FOLLOW Mi John M. Buchanan
Matthew 4:12-23 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
January 22, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

The nation paused last week to pay final respects to a United States Senator,
a former Vice-President, a controversial politician whose energy on behalf of his
causes was legendary, Hubert Humphrey died while he was very much involved in the
business of living. His funeral, I thought, was quietly remarkable, The minister,
the Reverend Caivin Didier, revealed that someone had asked the Senator if he
planned to resign from some of his major responsibilities because of his health. He
responded that he not only wasn't about to resign from anything, he was considering
gOining a few groups, He knew the brutal, unvarnished reality of his condition: he
knew that he could net win his last battle, What that meant to him and his family
in the quiet, personal hours, we will never know, What he did about it, however,
was put on a suit and tie and fly back to Washington and get on with the business
of living and fighting. Regardless of our opinion of Senator Humphrey's political
positions, in dying he gave a great gift to anyone who could see and hear; namely,
a lesson in living.

As T watched the news last week and listened to his colleagues, many of them
adversaries, testify to that great gift, IE recalled a quotation which I read recently
and used from this pulpit just four weeks ago, It was George Bernard Shaw's Credo,
adopted as his own by Bertrand Russell:

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly
worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being
a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish Little clod
of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will
not devote itself to making you hanpy,'' (Alistaire Cooke,
Six Men, p.172).

That, it seemed to me, fit Senator Humphrey. It also describes Christian Faith
at its best,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ offers true joy in life to anyone who will hear
and respond, It is called salvation and the New Testament couches the offer in
two statements - an announcement and a command, The announcement is that God Joves
you: He always has and He always will. There is nothing in life that can separate
you from His Lave, not even death: therefore you are saved - safe from the anxieties
and fears that are part of the human condition, The command is "Follow me", Follow
Jesus Ghrist and you will be saved; - saved from boredom, meaninglessness, cynicism,
saved by the granting of a mighty cause for which you can live and die. Both are
necessary words, The Gospel is distorted when one outweighs the other, Both are
saving words: thc Good News of God's love and the cail to discipleship are the
complementary parts of our faith ~ but if the New Testament is to be trusted the
call to disciplzsship,to get up and follow, is where it begins in the context of
real life.

At least that's the way it was for those first men who were to be known as
disciples, History has not been terribly fair to them, really. For centuries they
were regarded as "Super Christians" with remarkable powers: they became Saints, in
the worst sense of the word, Churches were named for them and in those churches
they stood forever enshrined in stained glass, They were larger than life, and
then the skepticism of the 1960's and 70's tried to demythologize them, Having

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worshipped them for so many centuries our age rather enjoyed bringing them down to
size, We're willing, for instance, to look at the complexity of a Judas, the total
humanity of Peter, the sometimes pettiness of John, Some efforts go even further,
Tim Rice and Lloyd Webber tried desperately to demonstrate their humanity through-
out "Jesus Christ Superstar", sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes foolishly, -At
the Last Supper, for instance, while Jesus is engaged in a passionate discourse with
Judas they sound boozy and insensitive:

"Look at all my trials and tribulations

Sinking in a gentle pool of wine,

What's that in the bread, it's gone to my head
Till this morning is this evening life is fine,
Always hoped that I'd be an Apostle

Knew that T would make it if I tried

Then when we retire we can write the gospels
So they'Li all talk about us when we've died,"

Somewhere between the two extremes, the stained glass saints and the twelve
drunks in the Rock Opera, is the truth: somewhere near the point of normal humanity,
They were just men, which is both a mundane and remarkable observation. They were
disciples, not because they were saintly in behavior, nor astute theologically, nor
zealous in theit piety: but because when Jesus of Nazareth said to them, "Follow me",
they got up and did just that,

When we try to interject ourselves into their situation we have difficulty
taking very seriously what they did, Our first reaction would be that the man was
a religious freak and we would probably give Him about as much attention as we do
the earnest young people in beards and sandles who acecost us in airport lobbies,
Assuming that somehow we proceeded beyond that initial reaction we would want, next,
the answers to some very fundamental questions: “Who is this who is asking me to
follow? Where does He intend to lead me?" Prudent, common sense questions, con-
spicuously absent from the text,

