Questing Parson: A Farmville Church Sermon

Followship
Matthew 4: 12-23

Bishop William Willimon tells a story of a telephone call he received from an upset parent when he served as Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. The father told Bishop Willimon, “I hold you personally responsible for this.”

As he talked with the father he learned his daughter had graduated from Duke with a degree in engineering. The father vented his rage to Bishop Willimon saying that his daughter was not throwing away all her education by digging ditches in Haiti.
At this point, Bishop Willimon tried to inject a little humor into the situation. He said, “I doubt that she got any training in ditch digging at the Duke Engineering Department.” The father failed to see the humor. “It was completely irresponsible for you to encourage her to do this,” the father said. “I hold you responsible.”

Willimon then pointed out that it was the girl’s parents who had her baptized at the altar of the church; it was they who took her to Sunday school and read the Bible stories to her. They were the ones who encouraged her to be active in her youth group. “You’re the one who introduced her to Jesus, not me,” said the Bishop.

The father retorted, “But all we wanted her to be was a Presbyterian.”

Ah, the daughter, it seems had caught a different being. She had transcended her denominational training; she’d left the comfort of the traditional church and stepped out in faith. You can’t help but wonder if one day while she studied the mathematical intricacies of some engineering problem, or maybe one day in the Duke Chapel she heard the voice of Jesus calling, “Come, follow me.”

In our Gospel lesson today, we find the Lord walking along the shores of Galilee and he sees Simon and Andrew. “Come with me,” he says, “and I’ll make a new kind of fishermen out of you.” And down the shore a little further they come upon James and John, Zebedee’s sons mending their nets. Jesus invites them along also. Peterson, in his translation says, “and they were just as quick to follow.”
Follow: to travel behind, go after, come after. That’s what my iPhone says the word means. To travel behind, to go after.

There’s a great story about a young girl who was applying for college. The school sent a form for the parents to fill out. The father took the assignment. He came to a question that asked whether his daughter was a leader. He answered the question honestly. “No,” he wrote, “she is not. But she is an exceptional follower.” They got an acceptance letter in a few weeks. And at the bottom of the letter the Dean of Admissions had hand written a postscript: “In the entering class of 500 students we apparently have 499 leaders. We thought the addition of a follower would be beneficial for them.”

What kind of follower are you?

I remember the summer following my sophomore year in high school. I was working at my grandfather’s plant to get some pocket money. One day as we ate lunch he told me, “In the next few years you’re going to make choices that will determine the course of your whole life. And one of the most important choices you’ll make is the choice of who you will follow.”

Who did you choose to follow?

I’d like to tell you the obvious answer in this setting. I’d like to tell you that I chose to follow Jesus. I’d like to tell you I’m like the Duke graduate and followed Jesus into a life that was more than being a United Methodist. I’d like to tell you that, but the truth is too often I’ve followed others. And more often than that I didn’t follow others. I followed my own desires, my own feelings, my own prejudices, my own selfish interests.

And I have to confess that since I gave my life to Jesus, since I knelt at that altar on the Emory University campus and Bishop John Owen Smith put his hands on my head to ordain me too often I have not necessarily followed the Lord I had vowed to follow. Too often I follow the expediencies of the institutional church; too often I temper my being a follower lest I upset a well contributing member; too often I’ve sold out.

And I want you to know it wasn’t the Devil that caused me to fall away from following after Jesus. I don’t need the Devil’s help. I’ve been able to sell out my faith all by myself.

Following Jesus isn’t something that happens easily. Following Jesus is something we have to be intentional about.

“Intentional” I want you to hold on to that word. You’re going to hear a lot about it. At the Council on Ministry planning session that word kept coming up. “We have to be intentional about welcoming people.” “We have to be intentional about inviting people.” “We have to be intentional about building a strong and fulfilling Sunday school. We have to be intentional in building this church into what God would have this church to be.

But all the intentions we have will fall by the wayside if we are not intentional about following Jesus.
The times I’ve fallen away from following after my Jesus were those times I failed to be intentional about it.

Look at those disciples. See how they, too, sometimes drifted away from their calling. It’s not easy to follow Jesus unless you put some effort into it.

We do not do these fishermen turned evangelist and faith healers any favors when we read this story and see them leaving their nets and following Jesus as thought that was all there was to it. We need to get into their lives, to feel their pain, to know their disappointment, to experience for ourselves the conflict they encountered every time Jesus’ way was opposed to their own way or self-interest. We need to understand that every morning of their lives they had to make an intentional decision to walk another mile or two with Jesus. Following Jesus doesn’t just happen. It has to be intentional.

My prayer for myself this week and my prayer for you is that each of us can become intentional in our desire to follow Jesus. I don’t know if it will mean we’ll end up digging ditches in Haiti but I do know that if we’re intentional about it we’ll be more than United Methodists. We’ll be masters of the art of Followship.