Sometimes
the most surprising thing about the gospel of Jesus is just how practical it
is.
That is not
to say that it is always mundane, familiar, comfortable. But it is practical. It is practicable. Like many people, I really don’t care to hear
much about a faith that is theoretical, arcane, other-worldly. The vast majority of people whom I know and
to whom I listen want their faith to connect with their daily lives. I do too.
I mean it. (If you think for a
moment that somehow clergy don’t have a problem applying their faith every day
of their lives, then once and for all let me disabuse you of that notion.) My problem is that the gospel, as I hear and
understand it, generally calls me to rethink some of my most basic
assumptions. That has something to do
with daily life all right, but it certainly does not suggest that Jesus is
something you can slip into a ready-made cavity with little discomfort or
little change. To the contrary,
following Jesus is not just a hobby; it is a way of life. It is specifically the life of a learner.
That is what a disciple is: essentially a learner, a student who follows
a teacher in order to receive valuable, even necessary, knowledge of the most
important things from that teacher. The very nature of learning is that one
does not do much of it for very long without being significantly changed. (One of the fallacies, by the way, of much
so-called education in this country, is that it is often presumed to be
relatively painless if it is any good.
Quite the opposite is true. That
fact is not to be confused with the deep joy that comes from growing in insight
as one learns the ropes from a master.
And I’ll bet that many of you have had just that experience.)
Today’s
lesson is about lessons, and our learning is possibly about learning
itself. If we get that, then the gospel
story about the first disciples that attach themselves to Jesus begins to make
sense. Not only that, but it makes sense
in way that has direct application to the way we might choose to be, or to
become, disciples of Jesus as well.
The story
opens as John the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him. Unlike the story in Luke’s gospel, in which
John and Jesus are cousins, John does not know Jesus at all. But God has told him that when he sees the
Spirit descend on and remain with someone, that is the one who baptizes with
Holy Spirit. John goes on to say that it
was precisely for that reason that he, John, came baptizing with water—just so
that the one who is Messiah, Son of God, who baptizes with Holy Spirit, could
be revealed to Israel. The next day
John, standing with two of his disciples (he was a teacher as well), points to
Jesus who is walking by and says, “Look!
There is the Lamb of God!” It is
the second time in the narrative that John has called Jesus that. Clearly John the Evangelist, the storyteller
(as distinct from John the Baptist), knows that phrase to be one which his
readers will recognize and understand to point to the divine origin of Jesus as
well as to his ministry as the sacrificed Passover Lamb whose death takes away
the sin of the world (and reconciles the world to God). It is a poignant phrase, this
declaration. John’s disciples pick up on
it and immediately follow Jesus.
Amidst all
of the details of this story, some of which are on the surface much more
compelling than the fact that these two anonymous disciples of John begin
following Jesus, this one little thing is pregnant with all sorts of surprising
insights. To begin with, there is no
record that John in any way reacts to his disciples trailing off without
him. On the contrary, in this gospel
John the Baptist consistently understands that he must decrease while Jesus
increases. Once he bears witness to
Jesus as the Lamb of God, the one who takes away the sin of the world, he has
done his job and disappears from the story—quite differently from the way he is
presented in the other three gospels.
But perhaps more surprising is that the two disciples follow Jesus. The word has a double meaning. They walk behind him, sure. But what we are about to see is that following means that they shift their
allegiance to him. When they call him
“Rabbi,” they acknowledge that now he, not John the Baptist, is their Διδασκαλος (Didaskolos), their
Teacher.
All of this
takes place within the larger narrative of the calling of disciples. In this gospel, incidentally, there is no
definitive list of twelve disciples.
Some names appear as disciples that are not even mentioned on the lists
in the other gospels. Disciple is not a
member of a group or a club or even necessarily an inner circle; a disciple is
a learner who follows the Teacher,
the master. Jesus does not literally
call these two disciples as he is said to call others. But that does not mean that they do not have
a vocation. The issue of vocation, or
calling, is the relationship the follower has to the Teacher, not the way that
relationship is initiated.
And that is
where this story intersects with your story.
