also occupy less common or even unique spaces that relate to the call God gifts to us.

Vocation finds its universality in the specificity of each person living out their own baptism in the context of their own life in contrast to those who create detailed ethics with lists of rules and prohibitions (see Wingren, Luther on Vocation, Ch. 3)

But it doesn’t always look the same. Those would-be disciples Jesus talked to? We don’t know what happened to them - whether they dropped everything to follow Jesus, whether they finished up their other obligations and ensured they weren’t disrupting things before trying to catch up, whether they joined the Christian community in its earliest days. We don’t even know that, if they didn’t follow right then, it was the wrong decision. Just like Mary and Martha were both beloved followers of Jesus but loved him in very different ways, we too are called in different ways.

How do we know what our calling is, then? When should we drop everything for the possibility of something and when should we cling to the work we have already felt called to? We pray. We dwell in the Spirit together and discern together in community. We consider whether our actions produce works of the flesh or fruit of the Spirit.

And we pray. Prayer is the central action of the Christian life in vocation. We serve God by serving our neighbor and invite God’s faithfulness in completing the work toward that neighbor by doing whatever we see in his power to help that neighbor and at the same time calling upon God in prayer. When one prays without having done what is in one’s power, however, it serves only to tempt God or put him to the test, for though God has promised to provide abundantly, he also calls each person to live out our faith in love each day.

So then, am I unfit for the Kingdom of heaven because I haven’t dropped everything for the one thing? In one sense, yes. That is, in a nutshell, the Law that leads us to the Gospel that God loved us deeply enough to save us in spite of ourselves.

But in another sense, maybe that’s not my calling. Maybe that one urgent calling (akin to Jesus’ disciples or underground pastors in Nazi Germany) hasn’t been revealed to me yet, or maybe I have multiple vocations and will never have a Dickensian revelation where suddenly I know exactly what I have to do.

If I dwell with the Holy Spirit, if I walk on the road with Jesus, if I listen for that nudge to say business as usual isn’t enough, there will come times when I come to understand that God is calling me to love God and neighbor in a new way, differently than my plans and expectations. They might be scary, but when they come, I will know that I am free, through God’s loving provision, to say yes.