Sermon from February 25: "The Jesus Family Follows Together"

Thanks so much to everyone who attended our midweek Lenten service yesterday evening and to the Sorenson family for providing coffee and cookies following the service.  If you weren't with us, we missed you!  Also, remember that worship times switch for Sunday as it is the first of the month.  Worship with Holy Communion will be at 9:00 a.m. at West Lake Johanna and 10:30 a.m. at Trinity.  Following worship at Trinity we will be having a potluck meal and our first in a series of conversations about our Communion practices.  Bring a dish to share or just bring your appetite, curiosity, and questions.  We hope to see you there!  Here is the sermon from last night's worship service.  As always, your comments are most welcome!

Sermon for First Midweek Lenten Service

February 25, 2014

“The Jesus Family Follows Together”

Philippians 2:1-8

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
 who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
 but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—
   even death on a cross. 

Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signalled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

Last week, as we received ashes on our foreheads and remembered our brokenness and mortality, we also remembered that we have been baptized, not just into a religion or spirituality, but into the very family of God.  We have been made a part of the Jesus family, eternally bound to Christ as children of God and to one another as brothers and sisters.  Now, we begin exploring what this means for our lives.  How are we to live as “the Jesus family?” 

The first thing to know is that, as the Jesus family, our lives are going to be different.  This claim on us changes us.  Just like being a part of your particular human family sets you apart from other families, being a part of the Jesus family sets you apart from the rest of the world.  I mentioned last week the phrase that is often repeated by parents to children: “I don’t care what they do at so and so’s house.  In this family, we…”  Have you heard or spoken those words before?  By relating to God as “our Father”, we not only recognize the dependent nature of our relationship to God, but also God’s authority over our lives.  As with any other family, there are expectations for how we live as the Jesus family.  So we are adapting this phrase to say, “I don’t care what the world says, in the Jesus family, we…” 

This week, we say, “I don’t care what the world says about leadership, in the Jesus family, we follow together.”  “Leadership” is perceived as a desirable trait in nearly every aspect of our culture.  From the athletic field, to the battlefield, to the business field, to college applications, as Americans we value and even idolize leaders.  We like to think of ourselves as a nation of pioneers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and risk-takers.  We associate leadership with strength, intelligence, and success, whereas if you say you’re a follower, you’re perceived as weak-willed or weak-minded or less successful.  This glorification of leadership is all around us.  As usual, the advertisers know what sells:

“Stay out in front when you choose Epax condition-specific EPA/DHA concentrates.  For over 170 years, we’ve led the pack in implementing global purity and quality assurance processes to keep our products ahead of the competition.  As a leading global competitor of Omega-3 marine oils…”  It doesn’t really matter what the product is.  Maybe you use fish oils, but I’m not entirely sure what Omega-3 marine oils are.  If I’m going to be buying some, though, I guess I’d prefer to buy them from the leading company. 

Or there was another one I found that includes just a picture of a watch and this simple phrase: “Engineered for men who don’t need a co-pilot.”  We could talk for a good long while about how many assumptions are working in that advertisement about what it means to be a man and to be a leader.  “Engineered for men who don’t need a co-pilot.”  It would be laughable if it didn’t work so well.  There was a part of me that thought, “Yeah, I don’t need a co-pilot, but I need that watch.”  (It was a pretty cool watch.)

Finally, I found another one that showed just the Cadillac logo (it’s sad that I recognized it immediately, isn’t it?) and these words underneath: “Mark of Leadership.”  How about that?  Buy this car (which isn’t even shown in the advertisement) and just the hood ornament will let people know that you are a leader. 

Maybe even worse than the messages about leadership in advertising, are how many things come up when you simply search for “leadership conference.”  There are leadership conferences on everything!  “Wharton Annual Leadership Conference: Preparing for Growth and Innovation in a Changing World”, “National Young Leaders Conference: Skills in Leadership for Change provides real-world experiences and strategies you need to succeed.”  There’s the “American Student Dental Association National Leadership Conference” and even the “International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Leadership Conference.”  Ok, so I kind of want to go to that one.  Who wouldn’t? 

Listen to this: “In today’s competitive arena, winning retailers and suppliers know that innovation is the essential building block to constructing a highly successful and profitable business.  But with today’s plugged in, connected consumers seemingly changing the game on a daily basis, today’s business leaders have had to take innovation to an entirely new level to stay ahead of the pack.”  Any guesses about what in the world they’re talking about?  Here’s the next line: “in recognition of this paradigm shift, Furniture/Today’s Leadership Conference, set for Dec. 2-4 at the Ritz Carlton Beach Resort in Naples, Florida, is appropriately themed: Are You In(novative)?”  Again, we could spend a long time unpacking everything that is swirling around in the assumptions about business, our culture, and leadership in this conference for furniture retailers.  Do you hear the mixture of anxiety over the fast pace of change coupled with that familiar buzzword: innovation?  And of course, above all, the goal is to be a “winner.”  We associate being a leader with winning and being a follower with losing.

