The name Jesus is derived from the Hebrew name Yeshua/Y’shua, which is based on the Semitic rooty-š-ʕ (Hebrew: ישע), meaning “to deliver; to rescue.”  –  Jewish dictionary.

 

A retired Episcopal minister who messages me often – we have become friends online – sent me this message today: “Where the church was wrong was in worshipping Jesus rather than following Jesus. You follow Jesus, say what you will – you are a Jesus person. I long to be one too.”

This message shocked me and stopped me cold. It haunted me throughout the day.

I like the meaning of Jesus’ name – “to deliver; to rescue.” I don’t worship Jesus, as my friend wrote, but I do consider myself a Jesus person. And by that, I mean that it is my work and my calling to lift up people who need encouragement,  support or warm shoes in the winter.

I am not related to God and am the furthest thing from a diety. But to me, Jesus stands for helping the weak, the list, the needy, and the vulnerable. There is a difference between worshipping Jesus, which I can’t do, and following him, which is relatively easy to do.

I always felt the urge to do it, but only later in life did I figure out how to do it, and make room in my life for it. Being a Jesus Person is a strange thing for someone born Jewish, turned Quaker, and uncertain about the existence of God.

Jesus was the world’s first great and devoted humanitarian. There is nothing about his life that I can’t follow or learn from or listen to.

I don’t have to worship him to follow him, I thought of him when I ran into the stamp story. The stamp story was the beginning of my long road on the path to becoming a Jesus person.

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When I was teaching creative writing at NYU some time ago, one of my graduate students came to me during a scheduled conference and was close to tears. His parents were threatening to stop paying for his college tuition unless he promised to get a business degree and seek work on Wall Street, as his father did.

Life was risky, his father said, he had to have a good job in order to raise a family and be secure. He wouldn’t support anything else.

His son was as miserable as I can recall any of my students being. He was one of my best students, a natural writer, a thoughtful and curious person, and a hard worker.

I loved his writing about stamps, his hobby.

I could see his father had made him ashamed of his love for stamps, he thought it sissy-like, something I heard quite often from my father about my wanting to write and avoid sports.

How did he feel about this? I asked him. Let’s call him J —.

He said he was miserable about it, he didn’t want to work in business or ever work on Wall Street. I sidestepped what his father said.

What, I asked, did he really want to do? What did he love?

He loved collecting stamps, he said, he had been collecting them and studying them all of his life. That was his passion, that’s what made his heart sing.

But there was no making a living with stamps, he said. That’s what his father said.

His two essays in my class were about the origin of a half-dozen stamps in his collection. He wrote about them with feeling and a sense of passion. This, I thought, was his bliss.

I asked him to come and see me in a few days, we made another appointment.

I went to the school library and took out a half dozen magazines published for philatelists. I figured if there were five or six stamp magazines, there had to be jobs and there had to be stamp collectors.

Even then, I thought the people who did what they loved were blessed, there was something sacred about it. Life is too short to be a slave to anyone, I thought.

(Today, there are more than five million stamp collectors in the United States, I don’t know how many there were then. But the philatelist magazines I saw were fat and stuffed with ads. There was nothing shabby about working in this area.)

I called two of the magazines – you could do that then –  and spoke to their editors, and told them I was an NYU professor and had an exceptional student who loves stamps and wrote beautifully about them and was being pressured to work on Wall Street by his father.

The editor asked for his name and I sang the boy’s praises and he wrote it down.

“Tell him his father is a jerk, and have him call me, we have an opening, he sounds just right.” J met with the editor and was offered a job, and he said he would think about it – he was terrified of his father –  but asked to keep it all a secret until the semester was over.

I was away for much of the summer and didn’t return to college until January. I didn’t hear from J–and assumed he had done what his father had asked. At least I tried.

That Christmas, I got a letter from J, who had been trying to call me at school. He was working at the magazine and had already been promoted twice. He was happier than he had ever been, and I called him and spoke with him and asked him how he made the decision.

He told his father he didn’t need his money to do what he wanted with his life.

“You did it,” he said. “You told me I could do it. You told me I was good enough to do it. I needed someone to say that, and thank you for it.” I remember blushing.

“You did it because you wanted to do it,” I suggested, embarrassed and unsure of what to say.

Every year, the week after Christmas, J has sent me a letter thanking me for changing his life.  He became editor of the magazine and wrote about stamps for the rest of his life, which ended a year or so, according to his wife, who continued the practice of the Christmas letter.

She thanked me also. She said he was happy in his work and his life.

It was just a sentence or two that did it. J was not poor but he was needy and vulnerable. All he needed was some encouragement and some help. He did the rest. It was simple and cost nothing.

I learned then to tell somebody when they do a good job.

I learned to tell people that they can be what they want to be, they can do it. I know some can and some can’t, but I also know that everyone needs to hear that. J planted the seed in me. I guess you could call it the Jesus Seed.

I agree with the Minister, and I am proud to be a Jesus person, worship him or not.  I am much too flawed to see myself as holy in any way.

I see that many Christians who worship Jesus seem to know nothing about who he was, or what he believed. They betray his teachings in their elaborate churches and political plotting and promotion of division.

Perhaps it’s better to follow him rather than kneel before him.

I have no trouble identifying as a Jesus person, even though there is nothing sacred about me. He was devoted to the idea of human beings being better, empathetic, and compassionate. I often fail at that but have never given up trying.

I think if enough people remember who Jesus really was – he would be ashamed of many of his “worshippers” now – they might follow in his footsteps. To me, Jesus personifies the idea of being awakened to good, even though being “woke” has somehow become a dirty word.

Our work in the Army of Good is not Christian work literally, but it is Jesus’ work in many ways.

He called out to his followers to care for the poor, the needy, and the vulnerable, to share what we had with them, and make sure they were clothed and fed and given comfort. Somehow, this message reached me.

So this is what we do, this is what I do, for the Mansion residents, for the Bishop Maginn refugee students, and for their families. We do what we can, and we share what we have.

I speak for no one but myself, but the idea is to deliver and to rescue.

I don’t worship, I just follow.