July 1, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
[Book of Common Prayer lectionary:]
1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21 Elijah's mantle on Elisha cast
Psalm 16 Conserva me, Domine
Galatians 5:1, 13-25 You were called to freedom
Luke 9:51-62 To another he said, "Follow me."
[Revised Common Lectionary:]
2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 He picked up the mantle of Elijah that had
fallen from him
Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20 Voce mea ad Dominum
(or: BCP as above; ibid., Epistle & Gospel)
Another Sea
Tú has venido a la orilla,
You have come to the lakeside,
Señor, me has mirado a los ojos,
Lord, you have looked into my eyes,
Tú sabes bien lo que tengo,
You know very well what I have,
Tú necesitas mis manos,
You need my hands,
Tú pescador de otros lagos,
You, Fisher of other lakes,
Jesus calls us, o'er the tumult
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We have sung both these songs a hundred times and shall sing them a hundred more: "Junto a Ti buscaré otro mar"--Together with you I'll seek another Sea." And: "As of old Saint Andrew heard it, by the Galilean lake, turned from home, and toil, and kindred, leaving all for his dear sake." Home. . . toil. . . kindred: at some point in our lives each of us has so met Jesus, and each of us has said to him where we met him on the lakeshore, "I will follow you wherever you go."
In his "The Quest for the Historical Jesus", Albert Schweitzer tells us luminously that "He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the lake-side He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow me', and sets us to the same task which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflictss, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery they shall learn in their own experience who He is."
We were all of us eager volunteers, as the one who met Jesus that day near the Samaritan village on his way up to Jerusalem. Following Jesus was, perhaps still is, the most enchanting option that life has ever offered us. We eagerly went to him with resolve, as in the gospel song: "Where he leads me I will follow", or perhaps we heard W.H. Auden's invitation, "He is the Way. Follow Him through the land of unlikeness, you will see rare beasts and have unique adventures." Or we prayed with Martin Luther King Jr., "Lead me, guide me, guide me along the way. For if you lead me, I cannot stray. Lord, let me walk this day with thee. Lead me, O Lord lead me." Or we sang with Martin, "Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand, lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me on." Our hymnals, like our young and loving hearts, were full of the promises that we would follow Jesus wherever he leads us.
We did not often stop to listen to Jesus' reply. We were, perhaps still are, too full of our promises and hopes to listen to his response. Jesus says, "Careful about your promises, for I am a Wild One, I'm for the open road and the open sky. Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, and even all the wild creatures have their dens and hideouts, but this Child of God is not domesticated, and my gospel is not house-broken. There's a Wildness in God's Mercy, like the Wildness of the Sea. Now are you sure you want to follow me after all?"
The hard fact of the matter is that most of us most of the time don't want to follow Jesus, we want Him to follow us. We would like him to be available to us as we go on our self-appointed rounds, to keep us safe, well fed and tucked into warm beds at night, protected on Our way, our travel maps and plans in our glove compartments, our credit cards at the ready. We will get our "post it" notes off the refrigerator door and see what it is we will do today, what we will buy, what we will sell, where we will go. We will pray the Itinerarium, that God may follow us faithfully, wherever we go, like Tobit's house dog in the Bible. My dear friend Malcolm Boyd's prayer puts it the way we prefer: "Are YOU running with ME, Jesus?" And of course Jesus always is trying to catch up with us, for we prefer being the mentor and the guide; "Captain is a good travelling name, and so I take it." We walk less risky perhaps than we did in our salad days, but even now we respond to his call, as did Augustine in his youth, "Yes, Lord, but not yet." Or "let me first tend to some housekeeping details, let me first go and bury my father."
We think this means Jesus had a prospective disciple, whose father had just died and he was perhaps on the way to the funeral when Jesus said, "Not important, come along with me." But there's no indication Jesus was interrupting a funeral here--although he was perfectly capable of it as we remember from the funeral of the widow of Nain's son, when he cancelled the undertaker's fee and sent the mourners home. Here Jesus is instead asking the lad to make a lifestyle decision, not merely to change an appointment for the afternoon. But the point of urgency is well taken, and repeated to us in all Bible stories of the Call.
