Follow Jesus, or else

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/060916.cfm

1 Kings 18:41-46

Matthew 5:20-26

Performance and accountability establish the measure of success at every level of human activity. We’re programmed to evade failure. Our relationship to God usually lines up in a similar fashion of measurement. We generally imagine that spiritual activity mirrors human activity. We think God expects good, better and best performance levels, and we assess our follow through, our accountability to those expectations. We are successful. Or, we are not.

At five years of age, most of us got candy, allowances, hugs, high fives, and ice cream when our performance met the subsequent accountability required. It’s how we stopped eating our boogers, learned to poop in a toilet, ate our vegetables, and successfully greeted everyone who entered our home with a firm handshake and an appropriate kiss on the cheek.

At ten, we got dressed in time for the school bus, did our homework before television, pulled weeds when asked the first time, apologized to our best friend for tripping him down the stairs, and wrote individually-thought-out thank you letters on our birthday.

At fifteen, we turned down a beer and a cigarette on the same day, fixed our sister’s bike without being asked, said something nice to a frightened girl, waved at a policeman, and wore those stupid Argyle socks that our mother bought us.

At twenty, we chose a political party that fit our concepts of compassion and patriotism, paid for our own newish set of tires, told the truth at a job interview, picked up the trash in a neighbor’s yard, willingly took a girl to a nice restaurant without payback, exercised for a whole week, and walked out on a morally challenging movie.

And for the rest of our lives we have struggled with the idea that while God urges comportment, high morals and ethics, passion, maturity, manners and fairness in our daily walk, none of our performance and accountability measures up to anything regarding our salvation. Underneath the performance, we hear that God doesn’t weigh our walk upon a scale. Heaven is a gift. We just have to accept it.

Confession is necessary, but God has already forgiven us. God loves us as we are, and yet molds us into perfection. The bar of propriety seems too high, and yet holiness hovers over everything we do. After 20 years of growing up with performance-based moral formation, another 60 years of maturation leaves us at a loss for clarity.

We wish we were innocent children again; when our Godly relationship seemed immediately connected to an obvious performance. That is, we want to go back to sometime between our insufferable disgust for vegetables and the time we were physically capable and horrifyingly willing to kill our best friend. Right in the middle there, we were relatively perfect angels.

Even though Jesus clearly states that we should desire to be like children again, the impracticality and embarrassing dependence required to be both innocent and full of abject wonder is impossible — except for hippies and the over educated. Hippies end up on drugs and hated by their children, whom they had named after forest animals. The overtly intellectual end up in therapy and hate their children, who end up being conservatives and capitalists. 

Sloughing off the childish lifestyles, what child-like characteristic works for adults to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven? How can we achieve a clarity as adults about the ying and yang of relating to God?

I think I have come up with the answer. Unfortunately, it’s not marketable. It doesn’t fit into the performance and accountability standards of today’s programming. I can’t sell it to you, because I can’t bottle it. As a catchphrase, it’s a cliche. It’s so simple, but so few of us fully accept the consequences. There is no evidentiary proof that it works until you try it, and then the evidence is only verifiable by you, even though tons of believers in Jesus Christ will both affirm the characteristic, and urge you in it. 

The characteristic is “follow.” Just like you followed your mom, your dad, your big brother, and Mrs. Knight, your kindergarten teacher. Except now, you follow Jesus, and do what he says. 

Follow Jesus, and do what he says. 

The result? You’ll will be walking immediately in the Kingdom of Heaven; and when you get hit by a bus, a cancer, an overdose, a broken heart, or any other fatal horror, you will cross over into the next life like stepping out of a shower.

That’s pretty much the whole thing, with consequential mind-blowing stuff that comes at us physically, emotionally, etc. Eternally, by the way.

If you review today’s reading from Matthew, 5:20-26, this “follow Jesus and do what he says” childish characteristic doesn’t appear at first to be the point Jesus is making. If you are an intellectual, you have to read the other chapters in Matthew, the other gospels, the rest of the New Testament, and all of the Old Testament, at least 20 different commentaries, get an Mdiv from anywhere, and then ask Jesus what to do next. If you are a hippie, just ask Jesus what to do next. The rest of us have some complicated paths between those two.

It helps big time if you have a bunch of friends who are believers. Or maybe just one good one. Pretty soon Jesus will bring all kinds of his body of friends to your attention. You will help each other to follow Jesus and do what he says. 

Now, if you don’t go this childlike way, you can spend a lifetime on righteous activity and maybe only figure it out when you eventually fail miserably. Maybe you go super righteous and find yourself in prison with a huge debt to pay. That’s probably the extreme. It just depends on how insistent you are on charting your own course to the Kingdom. 

Some of us are lucky enough to realize the map’s notation that, “You Are Here” means that you are already standing in the Kingdom. 

Some of us will grasp that the division with our brother has cauterized our relationship to God, and then we ask Jesus what to do to reconcile. Others of us will battle in the court of whatever world where we are joisting with an opponent, and we understand what “to settle” means, and we ask Jesus to help us.

All of us will eventually understand what following Jesus means. We either join ranks with Jesus and his body of believers, or we don’t. In between those two options, we put it off. The chronic “don’t” folks have a rough road ahead.

Nonetheless, the answer is still the same. The measures of this world are not the measures used by God. Over and over again we hear it. 

Follow Jesus, and do what he says.