I wish they had been walking by a field, maybe at sowing time.  As it is, “they were walking along the road” (9:57).  It’s a dirt road.  The road is packed hard.  It’s dusty.  Not much grows in the road.  “I will follow you wherever you go” (9:57).  That sounds promising.  I mean, this man doesn’t even know where Jesus is going; it’s like this man doesn’t even care, so long as he can be with Jesus.  Yes.  I like that.  Maybe that’s how it ought to be.

Has anyone ever spoken to you words of reckless love?  Overcome all odds love talk?  “Don’t care pretty baby, just take me with you.”  “Take my hand and we’ll make it, I swear.”  Oh, it was pretty.  Oh, it felt good.  Where is she now?  Ladies, where is he now?

Life is costly.  Life comes at a steep cost, and not just this life.  “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (9:58).  An attractive life?  An itinerant preacher, without two pennies to rub together, relying upon the kindness of strangers?  Look before you leap.  “I’ll go wherever.  I’ll give everything.”  Beautiful words without beautiful deeds don’t turn out so pretty.  It’s as if Jesus were saying, “Stop.  Don’t talk that way.  Think.  Consider what you’ll be getting yourself into.”  Scottish pastor William Barclay writes, “It may well be that we have done great hurt to the church by letting people think that church membership need not make so very much difference.  We ought to tell them that it should make all the difference in the world.  We might have fewer people; but those we had would be really pledged to Christ.”[1]  To be “really pledged to Christ,” which is to be joined to the church inwardly and not merely outwardly—to be “really pledged to Christ,” is to participate in salvation.  There is a way of life for those who have responded to Christ’s call.  In practice if not in principle, you and I may regard worship in the church building every Sunday as optional, but a life of worship is not.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts the matter strongly: “only the man who is dead to his own will can follow Christ.”[2]  That sounds like a tall order, but this death to self doesn’t happen all at once; it doesn’t happen without Christ.  What is God doing?  He is forming Christ in us, personally and corporately.  He is cultivating us up to the measure of our Lord.  We die to our own will over time.  As faith grows in us, in Christ by the Spirit, the less we live for the imperious demands of our fallen will.  Methodist William H. Willimon gets it right: “It takes time to worship—about a lifetime of weekly bending of one’s life toward God, of following a way that is against our natural inclination.”[3]

Some come running up, eager, ready, already devoted, reckless of the cost.  More often, it seems to work out as when Jesus says, “Follow me,” only to be told, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father” (9:59).  Now, do you mean to tell me this man’s father had just died?  What are the odds?!  If you had to get out of something quite serious, quite demanding and quite inconvenient, right away, you might very well make an extraordinary, implausible excuse: I can’t right now you see . . . um . . . I have to report for jury duty.  Um . . . my wife is having a baby!  Uh . . . look at the time!  I’ve really got to go, now!  Call me—later!

It’s now or never.  A crisis is first of all a moment of decision.  Seek the Lord while He may be found.  Call upon Him while He is near.   We like to say follow your heart, listen to your heart—why do we think and act as if that’s our most reliable guide?  Jeremiah, for one, didn’t have really great things to say about the heart.  When Jesus is speaking to us, asking us to do something, our hearts are not the most reliable guide present.  God’s Word is always our most reliable guide.  We’ve made good decisions.  We’ve made decisions that turned out to be not so good.  We live with the consequences of our good decisions and of our not so good decisions.  Mature discipleship comes with remembering both ways.  There are always and only two ways.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

One morning in autumn—strange mixture of beginnings and endings—not unlike life, I suppose—one morning in autumn, a decision needed to be made.  It was a crisis, you see.  No, it wasn’t a moment of terrible urgency, without time for reflection: the narrator of the poem talks at length about his reflecting—he had time, that morning, to think before he chose.  And it was a crisis, a moment of decision that had consequences, lifelong consequences: none of us can “travel both” roads “And be one traveler.”  He’ll be telling the tale “Somewhere ages and ages hence.”  The narrator sums up the experience by telling us that his decision, that road taken, “has made all the difference,” as indeed it did.

Now, which of the two roads did he take?  “[T]he one less traveled by”?  If you’re not sure, I just read a poem to you by Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken.”  That title makes it sound as if the poet will be telling us about the road he didn’t take that autumn morning.  Well, what could he truly tell us about a way he didn’t go?  The big What If.  Strange to give such a title to a poem that seems to be about the way he did go, if that’s what it’s about.  That way, as he tells us, made all the difference, so wouldn’t “The Road Taken” be a better title?

If you were listening with a little more care than usual, you might have begun to get the impression that both roads, both choices, seemed equally attractive: nothing calling out especially this way or that.  The one he chose was “just as fair”; the “passing there / Had worn them really about the same.”  How to decide?  Yet looking back on it—who knows how long afterwards?—he tells us that he “took the one less traveled by.”  I like the sound of that.  Shouldn’t we all aspire to do the same?  Isn’t that what all the great people have done?  No, not everyone takes that way, but those who do . . . .

