Keep Knocking at the Door

Luke 11:1-13 7-28-13
Jesus says,
“if your child asks for a fish,
would you give a snake instead of a fish?
Or if they ask for an egg, will you give a scorpion.”

One year when I was in college,
my grandmother gave me a ham for my birthday.
She gave me a canned ham.
She wrapped it and everything.
I don’t know what was going through her mind.
I know that had not asked for a ham.
I was actually a vegetarian at the time.

If you grandchild asks for -- anything.
would you give them a canned ham?
My grandmother may not have been very good at gifts.
But Jesus insists that God is good at gifts.

On his final trip to Jerusalem,
Jesus is teaching his disciples about ministry.
The disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray
and Jesus complies.
What Jesus tells them is the prayer
that we have been taught as children
the one that we have said so many times.

The Lord's prayer is not very poetic,
it's more of an outline,
setting out the things that we should be praying for,
-That God's name would be holy,
-That God’s kingdom would come to us.
-That God would give us what we need to live every day
-That we be forgiven.
- And that our time on earth is would not be too hard.
That’s pretty much it.
There are a ton of things written about this prayer
I read a lot this week, there was nothing too gripping.
which was too bad, because I wouldn’t mind
talking longer about the Lords prayer,
but the next part of this exchange
is actually the part that always gets my attention
and I can’t quite ever ignore it.
The knock at the door at midnight
the fish and the scorpion, asking and it will be received.
That always raises the question for me of why we even pray at all.
Prayer is a very complicated thing for me.
Not the actual doing it, but thinking about why we do it.
The concept has been troubling ever since seminary
Aren’t we telling God something that God already knows?
And if God already knows, why doesn't God just do something
about those things that we pray for? Why to do we need to pray?

To be honest, I have a struggle with this particular scripture
especially preaching on it, because I want to show you the evidence
that what Jesus says is right. The proof that what he’s saying is true.
Ask and it will be given to you.
Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened.
Everyone who asks receives.

And I know, I have seen prayers that have been answered.
Amazing prayers. Things that have happened- healing and life and
recovery and reconciliation. Justice done.
That has no other explanation but people of faith prayed fervently
and God replied with the impossible.
 

But Jesus says, Ask and it will be received. Just keep asking.
And what sticks in my mind is the times that hasn’t happened.
the times that people have asked, persistently, in good faith
and they haven’t received.

For thousands of years, Christians have prayed for peace
for justice, but once one problem is solved, another springs up somewhere.

There are parents who have knocked their knuckles bare
praying for that the lives of their children be spared.
And yet so many children have been lost.

There are people who have prayed for work that never came.
People have prayed that they would
overcome addictions that they never beat.
That they would have enough food,
so their family wouldn’t go hungry - and yet people starve.
Some prayers, some good, honest, genuine prayers haven’t been answered.

There was a story this weekend of a couple,
a Lutheran couple who met at church
and were supposed to be married on August 10th,
in Good Shepherd Lutheran church in Pearl River, NY
who were on a boat ride with their
wedding party and the boat crashed into a
big cargo boat and the bride and the best man were lost.

The mother of the bride said that “It just can’t end like this”
and she said she “has been praying for a miracle.”
But her daughter’s body was found yesterday.

And to suggest that prayers that don’t get answered
are just not done with enough persistence or faith
or that their not the right ones,
is rediculous and cruel and not the point.

But I do believe that persistence is a big part
of Jesus discussion of prayer. Keep praying.
Trust in God’s goodness and love, even
when signs are showing the opposite of that.
keep on going.

And I also think that maybe prayer is less about receiving.
Less about what we ask for and more about a relationship.

In the parable today, Jesus poses:
“Suppose one of you has a friend and you go to him at midnight
and say to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread”

When I was reading this story and putting myself in the character's place
I was thinking - wow, I would be really uncomfortable
knocking on a stranger's door at midnight and ask for something
if it wasn't life threatening.

But Jesus says that this is a friend.
What kind of special friend would that be
who you could knock on their door at midnight?
and get them out of bed to borrow some stupid food for a midnight party?
And know that they wouldn't call the police?

That would be a very good friend, a very loyal friend.
A best friend even. 
Not the image that most people would have had of God in Jesus time.
It might have even been a scandal to think of God as being so close.
Most people thought of God as being distant
and unapproachable. More like a king or queen.
Not the person living next door.
Not your best friend who you could wake up in the
middle of the night to ask a favor of.

