In my thirty years of ordained ministry and 50 years of church membership, I have discovered that there are five kinds of Christian: Free Riders, Fans, Friends, Followers and Fanatics.
FREE RIDERS are Christians in name only.
If you ask them, they will tell you that they believe in God and Jesus. They know how to answer the questions correctly. God is the creator of the universe. Jesus is the son of God, blah, blah, blah. They aren’t sure what any of that means. They don’t really think about it.
Most of them belong to churches. That is, they have their name on the membership roll of the church and they do the minimum required to keep it there. They send a check every two years or they show up at worship on Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday. They believe in prayer in schools but not in church.
Sometimes they borrow the tables or chairs for their family reunions or high school graduation parties. And they complain about how the church is always talking about money, about how the church is too political, and how it’s too conservative or too liberal.
Their relationship to the church is not unlike their relationship to Kroger or McDonalds. They are consumers of the church’s product. They like for it to be there when they need it for a wedding or a funeral or a baptism. They expect the minister to call on them when they are in the hospital. They want the perks of church membership but not the responsibilities.
They like to brag about how even though they belong to the church, they don’t really need the church to feel close to God. They can do that out in nature, walking through the woods or sitting on their back porch, drinking coffee and listening to the birds sing.
They like to refer to themselves as being “spiritual but not religious.”
They are “free riders.”
FANS are enthusiastic admirers of Jesus.
They look upon the Son of God the way people in New York look upon Alex Rodriguez, the way teenage girls look upon Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga.
They admire his talent and abilities — he could sure tell a story and he seemed to have a real knack for miracles. They appreciate his accomplishments — he was the founder of the biggest, most influential religion in the history of the world, after all. (Imagine what he could have done if he would have applied himself to business.) And they are blown away by the level of his commitment — I mean, whoa! Crucifixion? Please!
But they know they aren’t that talented and they don’t have his abilities, they can’t heal the sick or turn water into wine, and public speaking scares them to death.
They know they’ll never be able to achieve what he achieved. How many people get to start world religions? A dozen maybe? In the history of the world.
And as far as commitment goes, well, how often do we get a chance to die for our faith? And, even if we did have the opportunity, does anyone really expect that of anyone anymore? I mean, isn’t that what those crazy people over in the Middle East are doing? And who wants to be like them?
No, it’s sufficient to be a fan. It’s safe and, though it requires some effort, it’s not anything like fanatical. You just learn the jargon, wear the symbols from time to time, sing the fight song and the alma mater when everyone else does and you’re in.
Those are the “fans” of Jesus.
The FRIENDS of Jesus that I speak of here are not friends in the traditional sense, more like “Facebook friends.”
When you “friend” someone on Facebook, you agree to listen to what they have to say and they agree to listen to what you have to say. No, that’s not exactly right.
You agree to be available to listen to what they say even if you don’t actually, really listen to it. Or, in the case of Facebook, read it. It works like this:
You and I both have Facebook accounts. But we never cross paths, we never hear from each other unless we “friend” each other. That is, we press a little button that says we will make ourselves available to each other — not in any real way, just on Facebook.
So, now that we’re Facebook friends, everything I type on my site goes to you and everything you type on your site goes to me and, presumably, we stay in touch with each other that way. We hear about each other’s lives, see pictures of each other’s families, hear each other’s opinions, laugh at each other’s jokes, we say comforting things to each other when one or the other of us is sad or depressed and we say encouraging things to each other when one or the other of us is happy.
About 90% of the communications that take place on Facebook are brief, silly, shallow, and, pretty much, meaningless. It’s just for fun.
Through Facebook I’m able to keep track of my nephews, nieces, cousins, their kids, and old friends from high school, college, seminary, and former churches.
These aren’t real friendships. We don’t bear each other’s burdens. We just stay in touch.
And there are Christians who want that kind of Christianity. They don’t want a real relationship with God or Jesus Christ or a Christian community and all that that entails, the responsibilities, the commitments, the work, the effort. They want to be Facebook friends. They want to stay in touch with Jesus and they are willing to sit in the pew or read the Bible and be an audience for him, as long as, from time to time, he’s willing to return the favor.
FOLLOWERS of Jesus take the relationship to the next level.
