Let us pray together. Holy God, send your spirit to guide our time together this morning. May the words of my mind and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing to you, Almighty God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Today we find ourselves in the start of what’s already a very warm summer, and we consider a text that features this passage from Luke that Chris just read. I want to emphasize this one section. “To one, Jesus said, ‘Follow me.’ But that man said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their dead. As for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ And the other said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to those at home.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’” Since this is the second Sunday of summer, I have a poem for you. My favorite poet, Mary Oliver. For how many of you is Mary Oliver one of your favorite poets? Mary Oliver is really a wonderful poet. I recommend her to you. One of her most famous poems is called “The Summer Day,” and I want to share it with you:

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

Listen to those two lines again. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? As a hospice chaplain for many years, I lead many community memorial services. I just led one just a few weeks ago in Worthington. Those are the kinds of services that are inclusive to folks from many faiths and traditions. I often select a Mary Oliver poem as the text for my message, sometimes the exact one I just read, especially if it’s a summer service. I love that poem for many reasons. It’s engaging and universal and evocative. Everyone gets the content of that poem, especially if you grew up on a farm as I did, the hog and cow farm in Clinton County where I spent the first 19 years of my life.

I choose to share it with you today because it offers a theme similar to our lectionary text. And that is this theme: Our time on earth is limited. We are wise to not put off the important things that we are called to do. Mary Oliver urges us to make use of our limited time on earth and to take in the sights and sounds and smells of nature. It is deeply spiritual, her poem, as are many of her poems. And that idea of taking the time to pay attention, to pay attention to what’s going on right now. Consider that this group of people will never be gathered together again. This group, the group we are sitting with at this moment. Pay attention. God may have something to say to us in this moment.

The writer of Luke, on the other hand, knows four behaviors that do not have a place in this idea of paying attention and to be present with God. This idea of building a kingdom of God doesn’t have room for inhospitality, violence, an exclusive focus on comfort, and on dwelling on what we have lost rather than on what we have to gain in the future. In the first few verses of our text Luke knows that the village of Samaritans – and Chris, you said it better than I could – there was a tension, there was a discomfort between the Jews and the Samaritans. They saw God’s seat, God’s place, as being in different places, and Jerusalem was not perceived as being where God resided, by the Samaritans. So, there was tension between them. Luke notes that the village of Samaritans did not extend hospitality to these strangers in their midst because they found out that they were headed for Jerusalem. Jesus, in response, does not bless them and just keeps moving on. The importance of hospitality to strangers is one of the primary themes of both the Old and New Testaments. For instance, most progressive biblical scholars agree that the sin of the city of Sodom was not homosexuality but was inhospitality to visitors. Jesus himself preached on the importance of extending hospitality to strangers in the parallel with the Samaritan and in many other places in the Gospel. Incidentally – maybe not just incidentally – the horrific treatment of immigrants by the current administration is exactly what Jesus was preaching against in this passage.

Number two – in the next few verses Jesus admonishes against violence and retribution against the Samaritan villagers who refused hospitality. Jesus advocated peace, grace and forgiveness. That was the subject of many of his sermons. Not just incidentally, I’m certain that the recent bombing of Iran, along with the bombing of Gaza and Ukraine, will be mentioned from many church pulpits today as the exact opposite of what Jesus advocated in his passage.

Number three – Jesus often mentions that the kingdom of God is not about seeking creature comforts, and he does so in our text today. Our text says, “As they were going down along the road someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’” I often look at what Eugene Peterson says in the message, and in this passage, Eugene Peterson says something like, to the fellow who says, “I want to follow you,” he says, “Remember, I don’t stay in the best inns. I don’t stay in the best places. I live very basically.” This notion is a frequent theme of Jesus’ teaching. When Jesus commissioned his disciples at the beginning of Chapter 9 in Luke, he said to them in his commission, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, no bag, no bread, nor money. Not even an extra tunic.” Can you imagine going on a long trip and not taking a suitcase with you? That’s what Jesus would say at the start of this very chapter. Jesus would certainly be horrified at the lavish lifestyles of the religious leaders of our day today.

