Formation for Transformation

Sermon for June 26, 2022

Luke 9:51-62

Yesterday, more than 30 St. Andrew’s people went to St. James United Methodist Church on the Paseo to take part in Connecting Community, the first installment of what I hope will be an ongoing project.  All day, people from St. James’ neighborhood and beyond could come by for help with the needs of day-to-day life – things like groceries, and diapers, and clothing, and washing their clothes at a laundromat – in fact, apparently 420 loads of laundry!  I’m sure we’ll be hearing stories for a long time about the experience of standing alongside new friends from St. James and serving people together.

But why did we do this?  Why do we do things like the Connecting Community event, or the Free Store at Christmastime?  Why do parishioners serve at the Kansas City Community Kitchen or St. Paul’s Pantry?  You know, a critic could rightly point out that even if we held yesterday’s event every week, we wouldn’t be solving the problems that afflict so many in our community.  Giving people diapers or food or clean clothes is certainly a kindness, and Jesus blesses that.  But it doesn’t solve the larger issues – neither the particular challenges specific individuals face, nor the systemic limitations of opportunity resulting from more than a century of legal discrimination and educational failure in our communities of color.  So, if our outreach work isn’t solving those problems, why are we doing it?

To look for an answer, let’s look to today’s Gospel reading.  It begins a new, long section of Luke’s story in which Jesus and his followers move from their home base in Galilee, in the north, down to Jerusalem – the centerpiece of the Jewish world and what will become the “trailhead” for the disciples’ mission to the rest of the world.¹  Jesus starts out with his face “set toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:53), apparently resolute and focused.  Passing through the land of the Samaritans, historic feud partners for the Jews, Jesus is rejected by people there; and the disciples James and John want to channel their inner Elijah and call down fire from heaven.  Not only would that seem out of character for the Prince of Peace, but Jesus also doesn’t have time to get bogged down in judging those who won’t follow his ways.  They’ll find judgment enough later on.

Then the story keeps moving as Jesus engages people on the road, people who do heed his call to live under God’s reign and rule.  One person pledges to follow Jesus wherever he goes, but Jesus warns him that following this path isn’t just an intellectual exercise.  It means following Jesus in a life that offers less predictability and less comfort than what the animals get. 

Then another person catches Jesus’ attention, someone open-hearted enough that Jesus invites him along for the journey.  The man says yes, but “first let me go and bury my father” (9:59) – not a delaying tactic but an obligation if he wants to follow the Fifth Commandment about honoring our parents.  But Jesus stops the man short, saying the call to follow him takes precedence even over this: “Let the dead bury their own dead,” he says, “but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (9:60).  We don’t know which path the grieving son decided to take. 

Finally, another person agrees to come with Jesus on the journey but asks for permission first to go say goodbye to his family – the very least we might expect from someone about to abandon his household.  In fact, it was allowed by Elijah in the first reading today when he called Elisha to succeed him as Israel’s lead prophet.  But, again, Jesus takes the hard line: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (9:62).  Yikes.  So much for warm-and-fuzzy Jesus who likes to cuddle lambs and babies.  There’s no time to waste, he says, and no room for anything less than unswerving dedication to God’s ways and God’s priorities.

But if you keep reading in Luke beyond today’s story, you find that this unswerving journey … isn’t.  The story does not take Jesus and his community on a direct path from point A to point B.  Instead, they wander around Judea for 10 chapters – healing people, confronting opponents, teaching how God’s reign and rule stands in contrast to the systems and priorities we usually follow.  It takes them a long time to get from Galilee to Jerusalem for the confrontation we know as Palm Sunday.  So, did Jesus get lost?  Or distracted?  I don’t think so.  His face is still set toward Jerusalem, but he’s also got a lot of work to do to help his friends and followers set their faces toward the kingdom, too.

I think it’s just as hard for us to hear Jesus as it must have been for the folks trudging across Palestine.  After all, when people who disagree with us say ridiculous things and undermine the values we hold dear, we might silently wish for a little heavenly fire to rain down, too – but then Jesus rebukes us, not them.  We, too, would balk at leaving behind the comfort and predictability of our lives to follow a Way that runs counter to most of what the world values.  We, too, would feel the need to go bury our father and honor that relationship before we followed our heavenly Father’s path.  We, too, would want to share a final good-bye with our family before heading out for God’s kingdom with no return ticket home.  Neither we nor the folks following Jesus along those dusty roads are ready to hear what he has to say. 

So maybe that’s why that trip to Jerusalem changed from an express train to a whistle-stop tour.  Like the people of Israel a thousand years earlier, wandering in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land, these followers of Jesus found they were there for the journey as much as for the destination.  They were on a path of formation, even a path of transformation.  Most of them weren’t yet ready to keep their hands on the plow and never look back.  They were just beginning to learn what plowing was all about.  And Jesus was guiding this journey of discovery not as a flight engineer but as a pilgrimage leader, casting the vision of God’s reign and rule, and then inviting them to find it along the way.

We’re pilgrims, too.  And like all pilgrimages, our journey isn’t about physical distance as much as it is about boundary-crossing.  Jesus was inviting his friends and followers to step outside the patterns they knew and put God’s priorities first – to try out kingdom living, and see what relationships they might build, and see how the experience would change them … to see if, perhaps, God’s priorities would take root, and change their hearts, and reorient their lives.

And so, we come back to yesterday’s Connecting Community event, or our work at the Kansas City Community Kitchen, or St. Paul’s Pantry, or the Free Store.  We are not holy social workers.  Neither do we have the power to transform broken social structures on our own.  We are pilgrims, crossing boundaries as we follow Jesus step by step more fully into God’s reign and rule.  We’re being formed to embody God’s priorities just that much more deeply today than we did yesterday.  We’re being formed to be transformed – disciples learning to be apostles, fellow workers with Christ sent out to draw others in, and change their hearts, and thereby change the world by prioritizing those whom Jesus raises up.  Growing into the measure of the full stature of Christ (Ephesians 4:13), we speak, and we work, and we vote, and we serve – and in doing so, we witness for what the kingdom can look like on earth as it is in heaven.

In our pilgrimage, the greatest formative power comes from relationships – opening ourselves to someone we didn’t know, opening ourselves to someone else’s story, opening ourselves to someone else’s vision of the world.  That’s what I hope the Connecting Community event was and will be: a doorway that brings us alongside other pilgrims taking their own long and winding road with Jesus to Jerusalem.  

We come together to bless the community not because we can fix it.  We come together to bless the community because doing so helps to fix us. 

1.       New International Study Bible, 1872-3 (note).