What Would Jesus Do Schwenkfelder Style?
Dr. Drake Williams, 
Minister of Spiritual Enrichment

What Would Jesus Do Schwenkfelder Style?

Good evening everyone.  It's very good that we can all be together tonight as a Schwenkfelder community in Christ. It is a great pleasure to be able to bring the message, and as others who have stood here in this pulpit have said it is an honor to be able to stand in this place where faithful Christians have proclaimed the Christian message for generations.    I have brought my family along tonight.  Many of you from the other churches know me, but you may not know my wife Andrea, my son Henry, and my daughter Abby.  So, let me have them stand so that you can see my better half and our children.  We have a third child due to be with us at end of September so we look forward to that.

We also look forward to this heat wave breaking.  Do I hear an Amen to that?  One thing I look forward to with these conference events is having our brothers and sisters from the city joining us and having an Amen or two interspersed during the message time.  I assure you that tonight I will be especially attentive to the heat we are feeling.  I can assure you that with hot air rising, it is hotter up here.  So, I hope to keep this brief.

Well, it is a blessing for us all to be here. This is the 5^th or 6^th time that I have been to the Salford Pilgrimage, and I find this a wonderful place to worship the Lord.  There is something about worshipping in this place, when we sit on these pews that our spiritual ancestors sat on years ago, and when we open up with song and hear the echoes of generations past singing along with us.  Even though I have been to Salford a number of times these past years, each time I am here, and we open up in song, it is a fresh reminder to me that we as Christians stand in the line of faithful Christians of generations past. This is strength for us as Schwenkfelders when we have Salford Pilgrimage.  We are reminded that our faith is not simply a current expression but is supported by the faith and views of many generations past.  This is surely strength for us today.

Since we are in a place where the past is ever before us, tonight, I would like to think with you about the ways that the thoughts and ideas of Christians and Schwenkfelders from the past can support, strengthen, and challenge our faith.  Tonight, I would like to think with you as Christians and as Schwenkfelders about the acronym, WWJD.  How many of you have seen this acronym, WWJD?  It stands for "What Would Jesus Do?"  Many within youth circles and for that matter church circles around our country are excited about this acronym (WWJD) and how that can be of help for us today.

Let me share with you some of the places where I have come across this acronym.  It is likely that many of you have seen these letters in a variety of places.  Just the other day, I found myself in a traffic jam, on the way to a ballgame over in New Jersey.  I could not help but notice that the car right in front of us was loaded with bumper stickers. I am sure that you all have seen cars loaded with bumper stickers.  Since the car had a little bit of rust on it and since there were so many bumper stickers on it, I wasn't sure whether the stickers were holding the car together or whether the owner was trying to send a message.  After looking a little more closely, though, I could pick out a rather large bumper sticker that said WWJD on it, right in the center, along with a number of other Christian stickers on the back of the car.  Clearly, this car was trying to send some Christian messages, and one of those messages was for us to think about "What would Jesus do?"

That was just, of course, one of many WWJD sightings that I have had along the roadway.  I have seen the letters on other car bumpers, on billboards, on signs just off the side of the road, even on a tree house wall that I saw once off the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. But there are many other places than besides the roadway where I have seen WWJD printed.  There are many tee shirts with the letters WWJD.  I have seen a number of youth wearing them.  The other day I was on the Internet and typed in the letters WWJD into a search engine that scans the entire Internet.  Here I was scanning for the letters WWJD and found well over 50 sites where the acronym WWJD popped up.  As I scanned some of these sites, I found all sorts of ways that WWJD is being promoted and also marketed.  People have made T-shirts, polo shirts, coffee mugs, travel mugs, lapel pins, games, ties, shoestrings, and more all with the WWJD acronym.  I have heard that there are over 14 million WWJD bracelets in circulation today.  By any chance does anyone have one of the 14 million WWJD bracelets on here tonight?

