follow — Andy James

The Path to Follow

March 1, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 8:27-38
preached on March 1, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

He had talked about the importance of following him from the very beginning. The first time Jesus saw his first disciples Peter and Andrew fishing by the sea, he invited them to follow him and start fishing for people. Over time, he accumulated a notable little band of followers—tax collectors and sinners, among others—soon joined those first fishermen, and others came and went from the large crowds who gathered to witness his healing and hear his teaching in his ministry across Galilee. By the time of our story from Mark this morning, they were quite experienced at following him. They had become accustomed to his strange detours across the lake and his sudden departures from the beaten path so that he could find a quiet place away from it all, though they never quite could figure out what all he was up to.

So it wasn’t a total surprise when one day Jesus addressed the disciples and the crowd who had gathered with them and began to tell them what it meant to follow him. He had just talked with the disciples about his identity, and for the first time one of them—Peter—had identified him as the Messiah, leading him to describe what this would mean for him along the way. Jesus had planted the seeds then with the disciples that this would not be an easy path: he would undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, all before he would rise again three days later. But the disciples didn’t seem to understand this, and Peter even confronted him to vow that this should never happen. However, Peter’s insistence that Jesus should never suffer like this only seems to have made him want to help others understand what he meant even more.

Jesus’ instruction to the crowd was a bold response to Peter’s attempts to sanitize his message:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

He took the core idea of following him that he had been talking about since the very beginning and used it to shape his teaching to a new place. No longer could they think that wandering around the Galilean countryside was enough—even though many of them had already left behind their homes and families to follow him, they needed to deny themselves completely. No longer was it enough to just carry a knapsack worth of belongings along the way—they had to carry a cross, the ultimate sign of disrepute assigned to the greatest criminals who had threatened the Roman empire itself. And no longer could they come and go, following Jesus when they wanted—they were to follow everywhere he went, even to death.

If that wasn’t enough to sort out the imposters from the real followers, Jesus continued to explain things a bit more. Next he explained that their attempts to save themselves would be futile:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

If they were following him just to be saved, then they weren’t denying themselves after all—they were seeking their own well-being rather than truly following to join in Jesus’ mission and ministry.

So Jesus insisted that the real profit came from giving everything up, from the biggest loss imaginable, as the great hymn writer Isaac Watts declared so well:

My richest gain I count but loss
and pour contempt on all my pride.

And finally Jesus made it clear that acceptance of this seemingly-disgraceful path was not optional—those who were ashamed of it would find even more shame directed at themselves “when [the Son of Man] comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

As much as Jesus talked about following with his disciples, you’d think that we would take it just as seriously. The Christians of the early church probably thought about it quite a bit, for they faced many challenges from the culture around them and struggled even more with a government that didn’t welcome any group claiming any other way than the Roman way. But over the centuries, the idea of following Jesus put forth so clearly by Jesus in the gospel of Mark has largely been replaced in the church with a focus on belief that builds largely on the word of Jesus as told in the gospel of John. The sort of radical, self-giving action proposed and lived out by Jesus has become a much less demanding challenge, for it is far easier to affirm a creed and accept belief than to take action that has the potential for consequences as it did for those who first journeyed with Jesus. In our day and age, following Jesus has become about as difficult as following someone on Twitter, where all it takes is to click a button to start getting status updates and keep up with what is going on.

So what does it look like for us to follow Jesus in our world today? What is required of us if we are to truly deny ourselves and find a new way? How can we take up the cross of Christ in our own lives today? Following Jesus today is not about wearing a cross around our neck every day, about showing up to church on Sunday, about writing a check to show our financial support of the work of this congregation or some other good group, or even about getting others to join us on the journey. Instead, following Jesus today means taking his words seriously in our lives and standing up in our world as he did for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized.

When he tells the crowd to deny themselves, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us to deny who we are or set aside the gifts that we have been given to share. Instead, he is encouraging us to place our hope and trust in God, not in ourselves. He is calling us to set aside any personal benefit that might come from the work that we do or the things that we believe, for we cannot do these things out of hope for a better life for ourselves or our children or even the promise of eternal life but rather for the sake of God’s reign to be realized in our world.

When he tells the crowd to take up their cross, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must carry a cross everywhere that we go or display it in a way that shows off our faithfulness, for the goal here is not so much to make those around us aware of our faith but to commit ourselves to a path that we do not fully understand. And so in calling us to take up our cross, Jesus is encouraging us to go where he goes, to sacrifice the things of this world so that the world might be different, to walk and talk and live each day in a way that points not to ourselves, our human government, or our particular culture, to place the transformation of this world at the forefront of all things, not our hopes to be around in the next.

