What are you doing, pilgrim?

What are you doing, Pilgrim? The Dover Church
June 27, 2010– 5th Sunday after Pentecost Scripture: Luke 9: 51-62
Today is my 47th birthday and I have an announcement to make. I find that I have become my father. Raising two energetic young boys, I hear myself bursting out more often than I care to count with that time worn fatherly question: “what are you doing?” Silly question, I know. We both know, the boys and I, what they are doing. The real question is not what? But why? I know that before too much longer I will become even more like my father and begin bursting out with “what do you think you're doing?” or just “what were you thinking?”…if I catch them after the fact, because, of course, neither the deed itself nor the perpetrator, is really in question. It is the motivation and thought process that is troubling. And yes, I know, by asking that question I will be giving them altogether too much credit for having thought through whatever it is they have been doing. Although it has been more than 30 years now, I can remember how I myself thought I had turned the tables on my own father as he fumed “what were you thinking?” with my wise acre teenage response: “Isn't it obvious, Dad. I wasn't thinking.” So I have all of that to look forward to.
But we’re not here to talk about raising kids this morning. No, we’re here to give some thought to what we are doing with our lives, what we think we are doing with our lives. At least that’s what our Gospel would ask us to think about. It is a story about intentionality and decision, about setting out, or not.
We ministers tend to talk about life as a spiritual pilgrimage, with ourselves as pilgrims seeking God and following Jesus. It is a pretty apt way of looking at being a Christian. For one thing, Jesus is walking down the road in our lesson this morning. You might have noticed that Jesus always seems to be going from one place to another most of the time in the Gospels. So following Jesus is sort of hitting the spiritual highway, except for the interesting paradox that following Jesus is both the path and the destination, which can be a little confusing for folks like us who tend to think linearly about a beginning, middle and end.
“Wait a minute,” you might say. “Nothing happened in the stories. The village rejected Jesus and those guys by the road made excuses and didn't follow. How is that a pilgrimage? Don't you have to go from one place to another to be a pilgrim?”
Well, let's not be so hasty to pass judgment. Just imagine for a moment that Jesus came to Dover, proclaiming the kingdom of God, calling us to repentance from our failed ways and inviting us into God's promise of new life, forgiving us all our halfhearted and failed attempts and offering a new beginning in relations with God and neighbors. What would happen? Well, not to be too facetious, but I bet that most of us would be busy doing something and miss him. We’d find out about it though the next Thursday in the local paper’s Police Report: “Friday, June 25, 5:30 PM. Unwanted solicitor reported on Centre Street. Police responded and drove the man to Needham.”
We’re here in church, though, so that’s not really us. Our neighbors maybe, but not us. No. Most of us may be more like the next three men Jesus meets. Take the first man whom Jesus invites to follow him. He is very enthusiastic initially, “I'll follow you wherever you go,” but when Jesus spells out the challenges of being a disciple, we don't hear another word out of this man. Well, of course. He has a settled life where he is, all of which he likes. Just like us. Becoming a vagrant doesn't sound all that appealing, to him or to us, even if we would get to hang out with Jesus. Then we’d be the ones sitting in the back of the cruiser being driven to Needham.
Or how about the second man? This man seems willing, but first he has to go bury his father. Well, of course. That's an important responsibility, a demonstration of love and respect. Any of us would have begged off if we were in that man's shoes. Can you imagine how much psychiatric care we’d need down the road if we just left our fathers in the funeral home and took off with Jesus?
Or how about the third man? He too seems willing, but wants to go home first and say goodbye to everyone there. Well, of course. To leave without saying goodbye would be hurtful, without wrapping up any unfinished business like putting unpaid bills in the mail would be irresponsible. This man is a sensible person, just like us.
Martin Luther described the truth of the scriptures as de te loqitur, “It's talking to you.” Did these encounters actually happen? I say “yes,” or at least encounters a lot like these. But their real truth lies in how they speak to us. We know ourselves in these stories. We know ourselves and God in these stories. What would we do if we were these men? Just think for a moment of all the things that would keep you from following Jesus, were you to be out in your front yard, working in the garden say, and up walked Jesus. If Jesus really looked like he does in any of the movies, you’d probably try to get the kids in the house and let out the dog if you happen to have a big angry one. Jokes aside, if you're like me, a very long list of all the reasons why not would begin forming in your mind, growing longer every minute you didn't just go and follow.
Once again, facetiousness aside, there actually is one thing more than any other which I think stands in our way. It’s our way of being church. I don’t know why, but at some point the New England Congregational Church stopped teaching people how to grow up in faith. If you want to become a dancer, you take dance classes. If you want to fly planes, you take classes. If you want to accumulate assets, your investment advisor tells you how to go about it. But with the spiritual life in churches like ours we have gone out of our way to put people off the path. It has always been sort of “come to church, join, raise your kids, serve a committee, pledge, have weddings, baptisms, funerals, end of story.” How is that following Jesus? How is that going to get you moving down the spiritual highway of your life? It’s not really. It’s going to church!
Eugene Peterson, a retired pastor and scholar, and brilliant writer whom I greatly admired, puts it this way: “The whole point of life is to grow up.” Our kids really are on to something when they go on and on about what they’re going to do when they grow up. That is the whole point, growing up. We know that’s true. When we think about our own growing up we think about going off to college, getting a job, finding a partner, having kids, buying a home, building a career, saving money, accumulating assets, and doing some of the things we always wanted to with our lives. We know people who are really grown up in this way, guys who have their own real estate empires in NY, a TV show in which they get to fire people, their own beauty pageant, and yet it’s obvious they still haven’t grown up. We all know people who have grown up so much that they have become the best linebacker in the history of the game, made millions of dollars, are idolized by sports fans young and old, but who end up broke, divorced and in prison because they never grew up. Not to go overboard, but we know the same things about ourselves. In some ways we are really grown up, but in others, the really important aspect of spiritual growth perhaps more than any other, we are still little boys and girls. How could it be otherwise? No one ever taught us how to grow up.
I noticed this at some point in my life of going to church. I began to wonder why nothing was happening, why I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the ultimate goal of our faith and life, what the Apostle Paul called “the resurrection,” or “the new creation,” or “God himself.” God was not becoming “all in all” for me, in me, or through me (1 Cor. 15:28). I did not feel as if I was reflecting the divine image all that much, let alone fully and completely, not from God into the world and not from the world back to God. I didn’t even know that’s what following Jesus was all about when I started wondering. I still thought it was about “going to church,” which is an important part but only a part. Noticing the lack and desiring the goal, I set about finding teachers who might show me how I might start heading down that road and keep on keeping on. As your pastor, I am the one who is supposed to be teaching you. I myself have a long way to go. In many ways, I am still an infant. But I do at least ask myself the question: “what are you doing?” or “what do you think you are doing?” Where are you on your pilgrimage? Do you want to step forward? What is it that’s holding you back? If you’d like to some help…well, that’s what I’m here for. In every other part of our lives we are taught the steps towards maturity and have clear metrics to measure our progress. The same thing exists for the spiritual life. It’s just that no one ever told us. It’s not linear, but then neither is the stock market. This fall I am going to start teaching those of you feel called how to go about following Jesus. Call them courses in spiritual growth. Or just growing up. We can help each other grow up in faith. That’s what being the church is supposed to be all about!