When the patriarch of a family died, the son would take over as the arche, the ruler of the family, the new pater. So the system still needs loyalties, cogs for its wheels, gears for the grinding, if it is to survive, to stay on a roll. Jesus is questioning that allegiance to the system. Our own investment in the status quo keeps us, too, from the gospel adventure.
Oh, Martin of Memphis, don't you think you should go back to Atlanta, and take care of Coretta and the kids? Jon Daniels, get out of Alabama and get back to seminary in Cambridge! Dorothy Day, what are you doing on the Lower East Side with that bunch of bums? Get back to the Church of Our Saviour in Chicago, where you were baptized as a proper Episcopalian, and join the altar guild there! And Theresa, get out of Calcutta and get back to Yugoslavia and your family! (Oops, Sorry, Theresa, your homeland's not there anymore.) And Peter and Paul, have you lost your minds? Paul, you could have been the Grand Inquisitor, a proto Cardinal Ratzinger! and Peter, what about your fishing business? Capernaum Catfish could become a household word, like Starkist Tuna. What are you vagabonds up to?
Jesus says "Follow me." And wants his friends to commit themselves to the good news for the poor. The eager volunteer, the reluctant draftee, the apologetic procrastinator, the luxury loving lounge lizard: we are all alike called to a revolution in our lifestyle, a seismic shift in our attention, and "the Single Eye", in focus: straight ahead. "Don't look back,"Satchel Paige used to say, "Something may be gaining on you."
No one who puts hand to the plow and gazes longingly backward is fit to plant this field. The gospel plow has broken new earth, and opened new ground ahead of us. There's a muddy field ahead, but "there's another seasons's promise in the land."
Elisha was tilling his own field when Elijah came to him, and interrupted the impressive enterprise he had going--twelve yoke of oxen indeed--when the Man of God came to call and laid the mantle of the prophet across his shoulders. "Get into politics AND religion, combine prophecy and priesthood, set up some revolutionary governments, anoint rulers at home and abroad, train leadership." But Elisha has an agenda of home and toil and kindred, and says, "Let me first kiss them goodbye." And Elijah says, "That's your option! The Call didn't come from me! Go back again, for what have I done to you?"
God asked Elijah to "pull Elisha's coat". God has us preachers pulling coats in every field, every day. But the Call is to radical discipleship, not to a wise lateral career move (as Gore Vidal called it when Truman Capote overdosed on drugs, for it got him back into the headlines). And so Elisha acted with the Single Eye, and went to break new ground.
"Shall we bid fire from heaven to come down and consume them?"the disciples ask Jesus when they pass through the territory of the Samaritans--as alien to the Jersualem Temple as David Koresh and his Branch Davidians were to Janet Reno and the Justice Department, who called down fire from heaven upon the dissidents, in graphic apocalyptic images which still alarm us when we watch the regular reruns, safe and snug in our TV land as at a vestry meeting.
But Jesus turned and rebuked them: "No fire from heaven! No vengeance! We don't have time for recrimination. Keep your eye on the prize, Hold on! Hold on!" Or that other freedom song, "Got my hand on the gospel plow! I wouldn't take nothin' for my journey now! The only that we did wrong: stayed in the wilderness a day too long! Haven't been to heaven but I've been told Streets up there are paved with gold! Keep your eye on the prize! Hold on!"
For Peter and Paul, so many things tried to keep them from leaving their homes: the rules of Kosher tried to keep them from travel, from alien homes and clothes and food and language, and culture and custom and even their creed told them: Stay Home, Stay Safe, stay in Eretz Israel. But they chose to follow Jesus, not only geographically, but theologically and ethically, a voyage into outer space. Paul would write one day to the Galatians what the trip had meant: following Jesus meant freedom. For Freedom Christ has set us free. And following rules ain't following Jesus, for freedom is to be of service, and discipleship means love, not lust; joy, (not 'getting high'), peace (not 'a piece of the action'), patience (not anxiety), kindness (not cherishing grudges), goodness (not being quarrelsome), faithfulness (not jealousy), gentleness (not anger), self-control (not self-ish-ness). And so Paul gives lists of alternatives: each is a crossroads for decisions about the Call. The consumer mentality of our society--drummed into us with endless advertising--means that our youth can sing advertising jingles about owning, eating, or wearing, but cannot sing the Our Father or the Creed, and certainly not "Solidarity Forever" or "The Internationale".
