10 April 2011                                                    Matthew 7: 21-29

In light of all of the terrible disasters that have befallen our world recently, the idea of a house founded upon the rock which is impervious to floods—or perhaps tsunamis and earthquakes as well—is a very attractive one.  We probably all feel a little more vulnerable to the hazards of this world as we have read about Haiti and then New Zealand and then Japan.  But, of course, Jesus was not talking about a physical house, he was talking about a life.  There is such a thing, said he, as a life that is built on such solid foundations that it can withstand the multiple disasters and troubles to which human life is susceptible.  He said it is available to anyone who not only hears his words, but puts them into practice.  There have been few ages of the world in which so many people have been so vulnerable to such uncertainty and precariousness as our own.  It may, in fact, be the defining characteristic of this late modern age, the “liquid” age of modernity, to quote an interesting sociologist [Zygmunt Bauman].  Imagine having such a secure foundation for your life, that, though you are as vulnerable as the next person to the vicissitudes of late modernity, you need not fear any ultimate loss or any absolute frustration of your deepest desires.  Instead, you can approach life with confidence, with assurance, knowing that you are safe and that, as a result, you are free.  This would be a very good foundation to have upon which to build your life.  Jesus says that it is available to the one who “hears these words of mine and acts on them.” 

Understanding those words of Jesus has been the theme of my series of homilies on the Sermon on the Mount for almost three months now.  We have covered a lot of ground and talked about some difficult things.  In fact, I want to end this series by trying to counter an impression that I may have given as you followed along with me: the impression that it is just too hard, too difficult, too great of a commitment, and too complicated for the ordinary man or woman to attempt to take Jesus seriously.  I said that being a real disciple of Jesus was pretty much the same thing as being a saint; I may have been understood as saying that no one can be a disciple if he cannot be a hero of the faith—the kind of saints we see in our stained-glass windows.  Obviously that is not true—I maintain that discipleship is for anyone who wants to take Jesus seriously.  So today, I want to speak to the person who might like to sign on as a follower of Jesus but thinks that it is simply beyond anything of which he or she is capable. 

And, of course, that is true: being a disciple is beyond our capacities.  We have talked about doing what Jesus said to do, being obedient to him.  But there ought not to be any confusion about the necessity of grace.  Without the saving grace of Christ which comes to us through his cross and resurrection by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we should none of us have what it takes to be a disciple.  Christianity does not simply propose a new set of laws that come from Jesus’ teachings and then tell people to obey them, whether they can or not.  Instead, Christ offers to anyone who cares to take advantage of it, the possibility of sharing a new life, his own life into which he graciously brings us.  We are still saved by grace, only this grace does not save us without us, as it were—it works with us as we enter into the process of discipleship.  This life is Jesus’ own life, the life of the Kingdom of God, the life of the world to come, which will entirely transform this world of ours until it becomes the kind of place in which Jesus can be entirely at home, since the will of his Father shall be done here as it is now done only in heaven.

So how does one do it then?  I want to speak here of a logical first step.  All of us come from several different places on our way towards following Jesus.  Some were brought up in the Church and baptized as infants and went to Sunday School and never were not what they thought of as being a Christian.  Others found their way to the Church after a long time doing something else.  Some came to the Church because they enjoyed the people they met here and stayed on to become their friends and absorbed their religion at the same time.  I am not trying to describe all the possibilities, but rather offering a description of what must come, sooner or later, to anyone who follows the logic of being associated with Christianity.  At some point, one stands before Jesus himself and sees that He is offering a way of life that differs in important ways from the normal ways people live in the surrounding culture—He proposes a new direction and has a new plan for achieving a life that is fully human and abundant.  For example (and much simplified): our world seems to be motivated largely by greed and violence, the violence being pretty much the product of the greed, in the sense that violence is done to those who cannot compete in the contest for money and power, particularly the elderly, the poor, and the children.  Jesus comes along and does not propose a more effective way to gain money and power (those were his temptations in the wilderness) but says, seek first the Kingdom and love your neighbor as yourself.  Many people, including many who think of themselves as Christians, do not believe such a life is possible, but Jesus offers it as an alternative to business as usual.  At some time or another, the one who is trying to think clearly and live justly comes to wonder if, in fact, this way of Jesus might be preferable to the customary alternatives and if preferable, possible.  There is nothing that can really prove it to him.  The record of Christian history is ambiguous: who do you believe: St Francis or the Crusaders? 

Suppose, however, that our serious-minded person keeps thinking about and reading Jesus’ words and that at some point she is convinced that she ought to take them seriously—that maybe Jesus really was a smart guy and understood the meaning of human life and how it ought to be lived.  What does she do then?  She is faced with the problem of becoming a disciple, a real follower.  So, she decides to give it a try, to start to live the way that Jesus recommended, to put his words into practice, and see if it works.  Instead of doing what she has always done, living as she has always lived, she decides to do it differently.  In other words she has changed her mind.  This is called repentance—literally, changing one’s mind.  Does it require some emotionally exhilarating conversion experience—lightning striking, floods of tears and visions of glory?  No—in fact, such experiences can actually get in the way of the task of doing what Jesus said to do, if one were to mistake exalted spiritual experiences for the actual work of being a disciple.  All that is required is a decision to try Jesus’ way for a change and see how it goes.  

It is that simple, and also that complicated.  This decision is likely to have something to do with a church, which is where concentrations of disciples are usually found.  This is a mixed blessing.  Churches have come up with all sorts of regulations and requirements in order to control the lives of their members.  Many have found that keeping the rules, being a good Church citizen, is actually easier than following Jesus because it is easy to do, does not require much grace, and doesn’t mess with your heart.  However, you never know where you are going to end up if you really follow Jesus.  Following Jesus is more like being married than joining a club: the commitment is open-ended and there is another person with whom you are involved, and who knows what will happen as you live together?  It is likely to change you very radically. 

