Note: I have preached on this passage four times now; some things evolve, others do not. This message is a direct reworking of the message I preached at Warsaw EPC in October 2019.
The title of this message is Follow Me!; there are two reasons for that. One, that is everything in this passage. If you wanted to sum it up in one sentence, that would be it. Two, while it might seem to you that I’ve just said something boringly obvious, it actually means a lot more than you might realize on a surface reading. Indeed, it means everything, as I hope you will see. To that end, those of you who know me well will not be surprised—indeed, I’m sure many of you are confidently expecting—to hear me draw on the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey more than once this morning. For those of you who don’t, feel free to ask me afterward.
The first thing we need to understand here is that this is the hinge of the gospel of Luke. To this point, Jesus has had a spectacular ministry career. He’s established himself as a teacher who speaks with authority, he’s done stunning miracles—everything is rolling along beautifully. And then, instead of capitalizing on his success as any smart preacher would, Jesus tossed it all aside and—as Rich Mullins put it—“set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem.” This begins the section of Luke commonly known as the Travel Narrative, which continues into chapter 19. In these chapters, every interaction and every incident happens on the way to the cross.
On Pentecost two years ago, I opened the sermon in a way that maybe no one else remembers, but that haunts me: with a brief overview of the mass-shooting events in the US to that point in the year. By the most widely-accepted definition, there had been 223 as of the previous Sunday, May 21. Pentecost falls eleven days later this year; as of last Sunday, by the same definition, the count stands at 173. Which is . . . better, sure; but saying “There have been fifty fewer mass shootings in eleven more days” doesn’t exactly seem like cause for wild celebration. What’s more, given human ingenuity, killing a lot of people doesn’t require a gun. You might remember that six weeks ago, I asked for prayer for the Filipino community in Vancouver, British Columbia, as someone had driven an SUV at high speed into a street festival in celebration of Lapu Lapu Day. Dozens of people were injured, and eleven people died; the driver turned out to be a thirty-year-old man, also of Asian descent, who was dealing with mental-health issues—though according to reports, his care team had seen no signs of possible violent behavior before that point.
I could go on ad nauseam, but nausea would serve us nothing. It all boils down to this, that we live in a world which generates such horrors. It makes me think of the opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats wrote that in 1919, but as true a description as it may have been of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, I think it may ring even truer now. But then, like John Green in the clip Emily played last week, I feel the power and pull of the statement “Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks.” Green is a favorite in our house, too, in part because of his response to the steady temptation to despair. He chooses neither avoidance nor positive thinking but active resistance: he steers into it, facing the maelstrom head-on, and seeks to find and enact hope there—which is, I believe, uncommonly wise.
We as followers of Jesus are soldiers of the Prince of Peace, an army called to wage peace against a world of war. To do that, we have to face the violent life-sucking whirlpool of human sin squarely, or else we will end up speaking peace everywhere except where that word is desperately needed. Ours is not a peace that denies war, for we have been given a hope which does not deny despair. The things which tempt us to despair are real and must be answered, and ultimately made right; our hope in the face of despair is the proclamation that they will be made right, for they already havebeen made right—we just haven’t reached the end of the story yet.
