July 1, 2007
(Fifth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 8)
Prepare to be Surprised
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 • Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20 • Galatians 5:1,
13-25 • Luke 9:51-62
(From
The Lectionary Page)
If you haven't seen evidence of it yet, it'll come clear as the weeks progress: the gospel passages during the season of Pentecost are filled with paradox and puzzlement. If I were to sum it all up with a paradoxical observation of my own, I'd say, prepare to be surprised. That bit of oxymoronic wisdom represents a huge shift for me. Given my druthers, I druther be in control and in charge of my life. What I've learned, in submitting to this yoke of Christ, is that just when you think you've got this business of faith figured out, prepare to be surprised. As Luke will tell us time and time again in his gospel, Jesus will be no one's Messiah but God's. It will be on God's terms that he will preach and teach. We'll want to set our own terms and conditions. We'll try repeatedly to co-opt him. And each time Jesus will show us differently.
The gospel passage opens with Jesus and the guys heading toward Jerusalem from Galilee. The easiest route took them through enemy territory – Samaria. The Jews and the Samaritans had been at each other's throats for about 800 years by the time Jesus appeared on the scene. To the Jews, the Samaritans were half-breed sell-outs. To the Samaritans, the Jews were wrong-headed arrivistes. The Jews believed that the holy city was Jerusalem, the Holy Mountain was Mt. Zion (where the Temple was) and that God could only be served there. Any worship of God anywhere else was just wrong. The Samaritans, on the other hand, believed that cities were cesspools of evil, that Mount Gerazim was the Holy Mountain, that their temple there was the true temple because it was built first, and that God could only be served there. As far as they were concerned, any worship of God anywhere else was just wrong. Both believed they owned the truth. Sounds painfully familiar, doesn't it? The Samaritans and the Jews shared kinship bonds as descendents of those whom Moses brought to the Promised Land, and as many of us know, there's no kind of fighting in the world like the kind we do with our family.
One common denominator in all the ancient near-east cultures was the imperative of hospitality. You offered food, water, and shelter to travelers. To fail to do so was unthinkable. The Samaritans refused to receive Jesus and his disciples because in their world Jerusalem was the wrong destination. James and John reacted to this insult by suggesting that they deploy the weapon used by one of their heroes, Elijah, who had wreaked some serious hellfire on the ancestors of the Samaritans centuries earlier.
But Jesus wasn't interested in being their kind of Messiah. Even if it meant blowing an opportunity to emulate the great Jewish hero Elijah. The disciples, and those who would be his disciples, needed to know that Jesus was not simply a 600-year-old prophet reincarnated. God had other plans, radically different other plans. It was a puzzlement, no doubt, not only to the 2 disciples who got smacked down, but also to the whole gang who witnessed the three would-be followers challenged by Jesus in their assumptions. Jesus reminded the first one that personal comfort and safety were not high on the list for his followers. He reminded the second one that the demands of discipleship supersede the demands of society and of culture. And his response to the third would-be disciple self-consciously referred again to Elijah and the story in 1 Kings of the call of Elisha. Luke is being crystal clear: Jesus is not Elijah. This is not history repeating itself. This is God doing something new. Prepare to be surprised.
True discipleship resists the siren's song of control issues and agendas. It's something that the institutional church has struggled with ever since there's been an institutional church. We humans, at least in the west, have a tendency toward order and structure. We like predictability. We like being in charge, and if we find that we're not personally in charge, then we certainly like clarity from those who are in charge, whom we elect and whose agendas had darn well better reflect our own. Many of us, on the left or the right of whatever issue you want to name, could easily find ourselves making like James and John in today's gospel – seeking Jesus's authority to rain down destruction on those who oppose us or whom we believe to be wrong-headed. It is always our tendency to try to cast the Messiah in our own image.
Jesus, instead, points us to a different way. To be disciples, we are sometimes called to relinquish our grip on our tightly-held orthodoxies. To be disciples, we are sometimes called to make room in our lives for moments of grace-filled surprise – moments when we see the hand of God at work in the world in ways we could not have imagined heretofore. To be disciples, we are sometimes called to hold our agendas lightly not because they are necessarily wrong but because in God’s divine economy they may simply be irrelevant. To be disciples, we must be open to living lives where God’s purposes, not our own personal agendas or neuroses, are to be our compass and lodestar.
And if any of us expects this enterprise to be easy, stay tuned for the rest of the Gospel of Luke. Oh yes, and prepare to be surprised.
