Discernment (Luke 9:57-62; 1 Kings 19:19-21)

Delivered at St. John's Parish, Quincy, IL, on June 27

Today's readings give us some lessons discerning our call. We can learn three things from this passage in Luke 9, and the one in first Kings. The first is this: it's ok to hesitate. It's ok to pause. Take some time to pray. The second: make sure you're called. Jesus may be calling you to something completely different from what you were thinking. We need to make sure that we are hearing Christ's call and not our own. The third thing: when we hear the call, and we know it is the call of Jesus, we've paused and prayed, we need to make sure that we obey Jesus and follow. So, I'm going to briefly unpack each of these three things.

The first: it's ok to hesitate. To pause. Today we have two passages that seem to be at odds with each other. One seems to say it's okay to hesitate, and another seems to say it's NOT okay to hesitate. The first is from first Kings 19: Elijah finds Elisha, who is plowing a field. Elijah passed by him and cast his cloak upon him. It's the call to discipleship! Elisha runs after Elijah and says, “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” Elijah lets him. Elisha slaughters all the oxen he was using to plow the field, and he and his family have a feast to celebrate his call. And then Elisha goes along with Elijah.

Now, wait a second! Our Gospel reading is from the end of Luke 9. We've got one guy saying he'll follow Jesus, and Jesus responds cryptically: Foxes and birds have homes, but I've got no place to sleep at night. O...k. Jesus sounds like a nut here. Then a second guy says I need to bury my Father before I can follow you. Jesus rebukes him, too. “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. You go and proclaim the kingdom.” Guess asking to stay home and bury your dad is the wrong answer with Jesus. Finally, we have a third guy who says “I will follow you, but let me say goodbye to my family first.” Hey, that's the same thing Elisha said! This should be an easy one. Jesus is going to let him do that, right? Nope. Jesus says, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” Wow! Slap across the face! He even mentions plowing, and you know Jesus has read first Kings 19, so maybe he is criticizing the way Elijah and Elisha did things?

So, there's a contradiction, right? Which one is correct? Jesus, right? Elijah isn't God, so he obviously didn't know that when the guy you call hesitates you're supposed to reject him, right? Send him packing, right? Well, actually, the first Kings passage is the norm. Actually, the same thing that happened with Elijah and Elisha in Kings happens earlier in Luke, chapter 5! Just a few chapters before Jesus is disappointing these wannabe disciples, he calls Matthew. Matthew is sitting at his tax booth, and Jesus comes up to him and says simply, “Follow me.” Kind of like throwing a cloak on his shoulders. What does Matthew do next? He throws a great feast at his house. This is the same thing Elisha does!

So the Elisha passage is the norm. Elisha actually has a very positive reaction to be being called. What usually happens when God calls someone in the Bible? Here's a few examples from the Old Testament: God calls Moses from a burning bush. Moses responds: who am I? I can't free your people from Egypt! They won't listen to me. I don't talk very well. Excuses, excuses. Did God say, well, to heck with you, I'll find somebody else. No, he stuck with Moses. Jonah: he gets on a boat and runs away! God has to go hunt him down and bring him back to his task. Never once does God say, “aw, let Jonah go to Tarshish. I'll find someone else. Jeremiah: I'm but a child. I can't. I can't. You can just see God rolling his eyes and saying, “I give up!” But he doesn't. He sticks with these people.

So, Elisha's response is actually a very good one: let's celebrate! I'm going to be a prophet! Matthew's response to Jesus is the same: let's party! Jesus doesn't mind: he joins the feast himself. God is patient. It is ok to hesitate. It's even ok to be scared. It's okay to hesitate negatively. Actually, God wants us to hesitate. He wants us to pray to him and discern our call. What does the culture say? The culture says: plunge in—go for it! Don't hesitate. He who hesitates is lost. You may never get a second chance, fella! Get married in Vegas to someone you've just met. Go all the way! If you make a mistake, medical science can clear it up. The Bible says he who hesitates is wise. He who hesitates is listening for the Lord to speak.

That leads us to the second thing we learn from these readings. What is the Lord saying? Is he calling us to this mission or that one? Is he calling us to follow him here or there? This is where we can really break open the Luke 9 passage. Why is Jesus coming down on these wannabes so harshly? The first guy and the last guy are not listening to what the Lord is saying. The first guy was never called to follow Jesus. He just comes up to Jesus and says I'll follow you wherever you go. Jesus essentially responds, “you don't know what you are asking. I'm on my way to the cross. I'm not going to get any sleep until then. Are you sure you want to follow me there?” This guy knows that Jesus is the messiah, and the Jews had one idea of what the messiah was going to do when he came. Kick . . . you know what. The messiah was going to be a warrior. He was going to lead an army. He was going to overthrow the government. He was going to create a kingdom right here on earth and rule it himself. But that was not the way Jesus was going to do it. Jesus came to die, to be a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. When we follow Jesus, we are following him in suffering. But the guy doesn't get that. He wants to follow Jesus for the wrong reason, and Jesus knows that. Which is why he never called him. What does the culture say? Senior year of High School you have to pick a career. Don't try to figure out what God is calling you to do with your life, pick something right now. And then we'll send you to a university to focus on that subject. Spend thousands of dollars on something that might not be your calling. What happens? A lot of people fail out. A lot of people realize they are going down the wrong path. Some turn around and pursue something else, feeling lost and behind everyone else. Others drop out.