Number four – the last admonition of Jesus is the most difficult to interpret. “Then he said to another man, ‘Follow me.’ The man replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus told him, “Let the dead bury their own dead. You, however, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me bid farewell to my family.” Then Jesus declared, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and then looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Now, I’m not thinking that Jesus is saying that we should avoid mourning our parents when they die. I don’t think that that’s what he’s saying. I also don’t think that Jesus is saying don’t say goodbye to the folks at home when you go out on a trip in order to build the kingdom of God. It’s more likely that the man’s father is not recently deceased. That’s quite a coincidence. I think that both of these men are making excuses to not commit to building the kingdom of God. Jesus urges us to not procrastinate, to avoid excuses, and to make kingdom-building the top priority of our lives. Procrastination is a specialty of mine. I was busy finishing this sermon yesterday. If you would have talked to me yesterday, if you’d come to my house, I was busy in my bedroom. I have a desk in my bedroom. I was busy there with notes spread out all over my bed, and I was busy finishing. Now, I started it as soon as Jay asked me to do it not long ago. I started it very, very hard, and then I kind of set it aside and got busy with other things. But I was very busy yesterday.

So, there were four things here that are said that we should avoid in following the path led by Jesus Christ. But what is it I should do? Those are the things I should not do. What is it I should do? And I have a confession to make. When Jay asked me to prepare this message for you today, he asked for two things. When they call you to do this sort of thing, stand up and sub for someone else, they ask for two things. You know what two things they ask for? It’s only two. They ask for a text, and they ask for a title. So, before I ever start writing any sermon, before I ever start writing a sermon for Zion Church two weeks from now – I haven’t really started that one yet, but I already have a title because Scott texted me and said, “I’d like for you to be there in July.” Is it July the 13th? He said, “I want you to be there in July, are you available?” I said yes. He said, “I need a text, and I need a title.” So, I gave him those. It’s sort of like throwing your hat over the fence, and your hat’s over there, and you already put it in the bulletin so I can’t change it. I have a page on that text, so I really make sure that I can say something about that text. I read all the texts in the lectionary for today. I read the Psalms. I read the Old Testament lesson. I read the whole thing, all the texts that were in the lectionary, and I chose this one. I thought I could come up with something for this one, and I chose the title. I would like to change one word in our title. The one word that I want you to cross out is “the.” I want you to put, “Jesus Calls Us to Follow – So What’s Your Path?”

I don’t want you to get the impression that I think there is one path. I think there are many possible paths, not just one. I think your path is different than my path. I think the path of everybody here is different because we are called to different pathways, different paths to follow Jesus. In clergy circles, we call this path of following Jesus, we call it a call. Clergy are really fond of talking about what is their sense of call. It changes throughout our lives, our sense of call changes. I think, in fact, that everyone in this room has a call. Today, right now, everyone, even this little fellow in the second row who’s leaning against his mom, I think he has a call. I think you have a call. I think we all have a call. The trick is to pay attention to our call and not to ignore it. I ignored it for a lot of years. I negotiated with God for a lot of years. I said, “If I teach Sunday school, is that enough?” It turned out that wasn’t enough. If I do a lot of programming in my church, if I bring in speakers and do programming, is that enough? It wasn’t enough. If I serve on committees, if I serve on a Presbyterian committee in Delaware, where I was living at the time, I served on a Presbyterian committee called the Preparation for Ministry. I served on that committee for a lot of years. I’m preparing other people to be pastors, and I’m working with young people and people of all ages and helping them. Turned out that wasn’t enough either. We wrestle with this call all our lives. Everyone here, to some extent or another, is wrestling with a call.