They are not content to be just fans, wearing the garb, talking the lingo, singing the songs and then forgetting about it when they hit the parking lot and the drive home.
They are not even content to be Facebook Friends with Jesus, just listening to him and expecting him to listen to them in return.
They listen to Jesus and then they actually try to do what he says to do. They are willing to, from time to time, actually try out the life that Jesus commends to them – the love, the charity, the faith, the trust, the hope. They actually try, whenever they can, to be like Jesus.
Whenever it’s appropriate and not too risky, they do what Jesus says to do.
Whenever it’s not too expensive and they can be reasonably sure of success they act the way Jesus said to act.
Whenever it doesn’t take them too far away from their goals or their chosen destination, they are willing to actually follow the “road less traveled.”
They are not unlike Solomon.
Today’s Old Testament reading is the story of Solomon’s ascendancy to the throne of his father, David.
The reading begins at I Kings 12:10-12, then it skips thirty five verses and goes to Chapter 3 verses 3-14 wherein Solomon asks God to bless his reign as king and God offers Solomon whatever he asks for. Solomon, of course, asks for wisdom, which is the magic word because when he says it all the sirens go off and the fireworks explode and God congratulates him for choosing well and gives him wisdom and everything else that he could have asked for but didn’t – power, wealth, fame, women, the whole ball of wax.
Only, what, I wondered, did the lectionary committee leave out when they skipped over those thirty five verses back in chapter two. So I went back there and read those verses and here’s what I discovered:
Solomon executes Adonijah, his brother;
Solomon executes Joab, David’s cousin;
Solomon executes Shimei, who cursed David;
Solomon executes anyone who questions his right or ability to hold the throne;
Solomon fires and replaces Abiathar, the high priest; and Solomon signs a treaty with Egypt and marries the daughter of Pharaoh to seal a peace treaty between their countries and takes her back with him to live in Jerusalem just to make sure Pharaoh doesn’t go back on his word.
Then and only then, when he is firmly seated on the throne, when his detractors and challengers have all been fired or executed and when the only country big and powerful enough to be a threat has signed a treaty and he is holding the daughter of Pharaoh in his palace as a guarantee that the treaty will be kept…then, he is ready to ask God for wisdom and follow God’s advice.
Well, at least he did ask for wisdom. At least at some point he decided that slash and burn and kill and threaten and intimidate was no way to rule a country and maybe he ought to ask what God had to say on the subject. So give him credit for that. He may have come late to the wisdom party but at least he came, he showed up.
And so it is with those who are FOLLOWERS of Jesus as we have described them, here. They may not be perfect in their devotion, they may want to put off the difficult parts of following Jesus until their financial picture is secure, or the kids have moved out, or until the economy recovers or the dog dies, but at least they want to follow Jesus. They actually do make the effort to behave as Jesus said to behave, and good for them.
It’s just that there is another level, a level of devotion more perfect even than that of the follower. And while it sounds a little off putting, it is, I think, the most perfect level of all.
Let’s call this follower of Jesus the FANATIC.
I know that fanaticism is usually thought of as a negative, something to be rejected, eschewed and avoided, but allow me a moment to explain what I mean in this context.
First, let me acknowledge that in the English language the word “fan” was, at one time, just the short form of the word “fanatic.” The two words meant, virtually, the same thing. Of course, that is no longer the case. Fans are rarely fanatics and fanatics are something quite different from your run-of-the-mill fans.
As a friend of mine explained it, a fan is someone who dresses up like Brutus Buckeye on certain Saturdays in the fall of the year. A fanatic is someone who has a tattoo of Brutus Buckeye the size of a dinner plate on his chest.
Now, what I am going to suggest is that, in today’s gospel lesson from the sixth chapter of John, Jesus is, in fact, calling us beyond being a fan, beyond being a friend, even beyond being a follower. Jesus is calling us to be fanatics in our devotion to him and the message that he brings. He uses a metaphor to make this important point and the metaphor is that of bread.
Like Bread
Bread, in the Middle East is, today, a mainstay of life, even as it was 2,000 years ago. Hardly the fluffy, white stuff we use to make our bologna sandwiches, this is tough, grainy, nutritious stuff, filled with vitamins, necessary carbohydrates and fiber.