On the other hand, many of the details of organizational religion are actually meant to aid in the discipleship process.  We cannot avoid the Church if we want to follow Jesus, since all of these other people belong to him as well as we, and we are thrown together in a common life.  It is only the Church that is charged with proclaiming the reality of Jesus to the world and it is only within the Church that Jesus is likely to be known.  As J. N. Ward put it: “The Church is certainly composed of inadequate and sinful people (is there any other kind?) but this regrettable characteristic makes it a particularly suitable sphere for practicing as well as learning Christianity.”  [Five For Sorrow, . . . p. 48]

The practicing and learning of Jesus requires a community.  First of all, to this Church have been committed by our Lord Himself the means of grace which nurture the life in Christ.  In the Church we learn to pray and receive the Sacraments and receive the Word of God in Scripture and Sermons.  As we seek to follow our Lord, we require such sacramental grace and spiritual instruction—our discipleship is not likely to work for us if we are not receiving infusions of knowledge and grace.  If the Church is doing its job, it is also teaching its members how to pray on their own and develop a deep personal and interactive relationship with God.  And secondly, we all require brothers and sisters with whom to interact.  We practice our relationship with Jesus with them and learn from them how to follow Jesus—or at least, we ought to be able to do this.  It is possible that Church life can degenerate in some places to the level of a religious club where there is no serious following of Jesus.  And in other places, people still haven’t learned well enough to speak of their life in Christ with others and to assist them to grow in their relationship with our Lord.  The Church, over the years, has pretty much been able to keep the sacramental grace flowing to her members, but the set of nurturing relationships has often suffered.  For centuries it was supposed to be the priest or pastor who was the spiritual friend to everyone who wanted a deeper relationship with Christ.  This was obviously impossible—pastors have many useful functions, but they cannot be the sole source of spiritual understanding and encouragement.  We all know the importance of having close friends to discuss our deeper spiritual longings and achievements and failures—but we don’t often have the groups that we need. 

Still, the person who is serious about following Jesus can usually find the resources he or she needs.  One essential need is the development of a good rule of prayer.  In order to maintain one’s confidence in Jesus and to work out the implications of his teaching, it is necessary to pray and meditate, read and contemplate over months and years.  And this is both easier and harder than it would at first appear.  It is harder because it requires that we re-organize our lives around following Jesus.  Of course, as following Jesus becomes more and more important to us—which it will as we find that the way he taught us to live actually does work and gives us a deeper sense of satisfaction with our lives—we will naturally give a more important place to the requirements of our relationship with him.  This is nothing strange—we always make room in our lives for what is most important to us.  This is another implication of Jesus’ maxim: where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 

But it is also easier, and here is where I have changed my mind somewhat over the years.  Here is how J. N. Ward puts it: “To be blessed means to be inclined in the purpose of God and that purpose is worked out through human freedom, through people being wrong and right and losing and winning and learning what we must and what we need not accept.” [p. 50]  I used to be worried more about getting things exactly right than I am now.  It is not that I don’t believe in the truth and am not willing to argue it out with someone, but that I think God gives us space to work things out—to be wrong and learn how we were wrong and then change, for example.  If you are worried about being right to an inordinate extent, you import a fearfulness into things that is counterproductive.  I can see this playing out in the Church at large just now as we argue with each other over the great issues.  I can see this fearfulness keeping a person from a good experimental discipleship to Jesus: if he is afraid to get something wrong he might be afraid to act at all.  I can see this also keeping us from opening up to each other, if we are afraid of an honest examination of the details of our own lives of following Jesus.  What if we had a greater sense of liberty to try things and even the freedom to be wrong, if then we could learn from mistakes and try again—and not feel that God had abandoned us?

I don’t claim that it is easy to be a disciple of Jesus.  There is risk and there is suffering sometimes.  Of course, there is suffering that comes to everyone living in this world: disease, natural disaster, loss of job, betrayal by family and friends—everyone experiences these from time to time.  But the Christian sometimes has to suffer through the consequences of the choices he or she has made to be faithful to Jesus’ way of life, when in the world around us, people would quickly cut their losses and move on.  But I do claim that following Jesus is the way of wisdom—that it corresponds to the way things are deep down.  We are not very seriously in touch with deep-down realities in our modern world, but rather quite alienated from them, so that Jesus’ ways and methods may seem very peculiar.  But, in reality, there is no artificiality in Jesus; he does not seek to play power games with us, to subject us to his own version of slavery—nor does he give the church these options either.  This is why he could say that his own yoke was easy; his burden was light.  How, you might say, could he claim that, when he had to go to the Cross?  He could claim it because his was a freely chosen sacrifice of himself for love of us—there was no compulsion and no demeaning or diminishing of the reality of human liberty or the capacity to love openly.  And he does not seek to thwart or diminish the liberty of his followers.  He leads the sheep, he does not drive them.  He does not take us into dangers he is unwilling to face himself.  And he will bring all who follow him through the valley of the shadow of death into a place of life and refreshment.  Such is the promise, which, the more we follow him, the more sure we are that he spoke the truth to us.

Of course, this does not answer all questions and resolve all difficulties.  It would be presumptuous to think that I could.  Difficulties are resolved only by living through them and reaching the other side.  Still, we have the witness of many of the wisest and holiest people in history that the Jesus way of living actually works, and that ordinary people can follow this way and do quite well at it, too.