LK 9: 51-62 

Laterally Luke…Pentecost+3…Revised 2019 

It may seem a bit over-imaginative, but good preaching - & teaching - is imaginative. Was there ever more imaginative a Teacher & Preacher than Jesus Himself? So, that said, imagine our passage as two sandwiches. Each put together with someone caught in between. The first, in vv.51-56 is made up of a slice of racial intolerance on the one side, & one of religious intolerance on the other. Jesus & His disciples are then the  ‘meat in the sandwich’! Aren’t racial & religious intolerance as alive today, if not more so, as they were back in the days of this episode? Is calling down fire from heaven on the perpetrators, though, likely to do anything other than fan the flames & intensify them? Jesus knows this only too well. What can we learn from His Wisdom today; & how might we preach it to encourage each other to discern & practise ‘the Jesus Way’ rather than James’ & John’s ‘heavy-handedness’?

What follows is another ‘sandwich’. This time the slice of bread on one side is those who volunteer or are called to follow Jesus, & on the other side, the conditions each set for their following. The ‘meat in the sandwich’ is Jesus himself. There's nothing wrong with any of the things the three would-be followers want to do before setting off with Jesus wherever He might lead. There’s everything wrong, though, in their timing. God's time is always Now! Not tomorrow! Not the next day! Not when it suits us! God is always the God of Now! And, as Jesus makes clear, demands a Now response.

A question we might ponder, & pose in our preaching, is ‘What kind of bread slices are we being?’ &, who or what are we sandwiching in our congregation? Why not discern & preach whether the quality of life in our church, & its leadership, would be more Jesus-like if we applied the lesson of our sandwich? How much more Godly might our church life become if, we called more to be the slices of bread & the filling in our sandwich? Bread is a constantly recurring theme in the Scriptures. Why not, then, explore the idea of bread & its fillings imaginatively to illustrate how Jesus becomes the Bread of Life for us all today.

Brian

Afterthought: I here confess I’m a keen home-baker of Bread! There’s nothing like the smell & taste of freshly baked, home-made bread, filled (or spread) with our choice of toppings. Our local library actually has on its shelves, in the cookery section, a book called, ‘The Filled Loaf’! Maybe they should move it to the Theology section?!