Follow Me

Where do you turn to find wisdom today? We now have access to incredible amounts of information, but how do you sort out what is important? We have the technology to do so many things, but how do we decide which of those things are worth doing? We can travel very fast, but as we race through life, how do we know if we are going in the right direction? We have more things than any generation before us, but has it all made us happier or more useful or better people? We are charting the human genome, figuring out many of the processes that go on in the human brain, but how much do we really understand about what it means to be created in the image of God? Where do you find wisdom today? How do we know what to do with all the possibilities before us?

In our skit the confirmands went to listen to the proverbial wise man in the Himalayan Mountains. I can tell you about that, I’ve been there. We lived in Nepal for two years, in the Kathmandu Valley in the Himalayas. I used to visit at a Buddhist training center on the edge of the valley. They twice asked me to speak to their students about Christianity. We had some of the monks over for supper. We had great discussions. It raised some questions for me that I had never thought of before. But I came away more convinced than ever that Jesus Christ is head and shoulders above Buddha as a source of truth and wisdom. Buddha was a man of incredible dedication and insight. He worked out a system for coping with the suffering of the world, and it helps in coping with suffering. But Buddha didn’t claim to know real truth. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” And I believe him.

Log on to the Internet and you can find many millions of bits of information and every crank idea under the sun. But where can you see wisdom that is integrated, a system that you can live with where the different ideas fit together? Where can you actually see it lived out? Not on the Internet.

I look to Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom for life. And he invites every one of us, our confirmands and every worshipper here to follow him, to be his disciple, to learn from him.

That’s our number one goal here, to work together to become faithful disciples of Jesus, to help as many people as possible to know Jesus personally and live like he did. Confirmation is a big part of that.

Our text for this morning is Luke 5:27-32. “After this, he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, `Follow me.' And he got up, left everything and followed him.

Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and sitting at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, `Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and `sinners'?' Jesus answered, `Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.'"

Imagine with me two 1st century Jewish rabbis having an argument about who was better at training his students, his disciples. The argument might end with a challenge. Let one of them put together a list of the hardest people to teach about the things of God and then let the other one prove his skill by molding people from this list of most difficult people.

Tax collectors would have made any top ten list of the hardest people to teach about godliness. Levi’s boss would have paid the Romans all the taxes they had assessed for the district in advance, out of his pocket. They had their money and didn’t care much how he reimbursed himself. He and his employees were pretty free to collect any taxes they wanted on anything they wanted to tax, and what they could get went into their own pockets. And did they ever take advantage of that! They charged taxes on things like walking on the roads, how many axles on your wagon, and admission to markets for shopping, crossing bridges, buying imports or selling exports. There were taxes everywhere. And each agent had a lot of power to decide how much you should pay. The system just begged to be abused.

According to Jewish laws tax collectors were not allowed to give testimony in court, because it was just assumed they were liars. We actually have a comment written by one rabbi that it was especially hard for a tax collector to come to repentance before God.