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Jay Weldon
Come Hear Uncle John’s Band When last we saw Jesus a week ago, I think he was at a party. He must have been, because he talked to the guests about how one should behave at the party, never considering oneself as the most important guest. Take a lowly seat and then be invited to take a better one. This didn’t sound like party conversation; it sounded like a real downer to me. I don’t know if many of you are familiar with the Saturday Night Live character “Debbie Downer,” but she is that person—the one who kills a good time for everyone, the one who always says the wrong thing at the wrong time. Just when the party is going strong, she announces that her foot odor has reached a new peek and may even be contagious. That’s Debbie Downer. That’s what she does. I don’t know if those people felt that way last week about Jesus. He was the rabbi—perhaps people had come to expect from him that he would sum up life, even the life of a party, in theological terms. But this week it seems that the party has taken to the streets. St. Luke tells us that large crowds were following him. If we find ourselves in this revelry, it seems at first like a football game, following the team into the stadium after a few hours of tailgating. The tension is exciting; the buzz is contagious; but if we can imagine that there is something more exciting in life than football, then maybe it is Jesus of Nazareth. He has been healing and teaching and loving and proclaiming the coming Kingdom of God, all in a way that makes us want to be a part of this crowd. Then he turns around. Maybe we are expecting something exciting—a wave to the crowd, tipping his hat, giving us a confident thumbs up—but instead it is another visit from Debbie Downer! This time it has nothing to do with foot odor or party etiquette, but with the cost of discipleship. I don’t know if Jesus was ever a true evangelist in the sense that we understand it, but he doesn’t seem to make a very compelling argument. “You have to count the costs, to do the math, to carry your cross, to give up all your possessions.” It seems like the altar call after this sermon would have netted very little. All the verses in the world of Just as I Am would have still not done the trick. We can only envy Jesus that so many people were interested in following him. Perhaps it is because we know the rest of the story, knowing that he was rather serious about carrying a cross, but he had the kind of problem that most churches do not have. Too many people were interested in joining this movement, but I suppose he knew they didn’t get it; they didn’t see the larger picture; he believed intrinsically that most of them were not looking to travel the life-changing road that he would travel. It is so often the case with faith, that people are looking for easy answers—band-aids to cover the gaping wounds that life gives us. I wish that it weren’t so. I wish there were easy answers. I wish that I believed that a simple offer of salvation and a short prayer would be enough to get each of us through this life and the next. I wish that following Jesus seriously were easy enough that it would be more desirable, more believable, more amusing. I wish that, when offering an honest assessment of a life of faith, I didn’t have to sound like such a Debbie Downer, but true faith and discipleship is harder than it is easy. I saw this same scenario exhibited so often while working as a youth minister. It was the quintessential conversation with a returning college freshman. The conversation usually came at the end of his or her freshman year, but sometimes it happened by Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or Labor Day! It didn’t have to, but often involved philosophy classes, professors in tweed coats who challenged anyone to believe in the existence of God by the end of the semester. They reminded the students that Sigmund Freud had deduced that God was an idea created by humans, a father figure, that would give us comfort and strength after we had left our father or he had left us. They challenged the students with Karl Marx’ assessment that religion was a tool that the rich use to oppress the poor, so that they may remain in control. But it didn’t have to be philosophy classes. Sometimes it was the fun that they were having, a new kind of hedonism that reduced the role of deities and saviors. Sometimes it was the difficulties, the new challenges of life that made the old answers that had always gotten them by seem too simple and irrelevant. I suppose we all have been in that boat, when the challenges of life were too much for our old answers. And I think that is where we find Jesus today with this crowd. He isn’t wearing the tweed coat with leather patches on his elbows, and he certainly isn’t encouraging anyone to lose their faith in God, but he gives this crowd the same type of message that I had to give to my college freshmen. There are no easy answers to a life of faith. A life of faith is such a valuable thing to possess, not only when life is difficult, when it gives us strength in that dark night of our soul’s journey, but it is a gift that we can offer the world, so that when others are hurting we may give them our strength. That is the kind of life that I wanted my youth to have, but a life of faith is so difficult to maintain. If Freud is the issue, then Jesus says that God our father is calling us to come and die to ourselves, to turn away from our fathers and mothers. That is likely what Jesus meant when he said in his own language to hate father and mother. Hate meant to turn away, to turn away from parents and friends and the things that have worked in life at great risk of losing that support structure. If Mr. Freud believed in an idea of God that made life easier, he certainly hadn’t heard Jesus on that day in that crowd. If Marx is the issue, Jesus says to give up all you have and find yourself among the poor—then you can oppress no one and please God. He debunks these two ideas, but unlike other evangelists, he