"When the days drew near for Jesus to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem." One day a generation ago in Chicago I saw on the West Side a beaten up old VW Van, painted bright blue, and emblazoned with the hand-lettered destination, "Heaven or Bust!" Its passengers were bearded and bra-less beatniks, barging heir way to glory. Jesus People, they called themselves. They had the kind of resolution that Jesus had when humphrey-bogarting his way through the Samaritan villages, which would not, on good ideological grounds or sure sectarian principles, show him hospitality. A different race, a different church, a different way of worship. Jesus didn't let the differences keep him from trying--and sent out disciples AHEAD of him. A vital point. He did not call them to FOLLOW, but sent them to LEAD. Sometimes to follow Jesus means to be OUT FRONT.
The ecumenical organization of religious people called Witness for Peace (in Spanish, Acción Permanente por la Paz) in the days of the Reagan War against Nicaragua in the 1980's, sent hundreds of us into zones of conflict, to preach peace to them that were afar off, as well as to them that were nigh. It was a heady experience, and I remember that the possibility of being killed by a grenade while sailing down the Rio Escondido on a Contra-targeted river boat didn't frighten me at all, indeed was exhilarating, but I really got annoyed at the young peacenik who led us far from the board sidewalk in Bluefields and through a muddy field, which ruined my shoeshine. We may be ready for heroics, but what will more likely be asked of us is patience with inconvenience. Witness for Peace still beckons us to follow Jesus, to Colombia now. And Christian Peacemaker Teams invites us to Hebron in Palestine.
John tells us Jesus carried his own cross-bar for the cross, from the Gabbatha to the Golgotha, but the synoptics have another story, and for them the last person called to follow the historical Jesus was Simon of Cyrene, whom the cohort--the military unit assigned to crucify Jesus--met "coming out of the country". Jesus did not "call" Simon to follow him, but soldiers impressed him into discipleship, for Luke tells us the soldiers "seized him and laid the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus." Mark reminds us that we know him--he's "the father of Alexander and Rufus", so apparently he went on to choose discipleship, too, along with his sons. And a great many people followed this procession, which even today continues down the winding streets of old Jerusalem. The African-American poet, Countee Cullen, wrote of Simon's meeting with Jesus on the Via Dolorosa:
"He never spoke a word to me,
And yet He called my name;
He never gave a sign to me,
And yet I knew he came.
At first I said, 'I will not bear
His cross upon my back;
He only seeks to place it there
Because my skin is black."
But He was dying for a dream,
And He was very meek.
And in His eyes there shone a gleam
Men journey far to seek.
It was Himself my pity bought,
I did for Christ alone
What all of Rome could not have wrought
With bruise or lash or stone."
Pity--compassion--steadfast love--the movement in a mother's womb--is what
the poet identifies as our first movement towards the Crucified One. It is
our Call to follow him. At the Church of the Ascension in Chicago, there
is a magnificent crucifix on the front of the Church, which looks down upon
a busy street, "where cross the crowded ways of life", and under it is
carved the appeal from the Lamentations: "Is it nothing to you, all you who
pass by?". The rebuke expressed there, to all of us who so easily avert
our eyes from suffering, who avoid the crucifix for its hideous ikon of
capitalist punishment, still practiced in America today--that rebuke of
Jesus reverberates in every death chamber we have furnished with our
revenge. It reverberates in every land where the Pax Americana has imposed
terror and planted its crucifix on Terre Haute--"high ground", the high
ground of arrogance.
Can we follow Jesus into a future where following him will mean that the only crucifix we ever see again is his?
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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