The benefit of this kind of relationship,
I would think would not be getting the bread
it would be knowing you had a friend
who’s door you could knock on at midnight.
Prayer is the conversation between us and God
the conversation that is vital to any good relationship.
Prayer is us telling God our thoughts and hopes,
our worries and concerns, our joys and delights.
Prayer is sharing our secrets with our friend.

Prayer is the knock on the door at midnight.
The feeling, even, that we can take God for granted.
The assurance that we can knock on that door over and over
and that we will surely find something –
Maybe not always what we want,
but maybe something even more precious than that.

It is having faith that, even when our requests aren’t answered
that God will still be at the other side of the door, ready to hear.

Elie Wiesel is a writer who was in Auschwitz
when he was around 15 years old.
He wrote a book called The Trial of God.
In the book he remembers that in the camp,
the older prisoners created a rabbinic court of law
and the purpose was to indict God.

They had been faithful, they had prayed, they had done
what God required and still they suffered unimaginable pain and anguish.

The trial lasted several nights.
Witnesses were heard, evidence was gathered,
and a unanimous verdict was reached:
They declared God guilty of crimes against creation and humanity.

Then after a long silence, the Rabbi there looked at the sky
and said 'It's time for evening prayers,'
and they recited the evening service as they had done every night.

We pray because it is time to pray.
We pray because it is proscribed for us in the worship.
We pray prayers that we have memorized, that we read
that we make up in our heads and that we call out in a time of crisis.
We pray sometimes because there is nothing left to do.
We pray because even though we don’t always feel it,
we know that God loves us.

Mostly, we pray to maintain the relationship with God
even if, like Elie Wiesel, we may angry and ambivalent about God.
We pray to bridge that gap between
the every day world and the mystery.

We pray to bring the concerns of our
friends, our neighbors, and our world into the presence of God
And to bring the presence of God
into the concerns of our friends, our neighbors and our world

At the end of his instruction, Jesus says:
“how much more will your heavenly Father
give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?”
We are not promised all that we will ever request.
in the end, we are promised the Spirit of God.
We are promised that t when we knock on that door at midnight,
that God will be there on the other side
and that God will answer.

Martha & Mary

Luke 10: 38-42
July 21, 2013
I had an aunt Marion who was my great aunt
In her house, everything was covered in plastic.
The couch the rug, the toaster, the blender. Everything.

She had her clothing organized in her drawers into
different colors: blues and pinks and greens.
And each drawer was covered in a piece of plastic
with a color coordinated tissue paper and flower on top of that.
We knew this because she would take all of her guests
on the “Tour of the Drawers”,
And she didn’t remember who had seen it and who hadn’t
so we would end up taking it over and over.

Whenever we came over for dinner on a Sunday,
she would prepare food all day
and as you were sitting there eating, almost done
she would take your plate right out from under you
before you were even finished.
No seconds at her house, she had to do the dishes.
And she never sat with us and ate.
She bouncing up and down working in the kitchen.
To her death, I don’t think anyone in my family
ever had a full conversation with her.

Whenever I hear this story about Martha
I always think of my Aunt Marion.

Now, maybe my aunt Marion had some serious issues
that should have been diagnosed by a therapist.
But there’s not quite that much wrong with Martha


Mary & Martha, Maud Sumner

In Martha’s time, women were not expected
to sit and talk to guests.
They were expected to be up and doing stuff,
making the meal, getting what guests needed, cleaning up
so that the men could take the time and sit and talk.

Martha is a do-er.
Maybe you know someone like her.
Maybe you are someone like her.
Maybe it’s not kitchen work, but maybe it’s other
types of work that you spend your time doing.

We live in a world of tasks
These days we have automatic washing machines
and dishwashers and we buy our food
from a store instead of farming it, or raising the animals.
And all these automations were supposed to give us more
leisure time, but we have filled the space of those tasks
with other tasks.

I know of no better feeling than scratching
something off of my “to do” list.
Deep inside me, I kind of feel if I don’t do one thing,
that the whole infrastructure will crumble on me.
I think we have this notion, that what we do
or have accomplished is what defines us.
We are what we do. We have to keep going to have any worth.
There is some of Martha in most of us.

 
And then we have Mary, who has decided to
spend Jesus visit just sitting at his feet listening to him
instead of picking up dishes he’s not done with
or bringing out fruit plates, or putting plastic covers on things.
And Martha gets huffy about it.
Why isn’t she doing all the stuff that I’m doing?
But Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen the better way.
And I thank Jesus for reminding Martha and us
that sitting and listening is an important part of hospitality.
That giving people our full, uninturrupted presence is as
good as an extravagant meal or a spotlessly clean house.

