First Sunday of Summer Term
By the Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman
University Chaplain for Episcopal Ministry, Marsh Chapel at Boston University
Assisting Priest at Trinity Copley Square, Boston
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, June 29, 2025)
Let there be peace among us and let us not be part of our own or another's oppression. Good morning, church. If it weren't for the women who have guided me on my journey, I wouldn't be here with you this morning, and for that, I need to give thanks and praise. At the beginning of my ordination process, one is asked over and over and over and over and over and over again to write and tell your spiritual autobiography or how you feel you have been called to ordain ministry. Well, my story hasn't changed. The lens of which I view it has changed based on prayer and lived experiences, since I arrived here in 1999. So how did I come to live in Cambridge and attend the Episcopal Divinity School in pursuit of ordained ministry?
In March of 1999, I came to Boston to interview for a development job at Boston University. No irony there. The interview went well enough, and there was a housing shortage at the time, and I was encouraged to look around to see where I would like to live. My only knowledge of the Boston area was Cambridge, Back Bay, the South End, and my annual trip with my Brooklyn friends to shop at Filene's Basement. That evening after grabbing some dinner on Newberry Street and praying at Trinity Boston again, no irony there, I was walking down the street and a business sign caught my eye. The name of the business was Matching Roommates. Thinking that this might be a good option, I walked in. After speaking with a very pleasant woman and having sticker shock at the price for this service, she said to me, "I'm going to give you the name of a woman I think would be a good match, and I won't charge you."
She slid a piece of paper across the table, and off I went. I called the name on the paper, and the woman gave me directions to her place in Cambridge. I vividly recall her directions, "Green line inbound to red line outbound, get off at Harvard Square and walk down Brattle Street. You'll see huge houses, but I don't live there. Turn right onto the street, the address that I cannot recall. If you get to Huron, you've gone too far." I met with a very nice woman about my age. Then it looked like a good match. Walking back from our house down Brattle Street, what caught my eye and my thoughts was the campus of the Episcopal Divinity School. I had felt the call to ordain ministry years before, but dismissed it as I was living my best professional life, making my way up the ladder of university advancement.
I was good, just attending church, staying spiritually centered. All is good here until something stopped me dead in my tracks in front of the campus on Brattle Street, and I stared at the building in the center of campus. I looked to the right at the chapel and to the left at what looked like a dorm, and a voice in my head said, "You either walk through it now or you leave it alone." I didn't get the job at BU, but I got an interview at EDS. The Reverend Dr. Cheryl Kijower-Holbrook, an amazing thirty-year student, spoke to me that day, and by that August, I had quit my job and I was moving to Cambridge as a first-year MDiv student. In that moment of spiritual clarity on Brattle Street, I was called to follow Jesus. Now, the road hasn't always been smooth, and to quote the late Bishop Barbara Clementine Harris, sometimes it's been like trying to put pantyhose on an octopus, but I've been called to every moment of my journey and I have followed.
The New Testament records Jesus using the words “follow me” 22 times. No other command by Jesus does he repeat more than this one. Follow me. He doesn't say love me or worship me or give me something. He says simply, “follow me.” Walk with me. Do what I do. Learn from me. Over and over again, we find Jesus saying those words to people. Later, the Apostle Paul says that to be connected to the church is in some mysterious and deeply spiritual fashion to be connected to Christ. A clue to the answer for this can be seen in today's reading from Luke's Gospel. He invites us to join Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem and hopes that we will gain insight into what it means to travel through life as companions and disciples of Jesus. Remember, it was Luke who first described the Christian community as people of the way in Acts 9:2. Luke portrays an exchange between Jesus and the three would-be partners in which Jesus takes all the excuses by which we prioritize our lives and rules them out of the life of discipleship.
Beginning with this passage and continuing through the next nine chapters, Jesus is on the move. Here, we get a very mobile Jesus who is preaching and teaching along the way, and it's not always comfortable words that we hear. We began to hear some shake-up of controversial and static ways of living. This is also a text that is full of motion. All this motion talk invites the hearers at the time and for us today to consider patterns for living that may be very different from those to which they are accustomed to, being stable citizens hopelessly fixed on our safe environment of a comfortable home and surrounding does not prepare us adequately for discipleship. We must have that willingness to move. We encounter no standstill Jesus here either physically or metaphorically. We get several looks at his face. Luke mentions Jesus's face three times, or at least we are tipped off to where it is pointed. He set his face to go to Jerusalem.
The emphasis on direction is an expression of resolve. Jesus appears determined to warn others that the road to loyalty to God involves multiple bumps of rejection. The very mention of Jerusalem as a destination, the place where Jesus would eventually suffer and die, points to the close relationship between discipleship and rejection by others. Luke may be opening this lengthy travel section with a visit to the hostile Samaritan territory to awaken interested disciples with the knowledge that they would be following a rejected leader.
The question line just beneath the surface of Luke's narrative is, do you know that you are following a rejected leader? Would-be followers of Jesus is a suitable title for those anonymous figures in our text. There are individuals who wish to be with Jesus or intend to be with him. Does this sound roughly familiar to your own circumstance? For all our eagerness and interest in Jesus Christ, discipleship also looks most attractive when we set the terms. The figures who encounter Jesus on the road haven't grasped his claim, that even the best of human relationships must be subservient to follow him. Even our deepest loves are subject to a higher allegiance to God. We don't get the privilege of custom designing the terms of our Christianity. Let me repeat. We don't get the privilege of custom designing the terms of our Christianity.
The first person is turned away because the cost is too high. Because of your security, because there is a radical rootlessness to becoming a disciple. Home is where your heart is and your heart is with God. The second would-be disciple wants to maintain his ties to his family, can carry out the obligation he must bury his parents. But Jesus reminds him that the reign of God is about life and if one is so rooted in the past, then perhaps they themselves are dead to new ideas and ways of seen the world. For Jesus, one cannot put off the realm of the living while tending to the realm of the dying.
Then there's the third person who asked Jesus to let him go kiss his parents goodbye. Now, who would be against that? But Jesus says there's no looking back because in the reign of God, life moves forward. Jesus is the one who brings in the reign of God, and he wants disciples that he can count on, and there is a cost. The price of followership, though, is seen in a more hopeful light when we comprehend what Jesus means by his words, follow me. In Aramaic, Jesus' language, the word for "follow" doesn't mean to follow behind. Jesus is not saying, “Do this after me.” He is saying, “Do this with me.” Follow Jesus means we are not solely on our own here.
D.K. Chesterton wrote that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and not tried. To be a follower of Jesus is not so we can be better informed. We have to be formed. It is not enough to engage the intellect. We have to engage our whole life. Every Sunday, we learn something about what it means to follow Christ. We are just people along the journey who are doing our best to serve. We learn that being kind is more important than being right. We learn that it is those moments of recognizing God's presence that make life so special.
We learn that love, not time, heals all wounds. We learn that we can always pray for someone at any time and any place. We learn that the best way to grow as Christians is to surround ourselves with people, no matter where they are on their life journey and their spiritual journey. We learn that while everyone wants to live on the top of the mountain, joy and growth happen while we are climbing the mountain. And we desperately need each other to climb that mountain.
We learn that when we follow Christ, Christ walks beside us. Everyone who is here this morning, whether physically, online, or watching later, comes to us from a unique angle, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Regardless, there is a shared, if not always articulated sense, that we are implicating ourselves in something good and in something noble. Something that is put at the disposal of God's Holy Spirit for advancing the interests of God's people’s honor.