A sermonette by Alister Pate to get the conversation started about Luke 9:51-62, Year C, Proper 8 (13)
When I was growing up one of my favourite books was the J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The book starts with a very comfortably housed Bilbo Baggins enjoying his life – his six meals a day, including “second breakfast”, his country walks, and sitting peaceably outside the big round door of his underground home blowing impressive smoke rings from his long wooden pipe. He lives a predictable, safe, routine life, where nothing unexpected ever happens and nothing disturbs his peace and quiet, and that is precisely how he likes it.
And then one day, while Bilbo is doing just that, a stranger arrives in town, a tall man with a long grey beard, who has something completely surprising and unprecedented to say.
“I have no time for blowing smoke rings! I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone,” said Gandalf, for it was he.
“I should think so - in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them.”
Anyway, spoiler alert – Bilbo does indeed go with Gandalf, and sets out on an adventure which will change not only his life, but, it transpires, the fate of the entire world.
When Anne and I were in the UK a few weeks ago, we spent some time with some friends of ours whose daughter has surprised them by leaning strongly into her Catholic heritage and wanting to get confirmed. As good parents they want to help, even though they are a little nonplussed, and so they got her some materials to help her prepare for her first confession, which we ended up reading.
There is nothing wrong with the document. It’s largely a list of virtues appropriate to school children, including making sure other children aren’t left out of social arrangements and the importance of obedience to one’s parents and so on. But it left me feeling a bit… bored. Yes, it’s nice to be nice, and I’m sure it is better for families if children do what they are told and so on.
But it doesn’t grab you by the lapels, doesn’t inspire you go out and face the challenges of being a young person in the world today. It doesn’t seem to call for heroism. And, surely, that is what is going to be needed for today’s young people – just as it has been needed by people at all times.
Life is complex, we are faced with wicked problems, and it isn’t always obvious that anyone knows what to do about it.
Today is the festival of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Both of them heard the call from Jesus – Peter was called away from his perfectly sensible career as a fisherman, Paul from his life as an up-and-coming religious functionary. Both of them allowed Jesus to completely turn their lives upside down – and both of them participated in God’s redemptive, kingdom-building work in the world.
Jesus, like Gandalf talking to Bilbo, is issuing us a Call to Adventure. It might not involve magic rings, huge mountains of treasure, or dragons. But it does involve us stepping out from our comfortable, self-satisfied lives – turning our attention outwards towards the world.
It is a journey of profound importance. A journey which will ask everything of us, in the same way that love, which costs nothing, asks everything of us. In the same way that life itself asks everything of us. It breaks us open to the world, and hence breaks us open to God, just like it did for Peter and for Paul and for Jesus himself.
And, in the end, it will lead us home, citizens of the Kingdom, transformed and transformative, as people who have learned to walk hand in hand with God.