At the end of our appointed text this morning from the Gospel according to St. Luke, Jesus provides some agricultural and theological counsel: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Even if you’re not a farmer and don’t know a thing about plowing, this sentence is jarring – this is a full-stop.
2,000 years ago, our Lord’s agrarian hearers would have immediately known that taking one’s hand off the plow and looking back had disastrous agricultural consequences.
His hearers may not, however, have readily applied the analogy to what it means to really follow Jesus – to place our “whole trust in His grace and love,” as candidates promise at baptism.
I just want to say one thing, really, in this little homily. I need to talk with you about our fascination – our spiritually schizophrenic compulsion – to constantly locate our sense of fitness, our “enoughness,” if you will, in one of two ways.
Half of the people here, and you know who you are, feel most lovable by looking back to yesterday, to last year or thirty years ago when you were the Catfish Queen in Greensboro, Alabama – when you thought you had enough “enoughness.”
And the rest of us believe we just need a little more time to plow up some more “lovableness” – to really be affirmed. And this stuff happens to everybody every single day.
In his latest book entitled Seculosity, which is hot off the press, David Zahl writes:
“Listen carefully and you’ll the word enough everywhere…You’ll hear about people scrambling to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, wealthy enough, influential enough, desired enough, charitable enough…good enough. But here’s the wrinkle, one so well-worn it hardly bears mentioning; no matter how close we get or how much we achieve, we never quite arrive at enough. How much money is enough, Mr. Rockefeller? Just a little bit more.”
Don’t kid yourself. The struggle is real. Do you remember Peter Gabriel’s number one hit in 1986 – “Big Time:”
“Big time. I’m on my way to making it big time.”
The whole of the 80’s can be summed up as a compulsion to discover the meaning of life by plowing accomplishment.
C.S. Lewis described the reality I’m talking about like this:
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”
Have you seen the movie “Mule?” It’s the latest Clint Eastwood movie. What a man; I love that guy! It’s based on a true story, and Hollywood did a great job. Eastwood plays Earl Stone, whom you may have heard of from the papers or the internet. Earl is a 90-year-old man who has made terrible decisions basically all of his life, and he’s trapped in the past. And looking back is his total undoing – seriously.
In the first few minutes of the film, we discover that Earl came home with PTSD from the Korean War, then he dealt with it by becoming a workaholic, and then an angry alcoholic. Then he moved into bad financial and relational decisions that cost him his once booming business. Those decisions, in turn, cost him his wife and kids.
Finally, at 90 he goes to see his dying ex-wife, who is on her deathbed with minutes to live. When he walks in her room, he is utterly filled with frustrating, sad memories from his past, and as he watches her labored breathing, what do you think he says to her – “I’m sorry,” or “I’m going to miss you?” He looks at her, holds her hand and says, “I’m gonna become somebody.” Seriously, that’s what he said – at 90!
And how does he “become somebody,” who does he plow enough enoughness to finally feel like He’s enough?
He actually becomes a drug mule for a Mexican cartel, and they pay him loads and loads of money. Suddenly, his Timex has turned into Cartier, and his old Ford pick-up truck is a Cadillac SUV with spinning chrome rims – spinners at 90! And he believes he is finally loveable.
Of course, you know what happens next. He ends up getting arrested in a historic drug bust. And it really happened. Google it when you get home.
The reason it’s a great movie is because it reveals just how far you and I will go to be “somebody.”
Do you remember the 8th grace? In 8th grade, I thought if I finally made good grades in algebra like all my other friends I would be somebody. Do you remember report cards that were hand-written by the teacher? Do you remember white-out? Well, yeah, I whited-out my 57 and made it an 87. And I did it to be loveable, and it was a disaster.
The immeasurable joy of the path of grace – the real joy of being a follower of Jesus – lies in discovering the freedom that we don’t have to plow accomplishments to be loved! And, even if we really do have a few genuine accomplishments, a few national championships, if you will, the NCAA could erase them all, we’d still be infinitely loved – infinitely precious, as we used to say in the South.
I like the way Spiral Staircase sang it in 1969:
“I love you more today than yesterday.
But not half as much as much as tomorrow”
The astonishingly good news of the gospel – of being a follower of Jesus – is that it’s a gigantic waste of time to consider our “givens or our baggage” (Paul Zahl in Grace in Practice).
Because, real love – eternal life – comes from placing our whole trust in the One who never looked back, who plowed the perfect path for you and for me – who set his face to Jerusalem and saved our souls.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
3rd Sunday after Pentecost
30 June 2019