Eyes on the Prize

Scriptures:       I Kings 19:15-21;         Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20

                        Galatians 5:1, 13-25     Luke 9:51-62                           

Steven R Covey is a well-known businessman and author and consultant.  Perhaps his best-known book is titled “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”  Perhaps Covey’s best known saying is as follows:  “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”  Let me repeat that again, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” 

Our Scriptures this morning involve an Old Testament character – Elisha - intent on one thing, what was for him the main thing, and Jesus reaching out to a number of would-be disciples -  who were willing to consider doing the main thing, after they took care of some personal business first.   And their unwillingness to set aside their personal agendas told Jesus that for them, following him was a thing, but not the main thing.  As we consider each of these readings, I’d ask us to consider where we find ourselves in the story.   As we hear the invitation to follow – along with information about the working conditions of the followers of Jesus – do we see ourselves as willing to stick with the program, no matter what?   Are we willing to keep the main thing the main thing?  Or do we see ourselves as likely to get left by the wayside?

In our Old Testament reading, Elijah had been on the run from King Ahab of Israel and his wife Jezebel, both of whom are idolaters. And he was overwhelmed with depression; in fact, he asked God to let him die.  God does not grant Elijah that request, but he does get Elijah some help, in the form of Elisha, who becomes his successor.  So Elijah finds Elisha – Elisha is out in a field with a team of oxen, plowing - and Elijah puts his mantle over Elisha.  Elisha asks permission to say goodbye to his family – Elijah grants permission.  What Elisha does next is striking.  He slaughters the oxen with which he’d been plowing, sets fire to the wooden plow to boil the flesh from the oxen, throws a big party, and then goes off to be servant to Elijah.  In slaughtering the oxen and turning his plow into firewood, he says goodbye to his old way of life – he now had no oxen and no plow, and so he could not go back.  We would say that Elisha had burned his bridges to his past.  For Elisha at that moment, following and learning from Elijah was the main thing, and after saying goodbye to his family, he literally set fire to anything that might have distracted him.

In our Gospel reading, we’re told that Jesus is setting his face to go to Jerusalem – that’s an expression meaning that Jesus was determined to go to Jerusalem, that his mental GPS was set for Jerusalem.  Jesus knows what will be waiting for him in Jerusalem, and it won’t be a welcoming party…no cake to eat, no candles to blow out, and certainly no presents.  Rather, what’s waiting for Jesus in Jerusalem is opposition, arrest, crucifixion.  But he’s ready to take all that on.  He’s keeping the main thing the main thing.

To get from Galilee in the north to Jerusalem in the south, Jesus had to go through Samaria, which is in the middle between Galilee and Jerusalem.  We’re told that Jesus sent messengers to let the Samaritan villages know he was coming – but the messengers were turned away, because Samaritans and Jews for the most part had no dealings with one another – they worshipped the same God, but in different ways and at different holy sites.

When the messengers sent by Jesus were rejected by Samaritans, James and John, two of the inner circle of the disciples, said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”  These words did not come out of nowhere.  The prophet Elijah had several times called down fire on messengers from King Ahaziah, a son of the awful King Ahab who himself was one of the unfaithful kings of Israel – and James and John wanted to know whether Jesus wanted them to do the same.  But calling down fire from heaven was not on Jesus’ agenda.  We’re told that in response to James and John, Jesus turned and rebuked them.  Some ancient manuscripts – you’ll find this in the footnotes of many Bibles - include these words from Jesus to the disciples:  “You do not know what spirit you are of, for the Son of Man came not to destroy peoples’ lives, but to save them.”  James and John were focused on the disrespect shown to the messengers sent by Jesus, and by extension to Jesus himself.   They were focused on their own hurt feelings, and what they imagined to be the hurt feelings of Jesus.  But Jesus was focused on the main thing:  “the Son of Man came not to destroy peoples’ lives, but to save them.”  For Jesus, saving peoples’ lives and not destroying them was the main thing.  For we who call ourselves followers of Jesus, saving lives and not destroying them should be the main thing for us as well.  It’s notable that, after today’s reading, the very next parable Jesus tells is the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the hero of the story is not the priest, not the Levite, not is even Jewish, but rather is kin to those Samaritans who had rejected the messengers of Jesus.

