Burn the Bridges, Don’t Look Back

This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 29, 2025.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In preaching on the Gospel today, we have two different events. One is the story about James and John, who are so angry and incensed by the lack of hospitality of the Samaritans preparing for Jesus’ visit that they decide the correct solution is to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them. There’s a reason they call these guys the Sons of Thunder. You’ve got to commend them for their faith a little bit. At least they think it’s possible that if they were to pray and command fire to come down from heaven, it actually would come down and consume them. But on the other hand, they need the reminder that we don’t nuke the opposition.

Today, I want to focus on the second half of the Gospel reading, which is the threefold story of people being invited by Jesus Christ himself to come and follow him. Lest we think that the call of Jesus always went out and he said, “Come and follow me,” and immediately everybody, without any question or doubt, dropped everything and went. Today we need to talk about what it means to have excuses for not following Jesus Christ.

First Encounter: Passionate Yet Misguided Desire

The first man is on fire for Jesus. He is absolutely passionate in his soul about Jesus. As they’re going along the road, this man comes up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” That’s pretty good. That’s the kind of attitude we would like to encourage in people.

Jesus’ response to him is a little cryptic, but I’ll decode it for you. He says, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” What he’s saying is that even foxes have a place they can go to call home, a place they can feel safe, comfortable, and warm, even when it’s cold outside. Birds of the air have nests in which they raise their children and keep themselves safe up in the trees where it’s harder for predators to get to them. There is safety, even in being an animal in this world.

But for those of us who would follow Jesus, we’re not guaranteed a safe, earthly home. Following Jesus is not going to give you worldly comfort — not necessarily.

Second Encounter: A Duty-Driven Excuse

Then to another, Jesus calls him and says, “Follow me.” But his response, while not as passionate, shows willingness with a caveat. He says, “Yes, okay, I’ll follow you, Jesus. I’m willing to do that. I’m willing to come and go after you and do the things you ask me to do. But first let me go and bury my father.”

Now, this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing, even a God-given obligation, a responsibility given to this young man to take care of his father, to make sure that he is buried with decency and dignity. How is this a bad thing? But Jesus isn’t having it, which is actually kind of shocking if you think about it. I thought that God gave us the Ten Commandments, saying, “Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long upon the earth.”

Yet Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” How could he be that cruel? How could he be that mean? How could he go against the law in that way? Anything, including carefully keeping the law, can get in the way of discipleship.

Third Encounter: Sentimentality as a Barrier

Another man comes up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to those at my home.” He’s willing to follow but wants to go home and say goodbye first. Interestingly, Elisha does the same thing in the Old Testament reading today. Elijah didn’t tolerate that, and neither does Jesus here.

Jesus says, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” So not only will Jesus not honor our demand for worldly comfort in following him, not only will he not honor our excuses made in the name of righteousness for not following him, but even something more important in our culture—he will not allow our sentimentality to get in the way of us following.

The Works of the Flesh: A Warning from Galatians

It’s really easy for us to have regrets about what we are to give up for God. When I was a college student coming back to the church—having been involved in high school but truly finding my faith personal and committed in college—I started studying the Scriptures more closely. One phase I went through was looking at lists of things we were not supposed to do, and I mourned that a little bit.

Galatians 5 contains such a list. St. Paul gives us things we should not do, stating that those who do these things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Let’s not sugarcoat it—he’s saying if you do this stuff, you’re going to hell. He says if you are led by the Spirit, you’re not subject to the law, but the works of the flesh are obvious. You should be able to look at these things and know you’re not supposed to do them. Not only that, but these things will earn God’s righteous wrath.

Here are some of the works of the flesh Paul lists:

• Fornication
• Impurity
• Licentiousness
• Idolatry
• Sorcery
• Enmities
• Strife
• Jealousy
• Anger
• Quarrels
• Dissensions
• Factions
• Envy
• Drunkenness
• Carousing

Paul warns us as he warned before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. As a young college student reading lists of sins like this—lists of vices—I would say to myself, “But wait, that’s all the fun stuff. I want to get drunk and go carousing. I’m a college student.” But the Word of God convicted me and said that’s not how I am to live. These are not the things that give life meaning; rather, they steal life away.

