We made our Baptismal promises a couple of times this month. ..In the Baptismal Covenant (that which makes us God’s people in Christ) we are asked, “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior? and we say “I do.” “Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?” I do. “Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord? I do.That’s who we are. We are the people who have promised to follow Jesus.

Now we all know that with our heads. But sometimes that call to Follow can seem very distant -- not like something I’m supposed to be paying attention to right here, right now, right in the very fabric of my daily life -- I think at those times it isn’t that I don’t take Jesus seriously enough. I think it’s more that I’m not taking mySELF seriously enough. I’ forget, in all the details of getting on with my life, that what I am, first of all, my basic identity (like yours) is that I am -- you are -- God’s person. God’s child. God’s best beloved. God’s self expression.

The good news and the bad news are exactly the same. You belong to God. Like it or not, you belong to God. God cares for you. And God calls you.

And the question isn’t can you follow Jesus, or should you follow Jesus? Of course you can - we can do anything Jesus asks us to, because if we couldn’t do it, Jesus wouldn’t ask us to. And of course we should, because that’s what we’re here on the planet for.

The question is how do you follow Jesus? What’s your path? what’s my path? What is God in Christ calling you to, this day, this week, this year.

And the first place to look is where are you starting from, where are you right now? Who are you, what are you doing, what’s happening in your life? The best words to describe that that I know are f, from a minister and teacher and novelist named Frederick Buechner:

I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to even [a limited and limiting life, it opens] onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife good-bye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day’s work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize God or not to . . . but all the more fascinating because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. . . .If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.