And when he tells the crowd to follow him, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must live exactly as he did or spend our days worrying about the number of people who will join us along the way. Instead, he is calling us to get on the move, to step out of the ways that we have lived for so long and seek people along the road, to make our way into the world where the great need stands ready and waiting for God’s presence to be realized in people like us.

In these Lenten days, it seems incredibly important to recommit ourselves to following Jesus in our changing world, but we can’t approach this following in the same way that we have approached it before. We can’t just do what we’ve always done and say that that is enough. We can’t simply acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and go on about our lives as if nothing has changed. And we can’t leave ourselves or our world the same as before we set out on this journey.

The specifics of this path are not mine to set before you. The specific path for each of our individual lives to follow Jesus will emerge as we spend these days in prayer, penitence, and exploration. The path before us as a congregation as we seek to follow Jesus will only become clear when we commit to this individual exploration and begin to share what we learn along the way. Even so, what is clear to me is that we are called to follow Jesus in the same way as those who first heard him, denying ourselves and the things of this world that get in the way of our relationship with God and taking up the challenge of whatever cross we must bear in our lives and in our world.

So as we journey this Lent together, may God open the path to follow all the more so that we might join Jesus in both the challenges and the glory that lie ahead. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Day on the Lakeshore

January 25, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 1:14-20
preached on January 25, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

They were just ordinary fishermen doing their jobs on an ordinary day by the lakeshore, but before this day was over Simon and Andrew and James and John would be taking quite a new and different path. Jesus had just begun his work of proclamation and teaching in Galilee, and right away he invited Simon and Andrew—and soon also James and John—to join him along the way.

This was not all that unusual in that day and age. A lot of teachers and preachers wandered the countryside with bands of followers in those first century days, and even some prophets of earlier times had developed similar groups of devotees as they offered their words of comfort and challenge. These groups would wander the towns and villages of Palestine, sharing their varied messages and inviting others to join them along the way.

I suspect that most of these disciples chose who to follow somewhat carefully. Some of them might have had family connections to their teachers, and others probably were had been among the audience for the teacher’s teaching before setting out to roam the countryside. But Mark’s record of the call of Simon, Andrew, James, and John to be Jesus’ disciples implies that there is no such “trial period.” The way Mark tells the story, the disciples had no idea what they might be getting into when they set out to follow Jesus except that something was so compelling about the way he invited them to join him on the journey that they could do nothing other than follow.

Jesus’ message that he had begun to proclaim around Galilee was a curious and strong one:

The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news.

These fishermen on the lakeshore don’t seem to have heard this message, had any history with Jesus or any other similar teacher, or even seemed to have been tired of fishing and looking for a change of pace for a while. Mark simply tells us that Jesus called out to them as he passed by and invited them to join him on his journey:

Follow me and I will make you fish for people.

Then, “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Why did they do this? What was so compelling about this man, his message, or even the way he talked with them that they would leave their nets and follow? How did Jesus so easily convince these two sets of brothers to leave behind their nets, their boats, their careers, their families—everything, really—to join him in wandering around the countryside to proclaim a message that they had barely even heard that might get them in trouble with nearly everyone?

We can’t know the real answers—Mark simply keeps the story too brief—but even this silence speaks volumes about what was going on. It matches up very well with the general mood of Mark’s gospel, where everyone—especially Jesus—seems to be in a big hurry, for the kingdom of God is coming, not just someday far ahead but soon. I think somehow this immediacy and urgency was clear to Simon, Andrew, James, and John when Jesus spoke to them, and they knew that it was the right thing to follow him right away. So these four fishermen responded to Jesus’ urgent call to join him in fishing for people and proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God.

Just as Jesus’ call settled on the lives of these ordinary fishermen on an ordinary day by the lakeshore some two thousand years ago, so it echoes among us too today. I suspect that we don’t hear it with quite the same ears, though. We likely don’t share the same sense of urgency that things need to change as seemed to permeate the world that Mark describes for us. Many of us today struggle to change little bits of our lives to follow Jesus, let alone drop the nets of our lives and leave behind our families and livelihoods to go into an unknown future with him. And so many today are far less open to the kind of radically transformative message that marked Jesus’ proclamation.

Yet Jesus’ call to follow him and join in his proclamation of a time fulfilled, the kingdom of God come near, and the urgency of repentance and new life is still so very strong in our world. It is not easy to figure out what this call means in our lives. It took Simon, Andrew, James, and John three years with Jesus to figure much of anything out about it, and even then they weren’t particularly good at it!

