Free to Follow Jesus

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Emmanuel Church

June 30, 2013

"For freedom Christ has set us free."  Galatians 5:1

When I was in seminary, a professor once challenged us wannabe priests with the following question:  If you were put on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?  Now, that is a provocative and somewhat humbling question, isn’t it?

After posing the question, the professor then asked us to participate in a little exercise.  Close your eyes, she invited us, and review your own life’s story as if it were a silent film.  Just play back your life in your own mind’s eye:  your childhood and adolescence, your college years, the relationships you formed, the people you’ve loved and been loved by, your career, your family life, your contributions to your community, all of your day to day actions and interactions with the people around you, the legacy you will leave behind.  How would your life look to an outside and independent observer? Would Christ recognize himself in this film?  Is this life of yours a distinctively Christian life?

If you’re like me, this little exercise makes you feel more than a little uncomfortable.  Truth be told, my actions and relationships rarely seem to measure up to Christ-like standards.  

The point of the exercise is not to depress us, but rather to remind us that the Christian faith is more than just having the right beliefs. Christianity is as much a way of life as it is a set of creeds.  Indeed, if you read the gospels closely, you’ll notice that Jesus never asks the disciples to believe this or that; rather, what Jesus asks is that they follow him.  That is what ‘disciple’ means:  one who follows. 

This is a hard message and one which the Church, quite frankly, has not always paid heed.  As the great American preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick used to joke, people have for thousands of years been trying to get rid of Jesus. First, they crucified him. And when that didn't work, they started worshipping him. Worship can be just another form of crucifixion because we often use it to get ourselves off the hook of answering the real question Jesus poses. For the truth of the matter is that Jesus doesn't ask to be worshipped, any more than he asked to be crucified.  What he asks is to be followed.

So, how then are we to follow Jesus?  What are the hallmarks of authentic Christian discipleship? 

This is precisely the question Paul is wrestling with in his letter to the Galatians in our first lesson.  It seems so strange to us now, but the central issue the early Church faced as it moved out of Palestine to the Mediterranean basin was whether and on what terms to include Gentiles in this new Christian community.  The vast majority of the earliest Christians were Jews and continued to adhere to the Mosaic Law, including the rituals of circumcision for men, the observance of dietary laws, and the celebration of the traditional Jewish festivals. 

People at the time knew what it looked like to be a good Jew:  it meant conforming your life to Torah and to its many requirements for daily living.  But, as the Church’s missionary activity through Paul expanded to Gentile communities in Asia Minor, the issue became:  do we require these Gentiles to conform themselves to the ancient rites, rituals and patterns of life of the Jewish tradition, or is there a new moral standard?  Indeed, it is this set of issues that leads to the famous showdown between Peter and Paul, a quarrel that Paul ultimately and convincingly wins for all the reasons set out in what we now call the letter to the Galatians.

For Paul, Christian identity is not about our ethnic heritage (one needn’t belong to any particular clan), it is not about adhering to a set of ritual observances (one needn’t comply with traditional dietary laws or observe certain festivals), it is not about a physical symbol of the covenant (one needn’t, if male, be circumcised).  Christian identity is not about superficial and accidental external characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, or national origin.  It is not even about subscribing to any particular set of theological propositions.

Rather, as Paul makes clear in his letter, Christian identity is about turning one’s self and one’s heart over to Christ so that, through Him, we can cast aside our natural and ultimately destructive self-centeredness and instead become free to serve the other.  This is what Paul means when he writes:  “For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”  Christian identity is about trusting that we will be cared for by God in Christ, come what may, and that we can therefore turn our attention outward rather than inward.  We are freed from the bondage of the self, and all the worries that come with self-absorption, to live in freedom for others. 

Paul recognized that this message of Christian freedom was a dangerous one for the Gentiles of the Galatian church to hear, raised as they were in a Greco-Roman culture that was defined by violence and hedonistic self-indulgence.  So, Paul warned them:  to say that a Christian is free from the requirements of Torah is not to say that one is therefore free to indulge in whatever satisfies the self’s appetite or inclinations.  On the contrary, to be free in Christ is to choose to open ourselves to the Spirit, who leads us into a life oriented toward others and characterized by the nine fruits of the Spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and all the other hallmarks of the Christian life.

