Commitment (3rd after Pentecost, 2025 June 29)

 3rd Sunday after Pentecost

June 29th, 2025 Commitment

Wolf Kirchmeir

1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 16 ;  Galatians 5:1, 13-25;  Luke 9:51-62 

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today’s Gospel reading has two main parts.

There’s the Samaritan village that refuses to accommodate the disciples. They want to call down fire upon it, but Jesus rebukes them for their vengeful thinking.

Then we get some notes on what happened when Jesus attracted new followers. There’s the man who says he will follow Jesus wherever he will go. Jesus replies that “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

That doesn’t sound like an invitation to come along.

And then there are the two men that Jesus does invite to come along, but both have prior commitments that they must fulfill.

Well, which part of today’s reading would you focus on?

What stood out for me was the last sentence: No-one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.

That’s a hard sentence. It tells us that there are some things that matter most, and we had better not be distracted from them.

Distractions.

It’s never been easier for us to give in to distractions. That little electronic device in your pocket or purse vibrates or rings, and you answer, and talk to someone, and then touch End Call. But you don’t put the phone away. You open up some app and read somebody’s post about their latest experience with face cream or fish bait. Or you follow a link to a video showing a cat tippy-toeing through a maze of dominoes without touching any of them. Or a video of an ATV slooshing through a mud puddle and drenching its riders in muck.

Or whatever.

Distractions.

It’s not only humans that can be distracted. You can distract a cat by jiggling a piece of string in front of it. The cat can’t help itself. That jiggly bit of string attracts its attention and it swipes at it. If you have a dog, you will get its attention just by opening the fridge door. Because that’s where you keep the dog food, and the dog knows it.

It seems that anything with a brain can be distracted. You just have to figure out how, and it will work almost every time. That’s what the social media companies have done. As you may know, it works only too well.

Distractions.

They do have their good side. A wailing toddler can be soothed by distracting them. Offer them their favourite soft toy, and the wailing will likely stop.

Distractions can even change how we feel pain. Here’s an anecdote about that. I found it online.

As toddlers, whenever we'd fall down and start to cry, my dad would be like "OHMYGOSH! OH NOOO!! The floor!!!? Did you hurt the floor???" And we'd be shocked into forgetting we'd just fallen (and gotten scared-hurt).

It was hilarious seeing younger siblings do this –  to go from traumatized and in desperate pain to stunned in about half a second... guppy faces and wide eyes like- 'Oh no! I'm not the victim here at all, am I?' Maybe you'd have to see it to understand. Surprisingly, it really did make everything stop hurting.

Distractions.

They can also do serious harm. They are often used by politicians to shift attention from unpopular policies or decisions. I won’t give examples, there are enough of them in the news.

Political distractions are bad enough, but distractions can also interfere with commitments. Suppose you decide to read a book, or make a snack, or chat with a friend. If there’s no commitment to fulfill at that time, then these are not distractions. A distraction is doing anything at all when you should be doing something else. That means that even chores can be a distraction.

What I’ve mentioned are minor distractions, and we usually get back pretty quick to what we have to do. No real harm done. The serious problem is the distraction that is also a commitment. Then we have to make a choice. A real choice. One that makes a real difference.

That’s what the core of today’s Gospel is about. And Jesus does not make it easy for us. He demands 100% commitment.

Let’s hear again what Jesus says.

To the man who wants to follow him, Jesus says The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. That implies, If you choose to follow me, you will have to put up with all kinds of hardships.

To the man who wants to first arrange his father’s funeral, Jesus says, Let the dead bury their dead. That implies If you choose to follow me, you will live a life with radically different obligations.

To the man who wants to say goodbye to his family, Jesus says, No-one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God. That implies You must leave behind everything that you hold dear.

In other words, the commitment to follow Jesus is life-altering or it’s nothing.

Any commitment is serious business. To promise that you will do something may require more work, more time, more effort, more money, than you imagined when you made the promise. But that doesn’t excuse you from trying. External circumstances that you can’t control may prevent you from fulfilling your promise. Then you may be excused. But otherwise, you must do whatever it takes to keep your promise.

As I said, making a commitment, any commitment, is serious business. It looks like the prime take-away is Don’t promise more than you can deliver.

Now suppose that’s what you do. You never take on more than you can handle. You make sure there’s a back-up plan.  You always promise less than you could do, just to be on the safe side. You will say that you will try, you don’t promise delivery. And if in doubt, you don’t commit.

Sounds like a plan, right? A fail-safe plan. One that reduces risk to as close to zero as the Universe ever allows.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Jesus has in mind when he says, Follow me.

Commitment to service in the Kingdom of God is the most serious commitment of all. And Jesus repeatedly says it comes with a risk, it comes with trouble. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

And that’s the least of it.

The history of persecution, of strife between Christians, of political hi-jacking of religion, of scams and worse in the name of the faith, these show us the risks and the harms are both physical and spiritual. They come from other people. They come from within ourselves. There is no escaping them. We are flawed creatures, and we will make mistakes.

Often we will make mistakes believing we are doing the right thing.

We call ourselves Christians. That means we’ve answered Jesus’s call. If you answer Jesus’s call, that’s a total commitment. You’re promising everything. There is no back up plan, there is no “I’ll try”, there is no guarantee that you can handle it.

You have signed up for an obligation that will take you beyond your comfort zone. Way beyond, out there on the open sea, where there is nothing to hold onto, no one to reach for you, no way to get back to shore.

Commitment takes courage. We are naturally afraid when we don’t know what’s coming. Or when we know the odds are that what’s coming won’t be pleasant. Or when there’s no way out.

We each have some fears that are worse than others. They are the ones that make it difficult or even impossible to do certain things. I recall as a child being afraid of the dark at the bottom of the stairs. I still feel a small twinge of something before I turn on the light. I’m glad I can overcome those twinges, though. Many people have fears they can’t escape. My little twinges help me imagine what it must be like to suffer from a phobia. And that gives me another twinge of fear, the fear of being afraid.

What if you are afraid of not being able to keep your promise?

Commitment takes resolve. It’s a promise to ourselves and others.

Commitment takes courage, because we may have to act despite some fear.

Commitment takes faith, because we may have to act with no guarantee of success, or even with the odds against us.

But we’re not alone.

Jesus promised us the Spirit, the Comforter. The root of “comfort” is fort-, which means strength. We see it also in the words fortress, and fortitude.

The Spirit will give us strength.

The strength to do what we need to do when we need to do it. The strength to face whatever makes the commitment difficult. The strength to face whatever fears make us shrink from doing what we know we should do. The strength to cut distractions short, and to avoid them altogether.

That’s the promise of Pentecost.

The Spirit is a Spirit of Wisdom. The spirit will give us insight, so that we know what to do, and what to say. The Spirit will give us skill, so we know how to do it and how to say it. The Spirit will give us understanding, so we know when to change what we do and change what we say.

That, too, is the promise of Pentecost.

Finally, the Spirit is love in action. It works through us when we commit ourselves to follow Jesus. We become God’s hands, doing his work. The Spirit unites us in the body of Christ. It is the Word made Flesh, living within us when we accept the Redemption offered us through the sacrifice on the Cross.

That, to is the promise of Pentecost.

We started with some thoughts about the relationship between distractions and commitment.

We went on to some understanding of Jesus’s the life-altering invitation, Follow me.

We have come, once again, to the mystery of the Love of God.

May we love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength; and each other as ourselves.

Amen.