Against Easy
A sermon brought forth from Mark 13:5-7 and 2 Peter 1:16-2:3, 17-19 preached on July 9, 2023
Don’t you love it when you learn a new word. I learned a new one recently: Funambulist. A man named Jean-Francios Gravelet, born in 1825, was perhaps the greatest of them: he was a tight-rope walker. His most spectacular feat was walking a three-inch thick tightrope across a 1,000-foot chasm over Niagara Falls.
Newspapers from all across the country followed him to the Falls that day—most of them speculating how bad his inevitable plunge into the raging water would be. It was a vertical drop of 165 feet. Right before he began his 1,000-foot daredevil walk, he offered to carry a volunteer over on his back. Surprisingly, no one took him up on it.
He made it across. The walk took him a little over 17 minutes. He stopped to rest at one point. He also decided it would be fun to stand on one leg for a bit, which drew cheers from the gathered crowd. It was almost as if he was playing around out there. Loving every minute of it. Like what he was doing wasn’t a matter of life and death, but more like child’s play. As he was planning his walk, he said once that he considered it an easy task. By all accounts, he made it look easy, too.
It’s not difficult being Christian in America. The word not only doesn’t get any of us in trouble. It actually makes our way easier. We trust a Christian. All a politician needs to do is call them self a Christian, and all the sudden we stop asking hard questions about what they believe and how and why it matters to them. Being a Christian is easy. But following Jesus—that another matter entirely.
We live in a time when being a Christian and following Jesus are two different things. Anybody can call themselves whatever they want, but like Jesus declares in another translation of this passage, even wolves can dress themselves up in sheep costumes. You can dress yourself up as a healthy tree, but it’s the quality of the fruit you bear that will give you away. Calling ourselves Christians—that’s easy. Following Jesus is hard.
Some people talk about a flash moment in their lives when all the sudden they were saved. A moment when time split into two—before Christ and after Christ. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a conversion like this. I have a story that goes a bit like that. Maybe you do, too. But if these words from Jesus have anything to do with it, a moment is not what matters. How we follow is much more important to Jesus than anything we call ourselves.
Following Jesus isn’t a one-time choice. It isn’t an event. It’s a movement along a path. It’s a step forward, and then another, and then a million more after that. And each step is a choice—a choice about how we will walk through this world, this life, this hour, this minute. It’s a call to look at the right things while we take this journey. A choice about what we will carry in our hearts, in our minds, in our mouths along the way. The words we use, we direction we move. And at the heart of this journey, this constant following after Jesus, step by step, is holy discernment.
This is what separates followers of Jesus from those who merely call themselves Christians and leave it at that. Being Christian takes a decal for the back of your car. Following Jesus takes discernment. The way of discipleship—the Jesus Way—is narrow. It’s a 1,000 foot walk across a tightrope. Every step a measured one, a prayer-filled one.
According to Jesus, the Way isn’t safe. It’ll be treacherous, and hard, and confounding. You might lose your balance and fall down and have to get back up again, but maybe falling is exactly how you know you’re on it—because walking this Way is not easy.
If Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as He calls Himself in another part of scripture, and if the Way is narrow, then it cannot be up to us to walk it. If we choose to give ourselves to the Way—a way of speaking and thinking, imagining and praying—we cannot follow Jesus any which way we like. There are many ways to walk these days. Lots of paths to give ourselves to. Is the route we take, the way we talk, the way we treat each other—the way we do everything—is it congruent with the Way of Jesus?
The early church was up against a great threat. Peter called them false prophets and Paul called them “super apostles.” If you read through the letters of the New Testament, you can’t miss this. These were the Joel Osteens, the Creflo Dollars, and the Kenneth Copelands of the first Century. They had shiny suits and big white teeth and made their way into towns across the Mediterranean and in Jerusalem.
They were impressive looking is what I mean, and they said all the right words but with none of the authenticity. They made Jesus look attractive, too. There were more than a few of them, and their numbers grew exponentially, because who wouldn’t want the kind of devoted attention, especially from people who think you’re speaking on behalf of God. Once you say that, people will eat up anything you say. Throw a bit of Jesus language and you can get away with more.
The message of these super apostles varied, but Peter has them figured out, and he needs his church to know that how to tell what a wolf looks like even if it’s wearing sheep’s clothing. They’ll be greedy. They’re needful even if they don’t appear to be much in need of anything. They’ll make the Good News look like a self-improvement program. “Sign up with Jesus and this is what you’ll get.”
Peter warns the Christ-faithful of his day and ours that Jesus-language is not enough. Jesus was never into appearances.Love gives up its life for others—and it’s messy trench-work.
So, how do we know where we are? Which way is the right way and how do we find it? For that, we should turn to 1 John chapter 4.
“Dear friends,” the apostle writes, “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
“This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.”
Test each and every spirit, discern everything you hear, everything you say, everything others say and do—compare it to the Way of Jesus. Hold it up to the Way of Jesus, and if it doesn’t fit, if it isn’t cross-shaped, reject it. Run far away from it. Not only will it be a waste of your time; it will also lie to you, unravel you, bully you into conforming to its ways. And its ways may be far different than the Way of Jesus.
The way of Jesus has certain qualities to it. We need to know those qualities in order to discern our way—to test the spirits. The litmus test to it all is the Cross. The cross is the way of Jesus. This is the Way of death that leads to real life. Death to self leads to life in Christ. It’s completely counter-cultural and lop-sided, but the Way of Jesus is the way of servanthood and humility, that will lead us to true freedom. Freedom in Christ. Try convincing your next-door neighbor of that one!
The truth is we will constantly mistake the wide way for the narrow way—life on our terms is much easier than life on God’s terms. But for every one of our missteps on this high wire act of walking the Way, may God’s grace be there like a net below us to catch us, make the landing a soft one, and set us back on the Jesus Way.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.