As we struggle to respond individually to this call in our lives, I wonder if it is time for us to think differently about Jesus’ proclamation and invitation, to listen to it less one by one, independent of one another, and to consider how Jesus might be calling all of us together to follow him from the lakeshores of our common life out into the world. There is still of course an imperative for each of us to follow Jesus along the way, to respond to his call out to each one of us on the lakeshore, but the possibilities of transformation that emerge when we collectively respond to Jesus’ call to follow can be far greater. So Jesus calls out to us as his church on the lakeshore, inviting us to put down the nets of our tradition and routine, summoning us to join him in proclaiming that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, and calling us to follow him beyond these walls and out into the world to proclaim and embody the way of repentance and new life each and every day.

Today is a wonderful day to hear this call again as we join together for our annual congregational meeting after worship. When we gather every January to hear reports and take a few votes as we do, we are doing the sort of institutional work that looks a lot more like the routines of fishing that these new disciples left behind. Too often we can pay so much attention to our traditions and institutions that we miss the opportunities to proclaim and be a part of the kingdom of God. But when we are at our best, this meeting today can also propel us forward into something new as we join with those first disciples and countless others since to proclaim the new thing that God is doing.

We have struggled to figure out exactly how to do this over the years. Sometimes we have become distracted by the challenges of maintaining a church building or keeping up the basic elements of our life together. Many times we have scratched our heads wondering how we can find enough people to make the journey worth our while. And other times we have looked so hard for a common missional focus that we have become frustrated when one did not emerge for us.

Yet all along the way, we have kept our eyes and ears open for ways that we could join in the work of proclaiming and embodying the kingdom of God in our midst. We have joined others from around the presbytery in rebuilding homes destroyed during Superstorm Sandy. We have been a consistent support and presence in the work of the Grace Church Food Pantry. And we have reached out to others through other projects brought to us by members and friends who need our support in living out their call to follow Jesus.

In recent months, as we prepared to move into this new year and respond to God’s call to follow Jesus in this time and place, the session looked at all this mission we are already doing with fresh eyes, and rather than trying to replace it all with a unified vision or a single magic project, we decided to embrace the places where we are already working, to recommit ourselves to supporting the emergence of the kingdom of God by supporting this mission in new ways and to work toward deepening and broadening our missional commitments as we look for new places to use our limited resources most effectively. We can’t support anything and everything that comes forward—we have a group already working on setting up some criteria to help guide us in the choices that we make—but when a project helps us to better proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God together, we can support one another in living it out along the way.

So as we journey along the lakeshores of our lives, as we hear Jesus inviting us to follow him, may we leave the nets of our lives behind and join him in proclaiming and embodying the coming of the kingdom of God in this world until he comes to make all things new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Follow the Leader

June 30, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 9:51-62
preached on June 30, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Are you a Christian, or do you follow Jesus? It seems that more and more people are making a distinction between the two. A lot of people are frustrated with the trappings of Christianity, angry with the way that many Christians are viewed in the world, and exhausted with having to explain that they aren’t that kind of Christian, whatever that kind is. They just want to focus on Jesus and leave behind the baggage that has built up over the years in and through the church.

Earlier this year, a British singer and songwriter named Marcus Mumford stunned some people by saying that he doesn’t call himself a Christian. His music, played by the band he leads called Mumford and Sons, is full of references to God, prayer, and openness to the divine, and he himself is the son of a leader in the evangelical Christian Vineyard movement. Yet when asked if he still considers himself a Christian, he told an interviewer, “I don’t really like that word. It comes with so much baggage. So, no, I wouldn’t call myself a Christian. I think the word just conjures up all these religious images that I don’t really like. I have my personal views about the person of Jesus and who he was… I’ve kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity.”

Jesus would have understood Mumford’s perspective. He himself was not a Christian—he was Jewish by birth and by practice, and his whole ministry pushed back against the religious institutions and practices of his day. He went about his life and ministry inviting people to follow him and join in his proclamation of the kingdom of God, and he really didn’t seem to care about organizing something new.

In our reading this morning from the gospel according to Luke, we hear about three people who want to follow Jesus—and his response. The first one was excited to see Jesus and offered to join him without any prompting whatsoever: “I will follow you wherever you go.” But Jesus immediately issued him a warning, for this was not likely to be an easy journey. Just as he himself had faced many obstacles and been at the mercy of those who would or would not offer him hospitality, so anyone who followed him would similarly need to set aside the comforts of this world and be prepared for a very different way of life.

