THE JERUSALEM ROAD A Sermon by the Rev. Don Gall First Congregational Church, Eugene, Oregon February 18, 2018

Transcription

1 THE JERUSALEM ROAD A Sermon by the Rev. Don Gall First Congregational Church, Eugene, Oregon February 18, 2018 Text Mark 8:27-35 A seminary professor once asked his students where, in the Apostle s Creed, the life and teachings of Jesus were mentioned. After a lengthy silence, one student ventured an answer: I guess it must be in the coma between the phrases born of the Virgin Mary and suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. That s correct, said the professor. The entire life and teachings of Jesus have been reduced to a single comma within the church s creedal confession of its belief. I often think of that comma when I consider what some Christians are doing when they only report for active duty on Christmas Eve and Easter morning, seemingly ignoring everything else about Jesus between his birth and his death. And I couldn t help but be reminded of it again this past week when most of this nation s lawmakers (from the President on down) had nothing more to say in response to the latest school shooting and death of seventeen more children and adults than to assure all who grieved that they would, once again, hold them in their thoughts and prayers. Better to think and pray about it before doing anything precipitously, as if eighteen school shootings in the first forty-five day of this year are insufficient cause for hurry. And while they re praying, I m sure they will be giving thanks to the Almighty for the generosity of the gun lobby which continues to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to keep these pious guardians of the faith in public office. It is time for the rights of our children to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be placed on at least an equal plain with those who already have the constitutional right to own and bear arms. But for some incomprehensible reason, that obvious conclusion continues to elude us as a nation. Truly, we have, over time, developed some deeply disturbing notions about the relationship between life and liberty in this country. And as in the civic realm, so in the religious realm. Lip service to Christ has all too often taken the place of any serious commitment to follow where Jesus leads. And that, too, has serious consequences for the integrity of our life together on this planet. There was an old hymn we used to sing when I was a boy called Jesus calls us, o er the tumult of our life s wild, restless sea. It s a reminder that Jesus s call to discipleship is not a thing of the past but is also a call to us today. Unfortunately, in our world, we are often too self-absorbed, or burdened down, or distracted by the noise of our surroundings to realize that it is WE who are called to a particular way of being in this world. 1

2 I first heard that call some thirty eight years ago at the Riverside Church in New York City. I d gone to hear William Sloan Coffin preach only to learn that there was a guest preacher that day by the name of Ernest T. Campbell. The worship bulletin indicated that his sermon would be about discipleship. Well, I d heard plenty of sermons on that subject before, but resisting the temptation to turn around and join the coffee-drinkers downtown, I slid into a rear pew to find out if he had anything new to add. It wasn t long before he blew my theological ducks out of the water. Without much introduction, he suddenly confronted all of us with a question that changed my perspective on the meaning of discipleship from that day forward. The question he asked us that day is the same question I m going to ask this morning: Are you following Jesus or are you believing in Christ? What s the difference, you ask? Are the two not inseparable? Theoretically, yes; pragmatically, no. We separate them all the time. And when we do we often fail to distinguish between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith; between Jesus the man, the son of Mary and Joseph, and Christ, the Resurrected Savior and Second Person of the Trinity; between what Jesus calls us to do and what the church has taught us to believe about Christ. Therefore the question: are you following Jesus or are you believing in Christ? While I recognize the importance that believing in Christ may have for many of you, I am going to suggest that following Jesus is distinctly different from believing in Christ. And when I say Jesus, I am referring to a specific historical person who as a human being was born of the flesh, grew into manhood, and who walked, talked, laughed and cried; ate, slept, bled and died just like every other human being who has ever walked on the face of this earth. I will not be talking much about the Christ, whom the church has identified as the incarnate Son of God who came to earth to die for our sins, and through whose shed blood on Calvary we have now been washed clean and granted eternal life in heaven above. Instead, I want you to think with me about the man called Jesus. Because when we start talking about Christ, we tend to leave the human Jesus behind and become preoccupied with the divine Son of God; we begin to ignore what Jesus the man did and the kind of life he lived and calls us to live and we start focusing on the creeds and what the church says we re supposed to believe about the Christ. And when Christ comes in through the front door of our mind and sits down in the living room, the human Jesus too often gets ushered out the back door of our consciousness. It is my belief that the man Jesus became the Christ in the minds and hearts of Christians as a result of the church trying to explain how people had experienced God in Jesus, and when that happened all vestiges of his humanity began to slip away and he ceased being someone mortals could even hope to emulate or follow. From that time forward, people began to think that to follow Jesus meant trying to be more Godly or Christ-like which is literally impossible but which some have attempted to do just the same. I don t believe that Jesus came to teach us how to be godly; I believe he came to teach 2