To quote my namesake, Martin Luther, who loved Paul’s letter to the Galatians more than any other:  In Christ, through faith, we are freed from the tyranny of ourselves so that we might, through love, become slaves to one another.  Let me say that again:  In Christ, through faith, we are freed from the tyranny of ourselves so that we might, through love, become slaves to one another.

That may sound somewhat counter-intuitive.  Who, after all, voluntarily wants to be a slave to someone else?  And yet, the astounding mystery of our faith is that we find our true and fullest identity as God’s children when we die to our own selfish preoccupations so that we can instead love and serve others with abandon.

One of the central purposes of the Church, therefore, is to be a place where we can support each other in learning how to live such Spirit-filled lives.  Think of church as a training ground where disciples practice the art of following Christ.  Thus, in church, we say prayers of thanksgiving so that we can practice gratitude; in church, we sing songs of praise so that we can feel the joy of God’s presence in our hearts; in church, we confess our sins so that we can practice humility and recognize our dependence on the God who sustains us; in church, we pray for one another so that we can bear one another’s burdens in empathy and kindness; in church, we offer up our treasure when the collection plate comes around so that we can experience the liberating power of generosity; in church, we share the bread and the wine so as to experience the mystery of God’s presence among us in ways that defy words. 

Church is not just what well-bred people do on Sunday mornings.  Church is school for the spirit.  Church is where we learn how to be Christ-followers.

Which is why I always have to grimace when I hear people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”  “Don’t get me wrong,” they say, “its not that I don’t believe in God or a greater power in this world.  I am a spiritual person.  It’s just that I don’t see the need to go to church when I can have my own personal relationship with God in other ways.”   These folk will often acknowledge Jesus as a great teacher, they may even regularly read the Bible for inspiration or instruction; but, they insist, church is not my thing. 

But being privately spiritual without church is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water.  For there is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.  What is important is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you.  Where life with God gets rich and provocative and meaningful is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself and where you are held accountable by others who share that tradition. 

The very notion of “private spirituality” is, I’m afraid, an invention of an American culture captivated by the twin dangers of consumerism and narcissism.  The former values the freedom of the consumer over all else, and treats everything as a commodity to be bought and sold.  The latter values the individual self over all else, and treats everything as an object for the self’s gratification.

Christianity is, in this sense, profoundly counter-cultural because it values relationships over commodities, and community over individuals.   The Christian faith is not a private affair.  I am not free to pick and choose those bits that I like, and those bits that I don’t, as if I were shopping for God’s truth.  Nor is the question of faith about what I find personally fulfilling.  On the contrary, the faith belongs to the community of the faithful, and Jesus’ reality becomes most clearly manifest only when we, his gathered followers, come together in relationship to discern his presence in word and sacrament, in prayers, and in fellowship.  It is no accident that Jesus surrounded himself with a community of disciples, that he conferred upon this community the authority to interpret his teachings, and that he commissioned them to extend his ministry into new and emerging communities.

Don’t get me wrong:  Growing in the spirit, learning to follow Christ, is no easy task.  Nor does it always or inevitably lead to the results we expect.  While we are called to do what we can to be beacons of God’s love to this broken world, we shouldn’t lose heart if we don’t see immediate or unambiguously good results from our discipleship.  God’s time is not our time.  We call it “faith” precisely because we trust in the unseen and place our hope in a future that only God knows.  But while it is often hard to see the Kingdom toward which we are striving, we do know this much:  we know whom we must follow if we are to get there.  May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, my brothers and sisters, as the silent movie of your life continues to unfold.  Amen.

Encountering Our Demons

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Emmanuel Church

June 23, 2013

“Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him.”  Luke 8:30

My family is from a tiny farming town in southern Pennsylvania.  The town has the promising name of ‘Newville,’ but the name doesn’t quite fit anymore; it has been a hundreds years, at least, since there has been anything new there.  My grandfather on my dad’s side was a dairy farmer, and he had a few hundred acres of farmland on the outskirts of town.  Dad grew up on the farm, the youngest of seven.  My grandfather on my mom’s side managed Newville’s feed store.  While he wasn’t a farmer himself, his feed business was all about serving the town’s farmers.