Freedom in Christ: Not License but Love

Sometimes we approach following God saying we want to do all this other stuff but have to follow Jesus—as if there’s something good and affirming in that stuff while following Jesus is an enormous drag on our feelings and desires. That attitude is a sign we need something deeper than commitment to following rules. What we need is a conversion of our hearts.

A converted heart doesn’t look at fornication, licentiousness, drunkenness, carousing, anger, quarreling, or dissensions as the "fun stuff" that makes me feel powerful or physically good. Instead it says, “Lord, I know my flesh desires those things, but you want me to do something better.” Rules are not just given to crush my spirit or make life less fun; they’re given for my good.

St. Paul sums it up at the beginning of our reading from Galatians today: “For freedom, Christ has set you free.” You have been set free from the law and its demands—not so you can indulge yourself in these things. Just a few verses later in the same chapter, he gives a list of things you shouldn’t do—not because he’s making a new law to replace the old one but because he’s showing where your spirit rebels against God’s Spirit through desires for the works of the flesh.

Too often we hear the idea that since I’ve been forgiven my sins, I can do whatever I want. “Jesus is in the business of forgiving; I’m in the business of sinning. This is a wonderful relationship. I’ll keep doing my part, and he can keep doing his.” Let me share a case study from my college days when I was a leader in campus ministry.

One Saturday morning around nine o’clock—admittedly remarkable that I was awake at that hour—a young man stumbled into the Lutheran Campus Center needing to talk to the pastor. I told him I wasn’t a pastor but directed him to Faith Lutheran Church two blocks down the street. He didn’t have a car and couldn’t get there. When I asked what was going on and if I could help, he said, “I did a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have done last night. I was hoping to confess that to the pastor and be forgiven so tonight when I go out to do those things again, I’ll start fresh with a clean slate.”

I wish I was kidding; this actually happened! My response was simply to repeat the directions to the pastor’s office at Faith Lutheran Church. If we regard God’s forgiveness as permission to do whatever we want—to step on anyone or give in to fleshly desires—we’ve missed the gospel. First of all because those things don’t actually make you happy; giving in to fleshly desires steals your joy. Also because that attitude is license—licentiousness. The freedom to do whatever you want is actually slavery.

Living by the Spirit: True Freedom

We are called as Christians to use our freedom well—not just for our own sake but for the sake of God and neighbor. It’s not lost on me that in a couple of days will be the 249th anniversary of the founding of this country. We are people founded on freedom—and that’s good. We should not have the state compelling us to do many things Great Britain compelled the colonists to do.

But at the same time, in the name of freedom we’ve created a modern culture using freedoms in ways the founding fathers never intended. We turn it into license. We say things like “You can’t make me be good” or “How dare you legislate morality?” Yet we legislate morality all the time. That’s why we have laws against murder, rape, and theft—laws founded on moral grounds—not just any moral grounds but Christian moral grounds.

John Adams once said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It should come as no surprise that sometimes it feels like our society is falling apart. The reason it’s falling apart is because we are no longer a moral and religious people. People say this is a Christian country. Yes, it was founded on Christian principles necessary for adequate governance by our constitution—but to say this is a Christian society in actual fact today shows little evidence.

Freedom and Law: Avoiding a Yoke of Slavery

And yet the solution here is not the imposition of more and more laws to compel behavior. In fact, that's the mistake that John Adams is pointing out. Without the law being written in our hearts and governing the way that individual people in society interact, all we can do is pile on additional restrictions to freedom in order to generate the appropriate behavior. This is a yoke of slavery.

