FOLLOWERS ON THE WAY

“Follow me”, says Jesus.  “Follow me” is an unsolicited invitation to some people who are minding their own business (seafood in this case), content with their familiar routines, and quite happy to stay put in their waterfront homes.  “Follow me” is an invitation to become uprooted, to go on a road trip without a map toward a destination not specified.  “Follow me” is a major challenge.

St. Luke, in his history of the first Christian movements, tells us in “The Acts of the Apostles” that those original followers of Jesus called themselves “The Way”.  That’s road-trip talk.  The Way (or Via in Latin) is what Romans called their roads.  Those earliest Christians, as followers, saw themselves as people on a journey.  Somewhere down the timeline of history, the name for Christians got changed.  The people of The Way became Church people.  I regret that change.  Now we all “go to church”.  Church has a street address.  Church is not a journey but a destination.  But I think Christianity at its best is still a Way.  It’s not something fixed and rooted that stays put.  To say it differently, a Christian is not something you are.  A Christian is something you can hope to become if you stay on the journey.  Becoming a Christian is what following Jesus is all about.  So when people ask me if I’m a Christian, I reply in all honesty, “I hope to become one; I’m on the way, but I haven’t arrived.”

The opposite of being a follower-on-the-way, one who is becoming a Christian, is to be a settler.  I’m reading a wonderful biography of Daniel Boone.  I’m learning that when Boone started leading people from North Carolina into the then-unknown wilderness of Kentucky, the first thing those road-weary pioneers did was to become settlers.  And the first structures they built were stockades to keep out those who posed a threat to them.  That’s exactly what we do in our religion when we stop being followers-on-the-Way and turn ourselves into religious settlers.  We build psychological stockades around our hearts and minds to keep the threats away.  We become settled behind those stockades.  Our perspectives and attitudes get settled, our feelings, our thoughts, our behaviors all get settled in.

What a settlers’ stockade does is provide us with a comfort zone.  Most of us have our personal comfort zones which make us feel safer.  Some of them can be pretty funny.  I’m a white male of northern European ancestry.  I’m one of the frozen chosen.  Keeping a polite social distance between myself and strangers is in my DNA!  So if someone I don’t know gets right up in my face to talk, I find myself backing up quickly!  My comfort zone has been penetrated.

All of my adult life, the spirit of Christ has been penetrating my comfort zones.  In the 50’s and 60’s it was race.  Many of us Southerners reacted angrily, even violently, but after a while we were longer to remain comfortable with our racism.  Then along came another comfort zone penetration called “Prayer Book revision”, and not just any old prayer book but the one dated 1928 with its gorgeous Shakespearean language!  Many among us felt furiously uncomfortable when we ceased to address God as an Elizabethan gentleman!  Then in short order the threatened comfort zone was women.  They were necessary on altar guilds, perhaps just OK on vestries, but then some wanted to be ordained!  There went another shattered stockade of comfort.

Now the newest besieged stockade to be threatened is the sexual comfort zone.  Specifically the full inclusion of uncloseted homosexual men and women, not only as members of the church but also as leaders of the church.  When that gets through to our comfort zone, we’ll start quoting the Bible, usually, if not exclusively, passages from the Old Testament.  But I think the time is long overdue to start reading any part of the Bible through the lens of Christ’s gospel, the good news.  We need to read the Bible always with reference to what Jesus actually said and taught.  So whenever I’m asked what I think about homosexuality, I say that I agree with Jesus on the subject.  “Well, what did Jesus say?” some will ask.  He didn’t say anything about homosexuality or homosexuals, and perhaps his reticence on the subject should be a stimulus to our silence.  You know it’s strange that the same people who are clamoring to have a Constitutional amendment forbidding same-sex unions don’t have anything to say about divorce.  And divorce was one practice Jesus did say something about.  He wasn’t for it.  Perhaps divorce no longer threatens our comfort zones in the way that sexuality does.

Wherever our stockades of heart and mind and custom are penetrated, whenever our comfort zones are challenged, we are presented not only with a threat but with an opportunity.  It’s an opportunity to hear again the invitation of Jesus to follow, and often that invitation knocks on the doors of our hearts at those spots where we feel most threatened and uncomfortable.  That invitation, if accepted, is to take a Christ-inspired journey of mind, heart, and behavior.  It’s an invitation to become less settled, less heavily-defended, and once again to become people who are on the Way, people who hope to become Christians.

Sermon presented by The Reverend William S. Brettmann at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Morehead City, on the Third Sunday of Epiphany, 2008.