God In Every Moment

Luke 9: 51-62

Roger Lynn

August 25, 2019

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I confess that this passage from Luke’s Gospel has often troubled me over the years. It always seemed too harsh. Why would Jesus be so hard on people for wanting to grieve and love their families? Isn’t that what being truly and genuinely human is all about?

And then, as so often happens, as I sought to find a different way to understand this passage, two things came into focus which cast the whole thing in a fresh new light. The first of these insights is one which applies to a wide variety of scriptural references. It has to do with the concept of prescriptive versus descriptive. For a variety of reasons, the most common way of seeking to understand any particular passage is to read it prescriptively. Put simply, we take it to mean that whatever is being described is the way God wants it to be, or even the way God causes it to be. Sometimes we do this because it is how we have been trained to interpret scripture. And sometimes we do this because it is the filter the writers themselves used to interpret the concepts and events they were writing about. In either case, there are a great many instances when reading the Bible prescriptively leaves us with an understanding of God that can be frightening, disturbing, and profoundly unhelpful. Today’s passage is a good example. One of the reasons I have always had such a difficult time with it over the years is because I was trying to read it prescriptively. Thus the question – why would Jesus be so hard on people? 

But what if it isn’t Jesus who is being hard on people? What if Jesus is merely describing the way things are when we make certain choices? In other words, what if we read such passages descriptively rather than prescriptively? It changes everything. Some of the language may still prove to be a challenge, but that is because at the time scripture was being written, the prescriptive filter was often the only one available. For the most part, they had not yet recognized the possibility of looking at things any other way. When we begin to look past some of the language to the meaning which can be found underneath, suddenly the comment about not being fit for the kingdom of God becomes a description rather than a judgment. It is as if Jesus is saying, “As long as you are distracted and paying attention to other things, your heart just isn’t in it.” 

It is, however, the second insight which came to me that really opened things up for me. It has to do with a small little detail in the wording. Notice the way people talk about why they can’t follow Jesus yet. “First let me go and bury my father.” “Let me first say farewell...” The problem is not that burying our dead and connecting with our families are incompatible with following the path to which Jesus points us. The problem is the people fail to recognize that following where Jesus leads already includes all of the rest of life. “First let me...” as if things like grieving and saying goodbye are somehow separate from seeking God’s presence. “I’ll do this and then I’ll look for God.” What I believe Jesus seeks to reveal to us, over and over again, is that God is always and forever present in this moment and every moment. It is when we begin to recognize that all of life is included in what it means to live faithfully that we truly begin to live. Absolutely go and bury your father. Absolutely go and say farewell (or hello) to your family. Just don’t think that such things are outside of the realm of God. Every breath we take, every thought and feeling that we have, every experience which comes our way, occurs within the basic context of God’s loving presence in our lives and in our world. We can deny or ignore that reality. But in so doing we end up living less than the full, rich, abundant lives which God desires for us. Everything becomes deeper and richer and more filled with meaning and purpose when we allow the fullness of God’s presence to shape the whole of our living.

When we truly begin to understand that living in God encompasses all the rest, then there is no need to look back, because everything we might have looked back for is not, in fact, behind us but right here with us. In the words of Jesus as found in Matthew’s Gospel (as well as a popular church camp song), “Seek ye first the kingdom of God...and all these things will be added unto you.”

So, it is helpful to remember that Jesus and God are never about the business of cutting us off or judging us to be unfit. Those are conditions we impose on ourselves unnecessarily when we fail to recognize God’s presence in every moment. God’s intention is for us to live full, rich, connected lives. Let us begin to open ourselves to that possibility. Let us begin to live as if we believe it.