First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
30 February 2005
Install Dan, Un-installing Disciples
Our gospel story opens just as Jesus gets some bad news. King Herod has arrested John the Baptist. Jesus decides to get out of town. We don't need to speculate about his reasons. It's obvious that it's not safe in Nazareth. And so Jesus moves on.
Now, this isn't the first time that Jesus has given the slip to a tyrant. Matthew's gospel is the one that also relates what we have come to call 'The Flight into Egypt.' You remember—thirty years earlier, Joseph has a dream in which an angel tells him that the first King Herod is plotting to kill the child Jesus, and so Joseph takes him and his mother and flees.
When he hears that Herod has died, Joseph thinks it's safe to leave Egypt and go home. Matthew tells us that Joseph wants to take his family to his father's place in Judea. But before he can saddle up the donkey, Joseph receives yet another dream in which an angel tells him that yet another change of address is necessary because yet another tyrant has come to power. A wary Joseph takes his family to Nazareth in the Galilee instead.
From the beginning of his life, then, Jesus is on the move. In our passage today, he leaves Nazareth for Capernaum. He takes up residence there, Matthew says, but Capernaum turns out to be more a jumping off point than a place to settle down. Even without Herod breathing down his neck, Jesus is peripatetic. He never stays too long in one place.
And the message he preaches is all about moving, too—about turning around and getting unstuck, and about a God whose love is on the move too, getting closer and closer all the time, even and maybe especially when the world's atmosphere is charged with fear and violence. "Get ready," he says, "and be changed. The kingdom is very near."
A kingdom of mercy, free and eager and (some would say) reckless. A kingdom of grace fluid and supple enough to fit itself to every variation of human need, locate us everywhere we hide, anticipate us at every turn. An agile, daring way of life in sharp contrast to the caution of the fearful, the obtuseness of the status quo, and the heavy violence of the powers that be. God's kingdom and its messengers are nimble, moving targets. You can't pin them down. Like the wind, they are on the go, and they go where they will. Their sheer freedom keeps all the rulers up at night devising new traps to put an end to such dangerous divine whimsy.
What happens next in Matthew's gospel only reinforces the connection of God's realm of extravagant and dangerous welcome to a peripatetic life. Matthew places Jesus by the seashore, just walking around. And as he passes by, he calls four men to be his disciples. Just calls them and keeps moving. Those well-established fishermen get up and go after him, leaving everything behind.
Note that they don't follow Jesus from afar. They don't follow him in spirit, in theory, or in principle. They follow him with their feet, the same feet he will wash on the night he is betrayed and arrested. And as they follow with their feet, they give the slip to the fixed points of their culture—home and clan and father and trade. Wherever Jesus' feet pass, things come loose and undone.
All of which makes this perhaps an odd text for an installation. Odd because even as we read a text full of the tireless comings and goings of God's Spirit, we are planning to sign, seal and deliver our conviction that God has called Dan Smith to stay put here with us, to be a fixture in our congregation.
If you've read and taken to heart the documents of the visioning process, you know that we consider the position to which we've called him an important building block, if not a foundation stone, of the implementation of our vision. And so there's something that feels settled and finished about Dan's being here, finally.
Now that he's come, we sure don't want him wandering off, say, to places beyond the known world outside 128, where the earth drops off and dragons patrol the abyss. We want to bind ourselves to each other with solemn promises in the sight of God. We did not come here today with a shrug, as if to say," Yeah, sure, whatever..." We came here today with a made-up mind to pin each other down—to insert Tab A into Tab B and install the man.
Yet this passage is also wonderfully apt for this celebration, because if Dan actually does by God's grace what we have called him here to do, and if we cooperate with that grace as I hope we will, before long things here should start to come undone. If God's Spirit is with him and us, installation should soon be the farthest thing from our experience. We should begin instead to grasp in practice the reason that the Visioning Task Force named the vision a way of hospitality. If it's a way, you are supposed to travel on it. If it's a way and you're walking bit, you won't have much use anymore for a fixed address.
And it's not for nothing that our vision prompted us to call a Minister to help form us for discipleship, because disciples, as we read in Matthew's gospel today, get up and go when they're called. They follow Jesus not from a comfortable intellectual distance, not in spirit, principle, or theory. They follow him with their feet, which is another way of saying 'with their whole lives'; with a willingness, in other words, to loosen themselves from their moorings and become spiritually peripatetic, if not actually mobile. With Dan's help, God willing, we will no longer be content to be pew potatoes, or even (as Garrison Keillor once remarked) to lead good Christian lives, but to follow Christ. We're installing Dan so that he will help the Spirit to uninstall us.
And I think we do require a shake-up. Our church is simply not irritating enough, at least not by the gospel's measure of tyrant-irritation. We have a way to go before we become as agile and free as the kingdom and its messengers are agile and free. A way to go before we find it natural to get and walk around in such a way that we mess with the established order of the world that runs on track so violently and so greatly to the advantage of the few. A way to go before the Herods of this world sit up and take notice of our movements. A way to go before we find ourselves downloading the angelic version of MapQuest so that we too can leave in the middle of the night for new places, staying one step ahead of their threats. A way to go before our feet go where Jesus' finally went—to the cross, where they thought they finally had him nailed down for good. We have a way to go.
Blessedly, we know the way. God has shown it to us in a vision. It's a way of radical openness and dislocation and vulnerability and reciprocity that we (a bit too blandly) call 'hospitality.' And if we were just waiting for Dan to set foot on that way with us, putting off the day we get up and go until we have this new companion, well, now there are no more excuses. He's here! Right now we're going to install him—and watch the un-installation begin!
© 2005, J Mary Luti