Scripture: Matthew 4:12-22
Let me tell you a story. I guess it’s a confession, of sorts.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I was an associate at a large law firm based in the City of Detroit. As generally holds true of law firm associates, my life consisted in nothing but work. I started my labors at the proverbial crack of dawn, jammed through the lunch hour, and churned on well into the evening. When my cases heated up I often got home after 9 or 10 p.m.
Please understand that I’m neither complaining nor bragging. I loved my clients and my cases, I wasn’t working any harder than my fellow beleaguered associates, and I learned a lot along the way—like how to appreciate cold, stale coffee. I’m simply describing what my life looked like for a while. I suspect some or all of you may have had a similar experiences.
I give you this background so I can make a point about the nature of human beings and the nature of the divine creation. And the point is this: Human beings cannot operate like machines, relentlessly whirring on in endless activity. We need timeouts. Remember that even God himself rested on the seventh day; He literally invented weekends. And remember that even God himself took a break from his surveillance of the Garden of Eden; so He also literally invented playing hooky.
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.
During these years as a junior associate, my modest form of playing hooky took the following shape. An unexpected and atypical lull in my workload would materialize. I’d grab my keys, tell my colleagues I’d be back soon, jump into my car, and race as quickly as I could to 901 West Lafayette Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan, 48226.
“What’s at that address?” you might ask. Well, that, that my friends, is where you will find John King Used and Rare Books, one of the best bookstores in the entire world. But don’t take my word for it: The publication Business Insider describes it in exactly those terms.
Located in an imposing old building that once held a glove factory, the store occupies multiple floors and boasts an inventory of well over one-million volumes. Toward the back of the first floor is the sanctum sanctorum, a small room filled with rare editions, accessible only with permission and by appointment. A person could get lost in the maze of shelves at John King Books, and more than once I quietly prayed that things might turn out that way. But, alas, no.
When my stolen hour came to an end, I’d take the armful of books I’d selected down to the cashier, pay for them, load them into the car, and rush back to the office as if returning from a hearing in court or a conference with a client. Later that night, when I finally got home, I would unpack the brown paper grocery bags into which the cashier had piled my treasures and start reading.
And here is what I want you to know: I never, ever, went into John King’s store where I didn’t emerge with at least one book that told me things that I needed to know at that exact moment in my life. It was remarkably and consistently true, and I’ve had the same experience at many other bookstores as well. It is a phenomenon that I fondly, and only half-jokingly, call “the book angel.”
Now, permit me to limit the breadth of my claims here. I cannot comment on the tooth fairy, although—having been a parent—I have reasons for skepticism. Nor do I hold opinions on the parking spot angel, although occasionally a space has inexplicably opened up exactly where and when I needed it.
But experience has convinced me that sometimes, somehow, through some medium, the Holy Spirit delivers unto you the book that you need—just as it sometimes, somehow, through some medium delivers unto you the person that you need. This makes a sort of theological sense. After all, God must love books, having written history’s greatest best-seller.
My most recent experience of this kind came courtesy of a business trip that Lisa made to the University of Notre Dame. While she was there, Lisa took a brief break from a long day of work to visit the school store, which has a handsome selection of books, especially in the field of religion. Lisa bought one for me that she thought I might like: a book called “Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety,” written by the priest, professor, pastor, and prolific author Henri Nouwen. The minute I started reading it, I realized that the Holy Spirit, or the Universe, or the book angel, or whatever it is and whatever you want to call it, had struck again: It was exactly the book that I needed at this particular moment.
A reasonable person could argue that I needed exactly zero books at this particular moment because I already own dozens that I haven’t read. But, whenever I entertain that miserly thought, I recall what a wise rabbi friend of mine told me many years ago. He said: “Len, it’s important to have unread books on your shelves. They remind you of all the things you don’t know.”
Intrigued by the title, I moved this book to the top of my pile and dug in. Now, I wasn’t at all surprised that Nouwen had things to teach me. He was, after all, an extraordinarily gifted person. He served on the faculties of many distinguished universities and, toward the end of his life, left the comforts of the academy in order to care for the intellectually and developmentally disabled. But I was surprised to learn how much he had to teach me about something that I thought I had understood: what it means to follow Jesus.
And that’s what I want to talk about with you this morning: what it means to follow Jesus. Please bear with me, I’m going to give you a bit of a mashup. You’ll get some ideas of my own, some ideas of Henri Nouwen’s, some ideas that are fully developed, and some ideas that are still in their clumsy infancy. Like all thinking about such complicated topics, my thinking here is necessarily incomplete.