And I thank Jesus for reminding us that we need to
understand why we do what we do,
so listening to God, and learning about God,
and praying and being with God are things
we shouldn’t forget to spend time on.

And I especially thank Jesus, for encouraging women
to sit and learn and pray and hear and talk to Jesus
rather than just be relegated to just doing the church housework.
It has taken us a couple of mellinium to catch on
but thank you, Jesus for pointing us in that direction.

But we need to beware of a couple of things:
This short story has often been used to pit one
kind of work in the church against another.
People have used it to say that prayer and study
and worship are a better calling or more worthy
than works of service or doing the day to day
necessities of running church.
And I don’t think that was Jesus point.
We don’t believe that being on the facilities committee
or feeding people are better than prayer and worship
and we don’t think that study and learning are better
than volunteering in the food pantry
or making a casserole for someone.
They both go hand in hand.

And we also need to watch
one other very important thing:
That we don’t make Mary’s choice into
yet another task on our long to do list.
That we don’t make prayer and learning and being with Jesus
another drudgery that we need to do
in order to make ourselves worthy.
I don’t think Jesus was adding more to our to do list.

Because I think that in choosing the better part, 
it was less what Mary was doing, and more as how she was doing it.
 
While Martha was running around, anxious
and trying to impress Jesus,
Mary knew that sitting at Jesus feet was enough.
She was enough, just being there listening
without preparing a full dinner, without setting the table
without making the house spic and span for him
without completing a giant to-do list.
She was enough.

Whatever we do in life, in the church,
we always remember that God doesn’t love us for what we do.
I will stretch that and say that God doesn’t love us who we are.
God loves us because that’s the way that God is.

The preacher Fred Craddock said that if
Jesus was asked which we should follow,
the service oriented Martha
OR the contemplative Mary,
Jesus would have said, “Yes”.

Mary and Martha are sisters.
Jesus visits the both of them.
They are part of one household,
they are two parts of the full Christian experience and life.

Sitting at Jesus feet, and hearing the word of God --
the word that says that we are loved
not for what we do, but for who we are – That is what truly fills us up.
That is what inspires us to continue to do God's work in the world.

What Must I Do?

Luke 10:25-37 
July 14, 2013

A few years ago,
there was a man waiting in the subway in New York
and he had a seizure and fell onto train well
and onto one of the tracks right when a train was coming.


Wesley Autrey, "Subway Samaritan"

Another man was coming home from work and
standing there with his two daughters when he saw it.
And he jumped onto the tracks,
right in front of the oncoming train.
He pushed the man with the seizure into the center and
covered him with his body and the train
went over the both of them.
It came so close, it left grease marks on the man’s knit cap.

The man who helped was named Wesley Autrey and
sometimes in the news they called him the Subway Superman
but mostly they referred to him as a Good Samaritan
Someone who goes out of their way to help out a stranger.

This parable has been called the Good Samaritan
And most often the lesson we hear from it is
Be like the one who didn’t worry about his own schedule, or safety.
Help a stranger in need.
And that is a great lesson to learn any day.
But, of course, it’s a parable of Jesus.
and as we will learn in our summer classes on the parables of Jesus,
there’s always more going on with Jesus parables.

The reason Jesus tells this parable
is that a lawyer asked him a question
”What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?”

Now lawyers then weren’t excatly like we know them today,
lawyers knew Jewish religious law.
So the lawyer asked Jesus a question he already knew
the answer to. It says he asked it in order to test Jesus.
So Jesus knows it, so he says,
“You know what the law says.
Love God and love your neighbor as your self.”

So the man asks a follow-up question –
It’s always the follow-up quesitons that are trickiest.
He asks “Who is my neighbor?”
If I’m supposed to love my neighbor, then who is my neighbor?
It says that he asked this question in order to justify himself.
That means he asked it in order to put himself in the right.
In order that he could say, “look, I’m doing everything I should be.”
I love God, naturally.  And I’m loving my neighbor.
Because my nieghbor is whoever I already love, right?

Of course, Instead of any easy answer, Jesus tells a story.
But when you’re looking at a story of Jesus,
 it’s always important to remember what question
was asked that elicited this story: “How do I gain eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbor?”