The problem is that we have been schooled to regard religious faith as a matter
of understanding, Our aimost automatic definition of Christianity is that body of
doctrine contained in the Creeds of the Church. None of us is disposed not to follow
Jesus Christ, It's just that we want to be convinced first: we want to build up a
file of persuasive data,a reservoir of faith before we get up frau our nats and follow
into an unknown future, And occasionally we need reminding that the New Testament
describes that sequence in precisely opposite terms, Listen to Leslie Weatherhead
on the subject:

"I believe passionately that Christianity is a way of

life, not a theolosical system with which one must be

in intellectual agreement, JI feel that Christ would

admit into discipleship anyone who sincerely desired

to follow him, and allow that disciple to make his

creed out of his experience." (The Christian Asnostic, p. 16).

And later, talking about the relationship of theology to discipleship, he said
it again: "Christ called his disciples to follow him, to enter into a friendship
with him, As their experience deepened certain great truths were born in their
minds from observation, meditation, discussion and experience, ‘These truths became
their creeds, but they were not imposed on them by Christ or by the fellowship as a
condition of belonging.” (p31).

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The power of the new evangelicalism is precisely at this point. The evangelical
sees the Gospel clearly - as Jesus Christ calling neople to follow in Lives of
commitment, in a way that Presbyterians seem unable to do, It's almost as if we have
been innoculated with a little religion and we are thereby immune from the real thing,
We've gome to Sunday School as youngsters, learned a few Bible verses, the Apostles'
Creed and several hymns, We attend church on occasion, make a pledge, and snend a
whole Lifetime waiting for faith to happen to us, or wondering what in the world
has got into ''good old Joe" who is suddenly talking about nothine but his Lord, A
eareful reading of the text shows what's wrong. People follow Jesus first; faith,
belief, theology - are added later. I keep always close at hand Albert Schweitzer's
famous quote with which he concluded his very scholarly work, The Gvest for the
Historical Jesus. It's on the front of the bulletin: “He comes to us as one un-
known,,.and savs ‘Follow me’ - and to those who obey..,he will reveal himself... and
they shall learn in their experience who he is,"

Faith, in the Bible at least, is not having all the answers, In fact, it has
almost nothing to do with answers, Rather faith, in the Bible, is consistently
described as getting u» and following the call of God without knowing where you are
going, or who exactly is doing the calling, Tet is acting without the guarantees you
and I want to have before we move a muscle, The irony - and traredy - is that we
Will not know, we will not have faith, until we follow, Rollo May observed: "If I
do not will something, I could never know it." (Love and Will, p. 230). And some-
one once remarked to the great philosopher Pascal, "IF wish I had your creed, then
I would live your life," to which Pascal responded, “Live my Life and you will have
my creed,"

Our personiood depends on our being willing to make difficult decisions and
take concrete action, We become persons when we make commitments to something other
than ourselves and then oassionately follow where those cotaitnuents lead with every-
thing in us, Hubert Humphrey was an eloquent example of that: a man fully alive
until the moment he died, Shakespeare's most familiar line, out of Hamlet, “To be,
or not to be: that is the question," speaks the same truth. And we are learning,
even in the area of mental health, that people begin to feel better and be better
when they make decisions and change their behavior, instead of wallowine in the
guilt and hurt of the past. Reality Therapy, one of the new psychiatric alterna~
tives, places its emphasis on the future, not past, Its founder, William Glasser,
writes, "Without denying that the patient had an unsatisfactory past, we find that
to look for what went wrong does not help him. What good comes from discovering
that you are afraid to assert yourself because you had a domineering father? Both
patient and therapist can be aware of this historical occurrence; they can discuss
it in all its ramifications for years, but the knowledge will not help the patient
assert himself now," (See E, Campbell, Locked in a Room with Open Doors, p,31).