The Jewish Christians rebelled against this kind of freedom. They had a hard time with the idea in the early church that to be Christian did not require you to follow the law of Moses. They remembered the structure and order of the law. They saw the way that sometimes the freedom we have in Christ was abused by people who said they were following Jesus but put other things clearly ahead of God's priorities. And they began to insist that people submit again to what St. Paul calls a yoke of slavery because they saw people using their freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence.

But instead, the remedy is this: be filled with the Spirit and live by the Spirit.

Fruits of the Spirit: A Positive Path Forward

When I was a kid, I learned a song: “Goodness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. Against these there's no law.” That song is a wonderful way of summing up the verse from Galatians 5 that we had today. If we look to those things which God calls us to rather than those things he calls us away from, we see ways in which we are to live with God's good purposes.

We are to use our freedom not for selfish desires but for God and neighbor. Love is not license. Love says no. The fruits of the Spirit give us freedom to follow Christ. They show us, in a positive sense, not just “don't do this and this and this,” but rather “live in this way.” Here are some of those fruits:

• Be filled with love, joy, and peace.
• Show patience, kindness, and goodness (or generosity, depending on the translation).
• Be a gentle person.
• Be faithful.
• Be self-controlled.

Not just because "against these there's no law," but because this is what it means to live as a Christian—not just freedom from the law for our own sake or for the sake of license, but freedom from the law for the sake of God and neighbor.

No Going Back: Lessons from Elijah and Elisha

This represents an attitude shift in the life of a Christian—a shift not to freedom for the sake of license or freedom from rules, not freedom for the sake of sentimentality, but a change of heart. As Christians, people who follow Jesus say, “You, Jesus Christ, are my highest good and my sole focus, and I won't let excuses get in the way of my discipleship. I won't let the world's priorities shift my focus from the things of God. I won't let the things of this world which are opposed to God in any way dictate the way that I live.”

Instead, I'll be filled with the Spirit and live according to the Word of God.

The prophet Elijah understood this dynamic. First of all, he says, “I've been zealous for the Word of God and now everyone is trying to kill me.” As a pastor, I feel the same. But when he anoints Elisha as his successor, he doesn't just say, “Come on, Elisha, let's go.” Actually, Elisha says, “Hang on, I'm going to go talk to my family.” And Elijah says, “No.”

To underscore the importance of a total break with the past, Elijah slaughters the oxen. Then he takes all of the yokes—all the hardware used to connect the plow to the oxen pulling it—and builds a fire and roasts and boils the flesh of the oxen over that fire. No going back. He who has been anointed as Elijah's successor cannot return to his old way of life because it has been wiped out. There are no more oxen to drag the plow. There are no more yokes to put under new oxen. It has been symbolically wiped out. There's no going back.

Burning Bridges: A Call to Single-Minded Devotion

I'm reminded of those generals in antiquity who, when they would cross a river or a sea facing an enemy that was a daunting challenge, declared they would not go back without victory or death. Then they burned the bridge upon which they crossed or burned the boats they used to cross the water—not because the men couldn't swim back in some cases, but to show them that the only way was forward.

The only way to be a follower of Jesus Christ is forward—towards the enemy, towards the world, towards those things which oppose us and tempt our flesh and tempt us to abandon our love of God and Jesus Christ. Like those generals, he says to us, “Defeat the enemy or die.” Stand firm in your faith. You have been set free, but you must be single-minded in your devotion to God.

May you be so free that when the world's priorities try to drag you back, you can stand firm and say, “There is no going back. There is no bridge to the past. There is no boat that will carry me home to that sin. I will not gratify the desires of the flesh. I will not put my hand to the plow and look back.”

For I belong to Christ now. I have been rescued by his cross. I have been given new life and salvation. I've been given a relationship with God in Christ that no one can take from me. So I will burn the bridges. I will burn the boats. I will slaughter the oxen and burn the yokes. I will belong to Christ and him alone. For his cross has set me free. In Jesus' name. Amen.