The Dust of Your Sensei - John 1:29-42

We don’t really do sermon series at Christ Church. Each Sunday, we try to respond to what the spirit draws us toward in the Scripture readings of the day. But on occasion, those readings line up to make one sermon follow another. Today is one of those days. We might title this miniseries: What is the church?

Last Sunday, Kate drew on N.T. Wright’s definition of the church as a “small working model of God’s new creation.” This Sunday, I’m going a little less Oxford and a bit more San Francisco, with a definition from the pastor Mark Scandrette. The church is a “Jesus Dojo.”

A dojo, for those who don’t know, is a school for martial arts. There are classes and there are teachers. But all those words—school, class, teacher—can give the wrong impression of the kind of education a dojo offers. When we hear school, we think of a place with lectures and chalkboards, a place to gain the kinds of knowledge that can be found in books. A dojo, instead, is a school of practice. It is where students learn to align their minds and bodies, and even their whole way of life, according to the pattern of the martial art. Through that practice, a community is formed—all the students working together, at their various levels of skill and experience, to become masters like their sensei.  All of which makes a dojo a lot like the church. We too are a community of practice. We too are gathered to learn the way of our sensei. Don’t believe me? Then let’s look at our Gospel today.

By this point in John’s Gospel, we haven’t even heard Jesus speak. Instead, after a beautiful prologue about strange realities like Logos and Light, we find ourselves with John the Baptist. It is John who draws our attention to Jesus. Like a humble master, he doesn’t put out an ad, there’s no marketing plan. Instead, Jesus simply lives as a master of life in the ways of God, and John sees it. After calling attention to Jesus twice in two days, two of John’s disciples take note. Like students hungry to learn, they follow their master’s leading to seek out this new teacher. It is then that we have the first words Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John: “What are you looking for?”

It’s a profound question, the question of desire. Consider it for yourself. What are you looking for? I had a priest mentor who once told me that whenever someone comes to church, they are looking for something. I think that’s true, at least it’s always been true for me. Why did you get out of bed this morning and make your way here to this place, to be with these people? What is that you hoped to find?

Maybe you don’t have a clear answer, and that’s okay, because these two disciples walking behind Jesus don’t seem to know either. All they seem to know is that whatever it is they are seeking, being with Jesus is how they hope to learn it. So it is that they answer, Rabbi, where are you staying? By calling him rabbi, they have opened themselves to the education of their desires according to the curriculum of Jesus. By following him to where he is staying, they will find a life of abiding, not only with Jesus, but with the whole life of God in which Jesus is grounded.

John, who assumes his audience is not familiar with the Hebrew and Aramaic terms of his story, tells his audience that rabbi means teacher. But as with all translations, there’s something incomplete here. A rabbi in the first century wasn’t simply someone who had a school, a teacher of students. Instead, a rabbi was an exemplar of a holy life who could teach others to do the same. A far better translation of Rabbi is sensei. Sensei, in Japanese, means “the one who comes before,” which says pretty much what the students of a rabbi were to do. There’s a first-century Jewish blessing that says, “May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.” That’s what comes when you follow someone closely on the dirt roads of daily life. And that is what disciples were called to do in relation to their rabbi.

If you, like me, would like to be part of a church that’s more of a Jesus dojo than a nice social institution with some God talk, then let’s take a look at the three activities disciples were called to do in following their rabbi. As laid out in John Mark Comer’s excellent book, Practicing the Way, the call of discipleship is this: Be with your rabbi, Do what your rabbi does, and become like your rabbi. Our question today, then, is in this Jesus dojo, how do we follow our sensei.

I recommend Comer’s book for exploring this question further, and I plan to lead a study of it this Spring, but for today, we’ll start where the disciples in our Gospel started. Rabbi, where are you staying? We have to go where Jesus is and be there with him. That was easier for those who were physically present to Jesus in first-century Palestine, but I think there are three ways open for us to be with Jesus now and learn from him.

The first is simply to be in his presence. As the Gospel of John opens, Jesus is the Word of God through which all things find their meaning. Or as Paul would later put it, Jesus is the one in whom all things hang together. This means that in some way, Jesus is available to us as a personal presence even now. To be present to that presence is the work of prayer. Such prayer can look different ways. I heard of one woman who sat down with her coffee each morning and made herself available to Jesus. “Coffee with Jesus” is what she called it. Others sit in silence, meditating on the name of Jesus. Whatever the method, a personal presence to Jesus is what we should seek. That’s how we’ll be covered in his dust.

The second way is by reading the Gospels daily. We need to be wrapped up in the stories of Jesus’s life. The Gospels are the best thing we have to watch what Jesus does and find our way toward imitating him. A simple way to start is to use the reading suggested for Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer. You can also read through a particular gospel straight through, trying out various fresh translations. If you’ve never read Eugene Peterson’s The Message, I’d recommend that. For the more scholarly, try Sarah Ruden’s The Gospels.

And we don’t have to simply read the stories; we can enter into them. The Jesuits have a spiritual practice called “imaginative contemplation,” where you place yourself in the story, imagining the scene with all of your senses. This can be a profound way to be in the presence of your rabbi. Whatever the method, the point is to be immersed, every day, in the story of Jesus.

Finally, Jesus tells us that he will be found in those who are hungry and thirsty, the sick, and those in prison. Throughout the gospels, we find Jesus with those in need, with those who are desperate for a different world. It is with such people that we are most likely to find ourselves near to Jesus. It is with those who have been broken, and in our own brokenness, we will find ourselves most open to the presence of Jesus, for he is the Rabbi who has come to heal the world, as John said so long ago.

As a church, we have been invited into a community of dusty disciples, a dojo for learning and practicing the way of Jesus. Our work is to walk behind the one who goes before us, our sensei, our rabbi. To begin this work, we can join with those very first disciples who asked: Rabbi, where are you staying? And go there with him, learning to abide where he abides. It is through such a path and practice that our lives will become glimmers of light for the world, and gathered together, we will form a flame by which we can witness God’s way of love to a world that does not know how to be free of its hate. I can think of no more important work, and it all begins by being with the one who goes before us. Amen.