Still Following Jesus
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
Jan. 27, 2008

Isaiah 9:1-4
Psalm 27:1, 4-9
Matthew 4:12-23

“Jesus went throughout Galilee,

teaching in their synagogues

and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom

and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”

As several weeks ago on Baptism of the Lord Sunday we celebrated the renewal of our baptisms, so today I’d like us to consider the renewal of our call to be followers of Jesus, a time to hear again the Master’s command, (in the familiar King James Version), “Follow Thou Me!”

Most of us have been Jesus followers for some time now. If you’re new among us, this phrase, “followers of Jesus,” has a certain ring to it as it’s how we identify ourselves in our covenant and in a Congregational church the covenant is what holds us together; it’s largely what defines us as church.

But what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? In my own spiritual journey recently, I’ve been contemplating how to better live from my deepest convictions and so this morning the text draws me to reconsider how I – how we – might follow Jesus. And so, even though we’ve been following Jesus for a long time, even though we are still following Jesus, how might we renew that journey?

In today’s Gospel text, the story opens with a chilling piece of news: John the Baptist has been arrested and we know from the larger story, will be killed. So Jesus begins his ministry in the shadow of real political danger. Then he comes upon various disciples and asks them to leave their nets. As fisherman, they were to leave their method of livelihood. And in both cases the text says they did, “immediately.”

Jesus arrives suddenly, without warning, and asks them to radically change their lives. And they do. They leave work behind. Even, in one case, they leave their father. So with disciples in tow, this morning’s lesson concludes, Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching, proclaiming and healing.

Perhaps the conclusion of this morning’s lesson gives us a frame which might help us understand our own journeys with Christ: That to follow Jesus means to follow his teachings, live out his proclamation and participate in his healing.

Jesus was a teacher and a master teacher. A common motif in Bible stories is when someone – typically a religious authority or a lawyer – confronts Jesus with a hard question and Jesus answers with a parable. A parable has multiple meanings and it opens up the question in a way brings the hearer into the infinity of God’s universe instead of the narrowness of mere human constructions.

The essence of Jesus’ teachings is that God has loved us and we should reflect that love to all, even and especially those who stand at the margins of society. The Gospel of Mark summarizes it well (Mark 12:28ff) as Jesus explains the core of his teaching: “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…and to love your neighbor as yourself.” Love of God, love of neighbor, love of self—Jesus takes the old laws, the old prohibitions, the old ways of doing things and opens them up, universalizes them, and expresses for us a higher attenuation of how divinity is present in our human experiences.

It’s a pretty simple philosophy, but hardly an easy one to follow. So to follow Jesus we need to follow his teachings. And yet following his teachings is only part of the picture.

Next, the text speaks of how Jesus went throughout the land “proclaiming the good news of the kingdom.” That is, presenting the Gospel – good news – that God is here and at work in our world. In the Scriptures, of course, we see that at the core of this proclamation of God’s new realm is Jesus himself: the one who will be crucified and will rise again to be forever with God, alive forevermore.

So we follow the teachings of Jesus, and we also follow Jesus Christ himself, the Crucified and Resurrected One. The traditional Christian proclamation through the ages is that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. Not half and half, but full and full, a hard concept to wrap our minds around.

It seems to me that the teachings of Jesus emphasize his human nature and the proclamation of Jesus as the Christ, emphasize his divine nature. There is a tension in Christianity between the teachings of Jesus and, as it is sometimes described, the teachings about Jesus. Christians tend to lean one way or the other.

If you look at the general expanse of Christian history, I think that our tradition has underestimated his human nature and thus underestimated the value of his simple teachings. Perhaps you remember several years ago when Janet Wootton was here, the British minister and gifted hymn writer. In a hymn workshop she mentioned that in most hymnals there are many more hymns on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and fewer on the teachings of Jesus. Our hymnody reflects this diminishment of his also being human.

And yet we should not underestimate Christ’s role as divine savior. It sounds funny to say, but his teachings are not quite enough. We also have to understand how God came into human history, breaks into human experience, manifests God’s self as human, a radical and, as Paul has said, a scandalous thing. We often don’t see how this idea that God becomes human also lifts humanity. If Jesus is fully human and fully divine and sits, as the Scriptures poetically describe it, at the right hand of the Father—then a portion of our humanity is in the Godhead. So the Trinity, seen in this way, elevates us to a more noble existence, underscoring Genesis’ proclamation that we are created in the image and reflection of God.

So Jesus taught and proclaimed that in his life the kingdom of God was near. Then, today’s text says, Jesus went about “curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”

It is not enough to merely follow the teachings of Jesus, nor even to proclaim that Jesus is the Christ. Once we do those, we are called out into the world to open ourselves to the power of God at work in the world. To follow Jesus is to be open to being healed, and to healing others. This suggests that God is a real presence, not merely a metaphor, not merely a convenient symbol for that which is of the highest and holiest ideal.

This is to say, Christianity is a religion of elevated ethics that seeks to improve the human condition and bring it more in line with our understanding of what God wants for us.

But what does it mean to be healed and to be healers? Perhaps it means being actively involved in the world; getting our hands dirty in the problems facing both individuals and society. Trying to affect a healing presence to those problems. Throughout the Gospel accounts, Jesus generally goes toward conflict. He didn’t just go up on a mountain to pray about it all. He does that to be sure—he does indeed separate himself for prayer and meditation to get ready for the battles he must face, but he does face those battles. So in imitation of Christ, we cannot stay safely cloistered inside our biases and pretend we are following Jesus. Jesus calls us to come out and face the world—to confront the world and to then to help heal the world.

This last Monday we celebrated a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. I would say of Dr. King’s work that he was focused on healing our nation of its racial bigotry. But to heal it he had to first confront it and he did. He did so amid great criticism but he pursued it still, knowing, as he said in one essay, “As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality—God and his kingdom of love—to which we must be conformed.” A Christian, he says, holds dual citizenship in heaven and earth.

Dr. King was able to see beyond the great difficulties of his day and glimpse another reality that was beginning to break in. He was ready to move beyond his own comfort zone and push others beyond their comfort zones, to do the work that must be done.

This is not easy to do. We like comfort. We are comfort-seeking creatures and so we naturally avoid what we don’t like or what we find difficult. The German poet Ranier Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet speaks of “trusting in the difficult”:

“…it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security … If only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

Rilke calls us to a journey into the difficult and so especially does Jesus…to confront the things of life that impede our unfoldment as full humans and that impede God’s work on earth. When Jesus commands “follow me,” he commands us to a ministry of service, a ministry beyond our own wants and needs.

For he himself went headfirst into difficulty, a difficulty that leads him to the cross. And leads us to the cross, where we are asked to crucify our old ways of thinking about ourselves, our old ways of maintaining all our old orders and carefully constructed lives. The cross invites us to die to those things so that we might be reborn to a new and loftier sense of God among us. So that the Holy Spirit might work freely in our lives. But to get there, we have to trust in the difficult. But we are not alone in that process, as our faith tradition clearly teaches, if we but follow Jesus.

God has gathered us in this community and we have been greatly blessed. To renew our call from Christ, let’s consider these three aspects: that by following Christ’s teachings, by proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, the first fruit of the new kingdom that is breaking in to our world, and by going forth and to be healed and especially to heal others, we might have more vital lives, and together we might have a more vital ministry of love and sacrifice for the world.

This is, I think, what Christ calls us to. A journey forward from our old selves, into the promise of the future. There is, in that divine journey, no turning back.

Amen.