Few of you here do not have somewhere between mild interest and
consuming passion around the issue of vocation.
What is your work? What is your
life calling? What is your job? Or, if you don’t have a job, how can you get
one? If we are lucky enough to get past the
level of job as a means of livelihood, we begin wanting that job to have
significance. Even if it is not a job
out in the work force—say, you are a stay-at-home parent, for example—you want
some assurance that the work you are doing, the stuff of your life, is
meaningful.
Is what you
do your life? Parker Palmer, an educator, says
I
was in my early thirties when I began, literally to wake up to questions about
my vocation. By all appearances, things
were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than
accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a
career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life
other than one’s own. Fearful that I was
doing just that—but uncertain about the deeper, truer life I sensed hidden
inside me, uncertain whether it was real or trustworthy or within reach—I would
snap awake in the middle of the night and stare for long hours at the ceiling.
Then
I ran across the old Quaker saying, ‘Let your life speak.’ I found those words encouraging, and I
thought I understood what they meant: ‘
Let the highest truths and values guide you.
Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.’ Because I had heroes at the time who seemed
to be doing exactly that, this exhortation had incarnate meaning for me—it
meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks or
Mahatma Ghandi or Dorothy Day, a life of high purpose.[1]
Palmer goes
on to say in this book called Let Your
Life Speak that he set out to achieve lofty ideals, but found that trying
to live more nobly a life that was not his own left him imitating heroes rather
than listening to his heart.
Before
you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to
do with you. Before you tell your life
what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you
what truths you embody, what values you represent.[2]
I want to
suggest with considerable verve that listening to the deep truth within you is
where vocation begins. It is where
discipleship begins. And, if Jesus is
your Teacher, I believe that he teaches just that. In fact, I’ll go further. I believe that Christ is an image of your
truest and most perfect self, not a person or a master to be imitated, but
whose example of being absolutely true to his deepest Self is worth yours and
my following. Did you get that? Let me say it again. If you follow Jesus, really and truly, you
will be following your deepest and truest self.
And if you are listening quietly and deeply to your truest life, you
will be following Jesus. You will indeed
be letting your life speak. “The place
God calls you to,” in Frederick Buechner’s oft-quoted phrase, “is the place where your deep
gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”[3] But
you won’t get there by imagining that following Jesus equates with playing
church or turning yourself into something that is at odds with what your own
life is trying to tell you. You won’t get
there if you collect a lot of so-called “spiritual qualities,” like praying
without ceasing, speaking in tongues, working your fingers to the bone for
justice, demonstrating for peace, receiving every sacrament in the book. None of those things is bad and I wouldn’t
discourage any of them. But that is not
your life unless it is your life. It is the work of the soul to bring into
alignment your deep gladness with the world’s deep hunger.
Parker
Palmer’s heroes that he set out to imitate included Martin Luther King, Jr.,
whose life we pause to celebrate this weekend.
The message of King is not that you need to be ordained like him or to
speak like him or even to lead change like him.
The message of Martin Luther King, like Ghandi and Rosa Parks and St.
Francis and Martin Luther, is that you listen to your own life and you live to
the fullest what your life speaks to you and through you. And the world’s deepest hunger is for you to
do just that.
I do not
know whether Andrew and the other disciple that followed Jesus that day
somewhere near Aenon in the vicinity of Jericho would have put it this
way. Maybe their understanding of
discipleship and vocation belonged too much to the habits and thought-forms of
another age for me to suggest that they would put it the way Buechner does or
the way I do. But I am convinced that
the most amazing thing about our Rabbi Jesus is that he demonstrated what it is
to listen to your deep truth. When we
say that he is the Lamb of God, I think that that is the heart of what we
mean. He found his vocation not by
imitating the prophets or the priests or the heroes of Israel, but by being
himself.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014
[1]
Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), Kindle
version, loc. 49-59 of 1031.
[2] Ibid., loc. 59 of 1031.
[3]
Frederick Buechner, Wishful
Thinking: A Theological ABC (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1973),
quotation online at https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/118728,
accessed January 18, 2014.
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