Then Jesus reached out to another person he encountered on the way and said, “Follow me.” This man was clearly intrigued by Jesus’ message, but he also wasn’t quite ready to make a full commitment. So he responded, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” It was a fair excuse, really—proper burial was a requirement of Jewish law. But why would anyone whose father had just died be out on the road to meet Jesus? Many commentators have suspected that this man’s father was alive and well, and that his postponement might be measured in months or years, not days. But all that is beside the point. Jesus didn’t take kindly to this man’s excuse: “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” For Jesus, nothing was more important than the work of proclaiming the kingdom of God, and those who chose to follow him needed to share this commitment.

Finally, a third man stepped up to offer to join the journey: “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” This man also didn’t need any prodding to join the throng following Jesus, but he still felt that he needed to obey the fifth of the Ten Commandments and honor his father and mother by saying farewell. He may have even been remembering the story of the call of the prophet Elisha that we heard in our first reading, where Elisha made a stop at home to kiss his father and mother goodbye before joining Elijah in his prophetic work. But Jesus would have none of this. Those who wanted to follow him needed to make an immediate commitment without conditions, to set aside their worldly attachments—even and perhaps especially to their families!—and place their full and proper focus on the work of proclaiming the kingdom of God. So Jesus turned to this man and responded, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

We don’t know what these men did after Jesus spoke to them. There is no record of whether or not they followed Jesus after these strong words. But because they are written here, it is clear that those who did follow him remembered these words and wanted others to hear them, for they set a high standard of how we are to respond to God’s call.

Nowadays, when I hear these words of Jesus, my mind goes in two directions. First, I tend to get frustrated because other people just aren’t living up to Jesus’ standards. Some who follow Jesus seem to miss his point that there is some self-sacrifice involved, that they will not enjoy the full comforts of this world and may have to become dependent upon the hospitality of strangers—and then I realize that I am as guilty of that as the next guy. Then there are others who claim to follow Jesus who back out of church meetings or say that they just can’t do anything more because of family obligations or some other very reasonable excuse, and I want to quote Jesus back to them, insisting that even family must be set aside for the work of the kingdom of God!—before I realize that I do the very same thing sometimes. And still others who want to follow Jesus put conditions on their response to their call, saying that they really intend to do what God wants them to do, but they seem to forget that “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God”—and then I realize that I do the very same thing. This is no easy path for me or anyone else!

Then there are other times when I get a little defensive about Jesus’ words here. “Am I really supposed to just drop everything and leave it behind to follow Jesus? That doesn’t seem very reasonable or possible these days! Come on, Jesus, you couldn’t really mean this in our day and age!” These are incredibly high standards that are difficult to meet. It is almost impossible nowadays to obey Jesus and set aside concern for our future and not worry about how we will make ends meet. Most followers of Jesus in this day and age place a very high value on family relationships because of their faith and would recoil at leaving them behind to join Jesus along the way. And I would be lying to you if I said that I have not at times looked back and wondered about the life that I might be living if I were not doing what I am doing.

But the reality is that Jesus still calls us to step out of our comfort zones and join him in his work of proclaiming a very new and very different way of life that he called the kingdom of God. He did exactly this in his own life and ministry. He left his hometown under duress because the people there were expecting a very different kind of message from their hometown boy. When asked to spend a little time with his mother and brothers, Jesus responded, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” In his journeys of teaching and healing around Galilee, he left behind any wealth that he had and was totally dependent upon the hospitality of those who would receive him. And Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God was not about restoring a world of the past but about bringing in a new creation where all would have the fullness of life that God intended.

So when Jesus calls us to follow him, he speaks from his own heart, his own life, his own experience, inviting us to give up all that we have as we wander the road to new life together with him, trusting that we will gain far more than we have known before. This is no easy feat, and Jesus knew it better than anyone. He never actually condemned those who chose another path, for he knew the incredible challenges that his pathway would entail. He knew that following him would mean leaving behind family and friends, setting aside the comforts of a worldly life, even putting off the proper religious obligations of burying the dead. And most of all, he knew that following him would even require going to his death on the cross, for he trusted that God was doing something new even in death and that God and will continue to break into this world until all things can be made new.

And so from his life, his death, and his resurrection, Jesus invites us and challenges us and calls us to follow him, to set aside all the other things that pull us in so many different directions and make the work of proclaiming the kingdom of God as our first priority, to put even our lives on the line as we look ahead to the new life that can and will be ours as we follow him. So may we know the presence of Jesus Christ, our leader, who challenges us to follow him, not for our own glory but for the transformation of all creation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.