Followers Of The Lamb

From Christmas to Lent, the gospels offer a walk through familiar mysteries, lights and signs. The Star of Bethlehem, the baptismal Dove and the heaven-shouted name Beloved, disciples coming in the early days.

All the gospels begin Jesus’ signs at the river, but they offer different pictures of what was going on and what happened next, what was shown and who saw it – all those details differ.

Some say the devil is in the details. Some say God is there. Some say it is in the nature of people to experience the same thing differently. Perhaps it is in the nature of God, to be seen differently by each of us.

In John’s gospel, John the Baptist’s words are something akin to a nominating speech at a presidential convention. Jesus is introduced to the crowd as The Man Who: Here is the Lamb of God! says John, and, All my work has been for this, that he may be seen! And, I saw the Dove descend on him at his baptism (so John was the one who saw it), and again, Look, here comes the Lamb of God!

In John we read that Jesus was hanging around the river for days, working the crowds, being acclaimed by John as a man to watch, a man to get to know, a teacher.

We also read that Andrew and Peter, the first two disciples, are spending time around John, looking and listening. John’s gospel presents them as serious seekers, students of hope.

According to Matthew and Luke, Andrew and Peter were called from working their fishing boats, interrupted in their work, drawn to Jesus by a miracle of filled nets in one gospel and by the demand of friendship in another, or perhaps by their sense of adventure. But in John’s account they choose Jesus. They have no prior connection to him, they turn to him because John recommends Jesus as the teacher most worth embracing. According to John, it is here that Jesus gives Peter his name, the Rock. It’s a serious name for a serious man, where, in the other gospels, it is a droll name for a dear man who is often a fool.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged from the milling crowd around Rosa Parks and stepped out as the teacher and preacher to the US, a population groaning and straining in a river of dark dreams, what unfolded seems so amazing as to have been destined, so unparalleled as to have been a fullness of time. In hindsight, his years among us seem so brief as to be a life well worth studying, a life that led to a death worth remembering, in which something that could never die was present on the earth.

Rosa Parks had been working for years for such a moment and such a movement, such a time and such a transformation. King came and brought to it his particular blessing, his ability to speak with a voice that brought a vast array of people into the circle. With some reverence we can say that she baptized him into his powerful ministry among us, that she was his forerunner, and that he was the one for whom she had been waiting.

There was a sense of dropping what they had been doing and turning to the moment. But there was a larger context, more like the gospel of John, in which they had each spent years in preparation for the roles they would assume. There was a sense of miracle about their mutual moment, and the coalescing of a core of people around King for the time, but that does not diminish the years of serious seeking and learning that all of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement had been about. There was the experience of everyone seeing what was happening, and struggling to understand it together. But there was also plenty of time alone, before and after the speeches, and in jail (where John and Jesus, and Martin, would spend time), when the light that kept them going had to be within.

The stories, of where this light came from, who carried it to whom, when it emerged and what was learned, are still being told. Just this year, the film Twelve Years a Slave was able to be made and released, here in America, where this much truth about the history of slavery could not have been shown on film before. And it grew out of the light that shone then, fifty years ago, a light that is remembered – and seen – still.

All these lights – all these baptisms and new beginnings – and becoming followers of light- is about becoming part of the Great Story, in all its particulars and in the many different names and tellings by which it lives on.