sermon, C8

1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21
Psalm 16
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62

            Have you ever seen a wild herd of horses? While grazing, they may seem to be merely a group of horses who all happened to stop at the same diner for lunch. While on the move, running across country, they look the picture of freedom: manes and tails flowing in the wind, hooves gliding across the earth. And yet, these horses follow a leader, one whose experience and strengths can guide the herd to safety, food, and water.

            Or consider flocks of birds. You know, those giant migrating flocks in the spring or fall of hundreds of starlings, moving with respect to the rules of the flock, forming an intimidating whole. They are also free, but also following.

(pause)

            In our readings today, we hear both about following and about being free. Elisha seeks to follow Elijah, various people try to follow Jesus, and yet at the same time we hear Paul talk about freedom. So what is the connection between following and being free? Are not the two somewhat in disagreement with each other?

            John Denver has a song about following which has a line that says, “Follow me where I go, what I do and who I know. Make it part of you to be a part of me.” That sounds like a fairly solid definition of “to follow,” but where is the freedom?

            Most of our concepts about freedom are about individuality and the ability to make one’s own choices: school children are “free for the summer” and “freedom of speech” means you can say whatever you want. Following, which tends to indicate submission, is usually not in the freedom definition.

            So let us turn to these conflicting readings. In First Kings, Elijah throws his mantle over Elisha, calling him to follow. Elisha requests to say goodbye, which he does, and then he “sets out and follows Elijah, and becomes his servant.” In the Gospel reading, we have two folks who ask Jesus if they can follow him. This… is a little different than the way things usually go. Usually, we see Christ doing the asking.

            Where do these people think that Jesus is going that they want so badly to follow him? We have just heard that he has his face so set toward Jerusalem that the folks in a Samaritan village wouldn’t receive him. WHERE did they think he was going?

            For that matter, where do WE think he’s going? We often use the phrase “following Christ.” It’s something we strive for, something we work for.

            These folks were asking to follow him when his face was set toward Jerusalem, toward the cross. They probably did not realize that this was the destination they were trying to reach by joining Jesus. But then, this is often how God works: through revealing God’s self in the exact opposite way that we expect. It is what Martin Luther called the “revelation of God under the appearance of the opposite.” Jesus is headed to the cross where God will be most ultimately revealed in that way which is absolutely contrary to expectations.

            I do not think that pain, humiliation, and death, were what those people in our reading were intending to ask for. It’s certainly not what I usually have in mind when I think about following Christ. Social justice, beautiful liturgies, Christian community, a moral code to live by… these are the things that are associated with following Christ. In other times, in other places, following Christ really has been associated with humiliation, pain, torture, and death. This even happens today. This past November marked the twentieth anniversary of the brutal killings of eight Christian leaders at the University of Central America in San Salvador. But, to our ears those situations seem foreign, martyrs are heroes of the church, but more like legends than actual people. And in the Baltimore metro area, there is perhaps less of a chance of becoming martyrs, at least in the physical sense. Where is it that these people in our Gospel think Christ was headed?

            Yet, even so, even though we cannot comprehend the path Jesus was taking that day, nor the paths Christ leads us on today, we use following language and we do aim to follow Christ. And we use language of freedom, of Christ setting us free from the Law, free from the old, given new life in resurrection.

So we strive to simultaneously follow and be free, but… we are continuously held back from both by our captivity to the places where we lay our heads. To our own ideas of what the path should be: who should be consumed by fire, who SHOULDN’T receive heartbreak, illness, disease, and disaster. We make following into our own ideas, taking our freedom instead of living in the freedom that comes from Christ, from that very path to the cross, to death, that we shy away from. Without the cross, there can be no resurrection. Yet we are held back by our own foxholes, nests, and homes. These things which, Jesus points out to us, he doesn’t have. The Son of Man has nowhere to put his head. Well, neither do ten thousand people in Maryland, or 650 thousand in the United States total. What might Jesus have said if the man was not asking to bury his father, but instead had said, “well, just let me finish building my house so the poor can live in it while I’m gone?”

But that’s not the kind of question we ask when we go to follow Christ. Because we name the things we do as part of the following. We decide what must be done to be considered a follower. Yet Christ makes none of these demands. Even Paul’s list of works of the flesh doesn’t come partnered with a list of “things you must do.” The fruits of the Spirit are, like freedom, results of the following. They are fruits. Fruits come after the planting, and are not themselves the planting.

The planting is the Word of God, proclaimed in the Gospel, broken and shared in the Lord’s Supper, poured out in the waters of baptism, as will happen to Lucy today. This is the planting, the promise of the coming of the fruits, the promise of the one who is revealed in the most unexpected ways, the most opposite, contrary ways. The planting, which happens to each of us, regardless of what we do or say. Because it is what God does, it is what the Spirit does. And the fruit flows from that.

And so we follow and are made free. We are made free and follow. To quote Luther in his treatise “Concerning Christian Liberty,” “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.”

Remember the horses and the birds? Perhaps the most free creatures of all, one on land and one on air, and subject to none. Yet also subject each to each other, to the common flight, to the common path.

“If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” If we are made free in Christ, let us also be followers in Christ. These two are not opposites, but compliments. We are free to follow Christ, who gives us that freedom. Free from the “have to’s” to enter into the fruits of the planting. “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” Amen.