“Jesus didn’t say ‘Take up your lounge chair and follow me’, Jesus said, ‘Take up your cross and follow me!’ Take up a cross. A cross—an instrument of torture and death. Jesus said take that up! It’ll be hard. It’ll be tiring. It’ll be costly. It’ll be painful. It may even kill you. But you have to remember, you’re not going on a vacation when you sign up to follow the Lord, you’re building a Kingdom and preparing for a Kingdom!”
Many years ago, I heard our late Bishop Joe Bethea say those words to a group of teenagers who had come down from Massachusetts to work on South Carolina’s sea islands in the oppressive summer heat. They had come to work. To work. In the name of Jesus among and with and for migrant workers, the marginalized and the elderly poor served by Rural Mission.
This past weekend, a group of teenagers from the church I serve came back from a similar week of work with Salkehatchie Summer Service in Andrew’s, SC. They were sunburned, scratched, scraped, bitten, and stung. Two even had to see doctors while they were there. But they worked. Worked. In the name of Jesus among and with and for those served by Salkehatchie.
A lot of years and a lot of miles separate those two groups of young people. But what unites them is their understanding that following Jesus is no vacation. Instead, following Jesus is often difficult and more often than not, takes a lot of work. Which, of course, might be why so few people today are willing to truly do it. For despite what many people think, Christianity is not a passive religion. Rather, it is an active, vital, living faith that not only seeks to transform the world, but does not rest until it does! Put another way, if we are truly followers of Jesus, then we are called to put the faith we say we have into action. We are commanded to embody the Scriptures—particularly the lessons of Christ—in our everyday lives, no matter how tough, grueling, tiring or unpopular they may be.
Bishop Will Willimon recently wrote about an example of this after viewing “an exchange of letters between [John] Wesley and Miss J.C. March.” In them, “Miss March had written to Wesley about inadequacies in her spiritual life. Wesley replied, without noticeable sympathy for her plight, chiding her to give up her “gentlewoman” airs and be a disciple of Jesus. How? “Go see the poor and sick in their own poor little hovels. Take up your cross, woman!... Jesus went before you, and will go with you. Put off the gentlewoman; you bear an higher character. You are an heir of God!”
Two years later, in response to Miss March’s continued whining about her sad spiritual state, an aggravated Wesley replied, “I am concerned for you; I am sorry you should be content with lower degrees of usefulness and holiness than you are called to.” It’s vintage Wesley – nobody is too low (or in Miss March’s case, too high) to be outside of the reach of responsible grace. For Father John, faith in Christ meant being busy in Christ’s work, going where Christ goes, doing what Christ commands.”
The great circuit-riding Methodist bishop Francis Asbury died in 1816. At the time of his death, there were 227,000 Methodists in America. Over the course of his ministry, he had traveled 270,000 miles. If you do the math, that works out to 1 member for every 1.25 miles. In that time, he had also preached 16,500 sermons.
It’s hard to imagine anyone doing so much today, let alone in the days when it all had to be done without the benefit of planes, cars, or computers. Frankly, it sounds like an awful lot of work. And it was. But I’m pretty sure Bishop Asbury never gave it a second thought. Because I believe he knew, like another bishop who followed him in South Carolina some two hundred years later, that “you’re not going on a vacation when you sign up to follow the Lord, you’re building a Kingdom and preparing for a Kingdom!”
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