In the time of Jesus, as today, the local bread was what we would call large pita bread, flat disks about 10-18 inches in diameter, and an adult man could be expected to eat as many as three in a meal. Prisoners, however, were given one a day. The bread was also used as a spoon to scoop meats and stews from clay pots. Flat and unleavened, it was dry, durable and filling and usually had to be soaked in flavored olive oil to make it palatable. By the first century the Romans had introduced variety and artistry to the Middle Eastern science of bread making. Barley, rye, wheat, corn and other grains were being used and leavening, salt, and sugar were making bread lighter, tastier, and more digestible though it was still far from what we know as bread, today. Roman bread was heavy, dense and grainy.
And in both cases, whether we are talking about European bread or Middle Eastern bread, it was the staff of life and the mainstay of most people’s daily diets, especially those who could not afford meat on a regular basis, who had to sell the fish they caught in order to pay for other necessities, and for whom fruits and vegetables were rare, seasonal treats.
Bread is mentioned over 390 times in the Bible, 85 times in the New Testament, twenty of those in the gospel of John (the most of any New Testament book). Of the twenty times John uses the word “bread,” seventeen of them occur in the sixth chapter. Four of those are preceded by the words, “I am.”
In the RSV and KJV the Hebrew words for bread and food are often used interchangeably which indicates how much bread was a mainstay of the daily diet. Bread is often referred to as the “staff” of life because it was something that people leaned on for nutritional support as a shepherd might lean on his staff.
To be out of or “without bread” was the lowest form of poverty and often a metaphor for hopelessness.
In the Old Testament bread is used as a metaphor for anything that might have an effect on a person’s life, good or bad, but in the New Testament bread is used metaphorically only to refer to the coming kingdom of God or to Jesus himself.
By the time of the early church corporate worship usually took place around the meal table where bread was broken and the phrase “breaking bread” came to mean both eating together and worshipping together.
With bread that important to the daily existence of his audience, it is not surprising that Jesus would choose it as an abiding metaphor for his life, his ministry, and the relationship he had with his followers. And John devotes an entire chapter (6), 71 verses of his gospel to that metaphor.
Think for a moment about what happens when you eat a piece of bread.
It is digested and becomes part of you. You and the bread become one, inseparable. It supplies you with nutrients that are necessary for living and you, by eating the bread, enable it to fulfill its purpose, to provide nutrition.
Jesus says that our relationship with him is to be not unlike the relationship we have with the bread that we eat at our meals. We are to take him into our lives and he is to become part of who we are. We are to become as inseparable from Jesus Christ as we are from the bread we ate for breakfast, today.
It is no longer enough to admire Jesus.
It is no longer sufficient to listen and talk to him like a Facebook Friend.
It is no longer satisfactory to try to follow him whenever we have the time and the energy to do so.
We are called, in this passage, beyond all of that to a new level of total commitment.
Christianity is not just a good idea. It’s not just one ethical road among many. Jesus is not just our Facebook Friend or our moral trailblazer.
Christianity is a radically different way of living and relating to the world around us. It is challenging and demanding and expensive and hard. It is scandalous in its implications and downright scary in its requirements. It calls us to question everything we thought we knew and every assumption we ever made or accepted.
Jesus puts this all in plain language when he says that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.” Nothing was more abhorrent to first century Jews than breaking the dietary restrictions set down in Leviticus and chief among those was that no human was ever to drink blood of any kind or eat human flesh under any circumstances. Even to use human flesh and blood as a metaphor, as Jesus does here, was a horrible breech of propriety. And, yet, it is this very metaphor that Jesus chooses to show the radical demand of Christianity — demands that would be taken up only by a fanatic.
But, uncomfortable as it may make us, fanatical is exactly what Jesus is calling us to be.
FANTATICAL in our devotion to him; FANATICAL in our commitment to his way; FANATICAL in our acceptance of God’s grace and Good News; FANATICAL in our affection for each other; FANATICAL in our care for the broke and the broken; FANATICAL in our allegiance to his kingdom; FANATICAL in our dedication to peace; FANATICAL in our faith; FANATICAL in our hope; FANATICAL in our love.
This, says Jesus in the Gospel of John, is life lived abundantly, authentically, eternally. This is what is given to us if we will but eat of the true Bread of Life.
