The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
Good Ancestors
June 26, 2022
Text: Luke 9:51-62

In today’s Gospel passage, we learn that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” If this were a movie, we might expect a dramatic cut to the walls of Jerusalem in just another scene or two. We might even expect a dramatic cut like that if we were reading the Gospel of Mark, where everything seems to happen “immediately”! But today’s passage is from Luke, and one of the peculiar things about Luke’s Gospel is that the journey to Jerusalem takes up the middle third of the narrative. There will be ten chapters between now and when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, with frequent reminders that he is making his way toward that ultimate destination.

The distance between Galilee and Jerusalem, by the way, is about 65-70 miles, depending on which road you take. In other words, it’s a journey of anywhere from three to seven days by foot, which you would never guess by reading Luke’s Gospel. Walking several days to get somewhere important is a pretty foreign experience to most of us, who could cover that same distance in an hour or less in a car. Given all the ways we have to both travel and communicate across distance much more quickly than was possible 2,000 years ago, it’s difficult to relate to the kind of purpose and intention that is captured in the phrase he “set his face toward Jerusalem,” a stance that apparently led some people to fear, disdain, and reject him.

There are a lot of ways to think about what that phrase means. We could consider the long history of Jerusalem and its religious and cultural importance to Jesus and his disciples. We could think about Jesus embarking on a mission, about him moving him toward a place of occupation, about the journey to the Cross. We could and should think about how clearly Luke depicts Jesus as knowing that in going to Jerusalem he is heading inexorably to his death. In every sense Jerusalem is the end, the telos, the point and purpose and destination of his journey.

What might be less easy to notice is the temporal dimension of what it means for Jesus to set his face toward Jerusalem, and that is mostly what I’d like us to explore today. Jesus is resolutely facing the future; once he gets to Jerusalem, there will be no turning back. Jesus is facing forward, looking ahead. His purpose leads him in the direction of the future, what some have called the long now or the eternal present. His horizon is larger and longer than even his own end. He is stepping onto a path that will lead to sacrifice, to death, but it seems that his vision is fixed somewhere far beyond that, to the many, many generations who will follow him, who depend on him, and to a time when the Beloved Community will be fully realized, on earth as it is in heaven.

Having such a long-term perspective and goal is not something that was unique to Jesus, but it is something that we who follow him should make a priority in our own lives. Jesus did not live and die the way he did to save his twelve disciples, or his family, or even all the people in living in the world at the time he was on earth. He knew he was doing something that would have eternal consequences. And while “eternity” may be too much for most of us to grasp, living in a way that acknowledges our responsibility to future generations is not.

Public philosopher Roman Krznaric has written a book called The Good Ancestor, which makes the point that our whole culture right now, and especially the actions of our politicians and business leaders, is driven by frenetic short-termism. Our attention spans are shrinking at exactly the moment in world history when our actions and decisions will have the most profound imaginable impacts on future generations of people and potentially all of life on earth. This is not good, to vastly understate the situation. We are like people who are eating seeds that we should be planting, not because we are starving but because we are bored, anxious, and utterly addicted to instant gratification.

We’re also simply not trained or guided into seeing the long-term impact of our actions and our inaction. Our collective unwillingness to invest appropriately in robust infrastructure, health care, reproductive rights, and a just transition away from fossil fuels and an extraction-based economy is a symptom of a larger issue. Our time horizon just isn’t long enough. We need to be thinking about consequences not only within our lifetimes or our children’s lifetimes, but centuries out. This is the call that is issued by the Seventh Generation principle, a philosophy developed by the Iroquois people that says decisions we make today should be beneficial and sustainable for seven generations. The way Roman Krznaric puts it is that we need a modified Golden Rule: “Do unto future generations as you would have had past generations do unto you.”

The truth is, Christians should be really good at long-term thinking. It should be part of our DNA to want to be good ancestors. Our faith is predicated on hope and an orientation to the future. We tell and retell stories about people who laid down their lives for others, who made our own present reality possible. And we know that our circle of concern is not limited by geography, race, nationality, or anything else that people normally use to decide who is in and who is out, who matters and who doesn’t. The great cloud of witness, the community of saints, will surely include people who come after us as well as the people who came before us. It makes no difference if they are literally our own descendants or not. They will be people created by God, and their lives matter.

When I think of what it means for us, here and now, to set our face to Jerusalem, I hear in my heart a call to face the moment we are in with an eye toward the future. I know that when every day feels like one crisis after another, it is hard to step back and try to make decisions that benefit others, people who don’t even exist yet and whom we will never know personally. But the people who founded the Univeristy, built our church, planned a city with copious bike lanes, and planted the trees in the Arboretum did that for us. If we want to be good ancestors, we need to be just as generous, just as resilient, and even more adaptive than those people whose actions in the past so benefit us today.

While I am not always a firm believer in human progress, I am always, quite sincerely, a firm believer in God’s grace and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I know that when we set our faces to Jerusalem, we can do seemingly impossible things. I know that we can bridge divides, overcome fear and selfishness, and find paths forward that will make this world better for future generations. Or rather, I know that it can happen because God’s Spirit, working in us, can do more than we can ask or imagine. Let’s ask for imagination, for empathy, for the creativity we need right now. Let’s grow our capacity to be adaptive and flexible, future-oriented and hopeful. Let’s make decisions, large and small, for which future generations will thank us. Let’s do our best to become good ancestors. Amen.