This Following Is Forever

Psalm 62; Mark 1:14-20

 

            When you were younger, did you play Follow the Leader?   I know I did.    Mostly on my elementary school playground (back when there weren’t any modern day safety features!)  I remember always being the follower.   I didn’t quite believe I had any leadership skills until my late teens.   And these are certainly very much still in development!   Were you mostly a follower or a leader?   Perhaps both?

            If you need a refresher on the simple rules of this game, here they are: children line up behind the person chosen to be the leader; the leader moves around and the children have to mimic all of the leaders actions; if any of them fail to follow correctly, they are out of the game; and finally, the last person standing becomes the new leader.  A last shall be first sort of thing, right?   

            This game is both fun and formative.   It teaches youth some necessary skills about trusting leaders, following their cues and overall example, and organizationally falling in line.   This is learned, of course, while the leader is hopping on one foot or walking like an ape or a zombie, and such.    Both leading and following can be fun!   By the time I did start being a leader like this to follow, it was at Camp Johnsonburg and we did it all in the fellowship of Jesus.   As Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 4:10, it’s more than okay to be fools for Christ. 

            No matter our ages, we all play Follow the Leader as we engage in ministry together.   And there are faithful rules for participating.   First, we need to be sure everyone coming together for this activity has elected only one leader.   This is always Jesus Christ.   Ephesians 1:22 reminds us that He is head of all things for the church.   Regardless of where we are on our faith journeys, when we come together as the church, we do so to follow His example of selfless love and the new beginnings He initiates to further the growth of the holy kingdom.   Unlike too many leaders in adult lives, however, our Lord is merciful about the rest of the rules.  We can and inevitably always will fail to think, act and speak after His example.   But the Good News is that we are never ever kicked out of the line.  We absolutely can’t lose when we follow the Lord.  

            Yet following is often challenging.    One challenge in particular concerns timing.    We have His biblical example to follow, and the ongoing instruction of the Holy Spirit, but following this leader isn’t in the kind of straight, successive, and sequential line we are most used to in our thinking and planning.   This following is forever.   It’s not measured by time as we can calculate it.  It unfolds according to the timing of God’s all knowing, all powerful, ever present will.  

            How do we follow something so grand and as ultimately mysterious as this in the here and now?   Through all our carefully planned for as well as unexpected life experiences?   

            We do so by prayerfully paying attention to what Christian tradition calls Kairos moments.   This Greek word kairos is used over 80 times in the New Testament and it refers to divinely inspired moments in support of God’s purposes.   One definition of it that I like is that it’s when “perhaps everything changes because it’s the right time … when the eternal God breaks into your circumstances with an event that gathers some loose ends of your life and knots them together in his hands.  Kairos moments are God-given opportunities to enter into a process of learning kingdom living.”[i]

            Mark 1:15 is a great example.   Jesus declares to the crowds that the time has come, that the kingdom of God is near.   And what it the very next thing he does after such a grand announcement?   He finds his first disciples, Simon Peter and the brothers James and John.  He commands them to follow Him.    Now, Jesus hadn’t gotten up that morning and checked his watch and calendar to determine the next phase of a temporal project.   It was instead spiritual, eternal timing to further inaugurate His place at the head of the holy kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.  

            It wasn’t just Jesus’ moment.  It was an enormous kairos moment for these average joe fishermen.   The call to follow this itinerant preacher meant leaving everything they had known and heading into an unknown future.   Their families and family businesses.   Their dearest friends.   The vast experience in fishing for fish in the Sea of Galilee that they knew couldn’t possibly apply to fishing for lost souls.   They hadn’t planned on this.  Yet they recognized the power of the holy call.  They faithfully gave their lives to the kairos moment. Jesus needed them to go and be by His side, to further learn from Him and help expand the Messianic movement.    They trusted and obeyed in God’s powerfully steadfast love alive in Jesus of Nazareth, who they found to be their rock and their salvation as they followed him the rest of their lives and beyond death itself.

