Choosing the Path of Life

The Rev. Amy Hodges Morehous
Church of the Ascension
Proper 8
June 30, 2013


2 Kings 2: 1-2, 6-14
Psalm 77: 1-2, 11-20
Galatians 5: 1, 13-25
Luke 9: 51-62


When I was in college, I was lucky enough to make a group of girlfriends who are still friends. We have been friends for more than 20 years now.

About my sophomore year of college, it came time for one of our spring rituals - the Orange and White football game. One of my friends' parents had tickets, and came in from Nashville and offered to go along with us. We said, “Well, the rest of us don’t have tickets.” Her parents said, "Oh, don't worry about those. We'll take care of it." We, being poor college students, thought they were offering to buy tickets for us all. So, of course, we said, "Sure!"

When we arrived, her parents said "Well, we have a family ticket, so today, you're all our children." We were pretty skeptical this would work. After all, there were probably 10-14 of us or so, all roughly the same age, all together, including several boyfriends who are now spouses. My friend's mother, Betty, handed them the ticket at the gate, and stood there as we entered and said, "This is my daughter and my daughter and my daughter and my daughter and my son and my son and my other daughter and my other daughter....”  When her husband brought up the rear, she said with a flourish, "And finally, this is my husband!" And he smiled broadly. Then Betty said, "Come on children, lets all go find our seats!" And so, we did.

For one whole afternoon, Betty chose to adopt us all. That's just the kind of person she was, and we all loved that she would claim each of us in public, the whole motley lot of us. If God were handing out a double share of someone's spirit, I would gladly take Betty's.

Last Wednesday, one of those friends called me to say that Betty had died unexpectedly. Only 64, she had a fatal heart attack, and was gone. So last weekend, I made the drive to Nashville for her funeral. I went for Betty, and I went for my friend, who had lost her mother. On my way, I went to pick up another of our friends, someone else who had been adopted by Betty that day.

You see, there's a wrinkle in this friend's story, as well. She has been struggling with a re-occurrence of Stage 4 melanoma for 3 years. The melanoma has spread to her brain and heart, and she has volunteered for several clinical trials. Even if it won’t help her, she says, it can help someone else down the road. She has three children, the youngest of whom is 6 years old. Unless something miraculous happens, she is dying, and we all know it. But she refers to it differently. She's not dying, she's "living until I die." She is honest enough to remind us that having melanoma sometimes involves using language that I really can't use up here in a sermon. But she is also very clear that whatever the struggle, she has faith in her abiding relationship with a loving God. She is the same faithful, honest, funny, occasionally profane self she has been for 43 years, if a bit more fearless, because she is well aware she will have much less time than the rest of us to have her say. If God is handing out a double share of someone's spirit, if I were incredibly lucky, I'd take a share of hers, too.

So last weekend, we sat together, my very ill friend and I, through a funeral service for Betty in a beautiful Gothic church in Nashville. We heard how Betty's whole life was lived in a spirit of invitation, of welcome - in a spirit of adoption. Just as she 'adopted' all of us as her children that day, so she made friends with and invited people she met to come with her to church. All kinds of people - old friends, new friends, people on airplanes, people in checkout lines. Not in a spirit of arrogance, or 'better-than-thou'ness, but in the spirit of laughter, and fellowship. In the spirit of sharing the joy she already knew. My friend and I sat together, and we remembered Betty, and we laughed, and we prayed, and we cried, and we sang, and we felt lucky that we didn't either of us have to do it alone.

So it is for all of us who have loved all the amazing people in each of our lives. This has been an especially difficult week for us here at Ascension - we are in the middle of saying goodbye to so many people we have lost in such a short period of time. And then, in today's Gospel, Jesus seems to make it even harder for those who would be his followers. People who want be part of the ministry and kingdom of Christ, but... (And there’s always a ‘But...’)  "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God," and “let the dead bury their own dead.”

We, sophisticated urbanites that we are, might have a bit of trouble with Jesus' plow metaphor. I’m not sure how many of us have ever plowed a furrow for planting. I have, and it's hard. You have to fix your gaze on a point ahead of you, and head toward it. If you look back to see what you have already done, the path you're plowing goes completely crooked, and you have to do it all over again. Spending time in the past, at the expense of the future.

So it is with dying, whether it’s the death of someone we loved, or the end of a relationship or the end of the way of life that we had always known. When someone we love dies, it can be easy to wish that we could die right alongside them. To return to the life we had with them, to return to be the people we were before this hard thing happened that changed our lives forever. To die to the future, and live in the past. But that just isn't possible, as attractive as that sometimes is. Jesus is saying to each of us, clearly, that we have a choice. We choose how we walk down the path before us.  We choose whether we have our gaze fixed on Christ, or whether we are diverted by other things.

Elisha chooses to remain with Elijah as he is carried off in the chariot. And afterward, he chooses to pick up and put on Elijah's mantle, to carry on his prophetic work. Elisha could have chosen to leave, to go back to home to the fields where Elijah found him. But he didn't. He took up the mantle, and he parted the waters.

Paul is even more explicit in spelling it out for us. "For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters."  And then, in case we're unclear, Paul spells it out for us by giving us an extensive list of our choices. Death or life. We have the freedom to choose. I can choose to be envious of my neighbor, or I can choose to be joyful of their good fortune. I can choose to satisfy only my own selfish desires, or I can choose to live for Someone greater. Those virtues do sound pretty terrific, don't they? "Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." Who wouldn't want a life full of those?

But we have to choose them. Over and over. I have to choose patience every day - it does not come naturally to me. I choose it, and then I lose it, and have to take a deep breath and choose it all over again.

My friend has not chosen to die of cancer. But she is choosing how she lives with it. She is not superhuman - she wrestles with it just as any of us would. But each day she has, she chooses life, she chooses to continue to parent, and to hope, she continues to wrestle with her faith, and she chooses to live every day in relationship with God.  She and I sat together in that pew last weekend not to bury someone who was dead, but to celebrate her resurrection. We were there to be Resurrection people. Not a people of death, but of life. Together, she and I sung 'Amazing Grace' and we cried, knowing that God's grace might be leading one of us home much sooner than either of us would prefer. We cried, but we still sung as clearly, and as passionately as we could. Even unto the grave, we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Today, I challenge you to live, until you die. Choose to wrestle with a life lived in relationship with God, and with each other. Choose to love your neighbor as yourself, even when that seems impossible. Invite others to share in that life you discover together, because joy shared multiplies, and this world could use more joy. Fix your hopeful gaze ahead on the kingdom of Christ, and choose to follow Christ with full hearts, despite the cost. Choose the life of a disciple of the living, resurrected Lord, and choose to cultivate those fruits of the Holy Spirit, even in the midst of the struggle of the everyday. Seek out, and be guided by the Holy Spirit, and that same Spirit will illuminate the path before you.

Someday, that Grace will lead each of us home, and God will say, "Ah, welcome home, my daughter and my daughter, and my daughter, and my son and my son and my son. I have saved a place just for you."

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Amen.