The big question today is, “What’s your call today?” Do you feel any closer to defining your call than the day you graduated from high school? Do you feel any closer to figuring out what your call is? I graduated from Wilmington High School, about two hours south of here, two and a half hours maybe south of here, 51 years ago this month. My mom says that she asked me the question of what I thought my career would be, somewhere right about the time of my graduation. I have no recollection of that conversation. Incidentally, just before I got into the pulpit, she sent me a text that she hoped this went well. My mom’s 93. She said, “I hope it goes well today.” She thinks about it, she prays about it, every time I stand in the pulpit anywhere, and she’ll be present. God willing, she’ll be present in two weeks when I deliver that sermon. I have no recollection of the conversation, but my mother tells this story. She says that when she asked that question, that I told her firmly at age 17 that I would not have one career, but many, and that it almost didn’t make any difference what I did first because it would change throughout my life. I said that at 17. I don’t know where I learned that. I don’t know how I said that to her, but I was right. By various counts, and I changed this number about half a dozen times during the preparation of the sermon, the number I’m going to settle on is about eight to 10 separate careers in my last 48 years. That’s not counting volunteer work, and it’s also not counting concurrent careers that happened at the same time, things that I was pursuing, I had trouble choosing. Remember, I was negotiating with God all this time and trying to do something that was going to make God happy and let up on me, so sometimes I was doing two or three things at the same time. When I graduated high school, I had no idea that most of those career options even existed. I didn’t know, and that’s true for you, young man. It’s true for you. The things that you’re going to do in your life, most of them you don’t even know exist right now as you lean your head against your mom’s shoulder. You don’t know that they even exist.

Jimmy Carter is a good example of someone who had many careers and who talked about his sense of call over a lifetime of service. This is a famous quote from Jimmy Carter – “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. My faith demands that I do whatever I can wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have, to try to make a difference.” He’s talking about his call. For those of you like me, wrestling with retirement – so how many of you are wrestling with retirement? You’ve either just started it or you’ve been doing it for some time and you’re still wrestling with it. Retirement is tricky, isn’t it? It’s not easy. Some people think, “Oh, it’s easy. You just go and relax.” But you know, even as you’re trying to relax, God’s not letting up on you, because you keep feeling called to do something else. Retirement is actually an exciting time to consider your call again. Where is God calling you now? How are you working to proclaim the kingdom of God today? Don’t worry about that proclaiming thing. I love the words often attributed to St. Francis. Do you remember St. Francis’ words? “Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.” Do you know that quote? It’s attributed to St. Francis. I don’t know that St. Francis said that, but it’s attributed to him. A lot of things are attributed to Mark Twain, but he didn’t say that one. “Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.”

Our actions can be the most useful proclamation of the good news. Is there a scripture that comes to your mind that helps you to think about your call? One that is helpful, and this is where I’m going to close our time together. This message is going to be closed with a section from the Sermon on the Mount that I think says something about what Jesus thought of when he was thinking of this idea of the kingdom of God. Hear these words from the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew, Chapter 5. “When Jesus began to speak, he taught them, saying, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile on you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven for the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’” I think the central message of this passage from the Sermon on the Mount is that we would be wise to model our lives on the teachings of Jesus, and not to allow fear of persecution to be an impediment. Many of my friends who are over 60, including Louise, who’s sitting right here close to me, the person you don’t know sitting right there at that second pew, many of my friends who are over 60 who have made signs and are marching in the “No Kings” protests, we receive our calls in various ways from people around us, and Louise is one of the people who keeps giving me a new call. In the course of writing this message and reflecting on our text, I decided to join in the 4th of July protest at the Statehouse.

What is your call? Please don’t allow fear of persecution, don’t allow a temptation to dwell on the past, don’t allow a focus on comfort or even procrastination to stop you from answering the call to build the kingdom of God. To close, once again, I leave you with three questions. When have you felt called by Jesus to do work that builds the kingdom of God? Number two – When has your response to God’s call been impeded by focus on seeking comfort, dwelling on the past, or procrastination, or fear of persecution? And number three – where has this church, where has First Congregational UCC recently been called to do some new kingdom-building work? Thanks be to God. Amen.