            Emotions are a great indicator of kairos moments.   The joyful cherished ones that remind you of how very much God loves you as well as the negative ones that so often lead to the greatest potential for growth.    And kairos experiences happen on both an individual level and a corporate level.   The more each of us as disciples and all of us as the Church recognize God breaking in upon our lives in ways that lead us to grow in Christ, the more we’ll be able to “seize the opportunities and celebrate kingdom life.”[ii]   It will help us remember that Jesus saying the kingdom of God is near means, as Pastor Mike Breen puts it, “that if you reach in the right direction, your hand will disappear through the curtain of this world and reappear in the reality of the next world.”   Kairos experiences help us more fully realize that our faith journeys aren’t linear, that they are as dynamic as all those found in the scriptures.    Can you think of your most recent kairos moment?

            Individually and together, I believe we are moving through a great big kairos experience right now.  I believe this in-breaking of God for holy purposes we may or may not understand or have yet to fully accept is an extension of the one we experienced together in late summer of 2004.   Christ’s call through your Pastor Nominating Committee at that time was clearly a kairos experience, individually and corporately.   I followed Jesus from Norristown, PA just as I had followed Jesus from my previously places of ministry in Newark, OH, Wilmington, DE, Princeton, NJ and, of course, Camp Johnsonburg.    Each of those places carried on with following Jesus after parting from my pastoral leadership.  They kept discerning and living into God’s will because God is always doing something new.   Now I’m in the process of following our Lord to Phillipsburg and you all are beginning the process of following Him under new and renewed leadership.   As much as there is familiarity and comfort and a sense of security to stay in one place, we know that this following is forever and doesn’t always fit our linear time frames.  It’s always an eternal unfolding calling us to follow in the footsteps of our Savior for the reconciliation of the whole world.

            How will we all follow our leader in the coming weeks, months, years?   We will live and love as Jesus taught.   We will act peaceably and place any and all hurts and hopes in His hands.   We will trust as our ancestors trusted God Almighty when called to advance the holy kingdom.   

            May we all find a firm reminder in these words of Brennan Manning, author of the Cotton Patch Gospel -- “It requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Jesus Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, ‘Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened,’ He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love.”    Amen.

                       

             

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[i] Buildling a Discipling Culture by Mike Breen, Chapter 6

[ii] ibid

Chosen and Upheld

Mark 4:1-11; Isaiah 42:1-9

           

            About 300 years after Jesus dwelled among us, a baby boy was born in an affluent port city named Patara, which was located in southern Turkey.   During an awful epidemic of some sort or another, both of the boy’s parents died when he was a child.   They had blessedly lived long enough to help instill in him the gift of Christian faith.  

            In adulthood he lived in the neighboring town of Myra.   There he gained quite an incredible reputation.   All good, for he lived a very devout, former religious life full of the sacrificially loving spirit of Jesus.   His reputation as being Christ-like was so strong that he was an obvious choice to become the town’s new bishop when the need arose.  

            The Bishop of Myra’s ministry was marked with gracious generosity and compassion.  He had spent his entire inheritance on meeting the needs of neighbors.   He also would go out and beg for food to give to the poor.    In keeping with cultural practices of his day, another loving act was to pay dowry money for women who couldn’t -- thus saving them from the social disgrace of not finding a husband.   And he was particularly well known for dressing up in disguise to more anonymously give gifts to poor children.

            His reputation earned him a seat at the great church councils of his day.  Especially the Council of Nicea, which had been called by the Christian conversion claiming Roman Emperor Constantine.    Unfortunately, the Bishop of Myra got more than a bit heated during the debates about doctrines such as the Trinity and his behavior led to Constantine stripping him of his church office and tossing him in jail.   Perhaps this was to teach everyone a quick lesson, because the bishop was reinstated a short time later.   He went on to live to be my age of forty-five. 

            I’ve read that more churches in the world bear his name than any other.  So great was his legacy.   They don’t say Bishop of Myra Church, however.   They use the name and title of the saint whose legacy grew merrier and merrier over time.   We know him as St. Nicholas!

            The real St. Nick is an inspiration as someone chosen and upheld to represent the mind, voice and actions of Christ.    Even with all the latter day creative, commercialized, secular interpretations of his historic character, his witness continues to touch and transform the world to God’s glory.   His legacy of delivering both joy and justice continues.

