Sermon: Following a Different Drummer

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Following a Different Drummer

By Charles Rush

January 27, 2002

ese I recently got from a History teacher in High School, answers given on intro history exams, by people who could have spent a little more time at the library:

William Shakespeare was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is only famous because of his plays. He wrote tragedies and comedies, all in Islamic pentameter. [Don't look for the next great American novel from this guy.]

Abraham Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. [That's a busy infant.] On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot by John Wilkes Booth. This ruined Booth's career. [Yes, I guess it did, now that you mention it.]

Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. [Would that be compositions or children?] Bach died from 1750 to the present.

Handel was the most famous composer in the world. He was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.

Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

I'm quite sure that Peter and Andrew, James and John were teenagers when Jesus called them to ‘follow me'. My evidence? The scripture says they are working with their father, the job is only half done, they drop everything and leave with the first person that calls them, without a word to the Old Man, who is left to haul all the gear back in the boat by himself, and explain to their Mother they probably won't be home for dinner, and that he has no idea where they went!!! Not that this has ever happened to me personally. But I've heard told…

Young people, in general, but young men, in particular, will make these snap decisions that have long ranging consequences without really thinking these things through, won't they. Young men will drop everything and go. Sometimes it is tragic. Seeing the photographs of John Walker being breezed through town, surrounded by guys in full flack jackets and high-powered weapons. What did that poor boy get himself into? Dropping out of High School in Marin County, traveling to Oman to learn Arabic, signing up for training in the most severe ascetical branch of Islam, getting drafted to fight? What in the world is all of that? I don't care how stereotypically flaky his parents are, you have to feel for them. Young men will be rash.

Or yet, another suicide gunman in Jerusalem, religiously, fanatically devoted to the cause, killing two, wounding 22, setting back the peace process another year. Young men will be rash.

It makes you wonder what history would be like if Jesus and the prophet Mohammed had called women instead of men to be their first disciples? They would have the same passionate commitment, but in a different way. I don't want to idealize the feminine. But you remember Augusto Pinochet in Chile, all those people that disappeared? You remember those mothers, taking matters into their own hands, making huge pictures of their children that had been kidnapped by the military? Remember them walking every day in a procession right out in front of the Government buildings? They too were brave, unto rash. They had no fear of the Army's violence -- just a defiant challenge of conscience? Sometimes it is far better than violence. You want to defeat an unjust occupation of the Israeli army -- say around those Israeli settlements on the West Bank -- have those women surround the soldiers and their tanks with their children saying, “Let my people go”. Trust me, that will be a lot more effective starting a serious peace process than random revolutionary violence among citizens in Jerusalem.

But we don't get women called, that would be another sermon. Instead, we have Jesus calling these twelve to drop their nets and become ‘fishers of men and women'. This text really always makes me wonder how we ever got to the point in our country, when the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson and other Evangelicals could look to Jesus as the upholder and defender of family values. Essentially, we have a Messiah who never held a steady job, never had kids, never even married, who went about the country recruiting other men to leave their families and their jobs to follow him in an itinerant ministry. Family values? Go figure. As Jerry Garcia once wrote, ‘what a long, strange trip it's been.'

When you look at these twelve that were chosen, you have to ask yourself what Jesus saw in them. Clearly, he was not concerned about aptitude in the way that you and I would go about picking a team. That is probably good for us to hear because our understanding of aptitude is too often constricting, certainly the narrow parameters we develop in our educational system by which we judge young people.

Someone recently sent me a short list of famous flunkies.

Louisa May Alcott, the famous author of Little Women, was encouraged to find work as a servant or a seamstress by her family.

Beethoven was awkward on the violin and wouldn't work on his technique, preferring to play his own compositions. His teacher called him hopeless as a composer.

Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper editor who said he had no creative ideas.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was four and didn't read until he was seven. His teacher described him as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.” He was expelled and refused admittance to Zurich poly tech.

The sculptor Rodin's father once said of him, “I have an idiot for a son.” Described as the worst pupil in the school, Rodin failed three time to get admitted to the School of art. His uncle pronounced him ununeducable.

Leo Tolstoy, author War and Peace, flunked out of college. He was described as both ‘unable and unwilling' to learn.

Yes, you are saying, but they all became accomplished and famous soon enough. So we shall close with Sir Winston Churchill, who failed 6th grade. Remember that he did not become Prime Minister of England until he was 62, and then only after many, many defeats. So well known to us now, it is important to remember that all his greatest contributions were made after he became a Senior Citizen.[i]

Jesus doesn't seem to be concerned about aptitude. His disciples are from all over the map, some educated, some scientific, some revolutionaries, some Orthodox, some workingmen. He calls quite a variety of different people. And that is good news and bad news for all of us this morning. The good news is that we, too, are eligible. The bad news is that we too, are on God's radar map and we cannot hide forever.

Given the context of Jesus' religious world, it is interesting to see what he does not call them to do that he could have called them to do. What do I mean?

Jesus lived in a land that was under occupation, and not by a law-abiding army like Israel or the United States. The Romans used terror as the main means of striking fear in the hearts of those they taxed. Torture was routine. Resistance usually meant either slavery or crucifixion. Lots of young men were waiting for a revolutionary revolt and they were hoping that the Messiah would galvanize such a revolt upon arrival. They were called Zealots and Jesus had some Zealots in his rank that were ready and able to incite a revolutionary movement for the Promised Land.

