Third Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 19:15–16, 19–21; Psalm 16 (sung); Galatians 5:1, 5-6, 13–18, 22-26; Luke 9:51 –62
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, June 29 2025
Today, Jesus of Nazareth sets out on his final journey to Jerusalem. There, he will be welcomed by enthusiastic crowds waving palms, arrested by the Temple authorities, and crucified by the Roman authorities, and on the third day rise again. This may strike us as a little odd.
Didn’t Jesus just do that? Palm Sunday was on April 13, Good Friday five days later, Easter Sunday on April 20. Is this a case of what the late, great Yogi Berra memorably described as “dejà vu all over again.”?
No, in fact, it’s just the way our lectionary and the Christian year work.
Each year, on ordinary Sundays, we read through one of the first three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, or Luke – semi-continuously from beginning to end.
But not all Sundays are ordinary. There are special Sundays that intervene: the special Sundays of Advent and Christmas, Epiphany and Lent, and the eight Sundays from Easter Day to Pentecost. The story is further complicated by Easter not having a fixed date. It can fall on any date from March 22 to April 25.
But that’s alright. In these Sundays after Pentecost, as we continue to read Luke, our focus is less on the memories of Jesus that Luke puts together in his Gospel than on the church that Jesus leaves behind to carry on his work.
Our focus is on us, and today we are together on the way, following Jesus on the dusty highways of Galilee, Samaria and Judea.
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How are we to understand this following?
One of my favourite sketches by Paul Merton shows him in military uniform, speaking to camera in his usual deadpan fashion.
“For three days and three nights,” he reports, “we marched over open country, marching over mountains, marching under streams, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara desert. We marched and marched and marched, until at last it was time to open our Sealed Orders.”
He opens the orders. They say, “Don’t march anywhere.”
It’s very silly; but it’s a useful reminder that following Jesus may not mean going anywhere, still less marching.
This is true, to begin with, of us. Few of us are Swiss, still less genevois or genevoise. Most of us have come here from elsewhere. In rare cases, moving to Geneva or its hinterland was part of our following Jesus – some of us, for example, came to work for the World Council of Churches or (what is now) the World Communion of Reformed Churches. But most of us came for other reasons. Whatever our reasons, now that we are here, our calling is to follow Jesus and to serve our neighbours where we are, in the three Swiss cantons and the two French départements where we live.
It’s true too of the earliest followers of Jesus, in first-century Palestine. To be sure, some of these were literal followers, walking in his footsteps along the dusty roads. But others were not. Mary sat at his feet, listening spellbound to every word. Martha fixed him a meal, grumbling in irritation at the lack of any help from her sister. Nothing in their story suggests they ever left Bethany. But they were just as much followers of Jesus as those who walked with him everywhere.
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What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus?
We should remember, first, why Jesus came. He came to call us to turn to God and to join with him in a journey to God’s kingdom, where the one he called Father would be finally and fully revealed as author of everything and ruler of all.
We should listen, next, to what we hear in our Gospel. Jews and Samaritans didn’t much like each other, as the parable of the good Samaritan reminds us. Hostility had smouldered between them for centuries. Jews despised upon Samaritans because they had intermarried with foreigners. Samaritans had their own temple on Mount Gerizim and detested the temple in Jerusalem. When a Samaritan village denies Jesus hospitality because Jerusalem is where he is going, the hot-tempered James and John suggest calling down fire from heaven. Jesus rebukes them. He is not in the business of fomenting national or religious conflict. He is about his Father’s business, the business of a Father who makes the rain to fall on Jew and Samaritan without favour. We are all God’s children.
Ignatius of Loyola, the Basque Spaniard former soldier who founded the Jesuits, prays that God will teach him “to give and not to count the cost”. To those he encounters on the road to Jerusalem, Jesus says the opposite: Count the cost.
To one who says he will follow wherever he goes, Jesus responds, “Do you want to be homeless? I have nowhere to lay my head, no hole like a fox, no nest like a bird. Are you willing to do likewise?”
In our Old Testament lesson, before Elisha follows him, Elijah allows him to kiss his father and mother goodbye. To those Jesus encounters on the road and calls to follow him, he responds more harshly: No time to say goodbye. No time, even, to bury your father – one of the most sacred duties in Judaism, one of the most sacred of human duties. You want to walk with me to my death in Jerusalem? Count the cost.
We followers of Jesus in the Auditoire de Calvin are rarely, if ever, confronted by such stark choices. But like Christians everywhere, we must ask ourselves where our fundamental loyalty lies and whether we are willing to pay the price of that loyalty. We are asked to count the cost; and then we are asked to give God a blank cheque.
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In 1948, the year before I was born, the Church of Scotland met in Amsterdam with other churches for the first assembly of the World Council of Churches. “We intend to stay together,” they declared. We may think this obvious, and even banal – if you don’t intend to stay together, why did you bother meeting? But it wasn’t.
These churches – 147 in all – were committing themselves in the ashes of Europe to break down the walls of division between churches and the even more severe walls of division between nations and countries and states.
In 1998, I was at the sixth assembly, meeting in Harare, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the WCC. The theme, reminiscent of the good news Jesus proclaims, was “Turn to God – Rejoice in Hope.” Council staff, busy preparing the assembly, distracted themselves by creating national variations on the theme. My favourite was the British variant: “Turn to God – Rejoice in Hope. Please form an orderly queue.”
The title of the official report was today’s sermon title: Together on the Way. Together the participants, now representing more than 300 churches, recalled the mission statement in Luke chapter 4 that, drawing on Isaiah, sums up what Jesus is about:
“In this our Jubilee year,” they said, “we proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favour.
They, and the churches they represented, had come a long way in 50 years. In the quarter century since, we have come even further. But there is still a long way to go.
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We in the Church of Scotland, Geneva, are also together on the way. For a start, we are in a vacancy, on our way from one minister who has just departed to another minister who is yet to come. And, together with Jesus, we are on our way towards the fullness of God’s kingdom, when God will be all in all.
We intend to stay together. Frankly, we have no choice. Only together can we navigate the treacherous shoals of our vacancy. During the transition, we cannot leave the work of serving and sustaining this congregation to a faithful but hard-pressed few. It’s all hands on deck! We need – each of us – to count the cost and then consider how and what we can contribute.
We cannot do this – we cannot do any of this – by our own unaided efforts. Of course we can’t! But the good news of Jesus Christ is that we don’t need to.
Earlier in Luke chapter 9, in his account of the transfiguration, Luke writes of Moses and Elijah speaking about the exodus of Jesus, which he was about to fulfil in Jerusalem. (Luke 9:31).
The original exodus, nicely captured in the African-American spiritual the choir sang as an Introit, was Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and redeeming them from slavery under the Pharaohs.
The second exodus, also captured in the Introit, is Jesus, on his journey to Jerusalem and beyond, redeeming us all from everything that enslaves us. For freedom Christ has set us free!
Walking together on the way, we have the risen Christ to lead us. And we have the Spirit of the Easter Christ to guide us on the road and keep us from going astray.
What could possibly go wrong?