Well, ya coming?

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 8, Year C (June 26, 2022).

View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day: Proper 8C (Track 2)

Preached at Christ Episcopal Church, Jordan, New York

Thanks to the esteemed Mr. Andy Pierce for improving on the original audio in this post, and apologies for the quality. My connection wasn’t working.

Edited Transcript

May only truth be spoken here, only truth be heard, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

[Congregation: Amen.]

I invite you to be seated. So, Allen and Evelyn I was hoping your grandchildren would be here today, which they often are, because I knew there would be at least one person in the audience who would get my reference, but I'm going to go ahead anyway. Has anyone here seen the movie or read the book, The Polar Express?

[Congregation: Sure.]

Okay, you got it. So I've seen it about 8000 times. I seem to watch it every day from November to February in my house. So if you've seen it, you might remember the plot and the story begins with a little boy whose faith is kind of wavering in Santa Claus. And he is woken up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve by a train which has appeared outside his window. So he jumps out of bed in his pajamas and he puts on his slippers and he runs outside to see what's going on and the train is sort of all light and glory and snow. And a door opens from the train and the conductor leans out and what does the conductor say? Does anyone remember?

He says, "Well? Are you coming?" My son loves this. He's like, "Yes, I'm coming!" Well, I had to say, I thought about that a lot as we read today's Gospel, because I think Jesus is, in this movie... That conductor is kind of no nonsense, throughout the whole movie, and he's opening the door and he's saying, "Are you coming?"

You only get one chance to say, "Yes," to get on this train this year. And the boy kind of hesitates, but he decides to go. And this is the face of Jesus that I think we're seeing today. It's the face of Jesus that says, "I'm going here." Because the conductor says, "We're going to the North Pole, we have a destination," and Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem. He begins his ministry coming out of Galilee. He's sort of moving through the countryside and he's healing and teaching, but this moment comes where he says, "You guys, this is not only about my healing and teaching, but I want you to know how this story ends. This story ends with me suffering, dying and coming back on the third day."

And after he tells the disciples that story, you might remember he takes them up onto the mountaintop, he's transfigured, he has Moses and Elijah on either side of him, signifying his inheritance of a tradition. He's transfigured, but then they go back down the mountain. So this whole movement of Luke is kind of out and then there's a turning point. He comes back. He's coming back to Jerusalem. So he has set his face. He is on the way and he's saying, "Well, are you coming?"

Buddy Jesus: Not so much with Luke 9!

And I find myself wondering, maybe you do, too, what does it feel like to be among the people like the disciples and the crowd that are following him? Because maybe you mostly think about Jesus gazing upon you with compassion. Or even that, have you seen the meme where Jesus is kind of like, you know the buddy Jesus? (Two thumbs up and a wink). Or the painting of Jesus where he's kind of got blonde flowing hair and he's gazing peacefully into the middle distance?

But this is not the Jesus in today's Gospel. This is the Jesus who's kind of dusty and earthy and I imagine him with a determined expression on his face and I imagine being one of his disciples or one of the people following him, might even find him quite intimidating at this time. His face is set and he's asking: are we coming? And so, as he's moving in this direction, we see three people sort of interact with him. And each one has an idea that they're going to make life kind of neat and tidy, they're going to wrap one thing up and then they're going to follow Jesus.

And none of the things that they want to do are bad things, right? In fact, they're things that are honorable, they are things that are their duty to do, and I think that's what makes this passage so hard. All this man wants to do is bury his father and Jesus responds with this riddle. "Let the dead bury their dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another person wants to say, "Let me say farewell to my family and then I'm coming." But Jesus is like, "The train is leaving so come now."

And I think the important thing to understand about this, it's not that Jesus doesn't care about us and our families. Not that Jesus doesn't want us to grieve the people we loved and lost, not that Jesus doesn't want us to care for the people that God has entrusted to us in our lives. But I think that God is teaching us through Jesus in this, God is teaching us that there are going to be times where we need to choose between one good and another and those choices won't always feel clear or comfortable. There's going to be times when we need to give something up that is truly good or really matters in order to pursue another thing that is truly good or really matters, in order to pursue God's call for our life, for our community.

And that's tricky, because there's things that God calls us to do that make us have to leave behind something else that is important, that we care about, that we love. We might not be able to justify our choice to anybody, right? We might not even feel comfortable with saying, "Yes," to that call ourselves. There's that sense of, "I want to follow Jesus, and I have a duty here and now."

I don't think that that's our whole life. And I think we would be making a mistake if we thought that Jesus was always calling us away from duty or attachment to others and to the things we love the most in this life. But I do think it's important that we include this Gospel and this determined face of Jesus in our total understanding of who God is and what God calls upon us to do. Because if we find ourselves having to choose between one good and the other, or saying goodbye to something that we do not want to say goodbye to in order to say, "Yes," to something new. Or leaving behind a comfort zone in order to do something we do not know how to do and are not comfortable leaving. Or leaving behind good opinions, the high esteem of others, in order to do something, to stand up for something that people won't understand.

We need to know that God is with us in that decision, too. And that there are going to be times where we're going to be called to choose the priority that truly surprises us and that we may not be able to explain to anyone except God. And if we do that, we'll be going with Jesus. So that face of Jesus that is determined, if it's not already in our "vocabulary" of Jesus' faces, I invite you to consider adding it, the face of Jesus that is about strength and determination to do the hard thing that is the right thing that may be the lonely thing.

There is, in our Book of Common Prayer, the one with the cross on the cover, I think it's on page 372... I opened right to it!

[Congregation: Hallelujah.]

Okay. I was saying "God, I hope it's page 372..." Page 372, so there are four Eucharistic prayers in our prayer book. These are the prayers where we, as a people, describe the acts of God in history and their relevance to us today as we celebrate at Jesus' table, as we come to community and take communion together. And there's a line from Prayer C on page 372, the priest will say, "Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this table for solace only and not for strength, for pardon only and not for renewal."

Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this table for solace only and not for strength. Because those pictures of Jesus that we have, Jesus welcoming the children, Jesus being the friend who walks beside us, who is a shoulder to lean on: Those are true. We come to community, we come to church and we come to our relationship with God to seek comfort and solace, but not only. We also come to seek the strength to make a hard choice, or to stand up for something that might be very different from the way that our culture is going. To stand up for human dignity, to stand up for people's rights to make decisions about their own futures. We might be called to make very difficult choices, to give up something that we really care about in order to take care of somebody else.

So we come here not only for comfort, but for strength and renewal, to know that we are walking with a God who is determined to walk to the kingdom of God, who is determined to take us all the way there. And we will not be alone, even in those lonely choices. Amen.

[Congregation: Amen. Amen.]