So the story:
A traveller is on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.
This was a notoriously dangerous road.
Someone was bound to get robbed and beaten up on this road.
And this guy does. He’s left on the side of the road half dead.
Then Jesus says that a Levite and a Priest go by.
Not just anybody, these are trusted people,
people everyone would have looked up to.
These would have been the expected “neighbors”
to the lawyer who asked the question.
But we’re told that they both cross to the other side.
As many people do.

Now everyone knows, since the beginning of time,
that all stories happen in threes.
So there would be one more.
And the next to come up that road would be the hero of the story.
But that third man was a Samaritan.
Jesus was Jewish, all of the people listening were Jewish,
The lawyer was Jewish and
Jewish people and Samaritans had a long history of
racial and religious hostility toward one another.

Remember in the Gospel reading just a couple of weeks ago,
Jesus and his disciples were going through Samaria.
And the Samaritan people rejected them?
And the disciples were quick to ask if Jesus wanted
them to call down fire from heaven and blow the Samaritans up.
That’s what most people around Jesus felt they deserved.

And yet in Jesus story, it’s the Samaritan who is moved with pity.
The Samaritan helps the man, takes care of him and saves his life.
And, guessing or knowing the lawyer’s dislike of Samaritans,
Jesus asks him an uncomfortable question: “So was a neigbor here?”
And the lawyer couldn’t even bear to say the word “Samaritan.”
He says, “The one who showed mercy”

Now, this is clever in itself
many of you have probably heard this explanation before
and it’s still pretty clever.
but Jesus has done something extra clever in this story
besides catching the lawyer in is own self-righteousness.

Think about it.
Jesus could have easily made the Samaritan the person that
was beaten up and left on the road for dead
and then ask the question, “who should we show love and mercy to?”
That is often the position that we put people who
are oppressed, hated or outcast if we’re trying to include them.
We make them people that we need to help because
they’re so helpless or hopeless and they’ll never get anywhere
without our good guidance like ours.
They just need to learn to be like us. Our way.
Poor, poor Samaritan.

No, Jesus takes the Samaritan, the hated one,
and puts him in the role of the one who helps
The one who is to be admired, emulated, imitated, learned from.
Jesus tells the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.”
Go and be like him. Find your eternal life in that whole arrangement.
 
Remember, the original quesiton was
“what must I do to gain eternal life?”
In other words, in order to gain your life,
don’t look to the priest and the Levite.
The priest and the Levite represent the temple sacrifice
the institutionalized, religious practice of the Jewish people
Subtly, Jesus is saying that if this man wants to find his salvation,
he shouldn’t be looking to the regular systems of religion.
Where should he be looking?
To the outsider, the one who is dispised, outcast,
pushed aside. Not just to look and to help and have pity on,
but to emulate, to learn from, partner with.
That’s the new system God has ordained.

In other words, for the people of God,
Salvation is found by looking outside the people of God.
All this with a simple story about a man who gets beat up.
Now we might say to ourselves as we read this.
“I don’t hate any race like the Samaritans.
I don’t have prejudices, not like that.
We don’t really have the same hang ups today as they had then.”
And thankfully, we have come a long way even in the last 50 years.
The people of God don’t have one periah
that Jesus can depend on using as an example for us in a parable..
Thankfully it’s not socially acceptable to hate any more

But, of course, we’re not completely different.
Today, our dislike and distrust isn’t universal.
We don’t look down collectively on one group or another.
But we do look down and despise others just the same.
Take the Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman case.
Where do you fall on that?
is it the Trayvon Martins you judge?
Is it the George Zimmermans?
Is the opportunistic community leaders who cry racism every time?
Is the gun right activists who cry self-defense whenver it suits them?
Who do you roll your eyes at?
Who do you not want to consider your neighbor?
Who do you not expect anything good out of?
That is our personal Samaritan.

We all have people or groups
that we struggle to consider a neighbor.
That we find it hard to see the good in, to see as a possible example.
Jesus asks us to reach across that barrier.
To go where we don’t want to go.
And not just with help and hand-outs, not just to teach them the right way– but with honor for them.
We are asked to go as far as to learn from those we struggle with.
To realize that the very presence of God, can come from anywhere.

Like the one from Jerusalem to Jericho.
Jesus road is a tough road.
There are a lot of dangers, a lot of places for us to fall.
There are a lot opportunities for us to cross to the other side
when we should be stopping to help.
A lot of divides we will never be able to cross.
And when we fall on that road,
we know it is only the grace of God --
the one who always shows us mercy --
that we depend on for our eternal life.