Jesus does not promise them that. He doesn't encourage them to live out of their frustration or give vent to their anger in righteous indignation (and violence). Surrounded by oppression and injustice, he is positive. He comes to show them the Truth, the Way, and the Life. He calls them to build one another up. “Come”, he says, “I will make you fishers of women and men.”

And he does not call them to withdrawal from the world. He does not say to them, the world around us is so hopelessly corrupt that we must escape from it and find moral and spiritual purity in some interior ascetical religious practices that eschew the passing around us for what is eternal inside of us.

There were lots of these groups around too. One of the most famous, the Essenes, we know a fair amount about, because they gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a group of Jewish ascetics who thought the world was coming to an end soon and if you were living as an oppressed person in Palestine under Roman occupation, that would not be an unreasonable speculation. Evil was so evil that the caricature of Apocalyptic thought made sense.

And there were Roman religions that were predicated on this as well. The most popular Mithraism was enormously influential in the Late Roman Empire, so much so, that the great historian Adolf von Harnack once said that if Christianity hadn't triumphed, we would all worship Mithra in Europe. And he was probably right.

The monastic option has been chosen by some for obvious reasons. In the late Middle Ages, monks were like college faculties that met for prayer, food, and a couple beers in the evenings to discuss great ideas. In between, they read, cultivated the vineyard and the garden, took turns rotating the chores of life, trying to find a balance, a kind of inner and outer harmony, nourishing a more intimate community than most of us are given to know in our neighborhoods.

Jesus doesn't encourage them to do that. They all keep their day jobs and they use them from time to time. They stay in the world with all of its compromise and ambiguity. This is where they work out their salvation, in all of its limitation. Get involved, stay involved. “Come” says Jesus, “I will make you fishers of men and women.”

Neither does he call them to be great scholars of religion. He doesn't order the disciples based on who knows the most about Torah tradition, who has read the most commentaries on scripture by the great Rabbi's of the past. He doesn't create an elite of intellectuals that understand theology in a way that is inaccessible to other people.

That is what Ministers and Rabbi's do. They have their own internal pecking order based on how much education you have and how smart you are. In the Orthodox rabbinical tradition, students work and work and work to memorize copious commentary. The teacher asks a question and a student is expected to be able to say ‘Rabbi Hilell says this, Rabbi Shamai said that', on and on and on. Chaim Potok captured that tradition so nicely in his great novel The Chosen. The people know that this is not all it takes to be a good Rabbi, but it is the way you get promoted by the other Rabbi's is to be a scholar.

And Ministers are not much different. Special honors in Divinity School go to the top students in Greek. We hold in esteem, those among us who have read enough of St. Thomas to be able to compare him with Luther on the finer points of justification by grace through faith. Ministers are academic elitists for the most part.

Education, of course, has its place. God knows we have had plenty of uneducated Ministers and they were not helpful at all. But Jesus doesn't call us to become elites in academic theology. He calls us to simply think about what it means to be a compassionate person in a world of aggression. What makes for love? How do we find peace in the storm? How can we promote justice in the midst of ambiguity and conflicting power? What is the shape of forgiveness when someone has hurt me? They are complex, but not abstract questions, because they are figured out with all of us together in the world in which we share with each other. “Come”, he says, “And I will make you fisher's of men and women.”

And he does not beckon us to fine tune the ritual. He doesn't simply say, the Priests are doing it wrong. Here is the way a proper liturgy ought to go. Here are the real rules of religion. This is the way the ceremony ought to be so that God finds it edifying. The interesting thing about these disciples is that some of them couldn't have been priests if they wanted to. They were not all clerical types. Jesus wasn't just interested in worship. In fact, worship was not really a central concern of his. And he was probably right. We humans will spend plenty of time on that without any prodding. We'll get around to the liturgy.

Instead, he says, the life of the Spirit involves your whole being and your whole way of living. It is not just your church self, not just your righteous persona that you are required to wear in order to fulfill your social obligations and pay your respects vocationally. It is a positive joy that you live out of in public, but also in private, in things that are traditionally religious and in ways that are utterly secular. The life of the Spirit is connective. The life of the Spirit coheres in gracious abundance. “Come”, says Jesus, “And I will make you fishers of men.”

Now the good news is that you, even you, qualify in here somehow, someway to be called by Jesus and to be of use. And that is the bad news too. All my life, especially since I've moved to Metropolitan New York, I've heard people who say to me, “I don't know Reverend, I'm not all that religious”, as though somehow that exempts them from any responsibility spiritually speaking. Imagine showing up before a judge for jury duty and saying, “I don't know, Your Honor, I'm not all that legal.” You'd get one of those long looks, over the rim of the glasses, followed by, “Thank you Mrs. Baker, I'm calling you as juror number 11.” God is like that. You may be able to weasel out of Church time because we Ministers don't have big guys in Blue ready to cuff you if you try to leave. But, trust me, God doesn't have any time for your tomfoolery.

God is calling each and every one of us to live out of our positive spiritual energy and build each other up. God is calling us to engage the world. God is calling us to live with each other, for each other. God is beguiling us to a life of Spirit that encompasses our whole way of being, our whole way of living. “Come”, says Jesus, “And I will make you fishers of men and women.”

Amen.

[i] My understanding is that these examples are found in Jack Canfield's Chicken Soup for the Soul, which one I am unsure.