The Ministry of Presence

Luke 9:51-62 New International Version (NIV)

51 As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; 53 but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. 54 When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” 55 But Jesus turned and rebuked them. 56 Then he and his disciples went to another village.

57 As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

58 Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

59 He said to another man, “Follow me.”

But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”

62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

A few years ago I spoke with you all about redaction criticism, and I want to revisit that approach to reading the scriptures again this morning. Redaction criticism involves looking at the stories included in a certain part of the Bible and asking why the writer chose to include a certain story in a particular place. Sure, I believe they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, but what is the larger point that the author is trying to get across by including a story where we find it? For instance, why are some stories included in certain gospels and not others? Or why does John tell the story of the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry while the others place it near the end?

Today we will be looking at our text and the seemingly unrelated stories within them. But ultimately, I want to see how these stories fit together to make a larger point. And I think the point is that we need to be present for one another, and present for God. We are called to a ministry of presence.

One common theme that seems to be weaving throughout this text is that people don’t understand Jesus. I can be critical of the disciples from time to time, and we have probably all thought, said, or heard someone else mention how slow the disciples seem to be. I hear things like, “Oh, if only I could have been there with Jesus and learned directly from him. Surely, then I would get it. I would understand so much better than the duh-sciples.”

Let’s be honest, we probably wouldn’t get it. I’m going to cut the disciples a little slack. Remember that so much of what Jesus did, said, and taught went against much of what they had been taught their entire lives: Don’t touch the unclean people. Don’t eat with the sinners. Don’t do anything that could be even considered work on the Sabbath. Jews = good people. Samaritans = bad people.

Sometimes I think we need to cut the disciples a little slack, or to use a churchy term, offer them a little grace. Because if Jesus showed up today there is a really good chance we might misunderstand him as well. Rather than duh-sciples, they might call us duh-Mennonites.

In the passage just before our text and the beginning of our text for this morning, we find the disciples doing some goofy things again. In verse 49 we find John saying, “Master, we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.”

I imagine Jesus thinking to himself, What have I said that makes you think you should stop the guy just because he isn’t one of us? It never says that the man was a bad dude. He was probably a local Jewish man, and it says that he was driving out demons in Jesus’s name. But because he wasn’t one of the twelve, one of Jesus’s inner circle of friends, John tells the guy to cut it out. John sends him a cease and desist letter and tells the guy, a Jewish follower of Jesus, to stop healing in Jesus’s name.

I can almost see Jesus rolling his eyes as he says in verse 50, “Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you.”

That other guy isn’t doing anything in opposition to what Jesus is doing. He just isn’t a part of his inner circle. Don’t stop him, he is for us. He is on the same team.

That story seems to set us up for today’s text quite nicely. Verse 51 tells us that Jesus’s time has come near. Luke is telling us that Jesus will soon be crucified, and this is when Jesus starts his journey to Jerusalem. They decide to pass through a town populated by Samaritans. We know that Jews and Samaritans did not get along, but Jesus passed through this town anyway, and sent some of his disciples on ahead of the main pack. Verse 53 then tells us, “But the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem.”

It wasn’t Jesus’s destination that caused them to not welcome him into their city and into their homes. They knew that these men were Jews, heading to Jerusalem for a Jewish festival.

So what do you do when are not offered hospitality by a group of people? Verse 54, “When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, ‘Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?’”

And Jesus rolls his eyes again.

Come on, now. We’ve all been there. We’ve all wanted to call down fire from heaven to destroy entire cities of people for not inviting us into their homes for supper. Let the one without sin cast the first stone!

We shouldn’t be surprised to read that Jesus rebukes the disciples for wanting to call down fire on the Samaritans. And as we are considering how Luke laid out this book of the Bible, I’d also like to point out that in the very next chapter Jesus shares one of his most-famous parables. In that parable, the hero is a Samaritan. In a matter of verses, we go from disciples wanted to commit some sort of ethnic genocide to Jesus teaching about a Good Samaritan.

Again, maybe we need to offer a little grace to these disciples. The whole “call fire down from heaven” thing wasn’t new to them. They were referring to a story in 2 Kings 1 where Elijah calls down fire from heaven to consume 50 soldiers, and then he does it again. Keep in mind that the disciples would have heard these stories all their lives and Elijah was seen as a hero among the Jewish people. It was Jesus who was doing something different. And yes, the disciples were a little slow to pick up on that. But I think the point is that they are there, with Jesus.

Okay, a quick recap before we move on. In each of these two stories, John is named. So we know that he was present for both instances. Perhaps others were as well. John tries to stop the Jewish guy from casting out demons in Jesus’s name. John also asks Jesus if he should call down fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans for their lack of hospitality. John gets multiple eye rolls out of Jesus, but John is there.

Let’s jump ahead to the next, seemingly unrelated section of our text for this morning. After being rejected by the Samaritans, Jesus and his disciples begin traveling through more traditional Jewish territory. Here Jesus seems to have a good reputation, because there are several people who want to follow him. They want to join in the cohort of his learning community. But each one also seems to have a reason not to follow Jesus. One man approaches Jesus and says in verse 57, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

Jesus’s response seems a little strange. He says in verse 58, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

I don’t know if Jesus had some kind of supernatural insight into this person’s life, or just what is going on here. Maybe he sees that this guy is dressed really well and he appears to be rich. So Jesus answers, You do realize we spend a lot of time sleeping in guest rooms and even outside, right? I’m not sure you can cut it.

Jesus then invites another man to be his disciple, and he does so in the same way he called the other disciples. He simply says, “Follow me.”

