Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 27, 2010
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year C, Proper 8: 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21;Psalm 16:5-11; Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62

Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale begins with the story of a horse whose owner lives in Brooklyn.[1] The horse is drawn to the city, Manhattan. The horse is always escaping from his carriage house and this white horse always heads across the Brooklyn Bridge to the city.

The horse is the character that draws the reader into the tale about a man who dies and returns to life to save a dead child. The horse is not the story. But the city to which he drawn is very much a part of the story, as much a part of the story as the characters the writer draws. The city is the place where the matter of good and evil, the matter of life and death, is settled.

The novel was published in 1983. I didn’t read it until sometime in the early 1990s. It was while reading this novel that I really paid attention to the way the New Testament ends, with a vision of God and his people, his saints, in a city, the new Jerusalem.[2]

Jesus’ Jerusalem has a particular role in Luke’s gospel. For Luke, Jerusalem is the city of Jesus’ destiny.[3] Most of what happens in Luke’s gospel occurs on his way to Jerusalem, to his destiny. Today’s gospel lesson begins, when Jesus turns from Galilee to his destiny, to the city where the struggle for good over evil, for life over death, will take place.

In the passage we heard, some people reject Jesus and some people have excuses. Jesus does not punish those who reject him and he does not punish those who have excuses. Though Luke shares with Matthew one verse about the way to eternal life being narrow,[4] and though you can find a, with respect, “mean” Jesus in Luke,[5] the main thrust of Luke’s narrative is about a Jesus who has come to seek and save the lost.[6]

I have been trying to reread Joseph Fitzmyer’s two-volume commentary on Luke’s gospel this lectionary year. I haven’t finished – and for the record, I haven’t even started Fitzmyer’s volume on Luke’s second book, The Acts of the Apostles,[7] and I know I should read it too. Fitzmyer’s work is helping to make it for me to think afresh about the gospels as theology more than history.

The temptation to think historically about everything in the New Testament is very old. One of the oldest and important Christian manuscripts – from the second century – is an attempt to harmonize the gospels – to make all of the details fit chronologically.[8] It was actually used in place of the gospels in parts of the Church well into the fifth century. But so-called “harmonies” don’t work, then or now. The gospels have a historical framework, but, again, their authors are far less concerned with chronology and historical detail than they are with meaning.

Two things about Luke. First, Jerusalem is the place that where Jesus will reveal God’s gift of salvation and eternal life for all. Second, just as Jesus starts his leaves his home to begin his ministry – “no prophet is acceptable in his own country”[9] – Jesus will leave Jerusalem in glory so that his ministry will spread to the whole world.

Fitzmyer thinks Luke’s understanding of the Exodus shapes Luke’s narrative.[10] Just as the children of Israel are led out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and finally cross the Jordan to the land of promise, Jesus is led out of this life to the new life to come. Luke’s gospel is an invitation for you and me to follow Jesus and share in his risen life.

I don’t think people come to faith in Jesus because Jesus is mean. I think people come to faith because God works to bring us to know him. Jesus says in Luke’s gospel, that he comes to seek and to save the lost.[11] And if God is for us, as Paul asks, “Who is against us?”[12]

This is not to say that there is not sacrifice involved in discipleship. There are always choices to be made in life – and choice, like the choice of love, means sacrifice. But Christian sacrifice is always more about Easter than Good Friday, more about eternal life, than death. The Twelve disciples saw Jesus’ cross as death; they would come to understand it was life.

This Easter experience would be so powerful and so true that two thousand years later, men and women still gather to recall his risen Presence among them. This Easter experience still draws men and women to New Jerusalem. Easter still shows us that death is life.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Copyright © 2010 The Society of the Free Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, New York.

All rights reserved.