But....

Luke 9:51-62

This morning I want to talk about…buts.  I want us to talk about the lure of buts, and how dangerous buts can be.  Finally, I hope we all come to the conclusion that we should kick all the buts out of church!

And I’m talking about all the buts…the dangerous buts, the risky buts, the angry buts, the shy buts, the big buts, the little buts.  And let’s not forget the annoying buts and even the friendly buts.

The buts I’m speaking of are of the grammatical type, of course; but…the preposition.  Y’all knew that though….

Anytime you see a comma and then the word but, trouble follows; because, you see, “but” entirely negates what was said before.  This became apparent to me during an exercise I did during a Church Leadership Camp.  We were paired up and given sealed envelopes.  One didn’t know what the other’s instruction was.  One person was told to come up with “church” issues or problems, preferably past experiences, and the other person would come up with some sort of solution or idea, but this person’s instructions stated to place a “, but” and then give an excuse as to why they couldn’t be a part of the solution.  It’s easier to demonstrate:

The topic is “Children”:  “I think children are a top priority of the church, but I can’t teach Sunday School because starting next week is ball season and we’ve decided to let them sleep in after playing well into Saturday night”.

The topic is “Fellowship”:  “I think fellowship time is important, but I can’t come to the picnic because my son has band camp that week.”

And this went on and on…until we finally started seeing just how deadly these buts are to a church!  I had kind of forgotten about that exercise…until seeing the but in today’s Gospel text.

Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem, and nothing would stop this journey; not an inhospitable Samaritan village, not the religious leaders, not the enthusiastic disciples who would call on raining fire.

Jesus encounters three people. 

The first person says to Jesus, initiating the desire to “follow you (Jesus) wherever you go.”  Jesus responds…”are you sure? Are you sure you want to follow me?  Really?  Do you understand what that might mean?  Do you see the whole picture here?  Wild animals and birds have homes, but I have no place to lay my head.”  In other words…are you willing to do without in order to follow me?  Really?  Are you willing to give up your comfort, your belongings, your home, your pride…to follow me?  Are you willing to humble yourself to homelessness and depend on the kindness of strangers to sleep, to eat, to clothe yourself….?

The second person is invited to follow Christ by himself when Jesus says to him, “Follow me”.  The response here:  “let me first go and bury my dad”.  For a long time I could just visualize this poor man’s father at the funeral home, and here Jesus is scolding him for wanting to take care of business instead of joining him.  I used to think Jesus was almost cold and calloused for responding “let the dead bury the dead”.  And my whole life I’ve heard this taken so out of context…and we can do all things through a verse taken out of context, but that’s a different conversation for a different time. 

I encountered this text every single time under the premise that the man’s father was dead; like, physically dead, instead of accounting for the cultural background, the original language, the context, etcetera.  It’s very possible that this man’s father isn’t dead…and actually, it’s likely.  It’s possible that the father was elderly, or sick; otherwise, near death.  It would be in keeping with Middle East culture that the so would stay home and take care of his parents in this condition.  If the son would have asked to leave home before the death of his father, by their tradition, he would have been wishing the father dead, or desiring the father dead. 

So to this request that you and I would completely rule in bounds, Jesus responds “let the dead bury the dead”.  What does that even mean?  Perhaps, it’s a hyperbole…hang on to that thought….

The third encounter comes and we don’t know who initiated it, but we do know the end result.  The man said “I will go”, but first I need to tell everyone bye.  Is that really so much to ask?  If I were about to hit the road and follow an evangelist, I would want to tell my parents and family where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing, so on and so forth.  This isn’t foreign to us, as any one of us would expect that from our loved ones just as they would expect it from us.  This didn’t sit well with Christ either.  His response, “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God”.  Harsh, but direct and seemingly “not loaded”. 

It’s easy to see the “, but” in these encounters.  However, Jesus message is also clear:  decisions. 

Every day we are faced with decisions; what to wear, what to cook for dinner….  Sometimes we make good, sound decisions, like wearing a suit to a wedding and having a well-balanced meal for dinner; sometimes we make poor decisions, like wearing pajama pants in public and eating cake for dinner (as convenient/fun/rebellious as those decisions are, they are indeed bad decisions).  Every day we make the choice to follow Christ, or to put priorities over our discipleship.  That actually plays into every decision we make when you think about it.

Now it’s rough to say you should follow Christ at the expense of neglecting a sick parent or disappearing; but, like I said earlier, I believe these to be hyperboles.  A hyperbole is something that is exaggerated to make a point…like clearing the plank out of your own eye before pointing out someone else’s sin, or amputating your own hand if it causes you to stumble. 

I think we are called to see that, more times than not, it’s the “good” that gets in the way of following Christ more than the “evil”.  The evil is easy to see (usually) and we are eager to rid our lives of it (usually)…but the “good”, we tend to want to hold on to that, sometimes because it’s comfortable, and sometimes because we don’t recognize the harm it’s doing to us. 

Lord, I will follow, but….

The people in our story were “stuck” for various reasons; the one that really resonated with me is the last one…well, it’s Christ’s response that made me pause.  You can’t plow a straight line looking behind you.  Think about that.  You’ve got the plow in one hand, control of your animal with the other, and you’ve got to stay focused on a fixed point directly in front of you to get that line good and straight; anything other than that and you’ve got crooked rows…crooked rows that will be crooked all season long, until the next planting season…crooked rows that would make you the brunt of every farming joke…so you had to get it right the first time.  You had to be focused, intentional, persistent, and in control.

Are we following Christ with that type of dedication, focus, intentionality, and persistence?  Are you?  Am I? 

So many things force us to plow crooked lines, as the story goes.  Maybe we are too busy looking behind us, as the analogy would lead us to believe.  Maybe we are hung up on the way we’ve always done things, or too focused on tradition to see what’s in front of us.  Maybe, somewhere along the way, we were led to believe that we – and when I say “we”, I mean the human race – we were led to believe that we have been given the supremacy over the understanding and translation of the Living Word of God.  Maybe we’re fixated on the legalism of things…policy, discipline, law….

Maybe it’s none of those things, and we just want the security to eat our dinner in our airconditioned houses and lay our heads on our down pillows and go to sleep every night.

So, today, we all need to take a good close look at our buts; and while we’re taking this close look at our buts, let’s go ahead and give those buts a good kick and let’s get them out of our lives for good!