"Discipleship, Part Two: Diffident"
The problem with procrastination
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Text: Luke 9:51-62
Recently I decided it was a propitious time to sort out my wardrobe and get rid of some old suits and jackets that I hadn't worn for quite some time. Before I had them cleaned and sent to a depot to be recycled or used for the poor, I decided to check all the pockets. It's amazing what you find in old suit pockets. I found tickets to concerts I hadn't even bothered attending, cards from people I should have contacted. I even found (and this will give you a sense of just how old the clothes were), a two-dollar bill. As I cleaned out my pockets I managed to find all manner of memorabilia that surprised me, before I handed my clothes on to help someone in need.
It was a wonderful exercise and it reminds me of a true story I heard some years ago, about a man who was doing exactly the same thing. As he was going through his clothes he found a tag for shoes to be repaired. He looked at this claim tag and realized it was 10 years old. He thought, “What the heck,” and went down to the store to see if he could reclaim his shoes. He presented his ticket to the clerk and the clerk said, “Just one minute.” A few minutes later he came back with the tag.
The man said, “Is there a problem? I would understand if you couldn't find my shoes.”
The clerk said, “No, sir. We found your shoes. They just won't be ready until Friday.”
It's amazing, the luxury that can sometimes come about in putting things off. Everyone has this natural, human trait to want to delay things, put things off and wait for a more propitious time. Thomas Huxley even goes so far to suggest that one of the key elements in educating people is to learn to act at the right time and not delay. This is what Huxley wrote in his famous book on technical education:
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned. And however early a person's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he or she learns thoroughly.
Doing the thing that should be done when it ought to be done - one of the keys to being a truly wise person.
Nobody understood this more than Jesus. In this series of sermons on discipleship I commenced last week by looking at the impulsive disciple. Today we encounter one who was diffident. He was uncertain, unsure and wanted to delay the call of Christ. Unlike the other disciple whom we encountered last week, this disciple initiated the encounter with Jesus himself. He came to Jesus and Jesus said to him, “Follow me.” In reply, the disciple said these powerful words that we have heard many times before. He said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
Clearly, this was a delaying tactic, but what is at the heart of this diffidence? Well, if you look at what this disciple said in response to Jesus there are, scholars tell us, two basic ways of understanding what he was trying to say. The first is, “I will follow you once my father has died.” The reasons some scholars think this is a more accurate interpretation is because there is an old Arab tradition where people try to put things off by saying, “I will when my father has died.” In other words, I'll do it at an indeterminate time, a time out there in the future, a time that cannot be prescribed.
There is a well-known story of an Arabian student who belonged to the monarchy and was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University. Rather than accepting the scholarship as it was offered, he delayed it by saying, “I will accept the scholarship when my father has died.” In other words, when the monarch is dead I will be free to receive it, but not until then. In the eastern world this phrase is a common one. If you look at the way this expression could be translated, it opens itself to that very possibility.
But there is a second and perhaps more obvious response. This is the one that Professor Tom Wright of Durham suggests is perhaps the most poignant. Namely, that throughout his ministry, Jesus had a sense of urgency. This encounter took place as Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem in the latter days of his ministry and was about to be crucified. In other words, Jesus knew that there was an imminent moment of decision and that he could not put off his ministry any more than anyone who wanted to be a follower could put off theirs. Jesus was challenging this young man and when he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father,” this young man was simply delaying what Jesus knew was going to be inevitable. Jesus knew that if this young man did not come and follow him right there and then, he wouldn't follow him at all.
In the Bible we call this a moment of kairos, a moment of ultimate decision. For this young man, though, whether it was the actual burying of the dead father or whether it was waiting for his father to die, the fact is he wanted to keep Jesus at arm's length and put him off until another day.
What was the source of this diffidence? I would suggest that it was the desire to procrastinate, to not face up to the challenge that was before him. After all, look who it was who was asking him to follow: none other than the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth. But this young man clearly did not have the eyes to see that and wanted to delay until some future time when he was ready. So, rather than responding in God's time, he wanted to respond on his own time.
Sometimes, my friends, procrastinating can have very devastating affects. Thomas De Quincey put procrastination in its rightful place as a deadly thing, but I think he's overstating the case a bit when he says:
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
In other words, you begin the rottenness with murder and end it with the worst of all, procrastination.
Sometimes putting things off can have devastating consequences. A number of years ago in Psychology Today, I read about this human proclivity to put off important decisions. The author was telling us that if we delay making a decision, if we don't actually do it at the moment when it seems most obvious, very often we never get around to it at all. What stood out in this article for me was the example of writing thank-you notes to people. If you don't write a thank-you note almost immediately after you receive a gift, chances are you will not write one at all. Human nature is such that if something is on our mind and we make the decision we are going to act upon it, then we will. But should we decide to put it off for another day, the chances incrementally increase that we will not do what we had planned to do, or should do, or ought to do.
My friends, many of us are like this in our walk of faith. We are like that in the way that we treat our commitment to the church, to the poor, to those in need in the community. We think it's a great idea, wonderful, sure we want to follow, but then the more we delay, the greater the chances is that we never get around to doing it.