After my parents got married, they eventually moved away from Newville to pursue their own dreams in the big city.  But as a family we always returned to Newville to visit my grandparents, especially during the summers, when my brother and I were off school.  The one thing that I learned during my summers in Newville is that folks in small towns look out for one another.  They know their neighbors. Small town people think nothing of stopping by a neighbor’s house to borrow some flour, or to look in on someone who is sick, or just to have a cup of coffee.  They go to church together, they watch each other’s kids play ball on the weekends, they sit on each other’s porches at night and make conversation, they eat supper together without feeling the need to call it a dinner party, and they tend to keep their doors unlocked at night.  They take the time to know and care for each other.

As a small boy, I don’t know that I then appreciated all of these virtues of small town life, but there was one particular summer day when I learned a lesson in this little town of Newville that I shall never forget.  I was 8 years old and it was just another sleepy summer’s day in the country.  My father and brother were off doing something, my grandparents were busy with the day’s chores, and it was just my mother and me.  “Why don’t we take a walk down to the Walker’s place?,” my mother says.  “It has been awhile since I have seen Jeff.”  I knew most of my grandparents’ neighbors and I had never heard any mention of the Walkers or of a Jeff.  “Who are the Walkers?,” I ask.  “They live down by the spring,” she says.  “I used to take care of Jeff when I was a young girl in high school.  Gosh, he is probably in his twenties by now.”

And so, off we go, walking down Big Spring Road, and then up a gravel lane to the Walkers’ place.  As we approach the house, my mother stops for a moment, and turns to me and says, “Don’t be alarmed, but it takes a little getting used to Jeff.  He is in a wheelchair.  And he has trouble controlling his arms and legs.  He has something called cerebral palsy.”  The words meant nothing to me then.  I had never met anyone with cerebral palsy.  But the image of a wheelchair-bound young man with an inability to control his limbs conjures up enough of a specter so that I begin to feel my stomach tighten a bit with anxiety, not knowing exactly what to expect.

My mother knocks on the door and an older woman answers.  “Mrs. Walker,” my mother says.  Recognition spreads across the older woman’s face.  “Carol!,” she exclaims as she sweeps my mother into her arms.  My mom introduces me as we make our way across the threshold into the Walker’s modest bungalow.  After a few minutes of small talk, my mom asks for Jeff.  “I haven’t seen him in years and I was hoping he might be up for a short visit,” my mother says.  “Sure,” Mrs. Walker says, “he is out back on the porch.”

My heart is pounding audibly by this time and the twinge in my stomach is now a full-blown knot.  I keep my distance behind my mother as she swings open the screen door and walks out on to the Walker’s back porch.  Over in the corner sits a wisp of a young man in a wheelchair.  He is in shorts and a tee shirt.  His bare arms and legs are stick-like, more bones and flesh than muscle. He is a bundle of motion, twisting and turning in his wheelchair, each limb seeming to have a mind of its own.  His head gyrates to and fro.  The disease of cerebral palsy has progressed to a point that he no longer has control of any of his muscles, from his arms and legs to even his facial muscles.  This is Jeff Walker.

As my mother moves toward him, I can see Jeff’s eyes meet hers.  He recognizes her.  And at that moment, his movements become even more frantic as he turns and desperately but unsuccessfully tries to move his wheelchair to meet my mother.  My mother glides over to him, kneels down, and gently kisses him on the forehead.  She pulls a chair up next to his wheelchair, takes his gnarled hand into hers, and strokes his hair.  Sounds come from Jeff’s mouth that I do not recognize as words but that my mother somehow seems to understand.  They talk and sit together for what must have been twenty minutes or so.

All this time, I am frozen in place with my back up against the outside wall of the house.  I am about as far from my mother and Jeff as I can be while still being on the porch.  I am paralyzed with fear.  Panicked, I seem to have as little control of my body as Jeff does of his.  I want nothing more than to leave.  It feels like a nightmare.  And the twenty minutes or so my mother spends visiting with Jeff seems like an eternity to me.

