Tell Out My Soul

Luke 9: 51-62

What does it mean to follow Jesus? The message in this passage of Luke’s gospel is all about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. I guess we can call it Discipleship 101.
The journey that Luke talks about was an important journey, it was the last that Jesus was going to make to Jerusalem and Jesus was telling as many people as he could along the way. He was giving his disciples jobs to do, and he needed their help in this last part of his mission. He wanted to make sure that his followers had the right stuff, and knew what they were letting themselves in for.

At the start of the reading he sends his disciples go ahead to a Samaritan village to announce his arrival. At the end of the reading, Jesus sends out the seventy two disciples to even more villages on the way to Jerusalem to proclaim that the Kingdom has come. So right in between those two sending passages, we find three conversations that Jesus has with his would-be followers. These short, almost abrupt exchanges focus on discipleship. Here in no uncertain terms, Jesus is putting the spotlight on what it means to be his follower.

Jesus talks about counting the cost of discipleship. In Matthew’s gospel when Peter protested about Jesus’ prediction of his own death, Jesus said ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ In this case, Peter had lost sight of their spiritual goals. Jesus was going to make very big sacrifices and he expected that his disciples would too. He said, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” It’s not an easy prospect, carrying a cross.

In those days, crowds of people followed Jesus, attracted by what he said, and who he was, the healings and miracles. They wanted to be with this amazing person. He was what we would call today a superstar and he had countless followers. And it is this group of people that he was talking to. But most of them were people that would get excited and say yes, I’ll follow you, without understanding what that truly meant. Jesus made it very clear. He was direct and to the point; he didn’t sugar coat his words. These are some of Jesus’ hardest sayings.

Firstly, he talks about not having a home. He says, foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. There’s a distinct feeling of loneliness that surrounds Jesus even though most of the time he has lots of people around him. He is in the world but not of the world. He’s an outsider and his true home is the Kingdom of heaven with God the Father. He didn’t feel at home anywhere he went. Not really. And the same applies to all of us who follow him, our eternal home is not here on earth. Our bodies may be material, but our souls belong to God and they are not of this world.

Followers of Jesus fully realise this situation. We may live in our little town, in a comfortable house in a tree lined street and it feels like home… we’re citizens of this place. But Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, reminds us that we have what he calls an eternal citizenship in heaven. Jesus was an exile in this world, and so are we. This is not our final destination and, like Jesus, this is not where we lay our heads. And I think, because of this, that it’s not unusual to sometimes feel a kind of longing that’s hard to describe. The things of this world cannot alone provide complete fulfilment or satisfaction. Comfort resides in God’s enveloping love and, in Paul’s words, the peace that surpasses all understanding.

The Christian life can therefore be viewed as a pilgrimage, a lifelong journey, with our steadfast guide being the Holy Spirit. We don’t know exactly where the spirit will lead us, all we know is that the soul is a traveller. Jesus and his disciples also faced physical homelessness. From the start of his ministry Jesus was continuously on the move. The first thing he did was to wander forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. He didn’t attach himself to any one place, he literally had nowhere to lay his head. He had such a short amount of time on earth, and he had to reach so many people in that tragically small window of time. Three short years. He had to train up the apostles and get the word out to as many people as he could before time ran out. We can sense the urgency in this reading. This was going to be his final trip to Jerusalem and he knew that his life and ministry were coming to an end.

He didn’t stop over at the Samaritan village, not because he wasn’t welcome, but because we’re told that his face was set for Jerusalem. That means that he was in a big hurry to get there. James and John, those hot headed brothers, misunderstood the situation, and asked Jesus if they should call down a punishment on the Samaritans, thinking that they had rejected Jesus. But this wasn’t the case at all. Jesus reprimanded them for taking such an aggressive approach.

He wanted people to follow him, to be with him and share his life, hear his message of love and mercy. But he was also saying, hey I’m not here for a long time, you may not know this, but I do. So when he talked to his followers, Jesus didn’t mess around. He basically told them, if you’re going to do this, do it right away because I don’t have the time to hang about waiting for you to decide, or for you to take care of your business. They had to deny themselves for the sake of the mission.

