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“Looking Forward" |
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A Sermon Preached by Rev.Bruce Sanguin Luke 9:59-62 |
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We encounter the edgy Christ this morning. He comes across as neither understanding nor accommodating. If you’re looking for a “nice” Jesus, you came to church on the wrong morning. One of his followers claims that she will follow him wherever he goes. His response is that if she’s serious, she’ll end up without a place to call home, just like him. Foxes have dens, birds have nests, but he has no place to lay his head. I’ve always felt a little sad for Jesus when I read this passage - but I’m wondering, given the context in which it’s spoken, if I’ve over-sentimentalized the meaning.
In any case, it’s enough to cause a couple of other wannabe disciples to qualify their commitment. One says that he’ll be right along – after burying his father. Now this is a sacred obligation in Jewish society, so Jesus’ response is a little shocking. “Let the dead bury the dead. As for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” The next person just wants to say good-bye to his family. Again, Jesus shows impatience. “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God” (9:62).
What’s going on here? First of all, don’t take this literally. Jesus is making a point. To follow him is to go forward into the kingdom of life – not linger in the kingdom of death. What’s at stake is the fundamental orientation of Christian spirituality. Namely, it’s forward looking. Only those looking forward to where the new thing God is doing are fit for the Kingdom. Jesus is using hyperbole or exaggeration to make the point. Jesus relegates the institutions that we hold sacred, including home, family and family rituals as less important than this fundamental commitment to co-create the future – putting one’s hand to the plough, and laying down the furrows from which will grow a sacred future.
This is a bit surprising. Most people would say that religion is all about looking backward – that it is inherently conservative. The conservative worldview is based in the conviction that everything we need to know about how to do life has already been done. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The important institutions, social rituals, and ways of governing ourselves have already been discovered. Entrenching them for future generations is considered the sacred work of existing institutions and the role of families. Not surprisingly, it’s those for whom the existing institutions are working quite well who embrace the conservative worldview. If it’s working for us, it’s good enough for everybody.
Religion plays a useful role in society for those who desire to entrench the past, so long as it supports and legitimates existing structures and institutions. For almost 1700 hundred years, the Christian religion has in fact done just that. To a large extent the church is still doing this. We tend to think of the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as an unrepeatable redemptive event that happened 2000 years ago. God revealed Godself once and for all times in that event 2000 years ago. So, it’s enough for us to tell that old, old, story, and sing the old, old hymns, and live off the fumes of that story forever and ever amen. You’re saved, now go home and wait for your reward. Well, the fumes are beginning to dissipate – there’s not enough energy released from them to keep the church vital and alive.
So, it’s interesting that Jesus himself was so insistent that looking back and going back was contrary to what the Kingdom of God required. Clearly, there’s a difference between Christian religion – understood as a set of ritual practices and beliefs that legitimate the status quo, and Christian spirituality, understood as co-creating an indeterminate future with Spirit.
There are times when it’s absolutely necessary to look back. But only because you happen to be stuck there. For example, when individuals are traumatized by an event and they repress that event in their memory it can severely affect their freedom – they’re spending so much time avoiding situations that might re-trigger their trauma that they are don’t have anything left in the service of life. It’s appropriate for a trained therapist to journey back with them to the point of the trauma. But the reason to go back is because the person was stuck in the past. The journey back was for the purpose of releasing them into a new future.
In the same way, the primary reason we gather to tell the story of Jesus week after week is to release us for the future. If it’s forgiveness we require – receive it – and then move on. If it’s an affirmation of our worth, then be lifted up out of the dust by the one who deemed nobodies to be royalty – and move on. If what we’re looking for is a sacred project worthy of our soul, then hear the voice of Christ calling you to feed his sheep. But always, to be following the Christ is to be moving forward. Stand up and move on with the Restless One, he who had no place to rest his head.
This is consistent with an evolutionary universe. For 13.7 billion years the universe has been laying down grooves for the emergence of more complex forms of life – from geological, to biological, to self-reflexive consciousness in humans, to the emergence of cultures, to the awareness of Spirit – from the point of view of the unfolding story of the universe, there is no looking back. There are a series of what Thomas Berry calls “irreversible transformations” – out of no thing, hydrogen and helium, from these elements galaxies; out of exploding supernovas, the heavy elements necessary for life on earth; out of unnucleated bacteria come nucleated bacteria and the capacity of organisms to remember through DNA; then the march of the five kingdoms of life; then the capacity for conscious self-reflection. Once these capacities emerged in the universe, there was no looking back. This is the universe that is now evolving through you and me.
When Jesus uses the image of putting the hand to the plough, think about it as you and I, disciples of Christ, laying down the furrows for the future to emerge – this is how the Spirit plants the seeds of the future in an does evolutionary universe. You and I are centers of creative emergence. We are what the Christ, as Spiritual Presence and Cosmic Urge to novelty and fullness of being is doing. The universe has no place to lay its head. It’s always moving on. My own sense is that Jesus sensed this evolutionary impulse deep in his bones. He intuited that he himself was a center of creative emergence. He was birthing a whole new reality into being.
Now I realize that for most of us the thought that this is what is happening through us – that this is what our lives are for – seems a bit of a stretch. But think about it. Why is the desire to have children so powerful in us? We call it a biological urge, but what is a biological urge if not the entire universe surging through a part of itself in order to be born again and again and again? But born again with an irrepressible urge to become more beautiful, more complex, more novel, and more compassionate. Children are one way that we participate in this sacred drama of creative emergence.
In my new book I’m taking a look at congregations as centers that tell the story of Christ as a story of creative emergence, rather than as a story of human redemption. In this model, we do look back at the story of Christ, but we tell it as an unrepeatable instance of divine creativity. To follow Christ, understood as a shining instance of divine creativity – the new thing God was doing – is to see ourselves as well a potential instance of irreversible transformation. God is laying down the furrows in the field of the future, through this congregation. To embrace this role is to be fit for the Kingdom, and paradoxically to discover redemption – we are saved from the paltry purposes that a culture of consumerism, celebrity, and the money industry parade as being worthy of us. They aren’t, and we know it. We’re “saved” by accepting that we find our deepest meaning in being co-creators with Spirit of a Christ-shaped future.
“As for you”, says Jesus, “go and proclaim the Kingdom of God”. In the 21st century, let’s drop the “g” in Kingdom, and go out and proclaim the kin-dom of God. We don’t live under the authority of Kings anymore, but kin-dom is an equally subversive metaphor. Just as the Kingdom of God is the future that would emerge if God and not Caesar reigned, so the kin-dom of God is the future that would emerge if we lived as kin with all life, human and other-than-human. To proclaim and enact the kin-dom of God would undermine the culture of hyper-individualism that tries to convince us we’re all isolated individuals and nations competing for scarce resources. The kin-dom of God suggests the truth at the heart of this evolving, sacred universe story – that we are radically interconnected and the sooner we live out of this truth, the better off we’ll be. The universe is hard-wired for solidarity with all beings. We are intricately, exquisitely, implicated with all of life. Our kinship is not romantic idealism. It is geologically, biologically, and spiritually an accurate metaphor.
To live as though it was otherwise is to be continually going back and burying the dead – dealing with death it the kingdom of life. It’s time to move forward as a species and proclaim with Christ, the kin-dom of God.
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