The Tough Places of Following Jesus
The Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr.
United Methodist Minister and Lecturer
Los Angeles, California

(This sermon is also available in audio)

In these days before Holy Week, Eternal One, show us where we are in matters of faith, hope and love.
Remind us eternal Spirit, Mother/Father God, from whence we have come,
And how you have brought us thus far by faith.
Give us then, the wisdom and courage to view the huge distance we must yet travel if we would follow Jesus.
Make us strong to carry the cross of Jesus in loving, daily ways.
Increase this people, Calvary, and all the people of all the congregations in this city, in the work of making Christ visible for the welfare and the enhancement of the city.
In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Hear now this Gospel, from the fifth chapter, the forty-third through the forty-eighth verses of Matthew, and I'm reading from the Scholar's Version of the Gospels:

You have heard that it was said you shall hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. For God makes the sun rise on the evil and then the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles the same? Be generous, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is generous.

I'm grouping this sermon around the theme of the rough and tough place of religion--The tough places of following Jesus. Jesus faced a ruthless and implacable enemy. In the forty days of Lent we often bash Peter and Judas and John. We often bash the disciples and act as though they're the ones that Jesus must look out for. Many times I think that that is not the best spirituality. Because no matter what we may say about the disciples, they were Jesus' friends--and I'm not speaking now just of the twelve, but I'm talking of the seventy or the hundred or the five hundred -- they were friends. Whatever mistakes they might have made along the way in following Jesus and serving Jesus and working with him, they were the kinds of mistakes that you and I probably also equally make.

But Jesus had ruthless and implacable enemies. One must understand that the enemy is indeed in the world, and that we must be able to recognize them and know them. Jesus' enemy was the Roman Empire, which was the superpower of that day. Its economic and military powers covered the Mediterranean world. Jesus' other great enemy was Caiphas, the high priest. Now recognize when I say enemy, I do this deliberately. Recall for a moment that both men were brothers. No doubt each of them at eight days old was brought to the temple and dedicated to the Lord and sanctified before the Lord. They were both groomed in the history and the life of the people, of which they were a part. They read the same Scriptures, they were weaned on the Psalms, and the same Bible of that time. They both loved the temple. Remember Jesus was found in the temple every day from his birth according to the Gospels. They were both devoted to the notion of a Judaism preserved and a Judaism renewed and a Judaism strengthened. They were among the most learned men of their generation. They were servants of the synagogue. The Gospels tell us that on the Sabbath, Jesus was to be found in the synagogue. They were both leaders for undoubtedly countless numbers of people. They loved their people. But Caiphas as the High Priest, feared Jesus, perhaps he was envious of Jesus, we do not know.

Had we lived in those days, and had an opportunity to hear a little bit about Jesus, we also might have feared. We've domesticated our religion so much we've domesticated Jesus so much. We've applied to him so many of our legends and myths and creeds and belief systems that even the Jesus of the Gospels cannot oftentimes break out from how we image Jesus, and how we therefore tame him, and keep Jesus of Nazareth from, in fact, taming us. We keep the Word Made Flesh and the Cosmic Christ from working among us in our own time and age. Nevertheless, in various circles, fear and dismay ran rampant with the movement that Jesus had created.

Some of you may recall that fear with people felt in 1968 when it was learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. was coming to the city to participate in the sanitation strike. Some of you may go further back than that and remember that in the fifties, the late fifties and sixties, as black people across the nation began to gather around the movement of which King was the symbol, the fears, the animosities that also were in the air--the tensions that made many people see ghosts and fear in ways that they did not need to fear at all.

Remember Jesus for a moment in Nazareth, he came from Nazareth of Galilee. For three hundred years, Galilee was the hotbed for the people who wanted freedom, liberation and emancipation, who relished the stories of the Exodus and felt new shackles had been put upon them. They were going to break those shackles. So Jesus, early on, stirred the religious impulses of tens of thousands of people at times. Again, if we believe the Gospel accounts, as many as ten thousand or more people were in the train of Jesus, or were fed in some gathering of Jesus, or walked with him from village to village. There were thousands who got across the sea of Ganeserat in some fashion, in order that they could continue to hear him and follow him. Can you just imagine? A movement that is tramping across Galilee, Judea and Sumaria, not just the twelve disciples, but oftentimes hundreds and hundreds of people.

Remember how very different from our ministries Jesus' ministries were. He went out to the people, he did not stay in the synagogue or in the safety of his home, or in the shelter of being among only the twelve or the seventy. Jesus persistently went out to the people; the living dead he called to life. He attracted the folk who were comfortable and urged them to a larger purpose in life and to a higher, deeper, richer calling. He healed the sick; he restored bruised and wounded souls; he exorcised those of whom it was said they had demons; he fed the hungry; he overturned the tables of corruptions; and he challenged the synagogue. He caused women to see their full humanity, and built the movement in which the hospitality for the children and for the discarded was equal to the hospitality for the 12 disciples. He invited sinners to bread.

Imagine the Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem -- you can begin to feel the panic that Caiphas must have felt. Jesus moved to bring Good News to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, to break the yokes of oppression. And Caiphas knew instinctively that Jesus was not only a threat to the order, but Jesus could be the reason for the Roman legions to sweep across Judea, Sumaria and Galilee. So Jesus became Caiphas' enemy. It was Caiphas who counseled the Jewish church leadership that it was better for one man to die for the people, than there be greater chaos and calamity on the land.

