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May 23, 2010
Jesus,
Lord and Mentor
“As
Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew
casting a net into the lake… and Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me’ …and they
immediately left their nets and followed him.”
Mark 1:16-17
It is a milestone day and occasion in the lives of these young adults around
whom we gather today as they affirm their faith and baptism.
I want to publically thank
those who partnered with me in leading this confirmation experience:
Thank you
Rose Mary Grove!
You have been committed to these youth for two years, and you
have been an
integral part of the whole experience.
Thank you
Pastor Darlene Muschett.
You joined our leadership team this confirmation year and have
enhanced us as a team. We
three spent hours together in planning and dreaming up ways to
make the confirmation experience meaningful, interactive and even a little
crazy and inane. It tapped our
personal resources of creativity to the limit.
Thank you
Katie Romanoski.
I would bounce our ideas off you, and you provided insightful
critique, artistic expertise and the commitment of your time and talent to
sharpen and polish many of the things we had dreamed up.
Thank you
parents for your commitment
to the program and making sure your young people were there.
Without all of you this journey of the past two years would not have
been what it turned out to be – a
good experience!
I would dare say
that many, perhaps most of us in this room today would describe
ourselves as persons of faith.
However, our definitions of faith might differ widely and
reveal great diversity.
We devoted a significant portion of confirmation time this year in dialog
about the meaning of faith.
This is a day that each of
you, in your own unique way, is saying that you are a
person of faith.
But as your faith statements reveal, and especially as was
made apparent in class in our interaction and dialog, faith takes root and
expression in each of our lives in unique and different ways.
I think it’s that uniqueness and diversity that makes us
interesting and dynamic as a faith community.
As the bulletin reveals, each of you chose two passages (OT & NT) you
committed to memory as your designated confirmation scripture.
Just as you chose
your passage, so I chose
mine. I chose the gospel
passage from Mark that I read a few moments ago.
“As
Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew
casting a net… and Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me’ …and they immediately
left their nets and followed him.”
It’s a brief story, succinct and to the point - with no
frills. Was it really that
simple – dropping everything to follow a total stranger?
I doubt it was that simple.
Most likely there was a
lot more to this story than Mark reveals or tells, as is the case
with many of the gospel stories.
But Mark told the story the way he did because he wanted to
drive home a point.
And Mark’s point is this:
In the end when you boil everything else away, the Christian Faith
gets down to following Jesus and making that relationship the
primary relationship in
your life. That’s what the
dropping their nets “immediately”
and “following” Jesus is all about.
That’s what leaving their father Zebedee behind sitting in the boat
with the hired hands is all about.
Mark was not saying that their fishing business or their
families were not important – not at
all. In fact, we see in the
gospels they went back to their fishing business and their families.
But they went back to them with a new attitude – an attitude that was
now shaped by their relationship with Jesus.
That was Mark’s point.
Down through the 2000 years of Christian history there have
two general understandings
of faith. One
is faith defined as holding a
specific set of beliefs.
One person’s “beliefs” might differ greatly from another person’s
“beliefs” on a whole host of things; beliefs about: God, Jesus, the Bible,
resurrection, baptism, communion; on goes what can be a very long list of
specific beliefs. We could
call this definition of faith a
“head faith” for the primary emphasis falls mainly upon
intellectual assent to certain “beliefs.”
Tragically, some of the darkest chapters of Christian history
have been centered around conflicts over “beliefs”; conflicts that
have turned ugly, violent and even death-dealing;
conflicts that have yielded an extreme lack of toleration
among those who called themselves Christian but held different beliefs; or
violence directed toward those who held beliefs other than Christian.
The second
is faith defined as not merely a matter of the head and intellect, but faith
as a matter of the heart.
It is not faith as “belief”
but rather faith as trust and
commitment. It is not
“belief” about Jesus, but
trust in Jesus and
commitment
to Jesus.
As I reflect on this simple, austere story from Mark, I perceive
this is the kind of faith that is described here, and the kind of faith
that characterized Mark’s faith community - faith as trust
in and commitment
to
the life of Jesus.
“As
Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew
casting a net… and Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me’ …and they immediately
left their nets and followed him.”
That is a description of faith as
trust and commitment to following the person of Jesus and allowing
oneself to be shaped by his life.
I can say to you today that this is the very
essence of my faith.
I like to say this kind faith is a matter of “heart and feet.”
And by “heart” I don’t mean my head is not involved, of course it is.