And how does he know he took the road less traveled by?  Why, because it has made all the difference, as such a choice, such a way simply must make, once taken.  Attitude may be everything, but faith is more than attitude.  The voice of the poem is resolved to regard his choice in a positive way, but the destination still matters because every road leads somewhere.  Where do you want to go?  And where is Christ calling us—what does that road look like, by his own account?    Is the road less traveled by the way of faith?  Or is it the way wise people always advise the young ones not to take?  There’s a reason why you shouldn’t go that way!  No one comes back from that journey!  “Follow me,” Jesus says.  Some have said yes; others have said no—they’re out there, too, we know!  Still others are at that fork in the road: to the left or to the right?  Crisis.  How to decide?  “[B]oth that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.”  Jesus says no one can serve two masters (Lk 16:13).  No one can take both ways.  The first psalm tells us, simply, there are two ways: they are not the same, and they don’t lead to the same place.

“I will follow you, but . . .”  I want to live, but.  Bless me, but.  Let me know your love, have your love, but.  I love you, but.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s best-known work is The Cost of Discipleship (1937).  It costs us something to follow Jesus.  Yet I still find myself wondering why so many people around us don’t appear to be interested.  It’s not so much outright opposition as indifference.  When the grave is at the end of every road, what difference does it make which one you take?  Is that how such people think?

We may suppose this Jesus stuff, this Christianity thing, bores them, and we then wonder why we can’t, you know, liven things up, like those popular churches where all the young people go and are happy.  And if we did all that and the people who weren’t coming before still don’t come?  I’m thinking now about the ones who don’t come but could.  It’s not really that they find all this too boring.  I suppose there is that, but it bores them because they just don’t want it.  They don’t want to follow Jesus.  Not if it means being in church more often than not.  Not if it means having to sit here and do what we’re doing, rather than other things they’d rather be doing.  They value those things more.  Those things make sense to them, make them happy and satisfy their desire to be comfortable in every sense.  How many I’ve buried who never demonstrated any great interest in this life together, yet at the grave they come to me.

But what if we did church so that people were happy, came happy and, best of all, left happy, always?  People seem so happy at those churches where they aren’t bored, you know, the ones where all the young people go with the music and the lights and smoke and the jokes and the laughing.  That’s the kind of church Jesus would go to, the kind of church Jesus wants.  What kind of church does Jesus want?  He wants a church that follows; he wants a church that listens; he wants a church where people invest themselves in one another.

The “sin” of seriousness.  Tell me one joke Jesus tells his followers.  Now, the underlying idea, I think, is that we can relax and laugh because we’re saved and safe, and I agree.  No, our worship ought never to be gloomy!  Yes, let worship be bright, brilliant, glorious!  But the brightness isn’t earthly brightness—manufactured, artificial brightness—it’s the brilliance of God’s glory shining upon His people.  Let worship reflect the light of the One whom we worship.  Here, we are lifting our hearts to the Lord.  He makes them light by His Word.

I’m afraid what we’re talking about every Sunday is quite serious: life and death.  Life or death.  The Good News is that you and I have life.  The Good News is that the elect of God never can lose that life, once given.  The Good News is that everyone doing whatever today outside these doors—they also can have life, still.  A decision has to be made, though.  A road must be taken.  It can’t be put off, scoffed off, dithered off forever.

There will be a road not taken, as well as a road taken.  The German theologian of the last century Rudolf Bultmann puts the matter clearly: “All must make up their minds what they really want to set their hearts on, whether it is God, or the goods of this world.”[4]  The road less traveled by—Jesus is always telling us about it, inviting us onto it, to journey with him.  He’s going somewhere, you know.  He wants to take us along, wants us to go there and be there with him.  The besetting trouble with all too many earthly decisions is that the roads can look much the same, almost equally attractive.  What our hearts most want, then, might be found along any of those roads.

Our hearts most need God, but they will not want God most, will never want God most, until God touches the heart, speaks the heart into His life.  No one wants God until he or she does.  It is never we who find God but God who always finds us.  When He has found us, touched us, spoken our hearts into His life, then we want Him, then He is the priceless pearl, then, we can sing with Martin Luther, “Let goods and kindred go / this mortal life also. / The body they may kill, / God’s truth abideth still.  His kingdom is forever.”

No, Christ’s way doesn’t look really attractive, from this world’s side—obedience, suffering, perseverance, sacrifice.  Where’s the fun?  Where’s the play?  Where’s the vacation from responsibility?  From God’s side, Christ’s way is life, blessing, holiness, righteousness, full of grace and bestowing grace, grace for life, eternal life, life beyond and after the hurt, the loneliness, the hardness of circumstance, the hardness of hearts around us.  If the world, if our society and culture, encourage prolonged adolescence, biblical Christianity always calls us to maturity.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

               [1] William Barclay.  Gospel of Luke.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  131.

               [2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Cost of Discipleship.  1937.  New York: Macmillan, 1959.  79.

               [3] William H. Willimon.  Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry.  Nashville: Abingdon P, 2002.  333.

               [4] Rudolf Bultmann.  Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting.  Trans. Rev. R. H. Fuller.  New York: Meridian, 1956.  91.