reminds us that this is still a question of logic. We must consider carefully, as must these college freshmen, if we are willing to give up the life of just doing whatever we want. We may be called to follow him where we didn’t want to go. His call may ask us to abandon the easy answers that we found before. It is an interesting comparison that our readings present for us today: Moses standing before the people of Israel before they cross over the Jordan, and Jesus as he stands before this crowd of enthusiastic followers. Moses reminds me of the “Morphious” character early on in the movie The Matrix. Neo, just abducted from his home, is presented with two options, a red pill and a blue pill. If he takes the red pill, his life will be changed forever and there is no turning back, or he can take the blue pill, go home, and believe whatever he wants. Moses offers Israel that same option, hoping that they would take the red pill, afraid that they would chose blue. “I set before you today,” he says, “life and prosperity, death and adversity.” Put another way, “take the red pill!!” That is the same answer that I wanted to give my youth. I wished that I could convince them, that I could jump up and down and yell, “take the red pill!!” But I knew that at the next point of adversity in their lives, the next time that life questioned their faith, they would be swallowing blue pills and believing whatever they chose to believe. That’s why I am so intrigued by Jesus’ call to discipleship. I believe that he wanted them as well as us to keep following, to go where humanity had not gone before, to learn to love others as much as we love ourselves, to learn to love our enemies, to forgive those who curse us, to pray for those who persecute us, to give up so much the devices and desires of our hearts that we may truly become the likeness of him who called us to take his red pill. But he is perfectly honest in his warning. The blue pill is easier to swallow. It tastes like sugar and goes down like cold water on a hot day. The pill I want to give you will bring you the life and prosperity that Moses wanted you to have, but this pill is oversized and awkward and hard to swallow. It has a bitter aftertaste and tastes like spilled blood. Scripture tells us that he kept walking. He had taken the pill and was going to lead and follow wherever this cross took him. But on the other side of the cross is a life that we can only find when we take that red pill. This is where Debbie Downer leaves the party! A life of faith is not about the bad news that we hear when he calls us to take up our crosses, to be willing to let go of the things we rely on, to sell all that we have. It is about the new horizons that our undivided love of God and of our neighbor can produce. It is the world reborn, the vision that Jesus was not willing to forsake, even for the life of this party. If we are tempted to believe that the call to give up everything wasn’t real, we must consider Paul’s letter to Philemon, in which he is asked to give up a slave and call him a brother. While forsaking slavery may seem logical to us, this was a call to live life differently, to ignore wealth, to value people more than their usefulness to us. That is what Onesimus’ name meant, useful. And Paul says, do not just call him useful. Call him your brother and friend. See him now as someone created in the same image of God in which you were created. In 1970, the Grateful Dead released a new song called Uncle John’s Band. I mention this song at great risk today for obvious reasons, none of which is the most obvious that the Grateful Dead usually doesn’t do much good for the church! The last time I preached, I referenced a song by Elton John. While I didn’t get any responses regarding the theological impact the message of the sermon had on anyone, I did receive quite a few messages regarding Elton John. People went home and listened to his music, told stories about him, and found it ironic every time he was playing on the radio thereafter. This was all fine with me; I was relieved to know that people were at least listening to something that I had to say! However, referencing the Grateful Dead seems even more dangerous! Based on my own experience as a child when my family accidentally ended up in close proximity to a Grateful Dead concert, my sister and me being carried away hastily by our father—his hands trying in vain to cover both our eyes and our ears as he dodged deadheads left and right—this is a dangerous comparison. There was something in the air that day to say the least! And so, without recreating the 70’s for anyone here today, I was struck by the lyrics of Uncle John’s Band. In the midst of this party, for Deadheads, just like that street party 2,000 years ago for early followers, and for us, there is a simple message that he is asking us, “will you come with me?” “When life looks like easy street, there is danger at the door,” the song says. “If you thought this party was all about an easy way to God, you will have to sell all your possessions,” Jesus says. “You know all the rules by now and the fire from the ice,” the song says. “You may have to turn away from your father and mother to follow me… those are the rules,” Jesus says. But they both end with the same question. Will you come with me? And while I believe that the song on the other side of the way of the cross sounds more like Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, I must admit that the throng of followers from every language and tribe and nation may sound less like a cathedral choir and more like Uncle John’s Garage Band. I don’t know how you responded to the
Grateful Dead in their day, but I hope you will hear their message differently
today; I hope you will weigh the costs of following Jesus. There is no easy
life of faith. I’m not much of a South Georgia evangelist, because I want you
to weigh the costs seriously. It may cost you and me more than we wanted to
give up. But… I hope you will take the red pill. Amen.
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