This led to the second conversation. Jesus said to one man, “follow me” but the man responded by asking to be allowed to bury his father. But Jesus told him not to worry about burying the dead, that someone else would do that. He said, “Your job is to proclaim the Kingdom of God.” Let the dead bury the dead sounds harsh. But Jesus used the word dead to refer to the physical body and things associated with it. In this follower’s case, spiritual matters were to have priority over earthly matters. There wasn’t time to do both.

When I was a kid there was one thing I did that really annoyed my mother. She’d ask me to do something, like sweep the verandah and I’d say, “In a minute.” It drove her crazy. Now my kids say the same thing to me. I don’t get annoyed though, well, maybe just a little. I get the idea that Jesus felt the same. There’s an expectation that if you ask someone to do something for you that they do it in a timely manner.

Following Jesus means that we don’t procrastinate or put things off. We’re mortal, we don’t have all the time in the world. So one of the requirements of discipleship is that we prioritise our time. Most of the time we think of how we can fit Jesus into our agenda, but these statements of Jesus remind us that we should be fitting ourselves into his agenda.

Jesus uses the term let the dead bury the dead to jolt us to attention. He isn’t telling us to drop all our responsibilities; carrying out our social duties is also a part of our journey. But he is saying that when we have to take care of spiritual matters, that we make them a priority. When Jesus himself, in person, is calling to us and says, “follow me” we follow. It’s time to drop those things that are getting in the way. These things are the stumbling blocks that Jesus rebuked Peter about, the worldly things that we can afford to put on hold. Our relationship with God doesn’t go to the bottom of the to do list.

The third point that Jesus makes is about emotional attachments. Jesus said, no one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God. Jesus uses an agricultural reference. If the farmer looks back when he’s ploughing, he’s not focusing on where he’s going and the furrows will end up being crooked, he’s going to make a mess of the field. In other words, he’s unfit as a farmer. The action of looking back represents someone who is ignoring God’s love, who is turning away from God. God is up ahead and that is where we should be facing.

Being unfit for the Kingdom of God is a very sad thing indeed. And this happens when the love of God does not figure in a person’s life. Instead there is only love for the things of this world, and this worldly attachment blinds them to the love that God is so freely offering. In a way, the Kingdom of God will be meaningless to this person, they are unable to see it. If love of God remains unrealised in a person’s life, then how will they realise God’s Kingdom?

Jesus’ follower wanted to go back and say goodbye to his family first. Jesus is not saying that we should ignore our family or love them less; we don’t love God at the expense of earthly love. The important thing is that we don’t let our attachment to others, or worldly things, push God out of our lives. These emotional ties can never be a substitute for loving God, because the love of God is huge, and quite different in nature.

We have plenty of love to give to both God and family. Love is continually being replenished in our hearts, it is infinite. Love is like a spring that gives an endless supply of water. I went to a Catholic school and a couple of my friends came from very large families, one family had eleven children, and another had twelve. Being an only child I wondered at the time what that was like for parents; how could their parents have enough love to spread around to all those children? Now as an adult and a parent of three, I realise how easy it is to have more than enough love for all those children. Three or thirteen, it doesn’t matter.

Loving God with a steadfast love is what makes us fit to be followers of Christ and makes us fit for the Kingdom of God. God is the great source of love from which all human love springs. We mustn’t lose sight of this, because if we do, we become directionless. Our eyes need to be fixed on God and in this way our furrows will always be straight, and our path to God will be straight too.

We’re fortunate that today, here in our town, being a follower of Jesus is not as dangerous or demanding as it was for the Apostles and disciples who were spreading the word in a hostile land. We’re not going to be persecuted, and we don’t have to leave our homes and loved ones. But wherever we are, being a disciple of Christ does have its difficulties. It can mean making hard decisions. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. It can take us places we weren’t expecting. But it holds immense joy and fulfilment. The feeling of devoting one’s life to following Jesus is as good as it gets.

Jesus loves us with an infinite love, and he wants to talk to us and connect with us because he needs us just as much as we need him. I’d like to wind up my message today by reading some lyrics from a song by John Denver. He wrote these words but I’d like for you to imagine that it’s Jesus saying them to us:
It’s long been on my mind,
You know it’s been a long, long time,
I’ve tried to find the way that I can make you understand,
The way I feel about you,
And just how much I need you
To be there where I can talk to you
When there’s no one else around.
Follow me where I go, what I do, who I know
Make it part of you to be a part of me.
Follow me up, and down,
All the way and all around,
Take my hand and say you’ll follow me.

Amen