Leaving John

Matthew 4:18-23


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

January 27, 2008

Now I’ve never received a “Dear John” letter. “Hasta la vista Juan!” But only because my name isn’t John. But I, as you, know very much what it is like to be said goodbye to, to be left behind, to be rejected as a lover, a friend, or even as an employee. People part. People come together and people take leave, and part, the one from the other. In the UCC Book of Worship we have a liturgy (a work of the people) about saying farewell when people in our community move out and on.

Thomas Merton, the profound religious thinker, writer, tells the heart-wrenching story in his biography of how he and his older friends left his younger brother to play by himself. The pain of forlorn abandonment Merton felt upon seeing his left-out kid brother made a deep and sorrowful impression on his soul. And we have all been the leavers as well as the left.

In the literary competition for the saddest words in the English language, I’ve always thought the younger child’s words, “Hey, you guys, wait up!” were among the most poignant.

So in scripture, this week and last, we have two stories that—if you want to look at them from that angle—picture for us two significant men being left out, left behind. John the Baptist losing two of his primo disciples, Andrew and Peter, to Jesus, and the old man Zebedee, boat-owning fisherman, losing his two sons, James and John, to Jesus and to the new day-laborer fishermen Peter and Andrew (blue collar guys)--his more established enterprising boys being James and John, the sons of thunder. So, maybe only coincidentally, the rushing winds of Jesus’ new ministry whisk away disciples and sons from one John, John the Baptist, and the father of James and John, one Zebedee.

So we have a type of a story here: new disciples leaving old leaders and patriarchs. And we have the dramatic image of the ones left behind. Not too soon and John and Baptist is arrested and, then, what about the profound melancholy inherent in Zebedee, left in his boat?

Due to the lectionary cycle, this story of the leaving of the father to follow the Christ came up during my years of study at the Chicago Divinity School learning preaching. Now learning preaching—such as it is—was no easy task for me. The foremost reason being, perhaps, that my father was a master at preaching. And because he was also a Presbyterian, he knew exactly what preaching was, precisely how it should be done, and was completely sure—when all was said and done—that was how it was! I cried a lot those three summers in Chicago because it amounted to leaving my father, leaving my father behind in his boat, leaving Andy alone mending his old nets watching me go off with the same young Christ he had followed himself some forty and fifty years before. But how could I leave him and his ways behind? How could I not follow and follow as he himself had: the leading Christ?

We used to have a hymn in my high school church youth group—we sing it here some—“Lead on, O King Eternal.” In Christianity that means that God is eternally leading. “Eternal” is the direction of life, not the cryonic lab, bio-stasis eternity of frozen liquid nitrogen, not perpetual petrification, but eternally being led.

Christianity is a progressive religion. It is the opposite of ancestor worship. What is wrong with so-called conservative Christianity is not their politics but their theology: there is nothing to conserve in Christianity, no sacred burial ground where our God is under an eternal flame. Nothing to conserve, only a living God to serve. We do not need to go back to the Bible. We need to go forward with the Bible! Whatever the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is, was, or means, my friends, it was the death of a dead God, it was the end of religion as foundation and the beginning of religion as aspiration; not roots but hopes; not “back then,” but “over yonder.”

Now. That was the easy part. As hard as it is for us to change, as hard as it is for us to leave the old and go for the new, the deck is stacked for that, it’s already in the cards. We know that. It’s just whether we want to play or not. While there are deep values in the past, great traditions to bring forward, we know which way the world turns – from the past towards the future. And so if the preacher wants to say that progress not regress is at the heart of Christianity, so much the better. We’ll take that endorsement of our own American religion of optimism, progressivism, and none of us would want to argue with the aspirations expressed in the current motto: “The best is yet to be at RUC!” Besides, we have almost 300 years of learning to see our own American historical ascendancy as civil expressions of religious truth. From pure Christians building a city of light upon a hill, probably that would be Beacon Hill in Boston, to God’s manifest destiny creating the kingdom of God in America across our fruited plane, to the white man’s defeat of the yellow man in Asia and the victory of Anglo-British civilization over the perversion of progress in Nazi Fascist power, we have an empire-ego stake in “progress.” How could we not sing “God Bless America,” how could we not believe that our progress is God’s progress?

The hard part of our progressive religion is to separate our ideals, our way of life, our progress and our own ego goals and desires from the God-in-Christ that Andrew and Peter, then James and John, followed.

Think of our problem this way: how do we really know that the best is yet to be, if, if the “best” is “God’s will”? Look at the great long row of clergy pictures hanging in our conference room. Thanks to Pat Ameling and her father and her family we have a real art gallery of ordained iconic figures. But, but going from left to right, assuming that truth is revealed in the same direction as we read, left to right (and what about those Jews reading Hebrew from right to left?!), has RUC been getting better and better, going from good, to better, to best? If best is God’s will, could that really have been a peak on a graph behind picture number 4, or number 2, or number 8? What if we’ve been getting less faithful, further from God, even as we’ve gotten, so-called, better?

The answer is, of course, with new found humility, a dash of tolerating ambiguity, with the fear and trembling that comes with mystery, we don’t know. The truth is we don’t know if we are a part of God’s progress, even as we progress. God’s way might be a pilgrim’s progress way, but we do not know if we are in the right progression.

And neither did Andrew or Peter, or James or John. They could not have been sure that they were following the anointed one Rabbi, Messiah, to matter what John the Baptist said. Old Zebedee could have been sitting in his boat shaking his head saying, “I sure hope they are doing the right thing, I sure hope that is the Christ.”

But even if they, or we, gain assurance of being in the right line—we do not know, they did not know, where Christ was going, did not know what following this man would lead to, they were to be almost constantly surprised, almost always confused, more and more disappointed, and sometimes even angry at what Jesus seemed to be doing, where? Toward what better future was he leading them?

The mystery of following the progressively revealed God in Christ demands faith and prayer. Here is such a prayer Nancy read at my ordination in 1994.

Thomas Merton’s Prayer

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore, will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen