‘FOLLOW ME’
A SERMON IN IONA ABBEY, 10 AUGUST 2008
By Rev. Dr John Vincent, Leader of Ashram Community
Will You Come and Follow Me?
(tune: Kelvingrove, Scottish traditional)
Will you come and follow me
if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know
and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown
in you and you in me?
Will you leave yourself behind
if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare
should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer
in you and you in me?
Will you let the blinded see
if I but call your name?
Will you set the prisoners free
and never be the same?
Will you kiss the leper clean
and do such as this unseen,
and admit to what I mean
in you and you in me?
Will you love the ‘you’ you hide
if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside
and never be the same?
Will you use the faith you’ve found
to reshape the world around
through my sight and touch and sound
in you and you in me?
Lord, your summons echoes true
when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you
and never be the same.
In your company I’II go
where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I’II move and live and grow
in you and you in me.
John L. Bell and Graham Maule
Follow me –
So peremptory, unintroduced, unjustified, unexplained, the call to follow addressed to Peter and Andrew and James and John. It left space for enlightened scholars to invent reasons for the sudden call, and explanations for the life-changing and apparently unreasonable response that followed it. But the text of Mark gives us nothing. They got up, and left their nets, and followed him.
The ‘following’ theme runs through Mark. The disciples have to follow their Master. What he does they do. Where he goes, they go. The people he eats with, they eat with. The names he gets called, they get called. The new family he gets himself, they also become part of. The glory he thinks awaits him, they also get. The cross which ends him they also must carry, or be killed by.
When it’s supposedly all over, they’ll be told: ‘Get back to Galilee, and to follow me all over again.’ And if they ever question the primacy and unquestionableness of personal following, or try to raise questions about what other disciples ought to do, they’ll be told: ‘Never mind about them. You just follow me yourself.’
So, in this ancient place, we hear again the primal call which creates Christianity anew again and again – the call ‘Follow me’.
Characteristics
John Bell’s incomparable and deeply satisfying hymn ‘Will You Come and Follow Me?’ gives us hints of what this discipleship can mean. The way of following for us today takes its cues from the following of the first disciples. Mark’s story gives five pointers, at least:
1. Unpredictable journey. ‘Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?’ Jesus is on a journey. Disciples go with him. Where Jesus goes depends on his sense of mission. When everyone wants him to stay, he says, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ It’s unpredictable. So discipleship is uncertain, open-ended.
2. Unpredictable company. ‘Will you let my love be shown, will you let my name be known?’ Jesus is a people person; out on the streets. Disciples have to make friends with those he makes friends with – publicans, outcasts, lepers, people outside legal society.
3. Alternative community. ‘Will you risk the hostile stare should your life attract or scare?’ Jesus is excluded from Church: his synagogue does not want him. Jesus creates a new Community, unrecognised and ridiculed by most people.
4. Pouring out. ‘Will you let the blinded see … will you set the prisoners free?’ Jesus transforms homes into sanctuaries, sows’ ears into satin purses, and victims into partners, as he ‘pours himself’ out to others.
5. Political ministry. ‘Will you use the faith you’ve found to reshape the world around?’ Jesus opposes enemies of the common people. Jesus pioneers and practises an alternative society which begins to change everything around it.
Practice
This model of discipleship-following worked itself out in the shared project of Jesus in his day – to constitute the human divine reality on earth, and initiate the divine realm on earth.
We set the two side by side in our ‘Mission Statement’ for the inner-city Burngreave Ashram in Sheffield. Our purpose, we say, is to be ‘a sign of the Incarnation’, and ‘a place where Kingdom of God things might happen’.
The pattern works out. For us as individuals sharing in this community action.
1. Unpredictable journey. Only the vague but sufficient sense that Jesus ministered in the Galilean ‘inner cities’ of his day was the ‘call’ to put ourselves in the inner cities. But Spital Hill in Sheffield, even as inner city, proved an at times hideous adventure into the unknown.
2. Unpredictable company. Who would come? Drug dealers and prostitutes were all around. Would our ‘low threshold’ policy let all the wrong people in? In fact the inner-city poor came in, the failed or escaping sons and daughters of the middle class, the people of the streets, and above all, in recent times, asylum seekers.
3. Alternative community. Once outside synagogue or Christian denomination, a self-called group of second-membership Churchgoers plus post-denominational or non-denominational joiners arises. And the newly opened multi-faith chapel and library now brings in a wider circle. Whoever moves house to join us changes us.
4. Pouring out. We are one by one called to ‘pour out’ our gift for this or that person or group. Our ‘blinded’ are the disturbed and emotionally disabled and our ‘victims’ the asylum seekers. The 'pouring out' becomes mutual. We receive much from them. Both ways, we are a gift receiving community.
5. Political ministry. Our combatants and our colleagues are always with us – community workers, planners, shopkeepers, councillors, street walkers, unemployed, over-employed. And the government’s local New Deal for communities. Many, many stories to tell!
‘Follow me’ always gets you into the total oppression and the total liberation of the highly particular and the highly vernacular – as for Jesus. Today, the old way of Jesus still calls us to follow. And the ‘reward’ is still the same: ‘In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps show.’
Love and footsteps! That’s the heart of ‘Follow me’. Where will it take you?
www.ashram.org.uk
www.utusheffield.org.uk
Ashram Community on Iona
Sources
'Will You Come and Follow Me?', from Heaven Shall Not Wait (Wild Goose Publications, 1987). Words and arrangement by John L. Bell and Graham Maule © 1987 WGRG, Iona Community, Glasgow G2 3DH, Scotland.
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