As I tell you this story, I feel a certain amount of shame at my behavior.  At the time, as a young and inexperienced boy, I was unable to see Jeff Walker as a human being.  To my immature eyes, he was just a tangle of limbs, a frightening apparition, a deformed caricature of a person, someone or something to be shunned.  Only now, after years of reflecting back on this little episode, do I see what my mother was trying to teach me that day.  She saw in Jeff Walker a beautiful, intelligent, young boy trapped inside a badly damaged body.  She understood that he was a young man craving to be loved, to be known and embraced by other human beings, but whose experience of life rarely yielded such a gift.  Almost everyone Jeff encountered would recoil in horror upon meeting him, like I did, never able to get past the ugliness of his disease to meet the beautiful child caged inside.

In ancient times, people did not have as clear an understanding as we do of the range of physical and mental diseases that can rob a person of his  humanity and cause indescribable suffering.  And so we often encounter in our Bible, stories, like today’s gospel reading, where a person afflicted with an extremely debilitating disease is portrayed as being possessed by demons.  This unfortunate man lives in the darkness of the tombs, naked and alone, shunned by all.  He is tormented by unknown forces so extraordinary that they take command of his body and mind.  The people seek to shackle his arms and legs, but his afflictions are so powerful that they break the chains of social control.

When Jesus asks the man his name, all he can say is “Legion,” literally meaning “thousands.”  One scholar of this text has commented that this is one of the saddest lines in Scripture because this man has been so ravaged by disease and disorder that he can’t even remember his name.  He identifies only with the “legions” of demons that have taken over his body and mind.  His humanity, dignity, and self-respect have been utterly destroyed.

We can only speculate as to what set of mental or physical disorders may have been responsible for this man’s condition.  But that question is really beside the point, for the truth of the matter is that this naked, suffering, and abandoned man called “Legion” is a haunting metaphor for the full range of demons that struggle for the control of the human soul.  Demons like schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, different types of psychoses and phobias and anxieties, autism in all its forms, various sorts of addictions and compulsions, dementia, and the full range of neurological disorders, including, yes, cerebral palsy.  The list of such demons is literally “legion.” 

Today we have names for these conditions and understand something about their underlying biological and psychological causes, but that understanding doesn’t in the least reduce the terrifying reality they embody for those who live with these demons.  While few of us, thank God, are as tortured as this man called “Legion,” each one of us, to one degree or another, has our demons.  We have our anxieties, fears, addictions, crippling ailments, pathologies of one sort or another.

The startlingly good news of our gospel story, however, is that there is no disease, no disorder, no demon beyond Jesus’ reach.  Jesus meets us in our greatest moments of need and weakness.  In those dark places of our soul, in those tombs we sometimes wander, Jesus is there.

These miraculous stories of healing are often interpreted merely as evidence of Jesus’ divine power.  But let me suggest that there is something more going on here.  Miracle stories in the Bible are seldom about the miracles themselves. The miracle is not the ultimate point. Rather, the miracle points us to a deeper reality, to a truth about God and where he is calling us to go. 

The true power of today’s gospel story resides in Jesus’ willingness to encounter “Legion” as a human being, to cross the social boundaries of stigma, to see past the outward signs of his horrible disease to the humanity within, to move beyond fear to understanding, to care for the abandoned. The true miracle of the story is not merely that Legion is healed; the true miracle of the story is that we are healed when we set aside our fears, reach out, and love those who are broken or disfigured or possessed with demons; including, I might add, ourselves.

Many years ago I learned that Jeff Walker had died, another victim of the terrible disease of cerebral palsy.  When I heard the news I was overcome with remorse:  not merely a sadness because he had died, but a sense of regret that as a young boy I had lacked the compassion and maturity to embrace Jeff as the loveable person he was.  But I am grateful that my mother, God rest her soul, showed Jeff the love I could not find and restored to him a sense of dignity that his disease had tried to erase.  She embodied for me that summer’s day the deep truth in Jesus’ healing of this man called ‘Legion.’  She wasn’t able to cure Jeff of his cerebral palsy.  But she was able to give him a glimpse – and to give me a glimpse – of the Kingdom toward which God is calling us, and of the redeeming love that God now shares fully with them both.  Amen.