The enemy rarely sees self-inflicted wounds as having been self-inflicted. Rarely sees that they mess that we may be in is a mess that they themselves have created, rarely acknowledges disguised hostility for others, often views good as evil and often views evil as good. How often in our own day does the enemy see that it's the devil in the world operative and not human decisions that have created the plight of the twenty-first century. But Jesus said, "You shall love the neighbor and hate the enemy, but I say unto you, you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." This is an appeal to a higher spirituality than what we know. This is an appeal that we have a place to move from where we are, to where God is and where Jesus would have us be, in terms of the largeness and the size of our souls. "Be generous", Jesus insists, "as your Father in heaven is generous." God allows the sun to shine on the evil and the good, the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous."

Therefore, this God of Jesus the Christ is the God who does not discriminate among any of the six and a half billion people of the world. The sun shines on the Talibans in Iraq, as well as Chicago and Memphis. The rains fall no matter who the people are or where they come from or what they're about or whether they are saintly or ignominiously evil.

We don't like that kind of theology. Jesus insists, "If you're going to follow me, you must be prepared to go through the pains and the aches of allowing your life to be transformed into the likeness and the Image of God." Love your enemies? Ridiculous we say! But Jesus does not mean that I am to like my enemy as I care about my family or my friends or my colleagues or my brothers and sisters in ministry. Jesus rather is insisting that I must respect the humanity of those who would do me harm or others harm. Therefore, pray for those who persecute you. The "you' is plural, not you, personally, but "you" as a part of a community of the human race that needs the prayers of the church on behalf of those who would undermine life. Treat the enemy as God treats all of us. Respect the God-given gift of life of the other--do not demonize, do not violently resist the evildoer--this is a call to bear the cross.

Conventional, smooth religion is about going only a short distance, being changed only a little, so that we're immunized from the religion of Jesus. But, this is the call to bear the cross of imitating Jesus in a hostile environment and world by refusing to come off the cross of love and truth, beauty and wonder, and tenaciously clinging to what is right. The cross of Jesus is only limited by our unwillingness to pick up the cross and carry daily the task of obeying God in the rough places of life.

I shall never forget a conversation I had once in Los Angeles, in a Federal Detention Center, where, in the 1980's a large group of us were trying to challenge and protest the killing of people in Central America in the name of freedom and liberty. (Some of you may recall that period of time.) On this one occasion, my cellmate was Martin Sheen, and we were sitting next to each other against the wall, visiting. In talking, I tried to encourage people in that particular movement to use the jail as a schoolhouse, as a place of spiritual adventure, not to yield to the negative environment of that, even when it included being painfully handcuffed from behind. Rather as children of God there were prayers we could pray, there were holy conversations we could have, we could learn from one another as human beings and we could be encouraged and strengthened by the spirit in our resolve that we would not yield to the temptations of the wrong. This conversation went on for some twenty or thirty minutes, and other people began to object to part of it, because they raised the question: "Well, are we going to be successful in this?" Martin Sheen at one point turned to me and said, "Reverend Lawson, I am persuaded that God does not ask us to be successful, God asks us to be faithful." Loving, caring, doing the truth, loving mercy and walking in truth and kindness in the world, that is to carry the cross.

Elizabeth Cheney, a twentieth century poet has said this so very well, she writes:

Wherever there is silence around me by day or by night, I am startled by a cry that came down from the cross the first time I heard it. I went out and searched and found the man in the throes of crucifixion, and I said, 'I will take you down!' and I tried to take the nails out of his feet. But he said, 'Let them be, for I cannot be taken down until every man and every woman and every child come together to take me down.' And I said, 'But I cannot bear to hear you cry, what can I do?' And he said, 'Go about the world and tell everyone you meet, there is a man on the cross.'

God is on the cross in the midst of the wars on terrorism and crime and drugs, in the midst of militarism and the midst of the hostilities we want to continue to pursue with one another in our world. God remains on the cross, and a part of our task in the rough place of religion is to be in the world and help others to come to know that human suffering is not God's will. The same power with which we use that we use to impose the suffering, is the power that God would give us to take God off the cross, and plant truth and justice in the midst of Memphis and every human community. I insist that we who take the name of Jesus are called to this higher spirituality and ground. Amen. Let us pray.

Great God of the universe, we're grateful to be alive, grateful that we are part of life, grateful that you have sculptured in every single one of us.
Grateful that it is the name of Jesus that we gather in, and that we are among those who, in spite of ourselves, would strive to follow.
Give us the courage and the wisdom to do so in this day and age. Boldly, in Your Name, we pray. Amen.
Now may the Peace of God that surpasses all understanding,
The Peace of God that can prevail in the midst of your life's journey,
The Peace of God not as the world gives, nor as the world can take away, but as God alone gives, Keep your hearts and minds and bodies and the love and knowledge, the Mother/Father of all creation.
May the Blessing, Bounty and Beauty of God be with you and yours and remain with you and yours this day, and to the end of time. Amen.

Copyright 2002 The Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr.

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