Scripture: Luke 9:51-62
Given on 6/30/2019
On October 14, 2012, I presume seeking to traverse the tightrope in between adventure and crazy, an Austrian skydiver named Felix Baumgartner climbed into a capsule tethered to a large helium balloon and began going up. And Baumgartner would not stop going up for around two and a half hours or some 24 miles above the surface of the earth. And having come to a resting place somewhere on the edge between the biosphere and space, when I would imagine you come close to beginning to test the power of gravity, as well, Baumgartner, dressed in at least what looked like full-on space suit stepped out onto the platform of the capsule, looked directed into the camera that was beaming a live video back to earth, gave a quick salute to the crew on the ground and stepped off the platform. And, as it turns out, even 24 miles above the earth, gravity still works. It works really, really well and in no time Baumgartner was making a descent much quicker than the trip up had taken. To add some drama to the whole episode, some 35 seconds into the descent Baumgartner became stuck in a spin that if you watch the video of it, it is the craziest thing you have ever seen as the curved horizon of the earth below him begins spinning like a really fast top that one of my kids might play with. Mercifully, after a minute and a half of spinning like that he regained control of himself and continued on his way down. When it was all said and done, during free fall, Baumgartner topped out at 843 miles an hour or 76 miles an hour faster than the speed of sound. The entirety of the trip back to terra firma taking only 9 minutes and 8 seconds. And beyond studying the kind of brain that would drive the sheer lunacy required for an otherwise normal human being to step out of a capsule 24 miles above the earth, there was actual research being done during the jump. As it turns out, absent someone trying it, there was really no way for scientists to know what happens to the human body when it breaks the speed of sound. Moreover, at the dawn of commercial space travel, in which someday soon we will all be able to be 24 miles above the earth, though, and I mean this sincerely, y’all can go first, sitting on the cusp of this moment of potential new travel, there really is a need to know the feasibility and what is required to do what they call a “high-altitude bailout” which is exactly what it sounds like it is. In his reentry and landing, Baumgartner successfully piloted the highest manned balloon flight, the highest altitude jump, and the fastest speed achieved by a human being without the assistance of an engine of any kind. And, just in case you’re curious, Baumgartner’s record stood for all of 2 years and 12 days when an executive from Google did the same kind of jump from 26 miles up showing there truly is no limitation for how far the human spirit will test the tension on the tightrope line that stretches between adventure and crazy. But considering all this, more than the fall itself, I am struck by a singular instance in the midst of the whole day. It is a moment that comes right after Baumgartner offers his salute to those watching back on the ground. It is a moment in which, surely to goodness, there must have been some second thoughts that enveloped his mind. It is a moment in which he is staring down at the earth and it’s curvature is bending in either direction into space and he is breathing canned air in a spacesuit. There must have come a brief second in which he had to decide to step off and never look back. I have thought a lot of that about that brief pause this week and the experience of letting go of everything as he stepped off and began to be pulled back to the ground. It is something of the experience that Jesus must have had in the passage that we have for this morning.
The reading from the gospel for this morning comes at the end of a series of stories which would solidify Jesus as the Messiah in the eyes of some, a rebellious political revolutionary in the eyes of others, and a direct challenge to the authority held by the religious leaders of his day by scribes and pharisees alike. In the time prior to Luke’s account this morning, we have seen Jesus heal the sick, feed the 5,000 (not including women and children), we have seen him cross the seemingly unchallengeable boundaries between Rome and Judea, between Judea and Samaria, between wealth and poverty, between men and women and the gendered norms that were the order of the day. We have seen Peter call him the chosen one of God and we have seen him forgive the sins of many as only a child of the Most High can do, we have seen him transfigured into a figure who was dazzling white and standing with the great prophets of Israel and then, as if out of nowhere, the story grinds to a screeching halt and we are told that, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, [Jesus] set his face to go to Jerusalem.” And while this seems a curious line in the midst of a larger story, perhaps a geographic marker more than anything else, it is really here on which the whole of the gospel hinges, for this is the moment. This is the moment in which all the prophecies of the past of one rising up out of their midst to restore the Davidic royal line, to restore the Jewish nation, to save the people from themselves, when all that comes together. This is the moment that all the words that Jesus has spoken reach their full power and truth. This is the moment that all of Jesus’s healings and recovery of sight to the blind and making the lame to walk and healing the leper and raising the centurion’s servant from the dead and bringing the widow’s son back to life, all of it leads to, points to this one singular moment in time. Because apart from turning his face towards Jerusalem, Jesus is just another in a line of the great prophets of Israel and there were always a lot of those meandering the Judean countryside. Apart from turning his face towards Jerusalem, Jesus is just a great healer and there were others of those who moved from village to village. Apart from turning his face towards Jerusalem, Jesus is just a leader of a band of ragtag radicals, fishermen, and tax collectors. Apart from turning his face towards Jerusalem, the Christ story, the gospel, is woefully incomplete. For it is in that turning of his face towards that he chooses to be the Christ for the whole of the world, to leave behind all that he had known and to place his full awareness and trust and faith in what will come. It is in that turn that Jesus forever decides to turn his back on the ways of the world and embrace the call to be offered up for all the world. And while there is no indication that there was a pause, a brief respite, a spare thought given to the life he could have had living comfortably ensconced in the trappings of the old order of the world, one has to think that somewhere in the back of his mind, that sort of a temptation arose again. Just like Felix Baumgartner standing on the platform and looking down into the oblivion of the ground below and wondering if this is really what he wants to do with his time on earth, the story tells us that, as if out of nowhere, Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem and the life and death and new life that he will now experience. The agony and the glory that awaits him as he fulfills a role that only he can.
