THE WAY: PART II
According to an Associated Press article in last Thursday’s Meadville Tribune, the second coming of Christ was supposed to occur on Saturday, the 21st of May. That particular date was calculated by a retired civil engineer by the name of Harold Camping. For those of you keeping score, that would have been yesterday. Now if Christ did in fact return yesterday, then there are a lot of us who’ve been left behind.
When I first read the article, I thought, “Gosh, I may not have to write a sermon this week.” I decided to write one anyway just in case this Harold Camping fellow was wrong. Now I’m not making light of the second coming of Jesus Christ. It’s just that Jesus himself said, “Of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” So let’s not worry about the end of the world today. Let’s worry instead about the way we live in the world we have.
Speaking of living in the world we have, let me say this: The Jesus way plus the Jesus truth equals the Jesus life. As I said last week that’s a line quite similar to one Eugene Peterson uses in his book, The Jesus Way. What Peterson actually says is, “The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life,” but the essential meaning of those two statements is about the same. As we noted last week, the Jesus truth is not enough in and of itself to attain the Jesus life. Jesus calls us to follow the Jesus way as well. As Jesus himself put it in the passage we read from the gospel according to John, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father…but by me.” Could it be that Jesus is actually calling us to live the faith we say we believe? Perhaps the question thus becomes, “What is the Jesus way, and how do we go about following it?”
Along those lines, I want you to consider a famous poem written by a man named Robert Frost. It was first published in 1916 in a collection of poetry called Mountain Interval. The name of the poem is, “The Road Not Taken.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Listen closely to the words just the same.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost came to the proverbial fork in the road. There, he found he had a choice to make. He made his choice, and then he had to live with it. And in the long run, he came to sense that the path he picked ultimately made all the difference. Ladies and gentlemen, we come to forks in the road every day, and we have choices to make as well.
For example, imagine you’re taking an algebra test. Do you trust in your ability to retain the data you have studied, or do you sneak a peek at the paper of someone who does better in the lass than you? Or, imagine you’re working on a major business deal. A person who works below you comes up with an idea that is sure to make the transaction a huge success. Do you jump on the idea and claim it as your own, or do you give credit where credit is due and sacrifice a big promotion? Or, imagine you’ve been married for many, many years. Relationships tend to go through peaks and valleys, and you feel like you’re in a valley. Then someone you meet seems to take a profound interest in you. It’s flattering, it’s gratifying…it’s exciting. Do you stick to your marriage vows, or do you give in to your baser impulses? Ah, the stakes seem to get higher the older we get, do they not?
The choices we make do matter. As C.S. Lewis once put it, “With every choice we make we are turning the central part of ourselves – the part that chooses – into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.” Don’t think for a moment that the choices we make don’t matter. They do matter. They matter a great deal.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by…and that has made all the difference. We all come to the proverbial fork in the road, and we all have choices to make. The choices we make at the fork in the road make all the difference in this world…as well as in the world to come.
The Psalmist was well aware of that fact in the passage Bill read from the book of Psalms a moment ago. He wrote, “Blessed is the one who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on God’s law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the righteous…but the way of the wicked will perish.”
The Psalmist is saying that those who choose to abide by the way of God will prosper in the long run. Those who choose not to abide by the way of God – those who choose to abide by the way of the world – will be judged in the long run. Ladies and gentlemen, we have to look at this psalm through the eyes of faith. Because in this world, sometimes those who choose the way of the world are quite successful in this world. We have to believe that someone – somewhere – is keeping score. We have to believe that there are eternal consequences for the choices we make on a daily basis.
The Jesus way plus the Jesus truth equals the Jesus life. The question was, “What is the Jesus way and how do we go about following it?” Perhaps we’ve just answered the second part of that question. How do we go about following the Jesus way? The Jesus way is, first and foremost, a choice. It is a choice that – in the long run – will come to make all the difference in the world. Thus, when we come to that proverbial fork in the road – and you know we will – we must come to choose the Jesus way.
Allow me to literally prove to you the difference the Jesus way can make in the world in which we live. Byron Johnson is the author of a book entitled, More God, Less Crime. In it, he compiled a survey of every study conducted between the years 1944 and 2010 that measured the possible effect of religion on crime. Literally 90% of those studies revealed that more religiosity resulted in less crime. Believe it or not, however, 2% of those studies actually found that religion produced more crime. (I’d guess there was some kind of surveyor bias there.) And 8% of the studies found that there was no relationship either way.
Richard Freeman, a Harvard professor of economics, interviewed 2,358 young men living in downtown Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. He found that religious behavior was associated with substantial differences in how young men behave. More churchgoing resulted in less crime, less alcohol, and fewer drugs. So I ask you now, “Does the Jesus way matter?” It would appear that it does indeed.
So if following the Jesus way is a choice, perhaps we now need to take a look at what the Jesus way really is. As this is only sermon number two in a series, I am not prepared to give you the definitive answer right now. Yet perhaps I can lay a good foundation. Let me start by saying that the Jesus way is more about the way we live than it is about rules and regulations.
If you look at chapter 20 in the Old Testament book of Exodus, you will find what we call the Ten Commandments. You’ll find a lot more rules and regulations in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In fact, if you were to read what the Jewish people call the Torah, you would find 613 separate laws of conduct. God gave the Hebrew people a set of laws with which to conduct themselves, but somehow they failed to produce the results God desired.
That’s why God sent his Son. As Christians, we believe Jesus Christ is the revelation of God. In other words, what we know to be true of Jesus, we know to be true of God. Yet Jesus didn’t give us a list of rules and regulations to follow, did he? Jesus simply lived his life in accordance with God’s plan, thereby revealing the way for us to live as well. Perhaps that’s what the Jesus way really is. The Jesus way is a life lived in harmony with God.
The Jesus way is a life lived in harmony with God. I think Eugene Peterson gives us a marvelous illustration of that in his book, The Jesus Way. He writes:
Years ago I was traveling along a spectacular mountain road with an old college friend who was visiting from Texas. This road is one of the scenic wonders of North America. My friend had a map open on her knees. I kept pointing out features in the landscape around us: a five-hundred foot waterfall, a glacial formation, a grove of massive Western Red Cedars, a distant horizon of mountains upon which a storm was forming.
She rarely looked up. She was studying the map. When I, with some impatience, tried to get her attention, she told me that she wanted to “know where we are.” And knowing where we are, for her, was defined by a line on a map. She preferred the abstraction of a road map to the actual colors and forms, the scent and texture of Mount Reynolds, the roar of Logan Creek, or an alpine meadow on the way to Piegan Pass, luxurious in bear grass.
Perhaps the Jesus way is more than rules and regulations or a line on a map. Perhaps the Jesus way has to do with being present to everything on the way: the sights and the sounds, the beauty and the elegance, the friendships and the relationships. Perhaps the Jesus way cannot be codified or simplified or summarized. Perhaps the Jesus way must simply be lived.
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and devout Roman Catholic. She once said, “All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’” Perhaps we, too, will find the Jesus way when we start to realize that all the way to heaven is heaven as well. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment