Are you a Christian?

Matthew 9:9-13

So many people find this question hard to answer. Maybe that's because it could mean so many different things. "Are you a Christian?' could mean "Are you a good person?" or "Do you go to church?" or "Do you believe in God?" or a variety of other things. But Jesus didn't seem concerned about these things.

I am always surprised at how simply the gospel writers describe the process of people dropping everything and following Jesus. I think there were more details at the time - Matthew probably had heard about Jesus, been to hear him speak, perhaps even engaged Jesus in a one-on-one conversation... But in the retelling of the story, it seems best to simplify it all down to these words: "[Jesus] said to him, 'follow me.' And [Matthew] got up and followed him."

Jesus didn't seem to focus on what people believed. He certainly didn't choose who he spent time with based on how "good" they'd been. He didn't ever ask someone to go to church! What he did do was ask them to follow? SO, maybe the "are you a Christian?" question is actually confusing and unhelpful. What if we asked the question in a different way...

Have you decided to follow Jesus? Easy. Either you have or you haven't. Either you trust Jesus to be a leader and a teacher in your life, or you don't. And if the answer is NO, that's ok - there are a number of really good reasons why people haven't decided to follow Jesus yet. Many people have had bad experiences of religion and the church in particular. Some people have very real intellectual reservations about the Christian faith. Some people have been so hurt by loss that they find it hard to open their hearts to God. Those are all good reasons to delay the decision to follow Jesus. So we're not asking the question to judge anyone, but rather to clarify what Jesus thought was critically important.

I think he believed that LIVING was critically important. He lived his life in a way that is inspiring and worth learning from. That is why we might decide to follow him.

For those of us who have decided to follow Jesus, we are saying that we want to devote ourselves to being learners of Jesus. Living 2000 years after Jesus, means we have to "follow" in the best way we know how. One of the things that the church fails to do is to give sufficient focus to Jesus' teaching and his example. For instance, church has become very formal and respectable. Jesus speaks about Adultery twice in the gospels, and about money and poverty 72 times!!! And yet the church is far more likely to be speaking about sexuality than it is to be heard speaking about the problems of poverty and money in our world...

What does it mean to follow Jesus? It means to ask WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? But so many people think they already know what Jesus would do/say/think. But how do they know? I think we presume to know - and run the risk of deciding ourselves what WE think Jesus would do, rather than allowing him to speak/act etc. Jesus was sometimes outspoken, harsh, threatening - not always gentle, forgiving, and "floppy".

I believe following Jesus means taking him very seriously - it means devoting our lives to the pursuit of understanding Jesus' way of seeing the world, people and situations, so that we will really be able to live with integrity and with insight.

What do you think?