But I want to share these thoughts with you now because Advent is suddenly and mysteriously upon us, and waiting for the birth of Jesus strikes me as the perfect time to try to make sense of what it means to follow the Savior for whom we’re waiting. Plus, given everything that’s going on in the world these days, we may be waiting more anxiously and eagerly than ever. If a great light is coming into the world, then we need the best and clearest look at it that we can get.
Let’s start here.
As an initial matter, I’m not at all sure that the word “follow” accurately captures what Jesus really calls us to do. Sure, lots of translations of the gospels use that word when recounting those episodes where Jesus recruits his disciples. You know how it goes—Jesus says: “follow me” to someone and, lo and behold, they set everything aside and “follow him.” But what does that mean?
If we imagine these events literally and spatially, it means putting Jesus at the front of a line with the disciples trailing behind him, rather like a row of ducklings behind a mother duck. Indeed, countless paintings and movie depictions of Jesus and his disciples have portrayed things just this way. If you think about it, though, that literal and spatial image of what it means to “follow” Jesus can’t be right.
The gospels tell us that Jesus often spoke to his disciples when they traveled together, and you can’t talk easily to someone who’s behind you. In any event, you certainly can’t talk to them about the sorts of sensitive and momentous things that Jesus addressed with his disciples—things that require a soft voice, a smiling face, and eye contact. Furthermore, given the teachings of Jesus, such as that “the first will be last and the last will be first,” we would expect to find him not at the front of the pack but at its back, pastoring to the weariest and weakest among his crew.
Many years ago, I ran the Detroit Marathon as a tribute to my mom, who was struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. She had enjoyed a long career as a nurse, and I promised that I would carry her nursing pin across the finish line. Things went south, however, when I badly pulled a calf muscle at mile nine, leaving me to limp the remaining 17.2 miles.
Opportunities to quit presented themselves. At one point, a Detroit police patrol car drove up alongside me and a friendly officer poked his head out and asked if I wanted a ride. I probably should have accepted the offer, but, coming from German and Scottish stock that makes me hideously stubborn, I couldn’t do it. I thanked him and pressed on.
I can tell you three things about that experience. First, it was miserable. Second, all the other runners got so far ahead of me that finally I couldn’t even see them. And, third, I most definitely was not alone. A very old friend was limping right along with me—right there, at the very end of the very end of the very end of the pack.
Now, I’m no expert in New Testament Greek, but it’s my understanding that the word usually translated as “follows” in these passages, “akoloutheo,” has other meanings as well, including “to accompany” or “to attend.” Our word “acolyte,” meaning someone who attends to our religious rituals, has its root in this word. In my view, those other meanings provide useful clarification, because what the disciples did—and what I believe we are called to do—is not to get behind Jesus but to get beside him. Indeed, the word “disciple” comes from a root that means “student,” and you can’t learn much from someone who you trail at a distance.
Jesus calls us to get near him, next to him, up close and personal with him. He wants us to stand, to walk, to be where we can hear him, see him, attend to him, accompany him, and be accompanied byhim. Jesus doesn’t summon us to a parade behind a spiritual drum major. He summons us into a community of love, with him at the center and at our side.
That prompts the question: How should we respond to this summons? Nouwen gives us three words.
The first word is “listen.” Nouwen observes that we can answer Jesus’s invitation only by attending to what he says to us in his still small voice—and we will have to be intentional and alert to make sure we hear it. Sometimes, Nouwen says, the message will come to us through the voices of our fellow human beings, even—perhaps especially—the voices of the least in the kingdom. He writes that, to listen to Jesus, “We have to listen to the people in our lives, even the broken ones, and take them very seriously.”
The second word he gives us is “ask.” Nouwen wants us to ask a very specific question of a very specific person. Nouwen wants us to ask Jesus: Who are you? This is a terrific insight, and one that had never occurred to me. After all, we can’t really come into relationship with someone until we know who they are. And it makes no sense for us to say that we worship Jesus Christ, and that we want to go beside him, but that we have no idea who he is. We need to ask—and then listen.
The third and final word Nouwen gives us is “dwell.” Again, Nouwen has something very specific in mind. He wants us to set aside some time, whatever time we can, simply to be with Jesus—to dwell with him—and to feel his presence. Nouwen writes: “Be with him and listen. Listen to the One who invites you. Be quiet. Like a child dwells in the house with her mother and father. Just dwell. Play around. Be there. Just be there. Sit there and do nothing. Waste time with Jesus. That is what love does.”