One final place to note how prevalent all of this is in our culture is in the online community, where people have “followers” on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and who knows what else.  No one cares how many people you are following, they only care about how many other people are following you.  “How many followers do you have?” is a question attached to value and self-worth.  Have a lot of followers?  You must be somebody.  Are you only a follower?  You’re just one face in the crowd, a nobody. 

The church is not immune from these things, either.  We have our own leadership conferences.  We talk about building up “servant leaders” within the church.  At Wartburg Theological Seminary during my time there as a student, the tagline they formed from the institution’s mission statement was “Engaging God’s Future: Forming Valued Leaders.”  You hear that?  I am a “valued leader” (in case you didn’t know).

The temptation is so great, even within the church, to think of ourselves first as leaders instead of followers.  Jesus is clear, though.  His family is one of followers, not leaders.  There is but one leader of the Jesus family: God.  When we allow our own ego and ambition to get the best of us, we find ourselves trying to usurp God’s place as the head of the family.  The only way to keep this in check is to continually insist on being known as followers, to constantly recognize God’s ultimate authority in our lives. 

So what does it mean to be a follower?  Let’s put aside the negative connotations of that word that our culture would like us to buy into and think about how being followers together is a good description of being a part of the Jesus family. 

First, following means there’s movement.  You can’t follow someone if they’re staying in the same place.  If I say, “Follow me!” and then just stand here, it wouldn’t take long for you to ask, “Ok, where are we going?”  Being a follower means Jesus’ family, the church, is first and foremost a movement.  The church is not an institution or a congregation or a building.  It is a movement.  This is hard for us to hear because a lot of times we like it where we are.  Sometimes the problem isn’t that we want to go a different direction than Jesus.  Sometimes the problem is that we just don’t want to go anywhere at all.  We like things the way they are.  The calling of the Jesus family is to a movement, however.  It is a calling to leave the familiar, perhaps comfortable life that we’ve known, and follow Jesus.  The first members of the Jesus family literally did just that, leaving their boats and nets on the shore and immediately following him.  So it’s clear: we can’t follow Jesus and stay where we are and as we are. 

It’s not just about being a movement, either, though.  If all we said about the Jesus family or about the church is that it’s a movement, then there’s still the chance that we could be a leader of it.  By saying we are followers, we mean that we are a part of a movement that we are not fully in control of (if at all).  God is in control of this movement.  Instead of seizing power for ourselves, casting our own vision for what this family should be, or claiming our own authority, we relinquish all of those things to God as followers of Jesus. 

The famous Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has this to say about the temptation to such individual visions of what the church ought to be in his book “Life Together.”  I don’t typically include such a long quotation in my sermons, but I think what he says perfectly describes the danger of individual leadership in a community that is called to be full of followers:

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.

When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

Do you hear already the danger of what can happen when we insist on our own leadership ahead of God?  Do you hear how quickly we become the center of the community instead of Christ?  Hear, then, the promise of a community of followers that Bonhoeffer so eloquently describes:

Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily.

Did you hear it?  Our animosity, our judgment of ourselves and others, our selfish demands: in light of God’s forgiveness of all sinners in Christ, these are replaced by thanksgiving for that which we receive only by God’s grace.  That’s not all, though.  He goes on:

And is not what has been given us enough: brothers (and sisters), who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day?

Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother (or sister) still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his (or her) sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Christ Jesus? Thus, the very hour of disillusionment with my brother (or sister) becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by the one Word and Deed which really binds us together--the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship . . .

And my heart sings, “Oh that it would be so!”  As members of the Jesus family, we must pray that our individual visions of what this family ought to be would perish, that the family with Christ alone as our head would emerge.  For Christ alone and the forgiveness found in him is the ground we stand on.  It transforms the way we view one another, the way we see our sins and the sins of others, and it transforms the role we play in this family.  We are set free from selfish desires for power and leadership and called to take on the role of followers, being humbly obedient to the one who gives us life and salvation. 

Even as we engage in various roles and responsibilities in the church and in our lives, we must remember that we are all followers.  Jesus himself provides the example for us by forsaking all power and authority that were rightfully his as God’s only Son and walking the way of the servant, of suffering, of the cross. 

In a culture that wants us all to be leaders, let us boldly proclaim ourselves faithful followers of the one who has given himself for the sake of the world.  Following, and especially following Jesus, may be seen by the world as a sign of weakness, but as Bonhoeffer later concludes: “What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God.”  That’s why we don’t care what the world says about leadership.  In the Jesus family, we follow together.

Your Mission: Jesus Family for the week is as follows:

For families with young children, play a game of “Simon Says” or “Follow the Leader,” then talk about Jesus calling us to follow him.

For families with older children or for adults, share with each other an experience you’ve had both leading and following.  Talk about what it means for you to say you’re a follower of Jesus.