I went to high school in Austin, Texas, one of the country music capitals of the world. Nowadays it’s edgy and indie-rock oriented, but back in the late 70’s, Austin was full of hard-core country music. I went to high school with boys who dressed in hand-tooled leather belts with big turquoise buckles and their names on the back, so if you happened to forget who you were talking to, you could just walk around back and take a look to remind yourself. While you were back there, you might (or might not) take note of the fact that he had a round, worn circular spot on his right back pocket where his chewing tobacco always rested when not in use. (If you happened to walk into class behind one of those boys with a worn circle on his back pocket, and he was carrying a paper cup, you knew to stay away from that thing.)
We went to high school dances and danced to the same stuff everyone else was dancing to in the late 70’s – Saturday Night Fever and the soundtrack from Grease and “Crocodile Rock” and “Stairway to Heaven,” (what’s a bustle in your hedgerow, anyway?) – but we had other stuff too. If you went to high school in Austin in the late 70’s, you had to know how to two-step, and polka, and waltz, to hard-core classic country and western songs. And the dance floor would really fill up when they put on the Cotton-Eyed Joe, with everybody linking arms and doing the original line dance, and periodically shouting out a certain word that I can’t repeat in church, but if you’re from Texas, you know what I’m talking about.
Well, so if you spent any time listening to 70’s country music, you know a few of the classics. “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” and “Luckenbach, Texas” and “London Homesick Blues” (“I want to go home with the armadillo” – a song that people from Texas sing with tears in their eyes). And then there were the ones that were written with maybe a little less reverence: “Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way.” Someday I’ll preach a whole sermon on that song.
But of all the classic 70’s country and western songs, one has to stand head and shoulders above the rest. It’s the song that Wikipedia claims is the world’s only Christian football waltz, and I mean to tell you, if there’s any kind of song more perfect for Texas than a Christian football waltz, I can’t think what it is. My only question is why it only ever occurred to one person to write a Christian football waltz. I’m talking, of course, about Bobby Bare’s immortal “Drop kick me Jesus, through the goal post of life,” featuring such cherished lines as “I’ve got the will, Lord, if you’ve got the toe,” and, “All the dear departed loved ones of mine, Stick ‘em up front in the offensive line.” Yes, “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal post of life” is an all-time classic.
Paul’s letter to Philemon: you read this and you don’t necessarily think it’s earth-shattering. But what Paul is doing is no less than upsetting the foundation of all human relationships. Paul is saying Jesus is here -- and everything has to change. The apostle Paul is sending a runaway slave, Onesimus, back to his master, Philemon, with a plea for mercy. Paul knows he hasn’t a legal leg to stand on in asking for Onesimus’ freedom, and yet Paul knows also that in Jesus, all relationships have changed.
Paul wrote in Galatians: “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Here he puts those words into action. He presents Onesimus no longer as a slave, but as a brother with whom Philemon shares the bond of baptism – and that means everything has to change. He begs Philemon to look at Onesimus as if he were looking at Paul himself.
And if this causes us to think twice about all the social positions that people hold in our world, if this causes us to squirm in discomfort at the inequalities we see and know about, things that keep people apart like education, wealth, citizenship, race, sexual orientation, political outlook, instead of helping them remember that in Christ they are brothers and sisters, if this makes us uncomfortable with the way the world we live in works, it should. Because following Jesus has never been sweet and easy. Following Jesus means everything has to change.
Following Jesus is costly and difficult, and it means everything about us has to change – our relationships, our commitments, and our use of possessions. That’s what our gospel says today. Barbara Brown Taylor says about this passage: after meditating on this passage, she has to say that Jesus would not have been a good parish priest. Because here in church, we make lots of efforts to invite people in and make them feel beloved, safe, welcome, and assure them of benefits of membership. But here’s Jesus – followed by crowds of people who can’t wait to see and hear what he does next – and what he does is he turns around, looks at them and warns them that if they think they want to follow him, if they want to be members of his movement, if they want to become his disciples – they might not have thought the whole thing through. They might just want to turn around and go back home.
Because if they follow him, if they truly and honestly put their hearts into becoming his disciples – then everything will have to change. He’s just going to give them a good swift kick into a whole new life. He tells us that the whole structure of our relationships is going to have to change – and it’s not that the Lord of love is truly telling us to go around hating other people. It’s not that we are supposed to give up on loving our families, it’s that Jesus is giving us a whole new family – our brothers and sisters in Christ –and we are supposed to love him, and them, just as much as we love our families.
Now remember, for the Jews, love was not something you felt, it was something you did. To love someone means to take action to care for them. That means that we are supposed to care as much about the education of a child in Veracruz as we do about our own children. As Paul says to Philemon, treat Onesimus as you would treat me. So we are to treat every person as if they were Paul, or even Jesus himself, because we are all one in Christ Jesus.
And if we didn’t think that was impossible enough, then Jesus says we are to take up our cross and follow him. This is not something annoying (like we go around saying, my mother-in-law calls me on the phone and wants to talk for an hour every day; I guess she’s my cross to bear), this is something terrifying – Jesus is saying we need to be willing to die like a condemned criminal for the sake of the gospel. And maybe we’re OK with that, because in our world, it’ll never come to pass We Christians don’t get executed for our beliefs in 21st-century America.
But if the idea of bearing a cross doesn’t trouble us, maybe the last sentence should: you can’t become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. It kind of drops with an empty thud, doesn’t it? It leaves us gasping, because I don’t think there’s one of us present who’s ready to do it. And if we think about that, we might not be so ready to get out on the dance floor and waltz to “Drop kick me Jesus, through the goal post of life.”
Because if we let Jesus into our lives, if we really decide to follow him, Jesus is going to ask us to change in every part of our lives. Jesus is going to ask us to start living as though we have been launched right into a whole new world, a world in which every thing we do, every relationship we have, every possession we own, every vote, every purchase, every interaction with anyone, anywhere, is holy and consecrated to him.
That doesn’t mean we spend all our time in church, and it doesn’t mean we give every thing we have to the church – in fact, what it means is that the holy part of our lives extends way past the boundaries of any church and way past the one hour a week we spend worshiping. It means that our world is our church, and everything we do in any part of our lives is a holy act of worship, consecrated to God. And if that’s not a thought that makes us stop in our tracks and wonder whether we want to stay on the Jesus team, it should be. Because Jesus wants every single thing we do to be in his name.
Back in Texas when I was growing up, people used to say things like “it’s cheap, but it ain’t free.” Well, that’s almost true about the grace of God – almost, but not quite.
The grace of God is free, but it ain’t cheap. Christ comes to us free, he lifts us out of death and into life, he surrounds us with the love of God and the knowledge that to God, we are infinitely precious and infinitely loved, and he lets us know that the Lord of the universe would do anything, anything, to save us from ourselves. But as we become aware of that grace and love of God, he asks something of us. He asks us not to hoard it for ourselves; he asks us to give it away to world around us – a world that is starving for it. He asks us to give ourselves away. Because the love of God is not ours to enjoy, it is the world’s to share. And that’s good news for the world.
So count the cost: is Jesus worth following? I think he is. I think the fact that Jesus came to live and die among us, just because God loved us, is life-transforming good news, and I think that good news is worth sharing. It’s news that’s worth giving ourselves, and taking up our cross, and starting a whole new life for.
No comments:
Post a Comment