I’d like to linger here a moment.  Remember those words of James and John, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them.”  That is often our impulse as well, when we feel rejected.  For example, by means of drone technology, a military drone operator in the newly-opened and fully operational drone command center in Horsham, just a short distance north of here, can quite literally command fire to come down from heaven and consume people in places like Pakistan and Yemen who are deemed to be enemy combatants.  Of course, this depends on the accuracy of the drone operator’s interpretation of what he sees on the screen at his console; any number of women, children, and otherwise innocent bystanders have also been killed by this fire from heaven.  But similar impulses to harm or kill those by whom we feel rejected happen right here on American soil.  Our nation, and especially the LGBT community, is still working through grief connected to the mass shootings roughly two weeks ago at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  The shooting happened on the club’s Latino night, a night in which the club was full of gay Latino men.  Of the shooter, Omar Mateen, we’ve heard two accounts of the shooting.  At first, we heard that Omar Mateen was a radical Islamist who opened fire on those deemed unacceptable by his interpretation of Islam.  Later, we heard that Omar Mateen was struggling to deal with his own sexual identity, and chose that night to open fire on those Latino men to whom he felt especially attracted, but by whom he felt rejected, destroying in others what he could not accept in himself.  And it’s entirely possible that there are elements of truth in both explanations.  After the shooting, while much of the nation was united in compassion for the victims and their families – several thousand gathered for a vigil right downtown at Philadelphia’s City Hall the Monday after the shootings - there were voices from some very conservative Christian pastors praising the shootings – praising them!; indeed, the only problem these pastors had with the shootings is that more gay people weren’t killed.  I’m here to tell you that none of this killing – none of it! -  is part of the agenda of Jesus – none of this has anything to do with what Jesus was and is about.  Jesus came  not to destroy peoples’ lives, but to save them.  As Christians, the agenda of Jesus is to be our agenda as well.  The main thing for Jesus should likewise be the main thing for us as Christians.

After Jesus rebuked his disciples, he met several would-be disciples.  One approached Jesus and said, “Lord, I will follow you wherever you go.”  Now, if someone came up to me and said, “Pastor Dave, I will follow you wherever you go,” I might worry that he or she was a stalker, but I think I’d also feel a little flattered, and encourage them…well, a little anyway, though I surely wouldn’t give them my home address.  But not Jesus!  Jesus likely poured cold water on the man’s dreams when he said, “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but I have nowhere to lay my head.”  Jesus knew that for him, the phrase “wherever you go” would lead him to the cross, with lots of hardship along the way for himself and his disciples, and Jesus wanted this would-be follower to know what he or she was getting himself or herself into, that he or she wouldn’t be sleeping at the Hilton anytime soon.  Then Jesus himself went up to another person and said, as he had said to the disciples at the beginning of his ministry, “Follow me.”  The man said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”  And Jesus’ reply sounds harsh to us, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.”  By way of explanation, scholars tell us that the man’s father may very well have been alive, but aging and perhaps nearing the end of his life.  But even so – for Jesus to ask someone to leave behind an aging and possibly ill father doesn’t sit well with us – though we’re also told that at the beginning of his ministry, when Jesus said to Peter and Andrew and James and John and the others, “Follow me,” they dropped what they were doing and followed.   We’re told that another person said to Jesus, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me go and say farewell to those at my home.”  Even Elijah allowed Elisha to say goodbye to his family before Elisha followed Elijah.  But Jesus again replies in a way that seems harsh to us, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”   This isn’t the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” that we expect to find; indeed, here Jesus with his demands is hard as nails.  Clearly it would seem that, at the very least, Jesus had very different ideas of family values from ours, that for Jesus, families of origin came second to the family of faith Jesus was working to create and for whom Jesus would lay down his life.  Jesus was focused on going to Jerusalem and fulfilling the mission God had for him there, and was not about to allow other peoples’ agendas to slow him down.  We might say today that for Jesus, the train was leaving the station, and would-be followers were either on the train with him, or they’d be left standing on the platform.  Those who approached Jesus at this time, and the man whom Jesus approached, responded to Jesus with the words, “Yes, but...”  Jesus wanted to hear only “Yes”.

In our reading from Galatians, Paul boils all this down for his readers:  “For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.”  And then Paul goes on to contrast life in the flesh – with its self-indulgence and hostility toward others – to life in the Spirit.  For Paul, the whole law – the main message of the law, the main thing – was to “love your neighbor as yourself.”  And for Paul, the main thing was to live by the Spirit in freedom, as Jesus himself did.

Are we willing to say to Jesus, not “Yes, but”, but simply “Yes”?  Are we willing to say “Yes” to Jesus?   If you haven’t yet said, “Yes” to Jesus, do it now.  Do it today.  Don’t delay.  Tomorrow is not promised to any of us.  But even for those of us who said “yes” to Jesus for the first time many years ago, we are still called, day after day, to say “Yes”.   “Yes” to new people to whom Jesus is calling us, “yes” to new places of ministry – and we are all of us here ministers of the Risen Christ, in one way or another.   And we will find, as Paul found, that in saying “yes” to Jesus we will find freedom.  We will give our lives over to Jesus, and in return receive the grace to really live as we were intended to live, in freedom.

Speaking of freedom, I’m reminded of a  song connected with the Civil Rights movement which includes these words, with which I’ll close:

Well, the only chains that we can stand Are the chains of hand in hand

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on! Hold on! Hold on! Hold on! Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!

Got my hand on the freedom plow Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on! Hold on! Hold on! Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!

May we, with Jesus, with Paul, press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.  Amen.