I’ll confess that when I first read those words—“waste time with Jesus”—I was taken aback. How could time with Jesus possibly be wasted? But then I realized what Nouwen meant. He’s drawing an analogy to those precious moments that consist simply in being with someone you love and hanging around with them, with no particular plan or agenda. You’ve had those moments, right? Maybe even recently, around the Thanksgiving dinner table?
Think of that irreplaceable and sacred time that you’ve spent simply being with a spouse, or a child, or a grandchild, or a best friend, or maybe even a pet. Time you spent doing nothing, and thereby doing everything, because just being with them is enough, just being with them is the point. Nouwen says: You won’t be fully in a relationship with Jesus until you do some of that with him.
Ironically, sometimes our good intentions can get in the way of building this kind of connection. To make the point, Nouwen tells a story about a period in his life when he moved to a destitute part of Peru to serve the poor. While he was there, he lived in a house that was a good distance from the church where the mission was based. As a result, every morning he had a very long walk to work.
On those mornings, children often surrounded him, teased him, and invited him to play. Nouwen brushed them off: He had no time to play, he would tell them, he was on his way to serve the poor. And then one day he realized that he’d gotten things all wrong. Stopping and playing, sharing in a moment of joy, was exactly the service to which God had called him. “Laughter and play,” Nouwen writes, “Laughter and play are divine healing.”
Nouwen tells us that “The Kingdom is where everything is turned upside down.” With that in mind, I’d like you to notice that very often—especially as Advent gets underway and Christmas approaches—we do the exact opposite of everything Nouwen describes in his book. We fill our days with so much noise that it becomes impossible to listen. We spend no time asking Jesus who he is, but lots of time telling him who he is, often resorting to titles and abstractions that have no concrete meaning to us. And we certainly spend no time just being with Jesus, because there’s so much to do—ironically, to celebrate him and his birth.
But our topsy-turvy way of going about the Christmas season doesn’t end there. As the big day approaches, we may succumb to anxiety or even fear. We worry about getting everything done. We stress out over having enough. We fret over the divisions within our world, our country, our community, and our own families. Again, Nouwen says, this gets things exactly backwards. He writes: “Following Jesus is moving away from fear and toward love. Always toward the One Who Is Love.”
This time of year we can also fall prey to the disappointments that inevitably follow from perfectionism. We set unrealistic goals for ourselves. We set unrealistic goals for others. And in doing so we perfectly position ourselves, and everyone around us, for failure.
Nouwen says we need to give ourselves, and everybody else, some grace. “We are not called,” he writes, “to imitate Jesus. We are [instead] called to form a community of people who through different ways reflect the great love of Jesus. Not one of us can reflect the fullness of that love.” To borrow a phrase from Micah, we are summoned not just to walk with God, but to do so humbly, mindful of our place in the order of things, forgiving the flaws in others as we would have our own flaws forgiven.
Well, I hope that, by now, based upon what I’ve said, you’ve come to realize an incontrovertible truth about life in general and certainly about the season leading up to Christmas. It is a truth reflected in one of the great theological works of the twentieth century. I refer, of course, to the 1986 movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
As you may recall, in that film Ferris Bueller is a brash but extraordinarily clever high school senior who decides he wants to raise skipping school to an art form. He concocts an elaborate plan for an epic adventure in Chicago, inviting his best friend Cameron and his girlfriend Sloane along for the crazy ride. Along the way, Ferris offers us this bit of wisdom: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Spot on, isn’t it? So, we may empathize later when Cameron says: “Ferris Bueller, you’re my hero.”
You see, my friends, what I took away from Henri Nouwen’s book, and what the Spirit moves me to tell you this morning, is that life moves pretty fast. So does Advent. And if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. And the only way you’re going to guarantee that you don’t miss it is to make sure that, from time to time over the next several weeks, you occasionally play hooky from Christmas. You heard me correctly: Play hooky from Christmas.
Riding thoughtlessly along on the Christmas juggernaut will leave you with no time to listen, no time to ask, and no time to dwell. It will allow you no opportunity to laugh and no chance to play. It will disconnect you from the very thing that you seek and to which you most want a connection. It will drive you to limp along to a finish line where no prizes worth having await.
My friends. Jesus Christ, the very Son of the Living God, asks the pleasure of your company in the coming weeks. You are cordially invited to take some time to get to know him—to listen, to ask, to dwell, to laugh, to play. So take a half hour, or an hour, or maybe even a day off. In the name of God, play some hooky. And play some hooky, in the name of God.
You will see his pleasure. And you will know his delight.
And all the people said: Amen.
