Thank you for your recent letter to the clergy and other rostered ministers in our Synod, asking us to consider “following Jesus” as our highest vocational priority. Your laudable pastoral letter set me thinking. How do we follow Jesus these days? Obviously, all of us have to find a way to do more than just talk the talk. But what?
So I want to share a preliminary thought with you, to see what you think. To this end, in recent years I’ve found it helpful to hold on to one text for dear life, Matthew 5:37: “Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one” (NRSV). Which leads me to say, emphatically, with you: Yes, let’s follow Jesus. But to what or to whom shall we say No!? We all know, from the history of philosophy, as well as from Jesus, of course, that saying Yes by itself is meaningless.
Will we say just the same old critically important things, when we say No? Such as: renouncing the world, the flesh, and the Devil? Or have we followers of Jesus in the U.S. arrived at a Kairos moment for the birth of a new Confessing Church movement? Which would mean that as we say Yes to Jesus, we will also say, specifically and concretely, a resounding No to the inroads of proto-fascism in our national life? And I will name names. I mean the dangers posed by the governance of Donald Trump. Consider his proposal to set up “camps” for “illegals,” for example. Haven’t we heard that kind of threat before?
Probably not a time for Lutheran discipleship-as-usual, in other words. Perhaps a time to read Luther afresh, through the eyes of Bonhoeffer? Perhaps a time not only to process into the house of the Lord in order to revitalize our discipleship in the community faith, but also a time to process out on to the streets in order to embody our discipleship in public? What do you think?