Going Out Unprepared

Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20
July 7, 2013

You ever have that dream where you’re in a play
but you don’t know the script?
Or you’re taking a final and you have no memory of taking the class.
It’s a horrible dream. It’s a nighmare even.
We don’t like being un prepared, not knowing what to do.

I did improvisational acting when I was younger for many years.
There are classes for it, you don't just start out improvising.
But the classes were mostly about not being prepared.
the main objective of improvisation classes are to unlearn the need to always being prepared.
Keith Johnstone – one of the originators of imrpovisational theater
has some favorite sayings:
Don’t think ahead. Dare to be dull.  and Don’t be afraid to fail.
It’s about making a deicision in a split second,
trusting it and commiting to it and not worrying if it’s wrong.
It takes a lot of work to do this.

Sometimes Church seems sometimes to be the opposite of improvistation.
We have liturgy that’s been around for thousands of years.
Some people would never think of going off the book for anything.
We have processes and constitutions and old buildings.
it takes us sometimes years to makde decisions.
Pastors study for four years, we teach our children, we teach ourselves.
We think ahead on everything, sometimes 50 or 100 years ahead.
We are prepared.
Sometimes seems like we couldn’t possibly
go out there and do the work of God without being prepared.

But here is Jesus. 
He sends out 70 apostles with nothing. He says,
"Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals."
They have nothing.  No long seminary education,
probably no education at all. They don’t know the bible front to back.
They have no robes or buildings or constitutions.
They don’t have a list of plans or instructions for every occasion.
But still Jesus sends them out. Jesus trusts them.
Jesus knows that something will happen.
They must feel like we do in that dream.
Like lambs in the midst of wolves.

From this we know:
That Jesus sends people out without years of preparation.
Jesus doesn’t’ send out churches, Jesus sends out people.
And he even sends them out with a plan to fail.
“If no one welcomes you, wipe your feet off and move on
don’t get stuck on it.”

Jesus lets us know that we don’t need anything
more than our mouths and hands and feet
to go out and do what needs to be done.
To spread the love of God, to work for justice.
All we need to do God’s work is just ourselves.

About six years ago in Austin, Texas
a man named David Morales was beaten to death.
The car he was a passenger in hit a young child
He got out to check on the child and a few angry people beat the man.
The child survived with a few injuries, but the man was killed.
David happened to be latino and the people that killed him
happened to be African American.
There was a lot of tensions between the two groups previous to this.

Everyone tried to make a huge racial war out of it,
the media, the police, even pastors were
exaggerating numbers, trying to bring long histories of struggles up.
It seemed inevitable that something bad would happen.
It was tense to say the least.
 
But two days after, the murder
In the height of all the tension when it could go one way or another.
David Morales family stood up, against the advice of their lawyers
without consulting anyone, without years of study, without publicists
and they talked to the media, the churches, the community leaders
and said to everyone, “As the murdered man’s family,
we are here to tell you, this was not a racial crime.”

“This was a terrible act of a few people
and not a war between two racial groups.”
They said that David Morales was a man of faith,
a generous man, a kind man who believed in forgiveness
and who would want forgiveness and not vengence for his death.
Everyone needed to let it go.
And everyone did.

With just the words of their mouths and their actions,
David’s family declared “Peace to this house!”.
and just like that there was peace.
They were’t trained or prepared. 
They didn’t have years of seminary education.
They knew what they needed to do
and they did the work of God.  And just like Jesus said.
Satan fell like a flash of lightning.

Now, we might never have
a profound opportunity like they did,
but don’t we all have arguments that we can diffuse?
Don’t we all have people who need to hear about God’s love.
Don’t we all have someone who needs to know we forgive them.
Can’t we show that the church and the people in it
can be kind and forgiving and generous.
Doesn’t peace need to be declared on someone’s house,
in their lives, in their hearts?

Jesus sends us out, just like he sent the 70 out.
We are actually at our best when we are unprepared
when we lose our defenses, our agendas,
our programs, our pre-concieved notions. 
When we come together, person to person and really listen to one another.
When we come to our neighbors with empty hands
and ask, “what do you think we should do now?”
When we bet our lives on the movement of the Spirit
When we trust the forces that are within us that God has given us
and say yes to the Spirit’s call.

Kieth Johnstone the Improvisation person said: 
Those who say “No” are rewarded by the safety they attain.
Those who say “Yes” are rewarded by the adventures they have.

We don’t need anything more than our mouths and hands and feet
to go out and do what needs to be done.
We can say YES to the adventure God has put in front of us.
Because our trust is not in our own preparation or abilities.
Our trust is in God.