            How do any of us know we are being chosen and upheld by the Lord?   What does the incredibly spiritual matter of being divinely “called” feel like?  

            Back in my college days when I was just moving beyond my phase of being the lead singer for a progressive rock band, I attended a weekend for prospective graduate students at Princeton Seminary.   I remember two things in particular from that experience, both involving the late Dr. Tom Gillespie, who was the seminary president at the time.    The first is my shaking his hand and feeling quite worried that I was being judged.   You see, I still wore an earring in my left ear at that time!   As I said, I was still moving out of the rock ‘n roll phase!   And secondly, it was his comment to all the prospective students about how “call” is a like a tug on the heart.    I knew exactly what he was talking about.  I’d felt the “tug” all throughout my college and Camp Johnsonburg days, as well as through that brief stint trying to sing like Phil Collins, Geddy Lee and now seventy year old Jon Anderson.  

            It wasn’t a light tapping on my shoulder.   Definitely more of an undeniable tugging on my soul.   Another professor later remarked that God’s tugging on our hearts has to do with coming to accept the necessary direction of our personal integrity.    For St. Nicholas, having been born to privilege yet sadly orphaned so young, promoting joy and justice were certainly the tug on his heart and necessary direction of his integrity.  

            What holy tugs have you experienced over the years?   What holy tugs are happening in your heart and soul right now?

            I strongly believe our Lord calls us all to serve the building of his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.   Every call is unique.  And it’s way more than just a feeling.   It’s a refining, refueling fire.  The Spirit-filled sparks of this both touch and transform interpersonal relationships, entire congregations, and on out to ignite the whole world with the Light of Christ.

            The Book of Isaiah bears great witness to being chosen and upheld.   Listen again the first verse of this morning’s passage from the Hebrew Bible – “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in which my soul delights.”    These are words interpreting a call from God.   But who exactly is it referring to?

            Historically, for many Bible interpreters, it’s a reference to Jesus.   And true enough, it’s a very complimentary passage to this morning’s lesson from Mark’s Gospel about Jesus’ baptism.   Jesus is the quintessential holy servant.   It may seem odd that he needed to be baptized (especially by the likes of a loud-mouthed locust eater like his relative John), but this scene of commissioning at the start of his public ministry established the example for our own commissioning as faithful servants.   Personally, however, I’m glad for the Holy Spirit working through the laying on of hands.   Descending doves would likely leave quite a mess.

            Yet other Bible interpreters caution us not to be too quick in assuming this is a reference to the Messiah.   I fall in this camp because I believe there is great value in leaving this prophetic, poetic reference open so the servant is whoever accepts being chosen and upheld to carry out God’s transformative work in the world.    With you, God is delighted!

            This work always engages us in the unfolding of new things by God’s providential hand. “See, the former things have come to pass and new things I now declare,” says God through Isaiah 42:9.    Sometimes this unfolding of what God declares is experienced the way a rose comes to bloom.    It’s clear to see the process of change as something closed gradually opens up to reveal something fresh and intricate to behold.    We don’t grieve the former bud coming to pass because we know it is how the bloom comes to be.   Other times, the declaration of new things can seem more sudden … like a flash flood.  Either way and all the ways in-between, the holy call comes and is upheld.  And as those chosen to serve as ambassadors of Christ, we can all trust that we will find joy and not grow weary so long as we keep our focus on God’s glory by walking in the Spirit.

            At the start of every church year, there is always a degree of change concerning the good folks chosen by God and elected by the congregation to serve as Elders and Deacons.   We uphold their willingness to serve these offices by doing what we will do in a few minutes – by ordaining and installing these brothers and sisters in Christ.   Like Jesus’ baptism, this is a public celebration and marking of their divine commissioning.    We all have an important responsibility to support the ministry of all Elder and Deacon leaders in this congregation as they go about addressing the ongoing needs of FPC and of neighbors near and far.   And for you who have been chosen, I pray for you to be constantly attentive to the ways you can best delight God.   Stay focused on the Gospel witness, on the challenges to the early church and how the first apostles addressed them, and being an inspiration to people.   And grow in grace and faith by studying the inspiring stories of others both past and present.   Amen!