The man responds to Jesus’s invitation in verse 59, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” He recognizes Jesus as Lord. That’s huge! But before he will take that big step of faith, he wants to go and bury his father.

This seems like a reasonable request to me. Especially in the Jewish culture, mourning and a proper burial were an important part of what it meant to honor your father and your mother. Some suggest that perhaps the man’s father was simply old or even sick, but had not yet died. Perhaps the man was looking to put off his commitment indefinitely. The man was simply buying time because he didn’t really want to go with Jesus. That’s possible, but we really can’t say for sure what was going on here.

Finally, a third man approaches Jesus and says in verse 61, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”

Okay, that’s just the responsible thing to do! If you are going to disappear, even if only for a few hours, you should really let your family know. They could be looking for you for days, weeks, or longer!

Jesus answers in verse 62, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Now please notice that Jesus never speaks of eternal punishment or salvation in this passage. He isn’t saying that these would-be disciples will be sent straight to hell for not dropping everything and following him on the spot. But he does say that they aren’t fit for service in the kingdom of God.

The metaphor that Jesus uses here in verse 62 may be a bit foreign to you if you’ve never been involved in large-scale agriculture. I remember spending many hours in the fields of Ohio driving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Once you get started plowing a field, the job is pretty simple: you just keep your wheel down in the furrow. The challenge is getting started and plowing that first pass nice and straight.

For some reason, a particular field always comes to mind when I think of this passage. There was a fence post at the end of the field that I always looked for when I made that first pass through the field. On the front of the tractor was a hood ornament. And I don’t know why the tractor had a hood ornament other than for the reason I used it. As I pulled into the field and dropped that plow for the first time, I would line up the hood ornament with the fence post at the end of the field and not take my eyes off that fence post until I got to the other end.

If you plow a field crookedly, at the very least you lose efficiency that year, as you might need to go back and forth with some partial passes to catch the corners with the plow. But if you get the furrows running crooked and you plant a perennial crop, like alfalfa, you will have to slow down every year over the diagonal bumps and ridges.

The way I understand Jesus here is that he is encouraging his disciples, both the 12 who follow him from place to place and those who are considering following him, to keep pressing forward. They have work ahead of them, and they need to get to it. It is easy to look back on what you have already done and feel good about your previous work. And it is easy to say, “One day I’m going to do that.” I think that Jesus is looking for people to be available now. Because, as we often say, if we wait for the perfect opportunity to arise to start something new, we will be waiting forever. The perfect time never will come.

I want to come back to my earlier question: why did Luke arrange his stories in the way that he did? Again, this is a little redaction criticism. We have John looking like a total fool throughout these verses. He tries to stop a guy from healing someone else just because he wasn’t a part of his inner circle. Then John offers to call down fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans for being less than hospitable. But then we have the three would-be disciples, all of whom have some reasons for not following Jesus right then and there. And yes, they seem to be legitimate excuses, but they are excuses, nonetheless.

Do you know what John’s greatest achievement, John’s greatest accomplishment is in this passage? He is present. He is there. He is trying. And when we read John’s gospel, we read time and time again that he and Jesus had a special relationship. He was the disciple that Jesus loved.

What I get out of these stories is a reminder that when we try to serve God, when we try to follow Jesus, we are going to make mistakes. We will royally mess up. And that’s okay, maybe even expected. The only ones not to make mistakes are the ones who never try. The would-be disciples had good excuses, and because of that, they didn’t really risk making any mistakes. But Jesus never calls us to be perfect. He calls us to be present.

I received a phone call from a friend on Monday, a friend I hadn’t spoken to for months. One of the first things he said to me was, “Sorry to bother you…”

Bother me? No problem, no bother at all! I want to be there for you.

He went on to tell me some sad news, news that I hadn’t expected to hear, and I’m not going to get into it here. He shared with me for about 45 minutes, and I offered some insights and advice along the way. I’m sure some of my responses were helpful. I also bet that I made some very bad suggestions along the way. Either way, I think that I was a friend in that situation, and I think that I did my Christian duty in that phone conversation. Like John, I know I made mistakes. But I was present. When my friend said, “Sorry to bother you,” I stayed on the line. I didn’t say, “I’ll call you back some other day or at another time.” That’s a ministry of presence.

My first year of ministry at Staunton Mennonite, I sat in the courtroom as one member’s son was sentenced to 63 years of prison time. I remember sobbing with the family in the parking lot afterwards. I didn’t have the right words to say. I don’t think that matters, because they probably don’t remember what I said in that moment. But they will remember that I was there.

I’ve sat in the waiting room when families receive the news that the lump was in fact cancer. I don’t remember what I said to the family, and I doubt that they remember either. I probably tried to make a joke. I probably said something stupid, and something wrong. I hope they don’t remember that. But I’m sure that they remember that I was there.

As I consider my last 13 years as the pastor of Staunton Mennonite Church, I realize that some of my best moments in ministry weren’t when I said or did the right thing. My best moments were when I was available, when I showed up, when I was present. And I’m sure that some of my worst moments were when I was absent, too busy, doing something else.

Whatever your ministry is, I think that Luke 9 is calling us to show up. When you show up, you will make mistakes. It is so much easier to come up with excuses, and some of those excuses are legitimate. But we are called to be present. John made his share of mistakes, stopping a guy who was doing exorcisms and threatening to call down fire from heaven upon the Samaritans. Huge mistakes, for sure! But John was present. And we are called to a ministry of presence as well. Present for our friends, present for our families, present for the Kingdom of God. We are called to be present for one another.