We'll Do It Later

Luke 9: 51-62 June 30, 2013



No pillows like this at Grandma's house.

“The son of man has no where to lay his head.”
“Let the dead bury their dead.”
“No one who puts his hand to the plow
and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
These are some of many quotes by Jesus that
your grandma never had needlepointed on a pillow.

Jesus is kind of cranky today. No explanation why really.
Maybe it was the Samarian’s rejection of him and the disciples,
Maybe it was the disciples suggestion
that they call down fire to consume the Samarians.
Maybe it was Jesus knowing that the he didn’t have a
long time for ministry and things weren‘t going well at all.

It’s clear that Jesus is kind of frustrated over people’s lack
of commitment to his message and to the coming kingdom of God.
I always thought that the roughest of Jesus’ quotes from this one
was “let the dead bury their dead”.That’s definitely not making the tag line or mission statement
of any churches.  I always thought that it was kind of rude
of Jesus not to be sympathetic with this man who’s
father had just died and was just about to go bury him.
That wouldn’t have taken that long, would it?

But I read that the phrase “go and bury my father”
has lost a little significance over time.
The man is saying that he would follow Jesus
but his main responsibility is to his family
His father isn’t dead yet.
But the man is saying he has to t to
take care of his father into his old age
until he passes away and then he has to bury him
and settle his estate and clean up any loose ends
and then he would be happy to follow Jesus.
He’ll follow - Just later. Much, much later.
The man is saying,”oooh. Jesus, I’d love to follow you
but not right now.”

I can understand Jesus frustration.
We’re always doing things like that. At least I am.
We’re always saying things like, “Oh we’d love to follow Jesus call
we’d love to be Jesus hands and feet and voice in this world
but we’ll do it later.
We say when we have more time,
when we have more money,
when we’ve retired,
when the kids are older,
when I feel better.
When I don’t have other things to do .

I understand about having free time,
and setting boundaries. Those things are important.
But I always seem to feel like there is some better time
in the future when I can do what I dream of doing for God
but you know what? That time never seems to come.
We would really love to answer Jesus call.
But life seems to get in the way.
And tomorrow becomes the next day, beomes never.

And churches are often no help with this
as a whole body of people we often react to God’s call in the same way.

There’s a kind of seminary rule that has been passed around that says,
“when you enter a new call, don’t change anything for five years.”
Oops.

 
But churches do kind of have that slow and cautious habit,
We keep saying we would do that “if only”
we could do this ministry or that ministry
we could respond to that inspiration or idea –
 “if only” –
“If only”  Whatever  - then we could do what God wants us to do
If only we had a bigger facility,
if only we had more money,
if only we had more children in Sunday School
If only we were in a better neighborhood, or a worse neighborhood.
If only we were better than what we are right now…
If only we were like that church over there
then we could do what God wants us to do.
(Funny thing is, that church over there is saying,
If only we were more like Gethsemane!)

Jesus, we’d love to follow you,
we’d love to chase after the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
but call us later.  When we have our act together. Later.

But when Jesus is so curt with this man and said,
“let the dead bury their dead:
Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is here now.
There is something happening now that can’t be put off,
we can’t wait until the perfect moment,
when we have whatever we think we need.
And doing whatever it is that we do in the way of Jesus,
is what brings us life here and now.
Let the people who spend their life making excuses live half a life.
Let the dead bury their dead.

And another thing to think about:
following Jesus is not something that
we need to put off until everything is taken care of.

Follwing Jesus is something that we do
while we’re taking care of everything.
It is the way we take care of everything.
We follow Jesus in the way that we conduct our lives,
run our congregation, take care of our debts, spend our money wisely,
the way that we welcome new people into the church.

It’s the way that we treat people at our place of work,
the way that we raise our children,
The way we take care of our parents
The way that we live life every day:
serving others, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek.
Loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Following Jesus is not just about doing programs or projects.
It is how we live our lives.

And the last, and most important thing
to think about is:  we can trust God.
Whenever the Spirit calls us
We can trust that God has given us everything we need
to do what God wants us to do.
We don’t have to look back and wonder.
because God won’t let us down.

So, when we hear that call
we don’t need to wait for that ideal time and place.
or until everything is taken care of.
We can follow Jesus where he asks us to go.
God will make the extra time in our lives,
God will provide what we need.
The Kingdom of God is now.

Let’s put our hand to the plow and keep facing forward.