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Imagine how you would feel if someone close to you, a son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, began getting involved in one of those cults. Perhaps you’ve heard about them. A crowd of undesirables – drunkards, ex-convicts, illegal immigrants, women of easy virtue. They call themselves ‘the Way’. They follow a mysterious leader nobody ever sees – it’s hard to work out from what they say whether he’s alive or dead. They share all their money, they don’t live in proper houses, they don’t approve of hard work and earning a decent living. They go against most of the traditional ways of worshipping, they eat strange food, they undermine family loyalty. They quote all these terrible things their leader or founder supposedly said –
I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother
no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children for me … will fail to receive … eternal life
Let the dead bury their own dead
Worrying, isn't it?
Well that’s just how worried a respectable orthodox family in first century Jerusalem would have been when one of their children became a Christian. It is important for us to remember today that to the people of the time the early Christians looked like a cult. If we had been around then, respectable members of a settled community that we are, we should have looked on them in the same way as today we look on the Moonies and the Scientologists.
And indeed, if by ‘cult’ we mean a group and a set of ideas that challenges us to change how we’ve always lived then Christianity is a cult. Take our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus probably would have had little time for our national obsession with house prices for example - (v 58) ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Or even more challenging: (v59-60) Jesus sees a man in the street and wants him to go to work right now preaching the Gospel. The man says ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Maybe the man’s father has literally just died or maybe he’s saying ‘my father is old and frail - let me care for him until the end and then follow you.’ Either way, Jesus says no - and I’m not sure which is hardest, to leave your newly deceased father unburied, or to leave your infirm parent to the care of others. And then he says this strange harsh saying, ‘let the dead bury their own dead’. I think he must mean something like ‘do you want to be spiritually alive with me, or do you want to be dead in the spirit and carrying on with your own life?’. But however we read these words they’re very challenging. They make the kind of demands on us that cults make on their members. Is the Christian faith, then, in this sense a cult?
No, for three reasons. First and most simply, the Christian faith is true. The demands Jesus makes are demands we accept, not in the last resort because they are more reasonable than those of some crazed cult leader, but because Jesus is God incarnate. Second, it’s important to notice that however much Jesus challenged those who heard him, he was never cruel or selfish. He did indeed say that the ties that bind Children of the living God are stronger than mere ties of blood within a human family, but he honoured his mother all the days of his life and from the cross gave her into the care of his best friend. He indeed outraged the religious authorities, but only because they had failed to keep to the spirit of their religion.
And the third reason we can see Christianity is not a mere cult is that we stand in a tradition. Take one of the most challenging, cult-like sayings in our Gospel passage. A man says to Jesus (v61-62) ‘I will follow you, but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family’. Sounds reasonable. But not good enough for Jesus: ‘No-one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God.’ How does that strike you? Would you put service of God ahead of family loyalty? Crucially, though, this challenge is nothing new. Look at our Old Testament reading. Elijah the prophet is going about Israel preaching repentance and renewal. He needs someone to carry on his work after him and he sees the man he wants, Elisha, ploughing the fields. Elisha, recognising a higher calling, leaves the plough and runs after him. Then he pauses. ‘Let me kiss my father and mother good-bye’. A reasonable request you might think. But Elijah is outraged at his backsliding - ‘What have I done to you?’ Elisha understands: if he’s going to follow God he must have nothing to fall back on, no Plan B. It’s all or nothing. So he doesn’t just leave the plough - he kills his oxen and cooks them on a fire made from the plough, gives the meat away and leaves. There’s no turning back. And this dramatic, challenging episode stands four square in the middle of the Jewish tradition within which Jesus was teaching.
When Jesus challenges us to follow him without anything to fall back on, he’s not doing it like a charismatic cult leader, making up something new to get us excited. He’s harking back to a continuous tradition of immense antiquity. The great radical is in some respects deeply conservative.
The upshot then is that we can’t dismiss these challenging sayings in Luke as the recruiting slogans of a cult. We have to take these sayings – and the many others in the Gospels that carry the same message - seriously. And yet - I don’t want to give up my house and garden; and moreover I can’t really think of them as wicked. Perhaps you have the same feeling. What then can we make of these hard sayings of Jesus in our own lives here in Fulbourn in Summer 2004?
Well, don’t burn your ploughs just yet. To start with, some of the doctrines Jesus preached that were so challenging then are now ideas we already agree with. We have the advantage of two thousand years of Christian tradition so we don’t always get everything wrong. Remember the first story in our Gospel passage. Jesus is rejected by a Samaritan town and the disciples are angrier than you see them anywhere else in the Gospels – so worked up they talk perhaps fancifully about calling down fire from heaven. But Jesus rebukes them. And at the time, that rebuke was very radical. The Samaritans were to the Jews rather as Muslims are to Christians. Two thousand years ago that was enough to make them hate each other. But we know we have to respect Muslims as people even if we disagree with them in important ways. We would not want to call down fire from heaven on a Muslim village just because they didn’t want to listen to our sermons. And this tolerance is a Christian attitude: an attitude that was radical two thousand years ago but which is meat and drink to us now. So some of the challenging things Jesus preached, we are already doing and they don’t seem so radical today.
But the second reason not to burn your plough is the more profound. Turn to our passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. ‘Live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.’ This is a constant theme in St Paul’s letters and it is no exaggeration to say it is the core of the Christian life. Other faiths preach that you get right with God by doing right actions. We preach that you do right actions by getting right with God. So there’s no merit in self-denial for its own sake or radical life changes for no reason. The important thing is not what you do but who you are. We learn first to live by the promptings of God’s holy Spirit. From that flows either a life of dramatic hardship or a more modest life of service to village and family - or whatever else we’re called to. But the first step is to be the right people. As they say in the bumper sticker business, we’re human beings, not human doings.
In a way, what we do has the same place in the Christian life as the speedometer has in the car. The speedometer is not the speed. The speedometer might read wrong. What’s really important is whether you put your foot on the accelerator. But most of the time the speedometer works, and it tells you at a glance how fast you’re going. In much the same way, reflecting on how we are behaving can help us tell how close we are to God and how much we are, as St Paul tells us, living by the spirit. St Paul gives us a hand ready-reckoner in Galatians. Are we in our daily lives doing actions typical of ‘patience, kindness, faithfulness, self control’ – then we probably are living more or less by the spirit. Or are we given to ‘impurity and debauchery, fits of rage, selfish ambition’ and so on. Then the chances are we’re not living by the spirit.
And although the reading from Luke isn’t telling us all to burn our ploughs and go off to preach the Gospel, it should leave us in no doubt that if there is something along these lines that needs to change then we should not waste a minute. Jesus commands urgency: leave house and home, don’t look back, let the dead bury their dead.
For myself, reading these passages together in preparing these sermons I feel challenged to do the following, and I encourage you to do likewise if you also feel moved. I’m going to re-read Paul’s ready-reckoner list in Galatians a few times this week and, trying to discern the Lord’s guiding voice, select just one of the many ways I don’t match up. One of the respects in which I’m living by the sinful nature; or one of what Paul calls the fruits of the spirit which is absent from my daily life. I’m thinking fits of rage or selfish ambition – or perhaps a lack of patience. Maybe in the context of the church, ‘factions and dissensions’ might be the ones to pick on – or an absence of joy? Anyway, I’m going to select just one item, and then I’m going to pray daily for God to mend my relationship with him so that through his spirit I will be changed. And I’m going to go on praying like that until that one thing comes more into line. Now this is, of course, a worthwhile spiritual exercise at any time. But I’m going to start today. Because what I’m hearing from the Gospel this morning is a challenging message, and a bracing one: not just at any time: not later; now.