And we all know, we know that this is no easy thing with which he is wrestling. It is not easy to let go of one’s security, of every crutch and handrail and comfort. To reach the end of the rope in one’s life only to be called to let go of it and trust that God will catch you. And so it is that Jesus has three encounters in a row of persons who either feel the call to follow Jesus or are called by Jesus himself. In the first, a person arises out of nowhere and pledges to follow Jesus wherever he goes. And surely we have all been in that place before. Filled with the spirit, filled with a faith that feels as if it is teeming with life and care and concern for others and, in that faith, we declare that we will follow Jesus wherever he calls us to go and then in our minds, in our souls we are reminded that those who truly wish to follow Jesus must forego the comforts of a normal life in which they possess the safety and security of a permanent home. In which they will forever only ever be a traveler who is passing through this life. Having been born in the spirit and destined to return to the spirit and only ever here in a temporary capacity. The great southern writer Flanery O’Connor captured this reality when using the Gospel of John she quipped, “You shall know the truth and the truth will make you strange.” In our efforts to follow Jesus we must accept that we will always feel some degree of dis-ease in this life, a restlessness that only ever subsides when we find our true rest in God. Jesus next encounters a person and seeing something in him that maybe he didn’t even see in himself, he calls the traveler to follow him. And again, this must feel somewhat familiar to each of us. The call of Jesus rarely arises at a convenient time. It rarely takes into account our plans for our day, our time, our life and so, for this man, his immediate response, his knee-jerk reaction is to ask for time to bury his father. And in this case, the English translation really can’t capture what the Greek is saying. He isn’t asking to be able to go to his dad’s funeral for their is no indication that his father is even dead but rather, as a devout Jewish child, he well knows that it is his solemn duty to actually be the one to bury his dad, to get all of his father’s affairs in order and so what he is asking is permission to wait until a time more convenient for him. But, we know, the call to follow Jesus is the call to forego the concern that one has for one’s parents, one’s children, one’s family in an effort rather to experience the kinship of each one that you meet. From the earliest history of the church, members would use familial expressions towards one another so faithfully that those on the outside looking in believed Christianity to be an incestuous cult. So it is, that the call to follow Jesus is a call to feel a deep and abiding compassion for each person you meet, each person you see on tv or read about in a newspaper or learn about online for just as Jesus came not to judge the world but to save the whole of it, so, is the call to follow Jesus one that seeks to address the needs of all people and not just a select few.
Finally Jesus meets a third man who comes fully believing that he is ready to follow Jesus wherever he goes and needs only to say goodbye to those he will be leaving at home and of all the requests that Jesus gets, this one seems the most reasonable. We have no idea if this man is married, has children, has grandchildren, nieces, cousins. We only know that he wants to make sure that they know where he is and where he is going and surely we can all understand that. And yet. And yet, in the call to the original disciples was immediate and instant and required that they leave their nets and their boats and go wherever Jesus went, leaving behind any connections to the past that they had. So, too, does the call to follow Jesus arise in our lives. And that call may come in the form of a momentous alteration to one’s life that seems impossible apart from faith, but, more often the call to follow Jesus is the call to be present and aware of the needs of the world in this moment and this one and this one. It is to ask 1,000 times a day how can I be the hands and feet of Christ in this world. It is to reach out to the one in your midst who doesn’t think anyone cares, who doesn’t believe that the light shines in the darkness and that the darkness can never overcome it, who doesn’t believe that hope can emerge from despair, and peace from turmoil and love from hate. It is to be present to the opportunities that the spirit places in your path each moment and never turn back towards the old and broken order of the world. It is in this constant call that we are blessed to be a blessing in the world.
You know, what I like the most about this story Luke is the incomplete nature of it. We don’t know what the final results are for any of the people who encounter Jesus as he is heading towards Jerusalem and the pinnacle of a life lived in faith. We don’t know if the first gentleman was unaffected by Jesus’s warning that he would forever and always be homeless in the world, a nomad passing through on the way back to his true home. We don’t know if the second man determined that the call to follow Jesus was the call to have faith that God would provide what each one in his family needed with or without him. We don’t know if the third one simply walked away from every connection he had to the past that he might live into a new future in which all persons the he encountered were brothers and sisters on the journey with him. We are left to draw our own conclusions. But this I am certain, for us, the call to follow Jesus continues to scream out from the light years, the movement of the spirit is still wild and chaotic, and in the midst of this, we are forever and always grounded in the God of our being and God is not done with us. Like clay in the hands of a skilled potter, God is not done reshaping us. God is not done burning away the dross that we might see the gold that is at the core of our being. God is not done chasing away the darkness that shrouds our spirits with the light of life, a new life, that is made new each moment in Christ Jesus. Sisters and brothers, I am firmly convinced that in our living each moment is a chance for us to stare out into eternity and declare I believe, I trust, let’s go and then step off the platform in faith grounding the entirety of your life in the inexorable truth that God will catch you and there is nothing in heaven or on earth to fear. So let’s you and I together, arm-in-arm, step off into forever and find out the kinds of adventures that God has in store for us. Glory be in the highest to the God of the adventure and on earth, peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, amen.
Image taken from: http://www.velocityrigs.com/about/articles/looking-back-five-years-after-red-bull-stratos/