3 us how to be fully human and to be all that we as human beings are capable of being. All the things we know about Jesus are characteristic of a human being; all the things we believe about Christ are interpretations drawn from what we think God is like. When the two become fused into one, we become con-fused. Jesus we can relate to and try to emulate. Christ we can only believe in from a distance. Hence my question: Are you following Jesus or are you believing in Christ? This whole dilemma began with Jesus the man inviting twelve other men like himself to drop what they were doing and follow him. The Greek verb that is translated into English as to follow is found some eighty times in the first three Gospels while the word believe appears a mere fifteen times. But when we turn to the letters of Paul and the other writings of the early church, all written within two generations of Jesus s life and death, the Greek root for the English word believe suddenly appears an astonishing 200 times with virtually no references to following Jesus. What happened in that first century after Jesus that caused the church to shift its emphasis from following Jesus to believing in Christ; from following the dictates of one s heart to defending the correctness of one s belief; from adhering to the pragmatic to arguing the theoretical? And to what extent have you and I, and a lot of other Christians down through the ages, been led into thinking that Christian discipleship has more to do with what we believe than with whom we pattern our lives after, more with doctrinal correctness than with compassionate behavior; more with intellectual respectability than with ethical and moral integrity? I grew up in the church, as I suspect most of you in this room did. And yet, as I think back on my growing up days in Sunday School and confirmation class, no one to the best of my memory ever asked me point-blank if I was following Jesus. Not when I first became a member of the church, not when I was ordained, not at any of my installations services as a minister of the church. Always the questions had to do with what I believed. Do you believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior? Do you believe in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God? Do you believe in the unity and universality of the Christian Church. Always the questions were Do you believe? Never, Are you following in the footsteps of Jesus? The question Do you believe in Christ? is an appropriate question to be asked of any of us who profess to be Christians. And it s not a difficult question to answer. It s a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with the orthodox propositions about the second person of the Trinity. Do you believe, do you give intellectual assent, do you have confidence in the reliability of the church s historic teachings concerning the Christ of faith? Most people can deal with questions like that; can even respond with a simple yes or no. But when someone asks you if you re following Jesus, well, that can be problematic. For that is not a simple yes or no question; not a simple matter of giving intellectual assent to a hypothetical proposition. That question has to do with your lifestyle, your attitudes, your commitments, your possessions, and your very being. You cannot simply answer yes or no, because the 3

4 way you live your life and order your priorities and spend your time and money will bear witness to the truth or falseness of your answer. So when I think about what it means to follow Jesus, I think the walk must take precedence over the talk. Our creed must be in our deed, and like the disciples of St. Francis, we should resort to the use of words to share our faith only when words become necessary. Otherwise, it is more powerful to demonstrate than to articulate. Now we cannot physically drop what we re doing and literally follow Jesus anywhere. That would require him to be literally and physically present which, of course, he is not. Instead, we are called to be the kind of disciples who study the ways and words of the master to the point where we become one with him and he with us. Like the disciples of old, we are called to embrace, embody and emulate his way of living in God and the world to the best of our understanding and ability. And then to go out and share the cost and joy associated with serving others in his name, to imitate his way of reaching out to the sick, the lonely, and the downtrodden, to offer hope when hope seems all but lost. I cannot be an imitation of Christ, because Christ as the second person of the Trinity was never a man like me but only the veneer of God s divinity spread over Jesus s humanity by a medieval theology. Listen to the way the Nicene Creed describes Christ: Christ is the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father, through him all things were made. Now I don t know about you, but I do not know how to follow someone like that. I can only believe in a Christ like that because believing does not require that I follow or that I become one with. It only requires that I give intellectual assent to the meaning the church has given to the word Christ. But Jesus, the man from Galilee who walked and talked and bled and died in order to help people like you and me come to know God s love and strength and power and to join together in building a world wherein all of God s children can live together in peace and harmony... well now, that s someone I can follow often hesitantly and always imperfectly but follow I can and follow I will. But as soon as I make that claim I know I must also ask myself why, if I m following Jesus, I m still such a good insurance risk even at my age? If I m following Jesus, why, when I have done my giving for the year, do I still have so much left over for myself? If I m following Jesus, why are my closets full when so many others are left unclothed? If I m following Jesus, why do I have so many friends among the affluent and so few among the poor and the homeless? If I m following Jesus, why am I frequently tempted to overeat in a world where so many must beg for crumbs? If I m following Jesus, why am I still getting along so well in a world that marked him for death? The Jerusalem road upon which we are being invited to walk with Jesus is seldom an easy road, as Ann Weems makes clear in her poem called The Way: 4

5 O Jesus, I ve only begun and already I feel I ve lost my way. Surely this is not the road and surely these are not the ones to travel with me. This Lenten journey calls for holy retreat, for reflection not repentance. Instead of holiness this highway is crammed with the cacophony of chaos. Is there no back road to Jerusalem? No quiet path where angels tend to weary travelers? No sanctuary from the noise of the world? Just this? Can this hectic highway be the highway to our god? Countless souls before us have answered yes to that question because they found that it is precisely in the midst of life s tumult and confusion, challenge and despair, that Jesus s call can best be heard and that their priorities can best be sorted and ordered to reflect their deepest aspirations and highest values. The test of character and the strength of faith is rarely realized during the best of times but in the most trying of times. Thus did Albert Schweitzer give up a promising medical and musical career to become a humble missionary in Africa, and for such a reason could Mother Teresa remain in the slums of Calcutta, explaining that God had not yet told her to leave. And to such an end did Toyohiko Kagawa renounce the wealth of his family in order to serve the poor in his native Japan, prompting another to refer to him as a man on a cross who didn t need to say anything to make his message known. And to such an end did David Kim devote his life by helping to place tens of thousands of orphaned kids from around the world with loving families in this country. To that end did Hank Disney serve his country and community in a thousand different ways, and always with an open hand and a characteristic smile. And so do so many others of you in this church give of yourselves, your time, your energy and your resources in sure and simple testimony to your having heard Jesus call to follow him and to accept the cost and joy of discipleship. And through it all, even when it may not always seem so, Jesus goes before us, still calling to those who have not yet decided. So I conclude with the same question with which I began: Are you following Jesus or are you believing in Christ? Many of you will find it within yourselves to say yes to both questions. But if you cannot, then I pray you will choose to follow first, for you can always believe from the comfort of home without ever getting off the couch, but you can hardly follow without also becoming a believer. Amen. 5