Be Bold!

1 John 4:12-21; selected “follow me” verses from the Gospels

September 14, 2014

As many of you know, Don Hodgen and I spent the better part of the past two days as part of a relay team in a 200-mile run from Cumberland, Md., down to National Harbor. In the New Testament book of Hebrews it says, “run with perseverance the race that is set before you.” I was sorely tempted to preach on that passage; now I’m merely sore.

Actually, it is one of my favorite passages – it’s the one that begins, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance …”

It’s actually not the running that I want us to consider this morning; it’s the great cloud of witnesses. More to the point, it’s our part of that cloud, our role as witnesses, that’s been pressing in on me of late.

The more I have pondered this, lately, the more I have come to a simple conclusion: We have failed to be bold in our proclamation! We have failed to be bold in our invitation to others to join the community of followers of Jesus. We have failed, even, to say with boldness, “come and see.”

I did a search for the word “bold” in scripture last week. It turns up more than 200 times, in all kinds of contexts, from being bold crossing the River Jordan to being bold heading into battles. But the single book of the Bible that contains the most instances of the word “bold,” is the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Acts, that story of the early church and the explosive expansion of the movement of the followers of Jesus, is a story marked by boldness.

It would have to have been, for the movement would have died quickly had the first followers of Jesus, the people of the way, been anything less than audaciously bold in sharing with their world what they had found in responding to Jesus invitation: “Follow me. Follow me. Follow me.”

More than any other phrase in all his teaching and preaching, that’s the one that captures Jesus best, and, clearly, the one by which Jesus captured the imaginations of those who followed him. To follow him required boldness.

Jesus spent precious little time, according to gospel accounts, wrapped up in Christological debates. That is to say, he didn’t spend a great deal of time focusing on claims about who he was. I suspect he knew his time was short, so it was much better spent living the life he was called to, and inviting others to journey with him, than in endless debates about “the lordship of Jesus Christ,” as it were.

Such debates take the matter of Christian faith into the halls of academia where the drama of Christian life is reduced to obscure statements of belief that produce a great abundance of arguments but precious little by way of abundant life.

An old seminary joke captures this tension.

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked.

The seminarian replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the Ground of Being, incarnation of the divine Logos in whom we find our ultimate meaning and reason for being over against the Angst, alienation and uncertainty of the existential condition of human life.”

To which Jesus says, “huh?”

Likely, he spoke simple, plain words like those from 1^st John: God is love! Children, love one another, that is how they will know who you are, and who I am.

It’s no accident that Jesus sought his followers not among the scribes and the Pharisees – the educated religious leaders of his life – but, instead, among folks who worked with hands and hearts, deeply engaged in the marketplace of life.

In some sense, this was a curious choice, and Jesus wound up with a rather mixed bag of close associates. Take Judas; and I’m sure that Jesus would’ve be glad if you did. An out-and-out betrayer is, perhaps, an extreme example.

So, instead, take Peter. He failed over and over again. When the chips were down, he denied even knowing Jesus. He, too, wound up crucified. Nevertheless, upon this rock, Jesus said, “I will build my church.”

Personally, I love Peter. There he is, a fisherman in his boat – that is to say, a guy who knows a thing or two about water. But when Jesus said, “follow me,” Peter steps out of the boat and takes a step on the water.

Of course, he sank before the second step, but he took a step in faith, and he walked on the water.

Talk about bold!

Sure, he foundered and would have sunk had Jesus not reached out to him. But Peter took one step. He failed in his effort to walk on the water, but so what. That’s what people do. We fall. We founder. We fail.

I wrote part of this homily sitting in the visitors’ waiting room of the DC detention center. Talk about witness to human brokenness.

We have and will fail again and again. Sometimes our brokenness is a personal struggle. Sometimes it spills across many lives. Sometimes our brokenness is the shadow side of our strengths and gifts, and sometimes our best efforts at building something beautiful, even our efforts to be disciples of Jesus, fall apart due to the brokenness that clings to us.

But let us sin boldly, as Luther said, as we follow more boldly still.

Because in the company of the followers of Jesus we are not alone. We may stumble, and we may fall, but there’s another’s hand to lift us up when we follow Jesus’ call.

That makes all the difference in the world. We all desperately need authentic community, and most of us spend our lives searching for it and finding only bits and pieces of it here and there in neighborhoods or circles of friends or classes or clubs or jobs. Those can all be wonderful connections, but they tend to break down in the face of challenges that go beyond the close circle. Faith communities, by their nature, invite us into a relationship with that which is beyond the close circle of friends, that which is, indeed, beyond the bounds of our own time.

Connecting with something that is decisively bigger than we are, that was here before us, and that will long outlast us brings not only deep meaning to our lives, but it also connects us with wellsprings of life that sustain precisely in the moments when life seems to be coming apart at the seams.

That is why the great cloud of witnesses matters.  That’s also why this is not, after all, a sermon about just the race that is set before us. We are bold enough to proclaim that the leg of the race that is set before us is but one part of a much longer procession. Maybe this sermon really is about the Ragnar relay that Don and I ran!

But, seriously, as much as I enjoy running, that’s not the aspect of my own life that matters most to me. In truth, the various gifts I may have, and their shadow sides, and the opportunities along the way – family life, work, creative life – through which all these have been made manifest, for better and for worse – all of that has meaning for me because, at the center of my life, that still point around which all else revolves and from which all else takes it meaning is this: I have given my life to following the way of Jesus in the community of so great a cloud of witnesses.

I am bold enough to say that, and even more bold to say that I think others should join that community, too.

Community matters. Desperately.

It can; it has; it will again save lives.

If you’re already a member of the church, I hope you’ll hear in this encouragement to invite others to come and see, to experience the life-giving community of followers of Jesus.

If you’re sitting on the edges of the community, holding back for any of dozens of more or less good reasons – and, yes, there are definitely a host of very good reasons for not joining a church – but if that’s where you find yourself these days, I hope you’ll hear in this an invitation to join this community.

Yes. I think you should join the church. It’s a commitment, and it’s a promise. It’s not the last word of your life on the matter of the lordship of Jesus Christ, the ontological status of the unmoved mover or any of that other stuff. I am a witness here. For years, I used my own uncertainty as a fine intellectual excuse for avoiding a commitment to living a life committed to love; to justice; to peace; to following the way of Jesus in the company of fellow travellers – sojourners – pilgrims on the way. Finally I came to see that Jesus was fine with uncertainty. What he wasn’t OK with was folks too timid and tepid to give their lives to the journey – to follow him with boldness.

We have been given something precious here, and we are called to share it with boldness. Lives are at stake.