The lectionary for this week can be found here.
For some reason this morning my mood is black. Perhaps black is not the right word. It is heavy, a stone in my breast. I needed to hear "Be Still my Soul" as I drove to work this morning. But instead the CD player kept shuffling through songs of loss and separation. Thank God I don't have to preach on this lesson. I wouldn't make it without crying.
I imagine the heavy stone of dread that weighed down Christ as he began that last journey toward Jerusalem. He had "set his face" the writer tells us. I know the feeling, of turning toward something you want to run from, of picking up leaden feet and walking toward insanity. This reading, more even than the traditional garden of Gethsemane account resounds with some deep core of torment and pain. I feel the weight of it. He alone understood the darkness and the dread. And he felt it. Something has changed. People can see it, they sense it, and they reject it and him. Perhaps because in him they now see mirrored all of their own darkness and fear. Their own dread.
When Jesus stops the disciples from calling down destruction on those poor people I hear despondency in his voice. He knows why they rejected him and he cannot blame them. Here are the seeds of a fully human savior who, even as he is obedient, wants nothing more than to turn and run.
As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." To another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."And then the second half of this reading turns the mirror about, this time I am not reflecting Christ but he is pointing at me. I am these people. I have said to God, over and over again. "I will, but first let me..." And God let me go. Why? I don't know. Because I am free I suppose, because God is patient, because the answer when it finally comes must be my own. I have at last said "Yes, I will go, please send me now!" But it took a very long time to reach that place and now I must wait again, because that is the way the Church works. It is indeed frightening to not say "but wait" to God.
If I were preaching on Sunday it would be on trust. We corporately answer God in the same way as the men and women Jesus called. We are being called to do work but we instead distract ourselves with finances and building maintenance, with committees and studies and reports. But those things must be done, must they not? And yet here is Christ, weary and heart-sore and out of patience with the distractions of the world. He says not, he calls us to simply do. To simply do, to simply follow Him, we must trust. We must learn to trust that the finances will work, that the building care will be done by those gifted with that ministry. We must trust our leaders instead of spending months on reports and committees. It is trust that is hardest at this place. Trust in each other, trust in our diocese, trust in God. We have been hurt, we have reasons not to trust. But Christ is radical, he calls us to trust despite our wounds. He calls us to trust in Him, in God, just as he did. Trust even in the darkness and the dread.
I can hear God saying "walk with me and be my priest." I have said "yes" a thousand times now, ecstatic and joyful. But I know God is also asking me to walk a more immediate path and that I can't see, or perhaps I do not want to see? I want to say yes, I am just not sure to what. What are you asking me to do Jesus? Do I stay, or do I go? If I go, I go with friends, to a safe harbor though it will be new and different and I will be just another refuge there. Or would you have me stay, like the demoniac, here among the fearful?
There is a stone in my chest today.
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