A seminarian asked me if I would take him on for an independent study course in preaching.
“What do you want to study?” I asked.
“I want to learn how to preach like you,” he said.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You can’t. For one thing, you’re from Iowa. To preach like me, you’d have to be born in South Carolina. Besides, I don’t want you to imitate me.”
My reluctance had nothing to do with modesty, a virtue with which I am not overly endowed. It had to do with my discomfort at having a disciple, a young person patterning his way after my way. I don’t want that responsibility. I’d rather not have my errors reflected in someone else.
But then we come to Philippians 3. “Be imitators of me,” says Paul. This is no slip of the Pauline tongue. Paul gives exactly the same advice to the Corinthians, Thessalonians, and Galatians. “Become as I am.” Is there no limit to apostolic presumption?
Picture this: I begin a class by saying, “Class, this is a course in homiletics. The goal of this course is to see how well all of you can imitate me.” It strikes us as the height of conceit!
Instead I say, “Class, I’m going to lay out a few principles, a few interesting (though not my own) ideas; then I want you to make up your own minds. You see, I respect your individuality. I don’t want to force myself on you, or, God forbid, make you disciples of me. I’m not like Paul.”
That’s what I say-because I’m appropriately self-effacing, modest, respectful of your personal freedom.
Translated into honest English, this means: “I want to get through this class without taking responsibility for you.”
Part of this comes because of our stress on individual freedom and individual rights. Unfortunately, loneliness is an unavoidable by-product of a culture that believes guarding individual prerogatives is more important than fostering community.
At a faculty retreat a few years ago, one of my colleagues asked, “Does it bother you that some of our students are sexually promiscuous, that some of them are indulging in self-destructive behavior and addictive practices?”
“Well,” went the response, “we must respect their privacy. They’re all adults; we’re not their mothers.” (Meaning: God forbid that we should hold our students accountable not only for what they know but for who they are. If we did that, then you know what might happen … students might turn and hold us accountable, speak the truth to us about our personal habits and inconsistencies, and then where would we be?)
See? Students have joined in imitating us faculty after all!
As Martin Luther noted, you don’t get apples from a thornbush. You get apples from an apple tree. You get good works from good people.
For Jesus, being good was not an intellectual problem of knowing what I ought to do in this situation. Jesus unabashedly asked not just for agreement; he demanded discipleship-learning the moves, walking the walk, following him down the narrow path that he trod. Jesus asked for imitation. He wanted followers, not admirers.
Lifestyle is converted through lifestyle, and there is no weaseling out of the truth that discipleship is utterly dependent on our being able to identify examples, saints, people worthy of imitation. If we can’t point to examples, even to ourselves, we have very little to say.
If every hundred years or so we cannot point to a Teresa of Calcutta, or a Martin Luther King, Jr., or a Desmond Tutu, we Christians have a problem, because the world is quite right in judging our religion by the sort of lives that it produces. Being Christian is a matter of following someone who is headed somewhere, in a direction I would not have chosen if left to my own devices.
In my last parish, in the middle of a sermon on Lazarus and Dives, I read a Brazilian newspaper account about how the poor of Brazil are selling organs from their bodies. The story quoted a man named Walter who had recently sold his eyes to a rich person for corneal transplant. Walter, who has never had a job, was quoted as saying, “At last I can see my family to a better life.”
I just read the story; that’s all.
Next morning, Monday, when I arrived in my office, the telephone was ringing. It was Debbie, our resident congregational activist, who lived with her teacher-husband in a small house near the church.
“I haven’t slept all night,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because of Walter! I can’t get him out of my mind. I got David up this morning at five o’clock. We talked. We prayed. We were going to get a new car. We can live without a new car. We were going to buy a new stereo. We don’t need it. We are going to double our giving to the church if you can promise this money will go to help someone like Walter.”
I thought to myself, I slept like a baby last night.
My fidelity as a disciple hangs by a slender thread of grace provided me by people like Debbie.
So go ahead. Imitate me. Demand that my miserable, little life be a worthy example. Do me a favor. Don’t let me off the discipleship hook. Insist on congruence between what I practice and what I profess.
Imitate me.
The bread was broken and the wine was poured for Communion. I stretched out my hands over the Table for the eucharistic prayer. A child on the first row was heard to say, “Look, Mommy. He’s trying to look like Jesus.”
I dare not deny it.
William Willimon is dean of the chapel at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Adapted by permission from Preaching to Strangers by Will Willimon and Stanley Haverwas (W/JKP, 1992)
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