“Heart” is a biblical
metaphor for a deeper level
of the self. It’s the core self
- a level of the self that is deeper than our thinking, feeling, and
intellect – it’s our very being.
Like the disciples, I experience days when it is hard to follow where Jesus
leads – days I lack the courage to love as he loved – days when I am faint
of heart to give of myself the ways that he gave of himself.
On those days, I can still
choose to move my feet in the direction that Jesus leads – and
more often than not, I have experienced that my heart eventually catches up.
We devoted several sessions this year to the subject of
mentoring.
Remember when we spent an entire evening defining what a mentor is?
Together we determined that a mentor was a teacher, a counselor, an
authority figure you respect and look up to, a trusted role model, a
life-giving person; a wise friend who wants the best for you.
And then you named some of the people in your lives that you
would call a mentor, and we concluded with a worship ritual when we lit
candles in thanksgiving and recognized our mentors. It was all very cool.
You named a wide variety of people as your mentors including parents,
grandparents, teachers, coaches and many others.
I think we all left that evening realizing that without mentors
our lives would be like a ship without a rudder wandering lost and aimless,
at the mercy of the wind of our whims and
impulses.
We expressed gratitude to God for
our mentors!
The earliest Christian confession of faith was
“Jesus is Lord.”
That was it! That was
the creed by which those early disciples and communities of Jesus
lived. However,
“Lord” is not a word that we use
as part of our everyday vocabulary – not a part of the fabric of our post
modern ways of thinking and speaking.
But for me, a huge part
of what I perceive they meant by
“Lord” is what we mean by
“mentor.”
For me, Jesus is my mentor, my
first and foremost mentor, ahead
of all others, that shapes and informs my life as I follow him and open my
life to him.
What an exciting time of life it is for you!
It is a time when you are growing up and making all sorts of
discoveries about every aspect of life.
It is also a precarious and dangerous time of life for you.
There are all sorts of forces around you that are clamoring
for your attention and your
allegiance.
Over the next few years
you will make choices about many things – choices that will shape
you and will have long term implications for your lives.
It’s a time of life when mentors need to play a significant and
critical role in your life to help you discern best from worst choices;
life-giving choices from choices that take life away and reduce
the lives of others. It’s a
time when you will need those trusted mentors to lead you and guide you
along the way. Without them
your life could be like a ship without a rudder at the mercy of the wind of
your whims and impulses.
In my own life I can name no better mentor than Jesus.
The banner on the wall to my left entitled,
“Jesus Mentors Us” is a creation
of the confirmation class and reflects an ongoing dialog we had this year
about some of the ways we are mentored in our relationship with Jesus.
We identified nine things – of course there could be many more.
We spent considerable time discussing these nine life-giving ways in
which are mentored by Jesus.
In the years that lie immediately before you will be faced with many choices
– and each choice will be a little decision that shapes the bigger whole of
your life and the kind of person you are becoming.
I guarantee,
you will be faced with situations where you will feel peer pressure
to intentionally exclude someone(s) because they are different
in some way or because there are those who don’t like them in your peer
group. What will you do?
At that point your mentor Jesus will have something to offer.
Consider that Jesus included those that the most people had excluded/pushed
to the margins.
I guarantee,
you will be faced with situations when you will know what is right or
best, but you will be paralyzed by fear or by someone else’s fear who is
trying to convince you otherwise.
What will you do? At
that point your mentor Jesus will have something to offer.
Consider that Jesus calmed the fears of the disciples symbolized by
the calming of the wind and the waves when they were crossing the lake of
Galilee to the Gentile side of the lake bearing the hospitality of God – a
risky thing for Jews to do.
I guarantee,
you will be faced with the reality that the world can sometimes be a harsh
place for millions of people – that political and economic systems can be
indifferent and unjust – favoring some over others.
When that hits you in the face, what are you going to do?
At that point your mentor Jesus will have something to offer.
Consider that Jesus proclaimed and embodied compassion and social
justice for the oppressed. I
could go on and on!
“As
Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew
casting a net into the lake… and Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me’ …and they
immediately left their nets and followed him.”
Mark 1:16-17
My final word is that this relationship with Jesus as your mentor is a
relationship that is, first and last, a relationship of grace.
You are loved – unconditionally.
There is nothing that can change that – nothing!
That is the promise of your baptism.
The good news is that it’s a mentoring relationship in which you are
“made whole in love” which is
the deepest and most profound meaning of
salvation; in other words, it’s
a life-giving relationship that will guide and direct you every precious day
of your lives and enhance your humanity.
Amen.
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