With so much interest and with so many things with WWJD on them being sold, I decided I ought to find out where WWJD came from.  So, I found on the Internet what was called "the official website of WWJD." It is called, not surprisingly, wwjd.com.  From this website, it says that WWJD began in the hearts of a youth group in Holland Michigan.  They were sparked by an author named Charles Sheldon who wrote the novel, In His Steps in 1896.  The novel is about a lowly tramp who was dressed in rags, who disrupted a church in Midwestern Ohio. His repeated pleas for help were disregarded by the members of one particular church.  So one Sunday when these people arrived for church, well dressed and reverent, the tramp upsets their world.  He says in front of this church, "It seems to me, there's an awful lot of trouble in the world that somehow wouldn't exist if all the people who sing such songs went and lived them out."  With that, the tramp dies in this novel, leaving the congregation stunned.  This congregation then pledges to live their lives for one year asking themselves one question - "What Would Jesus Do?"  And hence from this question found in the novel, In His Steps by Charles Sheldon, the acronym and the movement WWJD was born and has now grown to impact many around the world.

Let me now offer some response to this, as a pastor and someone who thinks regularly about the Christian faith.  Generally, I feel that the question, "What would Jesus do?" is a good question for us as Christians to ask.  It is likely that the poor would be helped more if we would ask more often "What would Jesus do?"  It is likely that those who are outcasts will feel more included if we would ask more often "What would Jesus do?"  It is likely that the Christian faith and mission would be propagated further if we regularly asked ourselves "What would Jesus do?"  Thus, it is likely that the result would be as the founders of this WWJD movement state that "the world would indeed be changed for the better one question at a time."

Here, however, let me also say that while this question "What Would Jesus Do?" can be of help for us in our living, we can go and ought to go deeper than what the WWJD movement says.  As Christians who are interested in Scripture, we ought to go deeper than merely asking this question and instead search the Scriptures diligently for "What would Jesus do?" Also as Schwenkfelders, those, who are keenly interested in the historical interpretation of Scripture, what Reformers and other trusted church leaders of the past thought about the Lord, we must go deeper and search our tradition to find out what it has to add to our thinking about "What would Jesus do?"  Now surely tonight, as we sit here in this historic meeting house already having our voices blend with the voices of the past and feeling the pains and the heat that they felt years ago in this place, we ought to go to the past to find out how it informs, enriches, develops, and deepens how we would answer the question "What would Jesus do?"  So, let's go a little bit deeper and recall some Scripture texts that would be of help for us and then let's consider the voices from our own Schwenkfelder past to see how we can answer the question "What Would Jesus Do Schwenkfelder Style?"

Where first can we find the ideas, "What Would Jesus Do?" from the Scriptures?  There are many places that we could look.  An obvious place would be from our Scripture text that we read tonight from the gospel of Mark.  This passage from Mark 8 is not only an important one in Mark because it states Peter's great confession and realization that Jesus is the Christ, but this passage also has a challenge for anyone who would follow Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.  The statements that Jesus makes following immediately on the heels of Peter's great confession, suggests that anyone who confesses Jesus as the Christ, as the anointed one, as the Messiah who came from heaven, then ought to be ready to follow Jesus in this way.

Rereading part of the passage, picking it up in Mark 8:31, we read that Jesus then, ". . . began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again."  Here of course, Jesus is speaking about the road he is going to take to the cross.  This is definitely what he feels called to do.  There are no options that Jesus has from his perspective except that he must go to the cross. 

In fact, Jesus makes this explicitly clear when someone objects to this plan.  Ironically, it is Peter, the leader of the disciples and the one who has just made the great confession.  We read this in verses 32-33, "Peter took him [i.e., Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him.  But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter.  "Get behind me, Satan!" he said.  "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."  That's a pretty harsh rebuke.  Jesus is not just telling Peter that he is wrong or that he is mistaken.  He makes it explicitly clear that Peter's plan for him not to go to the cross, for him not to fulfill his mission on earth of dying for the sins of those who would call him Lord and Savior is not at all what the Lord's will is.  Hence, the sharp rebuke, "Get behind me Satan!"  That's a pretty harsh reply to the one who just moments earlier called him Christ.

