Eyes on the Road Ahead

July 8, 2007 Sixth Sunday After Pentecost Sermon: Eyes on the Road Ahead Text: Luke 9: 51-62; Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20 The Ford Taurus with the "Driver Education Class" sticker on the trunk pulled out of the high school parking lot with three teenagers and one adult. The teenage girl behind the wheel never seemed to take her eyes off the left side-view mirror. The instructor grew concerned about this odd habit and finally asked, "Why do you keep looking in that mirror?" "My dad said if I can see the white line in my side-view mirror, then I'm going straight." The instructor rubbed his temple and said, "Look, Miss, with all due respect to your dad, you can't be a safe driver if you're always looking backwards. You've got to keep your eyes on the road ahead of you, okay?" This story reminds me of my attempt to teach my son to drive several years ago. He made me very nervous because he drove too fast and he just did not read the signs along the way. He's cruising down the streets of our small town with me saying "slow down" and before we know it, we're on a dangerous one-way street in front of the East Walpole post office. You ask me why I have all this gray hair? My husband, Bill, was much better with him in terms of patience and willingness to let him learn from his mistakes. Do you have "teaching to drive" story? Today's lesson from scripture sounds like a "teaching to drive" story. As you read the lesson you can almost feel the exasperation of Jesus toward his disciples. Jesus is at a turning point in his ministry; he's instructing his disciples, but they keep looking back. He wants his inner circle, those who are his closest friends and disciples, to understand how to keep their eyes on the road. From this world of ours where we teach youth to drive and help them to be good, responsible drivers, we can draw parallels for what it must have been like for Jesus to guide his disciples on the road toward following him and understanding how to make the right decisions along the way. He kept guiding them to anticipate, plan, read the signs and look to the future. Jesus asks people to follow him and gives some guidance as to how to keep our eyes on the road for us to have the life he intended. Jesus gives instructions about how we are to teach, preach, and faithful to winning the world to God's way of love, justice and peace. I'm convinced that Jesus wanted God's shalom, a wholeness, harmony, wisdom and prosperity to be upon all people. Faith should make a difference. Paul will say in his writing, "If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit." Being guided by the Spirit is the key phrase here because it is the road. I also see the road in other scripture. With regularity we read part of a Christian hymn at funerals, at weddings, or other celebrations of life: The love chapter hymn from I Corinthians 13 is a wonderful guide. We read, "love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth." (I Cor. 13: 4-6) Jesus shows us a way of life that expresses God's desire for God's infinite love to reign. He spells out the alternatives to his disciples by remembering what did not work well. Our Old Testament lesson says that when Elijah was confronted by fifty of the kings' soldiers, he called down fire from the heavens to consume them. But when Jesus was rejected by a Samaritan village, he would not let James and John call down the same fire. Jesus rebuked the disciples for suggesting they "call down fire from heaven" to consume the Samaritan's because they were not hospitable. He was trying to teach them what it meant to be guided by the Spirit. His ministry was not about destroying another, it was about redeeming them. It was about bringing reconciliation not destruction. We have the ministry of risk, of reconciliation, of commitment beyond the bounds of what would be expected. We may have legitimate needs but Jesus said to even reconsider those needs when responding with care for others. We may even find conflicts in decisions we have to make between what society wants of us and what our families want of us. Committing ourselves entirely to God's reign of justice and peace may mean not looking back at what we've left behind but looking forward to what Jesus would want of us. On the 3rd Wednesday morning of the month for about six years, I served the Association Church and Ministry Committee of the Barnstable Association on Cape Cod with nine other lay and clergy persons from our churches. Our responsibility for the 19 churches in the Association was to make important decisions for our churches about the ordination process, the in-care for ministry process, disciplinary action process, plus installations, periodic reviews, and support consultations. It was intense work but it is work that asked us to constantly question, "What would Jesus have us do?" As we opened with this passage for our preparation for a difficult meeting one morning, we focused on the question, "What does it mean to follow Jesus?" One of our lay members of the Committee said "This is a question we must each ask of ourselves." We are each responsible for asking ourselves how we are following. I liked his answer because at the heart of our faith this is a question for every person who carries the name "Christian." Is there sacrifice, is there risk, is there trust in the unknown? I keep reading that God is not in the business of keeping things tidy, nailed down, and predictable. Rather, God disturbs the status quo, breaks open the settled worlds, reverses the world's order, and raises the dead. As I begin my ministry among you, I have much to learn about what you have done here in Christ's name and what we may do together. It is a day for us to begin to ask with sincerity, "What does it mean to follow Jesus?" We ask because we know that being faithful, as individuals and as a congregation, means we take seriously the high commitment that the Christian life asks of us. It is through prayer and study that we are best equipped to keep our eyes on the road ahead. I hope we'll keep in mind some attributes of excellent congregations that have been named as important for healthy, growing congregations: 1) A vibrancy, an excitement about living the Christian life 2) entrepreneurial 3) reach beyond our comfort zone 4) regularly evaluate ourselves 5) have a clear yet changing sense of mission 6) willingness to break up old structures, committees or groups and reassemble. I'll end on the perfect number 7) unafraid of being vulnerable and of making mistakes. Keeping our eyes on the road, keeping our eyes on the call of Christ means asking with humility, "What does it mean to be a practicing Christian? What is our way of being a Christ-like congregation in the world?" In our asking, I pray we'll be determined to keep our eyes on the road for what new way will draw us closer to God's way. This should be our starting place in our preparation for answering questions about our future and what road we will travel on. It's not easy to enter the zone we call risk or new life. But, Christ calls us to be open and receptive to hear and discover something new in God's presence. To be in the presence of God is to be in the zone of risk, of change, reorientation and new birth. "You can't be a safe driver if you are always looking backwards," said the driver's education instructor. "You've got to keep your eyes on the road ahead, okay?" And, we say, Amen.