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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