July 1, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

Luke 9: 51-62

Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

There are fresh flags in the cemetery, all ready for the celebration of the 4th of July.
The out-of-town visitors that come to Yorktown to steep themselves in history,
God bless ‘em, are thick on the ground.
We are smack in the middle of a summer
loaded with national commemorations,
and some days it feels like we are at historical ground zero!
And me? I’m an ex-American History professor,
whose father gave his couple dozen genealogy loose-leaf notebooks to me.

As William Faulkner once said with respect to the South,
the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.¹

As for us Christians, we are descended from the Hebrew tradition,
which depends for its very existence on remembering
the mighty acts God did among his people in former times.
The Torah says, “take care . . . .so as to neither forget the things your eyes have seen,
nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life;
make them known to your children, and your children’s children.”²

If you read the Old Testament straight through,
you will think you are having a few bouts of deja vu
because the redemption stories are told over and over
so they become as familiar as the multiplication tables are supposed to
when you teach them to a third-grader.
For the Jews, their story is their past.

Now, to change the context quite a lot,
think of our contemporary therapeutic culture.
How do we know who we are?
How can we face our issues and problems and dysfunctions,
overcome them, and move on?
Show me a competent therapist,
and I will show you somebody who begins by saying,
tell me about your childhood, and your mother and father.
Who you are depends on where you’ve been.

So what Jesus says in today’s Gospel is deeply shocking.
None of you stood up in protest with one hand in the air,
because I guess you’re polite when someone is reading the Bible to you!
But a young man says he’s going to follow Jesus,
though first he has to go bury his father
(which is not only a normal thing for a son to do,
but in the Jewish tradition, a solemn requirement).
Jesus (who unquestionably comes from that Jewish tradition that honors the past,
Jesus who quotes from the old Scriptures all the time)
says, No, don’t look back. Follow me.
You can’t plow a straight line in the field if you are looking over your shoulder.
Forget the past and come now, or don’t come at all.

I tell you, although there are times when being an Episcopalian
feels like being in the cross-hairs of a shotgun,
at other times, I sure am glad I am one.
Because we seem to have an attraction to
apparently irreconcilable propositions, which all seem to be true.
Here’s an example:
God wants the people who follow him to be free.
If you do not know your past and honor it, you cannot be a free person.
Yet neither can you be free if you remain focused on the past.

To put it another way:
ignorance of the past can kill you.
And idolatry of the past can kill you too.

I had a small domestic situation occur two days ago
that all of a sudden snapped on a little light for me.
This wasn’t a great life-changing revelation,
just a little “aha!” on the week’s road to this sermon.
It reminded me of all the old jokes about
“How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“Change that bulb!? That bulb was given as a memorial to my grandmother!”

But this was the light switch in the upstairs bathroom.
I had houseguests Thursday night: a dear old internet friend named Judy,
and her husband Bill who, for a priest,
turns out to be pretty handy with tools and electronics and carpentry.
He built their home in Michigan, for example.

Anyway, Friday morning Bill tactfully mentioned the bathroom switch.

“Oh,” I said, “you have try about ten times before you can switch it off.
You have to give it a good snap. It’s been that way for years.”

“Well,” he said, “I could easily fix it.
And if it stays that way it could burn your house down.”

A few minutes later I was taking him to the local hardware store.
He bought a new switch, brought it home,
and in ten minutes flat, it was repaired, at a total cost of $1.19 plus tax,
which Bill insisted on paying himself.

What had I been waiting for?
How free am I willing to be?
You know, the cost of turning to look forward
may not be as high as our imaginations predict,
and as grace would have it, sometimes the tab is picked up by an angel.

I am enough of a Christian and a historian both
to believe that in God, nothing is ever lost.
No person, no truth, no event, good or bad is lost to the mind of God.
I am equally convinced that our past shapes our present.
I believe this about people,
and also about bodies of people, like the Church.
Like the nation-state.
Moreover I believe in telling the truth about the past,
and seeking understanding, or expressing regret or gratitude,
or a combination of both.

But there comes a time
when Christ calls us to put our hand to the plow and follow him,
looking straight forward and paying attention to a new line of duty and promise,
a new field of labor and fruition.
Christ may well call us to let go of past certainties,
traditional duties, and familial attachments,
and trust only him.
What could this mean in reality?
In the Church, we might honor tradition,
but always expect God to take us out of the zone of the familiar to something new.
In national life, we might learn the story of the past in order to chart a new future.
In personal life, we might acknowledge the brokenness of our past,
ask God to forgive it or bless it,
and then set it slightly to the side,
neither ignoring it
nor allowing it to block our line of sight to the future before us.

I think when Jesus calls, he means right now.
We may carry our pasts on our back,
and we may be mired in current circumstances.
But Jesus’ call is to lay those things down on order to respond,
maybe even to walk away from them..
At the outset at least,
Jesus’ call always, always feels like giving something up
that is of tremendous and intimate value

But the glory in it is this.
After we have set the burden down,
we discover that we are free.
The psychologists may call it “integration,”
but we Christians describe it a little differently.
We discover that Jesus has been paying the tab for our freedom, all along.
and we are filled with new life, life in abundance.
We call it redemption.
And for our redemption in Jesus Christ, we say:
Thanks be to God.

Back to the index of Connie's Sermons