The Weight of the Call
A disciple is a follower. That means there must be someone to follow and that someone wants followers. Considering that, in the gospel accounts, Jesus said “follow me” more often than he said, “believe in me,” we can be confident that there is a call to follow laid upon anyone and everyone who seeks to draw closer to Christ. Yet even a cursory reading of the gospels will reveal that Jesus never undersold this call. He never tried to convince us that following was an easy or a simple thing. So, we begin our summer worship contemplation with consideration of the weight of the call. Throughout this four-part series, we listen again to the call of the whole people of faith, when God called Abraham to be the beginning – the genesis – of a new nation. Then we lay this ancient call alongside the words and deeds of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew as he confirms and enhances and redirects the call to be the church at work in the world. But here in part one, we are especially mindful of the radical nature of the call to leave everything behind and to live into a new reality, only then to discover the added responsibility of inviting the whole world to come to know the one we follow. Jump in as we consider the weight of the call.
