Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost

‘The Son of  Man has no place to lay his head.’

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‘Lord,  do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’

The Son goes forth to Jerusalem, and wishes to stay in a city of the Samaritans. Yet the Samaritans will not have Jesus, for He goes toward Mount Zion to sacrifice His body, and they worship on Mount Gerizim. To the Samaritans, the Lord is a heretic, for they worship on the wrong mount. Therefore, they will not have Him. They reject the Son.

For such an offense, to turn away the Son of God, the very Messiah promised from ancient times, the Apostles ask ‘do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven?’

Such seems quite a harsh punishment for inhospitality in our own day. But we should remember that the Samaritans too awaited the coming Messiah. That they would reject a resting place to  such a Messiah when He had finally come after so many centuries was to wish condemnation upon themselves. If they will not have the Savior, they will not be saved.

We may think we would not burn down someone’s
house for refusing to room us. Then again, we are not God, and the house we
wish to enter into is not the house of those expecting to entertain God
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. It is one thing to be rude. It is another
thing to be rude to source of all being. Especially when you hypocritically
claim that you have been waiting anxiously for him all this time, a hundred
years upon a hundred years. Perhaps the disciples were not being so irrational
to ask whether heavenly fire was the proper punishment for such wicked and
inhospitable people. Sodom and Gomorrah were overturned for less. Why not this
Samaritan village?

But the Lord rebukes the disciples, and moves on, and for a reason.

And what is this reason?

‘Foxes have their dens, and birds their nests, but the Son of Man has no
place to lay His head.’

For the Lord is homeless. Though he rebukes the disciples, He does not
rebuke the Samaritan town, for, at the end of the day, He has no place there.
He has no place anywhere. He has no right to stay in the Samaritan village. He
has no right to stay anywhere. He has no right to be anywhere. He has no place
in this world. Him who was born in a stable, would die in the air; neither a
suitable resting place for man. But this the Lord accepts, for He has no place
in this world, for the world has rejected Him. Since Adam, the world has hated
Him, and so He came to the world as one hated.

How much we long to make of this world our home.
How much we work, we toil, we invest, we buy, we settle; how much we smile to
see what we have made for ourselves. We are foolish in doing this, but not
evil.

Foolish in that this world can never be our home. As long as we profess the
name of Christ, we will always be restless for our true home, the New
Jerusalem, the presence of God, which is heaven on earth.

Yet we are not wrong to wish for a home, for all mankind has been wishing for
the same since Adam’s fall. In our poverty, we would make a hut our home. In
our comfort, we would make a house a home. In our wealth, we would make
ourselves palaces, and call them homes. But none are homes, for we, with the Son
of Man, have no place to lay our head.

It is no surprise that we are overcome with so much sadness in this world,
so much anxiety. For we have no place to come back to after our labors and say,
‘I am home.’

The Lord tells us ‘Follow me.’  The Lord tells us to forget everything,
even our sacred obligations: ‘let the dead bury their own.’ The Lord
tells us ‘anyone who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is not worthy
of the kingdom of God.’

The Lord tells us such harsh things, for the Lord tells us to follow
him. By blood, He will go where we will one day be. By sacrifice, He goes
to prepare a place for us. By His glorious resurrection, He goes to make many
mansions.

The Lord takes us to a place, a place with Him, not of this world, that
we truly and finally call home.

In that heaven, you will say for the first and  last time, ‘I am home.’

In that heaven, you will say:

‘Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.’

+INJ+

Preached by Pastor Fields

Sermon Texts: 1 Kings 19:9b-21;
Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62.