There is something about our humanity which becomes more human, more noble,
more authentic, when we decide to be, when we make deep commitments and covenant
to live for them,

But there is much about our Lifca,and the predominant life style of our culture,
that mitigates against it. Two motifs, in particular, stand out: the pursuit of
pleasure and apathy, the inclination away from commitment to anythine of substance,
The latest in sociclogical trends has become something called the "new narcissism”,
and obsessive concentration on self: self-identity, selfi-realization, self-
actualization, My happiness, my gratification, my satisfaction becomes my

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priority - my religion, And if it conflicts with other commitments or relationships,
they must be sacrificed on the altar of self, Hedonism, as a religion, went out
with the Greeks, but it has reappeared in our day disguised as the simple gospel of
Hugh Heffner: "if it feels good, do it." It ig defended seriously by people who
should know better, It's all right, we are told, to give yourself to the goal of
being happy,

Trouble is - it doesn't work, and never has. In a4 superb little paragraph on
human sexuality Victor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist, writes: "Primarily and
normally man does not seek pleasure: instead, pleasure ~ or, for that matter, happi-
ness - is the side effect of Living out the self-transcendence of existence, Once
one has served a cause or is involved in loving another human being, happiness
occurs by itsclf£. The will to pleasure, however, contradicts and defeats itself,
For pleasure and happiness are by-products, Happiness must ensue, Ut cannot be
pursued, Jt is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness," (The
Unconscious God, p. 84-85),

The Gospel of Jesus Christ promises happiness - in its only, real form - as a
by-product of serving a great cause, It was Chesterton, I believe, who remarked
dryly that "Christianity had never been tried and found wanting, He just hadn't
been tried,"

The second cultural motif which mitigates against the New Testament definition
of faith is detachment, cool non-involvement, non-commitment, It is fashionable not
to get "hot" avout anything, not to care too deeply, not to throw too much into any
fight, We have learned ~ in parenting, politics, im love, that deep commitments

can be castly and disappointing and painful, Someone has written a Little poem
about the final result of this dynamic, when played out to its end:

‘Some men die by shrapnel,
Some go down in flames

And some men die of boredom
At play at Little games,"

Who among us wouldn't give anything for a causa big enough to live and die for?
Who isn't anxious to know that life adds up to something besides the frantic,
twenty-four hour a day struggle to earn enough money to buy that illusive security,
or to finance a vacation long enough so that we can rejoin the strupele with
renewed vigor?

And to each of us - regardless of who we are ~ Jesus says simply - "Follow me",

What does it require? The courage, first to be a person: to say "yes": to
commit and give and decide, And second, it requires the willingness to leave our
nets behind, That's how it was for them, after all, Matthew records it for the
edification of any reader capable of being astounded: “They left their nets and
followed him,''

The Church presumes too much, I believe, when it tries to identify the nets,
You know what they are for you, I know what mine are, There was a delightful
story in the Washington Post some time ago about the maiden voyage of a cruise
ship on the Potomac, The passeneer list was a veritable "Who's Who" of Washington

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society. it was a hot and humid day and at one point some of the passengers
removed their shoes and socks, In the crowd a man accidently kicked overboard one
of the socks of a ranking government official, Without even thinking about it the
official did the truly Logical thing: he threw the other sock in the river, (See
Hoover Rupert in The Outlook, 11/7/77), Most of us would not have done that - wa
would have brought the now useless sock home and kept it in the drawer for at least
a year,

Christian Paith is Like that, It requires the courage and grace to throw
away the useless sock; to walk away from whatever stands in the path of followins
Jesus Christ, In William Faulkner's novel The Reivers, there is a line that oes:
"You've got to say goodbye to some things you know in order to sav hello to some
things you don't,” (Rupert, Ibid,).

So, for each of us, the cail to discipleship is a call to leave our nets
behind: to say goodbye to an old life in order to discover new life,

Jesus Christ calls each of us to follow, He does not call us to imitate Him
slavishly, He does not call every person to be a missionary or a minister, He
calls each to follow. He calls you and me to follow - where we are now, in the
context of our lives.

He promised those humble fishermen that He would make them into fishers of
men, He promises us that in folloving Him we will become everything we were
created to be: that in His service we will find that illusive selfhood, that ful-
fillment and peace and happiness for which we are locking, And something else as
well ~ we will find one day that in following Him, we have found faith,

Anen.

God our Father, may we hear asain the clear call to discinleship, Give us
courage to follow, to leave our nets behind and to live new lives as disciples

of Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord,
Amen,