I was pretty good at math in High School. I liked to play computer games. Translation: Fred is going to be a computer programmer! Get him in a math program. I thought I was called to play music. Neither path was what God called me to. One was chosen by my parents and my guidance counselor. The other was chosen by me. No! I went to James Madison University as a math major. Calculus killed me! I ran away from that. Had no idea what I was going to do. Decided I liked literature, became an English major: the major for those who don't know what they want to do. Went to a graduate school to learn writing. Wrote novels. Worked in Web design. Still knowing that I was not where I was supposed to be. Finally got the call from God to this. 20 years later. What if I had heard the call earlier? Don't know. Here I am.

The last guy in Luke 9 is worse than the first: Once again, he was never called. So, he is calling himself to Jesus—taking control. But he adds a second insult. I'm calling myself to you, Jesus, he says, but on my terms. He has reduced discipleship to a human undertaking. I'll follow you, Jesus, but I'm calling the shots. I'm doing it my way. Imagine going in for a job interview and saying, I'd like this job, but I'm going to set my own hours and I'm going to put together my own salary and benefits. Hmm. Let's see. I'd like that corner office, too. How should the employer respond?: “I haven't hired you yet.”

The culture is all behind this last guy. What does the culture say? Take control of your destiny. You can do anything you put your mind to, and do it your way. Be independent. Follow your own path, march to a different drummer. Go against the flow, swim upstream. But if God isn't calling you to that path, what is your life? You're living a lie. What would happen if people chose careers in order to obtain wealth and power and influence instead of listening for God's call? What if that not only happened in the world but in the church, too? I wonder what that would look like. Oh well, I guess we'll never know.

The third thing we learn from these readings: once you've paused, once you've made sure that you are called, then you follow. You'd think that's the easy part, but you'd be surprised at how much we let things get in the way. We find excuses, so we can avoid following. Here's where the second guy in the trio comes in. The second guy is called. Jesus says to him, just like he says to Matthew, “Follow me.” But the guy responds that he needs to bury his Father before he can follow Jesus. He responds with a point of Jewish law. His dad is not dead yet. We assume that the dad just died, and he'll be a day late running after Jesus at the most. No, he could have 20 more years waiting to follow. He's using the law as an excuse. He has set up the law as a barrier between Jesus and himself. It's a convenient excuse. We can't break the law, can we? Well, let's see how Jesus responds. Jesus rebukes him: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. You go and proclaim the kingdom.” Jesus's call is stronger than the law. Nothing, nothing should come in between Jesus and the one he has called, not even the law itself. We're not talking about committing crimes here. We're talking about letting those little details build up, like excuses, so that we can not follow the call. In Jesus' time, the Jewish law was filled with little details that constantly got in the way of following God. That's why Jesus comes down so hard on the Pharisees throughout the gospels. They could have been such great followers of Jesus, but the little details of Jewish law became big obstacles.

Paul was one of those Pharisees, and Jesus had to knock the guy off his horse to get through to him. Jesus blinded him, he had to yank him out from under that pile of legal details. And what did Paul do next? He went on to Damascus and waited. He waited for three days. He paused. He prayed. He fasted. And then Ananias came and restored his sight, calling Paul to follow Jesus. And Paul followed. All three lessons we just learned today. This last lesson is tough for us. We may not have the Jewish law but some churches have legal battles going on, and those barriers are using up lots of time, money, and resources that could be used to grow the kingdom.

Aside from Legal issues, we've got a lot of other things that pile up and prevent us from following the call. We're too busy. There's not enough time in the day. We're distracted by technology and a seemingly infinite variety of entertainment. We're over-committed, and most importantly, we've invested too much in the path that we are taking. Too much money, too much time, too much study, too much effort. I know of a woman, a doctor of theology, she went to oxford. Her dissertation was on the authenticity of the Gospel of John. Her committee tried to destroy her. They bombarded her with questions and virtually attacked her. She succeeded, though. She passed. They signed off on her work. She asked a member of the committee, why did you all attack me so harshly? He responded: “we were ordered to. Your paper contradicted the head of the department's life's work.” That's the big hurdle. We've invested too much in the wrong path. That's why we see so many people in the media, in politics, in the culture defending lies. Obvious lies, but they have to defend the lies. They've invested too much in the lies. If they speak the truth, they will be ruined.

And that's exactly what Jesus calls us to do: ruin ourselves. We drop the lies we are living when we are called. We repent, we turn 180 degrees from where we were headed. We take our hand from the plow and slaughter the oxen, so that we cannot go back to that old life. We leave our fishing boats behind, and our nets. We completely eradicate our old lives to follow the call. Because that is what Jesus did. He was there at the creation of the world. He is the Word of God. He is the son of God. But he was called to be a sacrifice for us, to break the bonds of sin and death, so that we could have everlasting life. Jesus heard the call of the father, and he paused, he waited until the fullness of time. And when the time came, he followed the call. He became incarnate. He became man. And he suffered, he died, he was entombed. And then he rose again. The firstborn of the new creation. The first of a new order, of which we are all a part.

All we have to do is pause, listen, and follow.

Amen