Dead bury the dead: A reply of Jesus when a new disciple of his asked for time to bury his father.

Jesus of Nazareth still remains one of the top three quotable dudes of all time.

It’s because he was unpredictable.

Religion has come along and tried to smooth out his edges, trimmed his beard, lightened his hair and softened his skin features—but if you caught him in his natural habitat on any given day, it would not have been easy to guess exactly what he was going to say, nor what he was going to do.

The reason for this is quite clear to me.

It’s not because he was a maniac minister, nor a confused Jew.

It’s just that the variety of things thrown his way by the diverse nationalities that had converged on Mesopotamia at that time required specific answers which didn’t necessarily run in a theme.

When asked about the Roman Empire, he suggested it was good to give them their due and not try to kick up dirt over meaningless subjects.

When queried about Abraham, who the Jews considered to be their father, Jesus threw off, “God can make children of Abraham out of stones.”

And one day, when a man said he’d like to come and join the Nazarene’s ministry team but he needed to go home and bury his father first, Jesus challenged, “Let the dead bury the dead. You come and follow me.”

Now we could probably spend a whole book discussing what he might have meant by that.

But he certainly was not choosing to be sympathetic to a young man who had lost his father. Rather, he was saying that if you continue to choose anything that comes along which appears to be important over what you know to be essential for your life, you will never get anywhere.

It’s a good lesson.

Some things are just dead.

America seems to be waiting around to either resurrect them or give them a decent burial, but politics, religion, racism, corporate greed and nationalism need to be entombed by those who think they still should be alive.

Folks who know they should be dead should be moving along:

Preparing the way for better things.

Deadbeat: (n) a person who deliberately avoids paying debts; a loafer and sponger

Having arrived at the cream of my milky years, I can truthfully tell you that the greatest advantage I possess in respect to my journey is that I’ve been called almost everything under the sun—and therefore have a living, breathing testimony in my soul as to what it feels like.

Occasionally it was praise.

More often, confusion.

And certainly on occasion, brutality, which was passed off as honesty, which apparently was meant “for my own good.”

But some of my more painful experiences were those times when I was called a deadbeat.

I arrived at this distinction simply by running out of money before I did bills.

Unfortunately, I was a father of children at the time and being a deadbeat served to make me an uncaring papa for my children.

It taught me something powerful.

Sometimes poverty is just a lack of money.

There are poor people who are grifters, criminals and con artists.

There are those without funds who find themselves in that condition because they refuse to work and use all of their initiative coming up with a variety of lies about why it is physically or emotionally impossible for them to do so.

In my situation, I had enough talent to perform a function—as long as I could convince others to allow me the opportunity to step forward and offer my wares.

When I was very young, I was considered too immature to trust.

As I got older, the competition became stiffer.

And then one day, without my knowing, the Earth moved an inch or two and I went from “no damn good” to “pretty damn good.”

Doesn’t sound as if that makes that big a difference.

But whooee—saints be praised!

It pays better.

As soon as I was able to match my talent with my bank account, which made my bill collectors more believing, I was no longer considered a dead beat.

Not much changed inside me during the whole process.

Except I will tell you—it’s a lot easier to come to town when the merchants greet you with a smile, instead of waving a paper over their heads, insisting you are debtor to one and all.