There's a wonderful Arab parable about a man who is an infidel. In his will, he decided to leave his farmhouse and his land, everything, to the devil. So the will came to probate and was examined, and the judge didn't know what to do. How would we give belongings to the devil? He thought about it for awhile and decided to do nothing. He decided to le the fields die and the crops wither, to let the soil erode, to neglect the house and allow the elements to knock it down. The concluding decision of the jurist was, “The best way to leave something to the devil is to do nothing.”
In other words, the best way to avoid the commitments to do good that you should make is to do nothing. Not making a decision can sometimes have devastating consequences. As I look at this story of Jesus coming to this young man and saying, “Follow me,” I can understand why some people would not want to do so. I also think that Jesus knew that 12 people would respond to him, 12 people to correspond to the 12 tribes of Israel. He knew that there would be some who would put him off, not join him, not go to the cross with him and not take part in his ministry.
My friends, Jesus knows whether we are willing to respond. He knows what is in our hearts. But even so, we cannot delay. There are some people, for example, who quite honestly and cogently and sincerely want to understand Jesus better. They want to read the latest books, they want to know as much as they can and gather the greatest degree of information in order that they can make a commitment to Christ. I say, “No.”
St. Augustine said, “Credo ut intelligam. I believe in order that I might know.“ Faith begins with one step, the decision to follow Christ. Then, having made that decision comes the reading of the books, the seeking, the exploration of the faith that through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit becomes all the deeper. We in our society are doing everything backwards, or else we're not doing it at all. A lot of this is a tactic to delay making a commitment. I will wait until my father dies and then I will follow.
So, what is the antidote? What is the cure for this diffidence? Jesus is clear: the answer is, “Let the dead bury the dead.” This sounds harsh on the surface. Surely Jesus would have more compassion than that. After all, when you look at the whole of his ministry it is one of gentleness and caring and consideration and compassion. Why does he seem so harsh here? Because he knows that the young man is using the death of his father as an excuse for not doing what he should do, that's why.
Jesus understood that the Kingdom that he was inaugurating was a pearl of great price. It was going to cost him his life; there was not time for delay. But the dead who bury the dead to whom he referred are those who are spiritually dead, those who really have not opened their souls to the power of God's spirit. Because Jesus knew, and this is key, that his ministry was to come and to seek and to save those who were dead - spiritually, physically, emotionally, mentally. He knew that his ministry was on behalf of a dying humanity, to bring it the power and the love and the vitality and the life of God. So therefore, to delay following him was to delay bringing the life that this young man really wanted to celebrate.
But there is more. In a cathedral in Milan, Italy there are three doors. Over one of the doors it says, “All that is pleasurable is but for a moment.” Over another door it says, “All that is trouble is but for a moment.” But above the main door it says, “What is important is that which is eternal.” Jesus and his ministry were about eternal things. This young man was given an opportunity to follow in the path of that wonderful, eternal ministry, but he put it off.
Over the last couple of weeks I'm sure we've all been deeply troubled hearing about what happened on HMCS Chicoutimi. I think the young men on board that submarine, and in fact all those who are in the navy, male and female who go on such ventures often go through hell. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be on those seas. It must have been horrendous. I feel it all the more because a number of years ago I was invited by some of the chaplains in Halifax to go on board a submarine.
We travelled under Halifax harbour on a training exercise for two of the most gruelling and frightening hours of my life. When they closed that door above my head and I climbed down the steps and could smell that diesel oil, I was terrified. I thought to myself, if I am like this in peacetime in Halifax harbour, which I know so well, can you imagine what it would be like to know that there is an enemy above you who wants to kill you? It is the most frightening and claustrophobic of all feelings. All I did for two hours in that submarine was eat. I was so frightened I just ate from the moment I sat down in the mess to the moment they opened the hatch. And then I was afraid that I had eaten so much I might not fit through the portal and out again.
That's how terrified I was. So I went to one of the young men who was responsible for navigation and asked, “How on earth do you navigate this thing? I've been on board boats and ships, I know how to sail, I know how to get from A to B when I can see the horizon, but to be under water, to be sailing blind must be absolutely terrifying.“
He said, “There comes a time when all you can do is trust that what the gauges are telling you is right. Until we put the periscope up we can't see for ourselves, all we see is the radar, all we see is the computer screen, all we see are the gauges. We have to trust those instruments completely, and any delay in following what they tell us can lead to disaster.” That made me feel a whole lot better about being under the water.
Since then, I've thought about what he said and realized that faith is just like that. There comes a point where you have to trust the gauges. You don't decide first whether they are telling you the truth, you make a decision that you are going to trust them, and then you follow them.
So it is with God, so it is with the call of Christ. It is not something that can be delayed or put off until some future, unknown day. It is something that comes to each and every one of us in our own time and in God's time. We have to be prepared not to be like that young man, but to set our priorities in such a way that when Christ says, “Follow me” we say, “Right now, I will.” Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.