Then, the challenge for us as we consider this passage in the light of WWJD "What would Jesus do?" gets quite personal and quite clear why Mark has inserted this into his gospel.  This confrontation between Jesus and Peter is not merely between these two, but is intended to affect us when we hear what Jesus says next in Mark 8:34.  He says, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." 

What is Jesus saying here as we consider answering the question, "What would Jesus do?  Jesus would go to the cross even though he is the Christ, the most significant and important person ever in this world.  And he makes it fairly clear, that if we would do as Jesus would do, then we, too, would also be willing to suffer hardship and follow the road of the cross as well.  So, what would Jesus do and perhaps more importantly, what would Jesus have us do from this important passage from Mark 8?  He would want us to pick up our crosses daily, the cross of suffering and shame.  He would want us to take the road of suffering and shame.  This, unfortunately, does not wash too well in many quarters of Christian living today where happiness and abundant living is talked about often, but it is very clear from Mark 8 that this would be what Jesus would have us do.

Let's consider another passage of Scripture that can help us answer the question, "What Would Jesus Do?"  Here let's consider the second passage of Scripture that we read from the apostle Paul's writing in 2 Cor. 4:7-12.  Paul, of course, is the great missionary apostle of the church. He wrote many books of the Bible.  He was not one of the original 12 disciples, but then one day as he was on the Road to Damascus, he saw a vision of Jesus after Jesus was resurrected.  He fell to the ground blinded by the light of the risen Lord, and then he decided that he would then follow Jesus.  He is the last of the apostles as he says in 1 Cor. 15:8-9.

Now Paul was not present when Jesus turned the water into wine;  he was not present when Jesus fed the 5,000;  he was not present when Jesus spoke the Sermon on the Mount;  and he was never on the Mount of Transfiguration to see Jesus transformed into glory.  But Paul did know how to ask the question, "What would Jesus do?"  He doesn't use this question explicitly in his letters, but he does speak more than any other author of the New Testament does about the idea of imitation.  In fact, he talks about imitation explicitly 10 times in his letters and implies that idea in many other places. Now imitating Jesus is very close to the idea of "What would Jesus do?"  Imitation is the idea of copying, replicating, reproducing, following the example of someone else.  Paul is so bold to claim to the Corinthians that he is repeatedly asking the question "What would Jesus do?" and then living it out in exact agreement with Jesus' will.  He says this clearly in 1 Cor. 11:1 when he encourages the Corinthians, "Imitate me, as I imitate Christ."  So close is Paul's lifestyle to doing what Jesus does that he encourages the Corinthians to follow him.  Paul's life and conduct indicate that he is living as Jesus would have him live and the Corinthians should be living like Paul does as well. 

So, what is Paul's lifestyle like?  He states it pretty clearly in 2 Cor. 4:7-12, and once again the ideas of going to the cross are found just like Mark 8.    He explains to the Corinthians, the people to whom he is writing, that he feels "afflicted in every way and perplexed" in verse 8, he feels "persecuted and struck down" in verse 9, all which is a part of the way of the cross. Then in verse 10 he states it most clearly that he feels as if he is "always carrying in his body the death of Jesus."  Following Jesus for Paul meant doing what is right and being willing to suffer for it, to go the way of the cross, the way of suffering, and hardship.  That very clearly is what Jesus would do and want, and that is what Paul is willing to do.  So, what would Jesus want us to do from the Scripture texts that we have considered from Mk. 8 and 2 Cor. 4?  He would want us to do what is right and be willing to suffer the consequences for it. 

I mentioned earlier that we ought to take a look at this question from our Schwenkfelder tradition to see how that can deepen our understanding of "What Would Jesus Do?"  I came across some interesting writing from a scholar named Max von Habsburg who worked on Caspar Schwenckfeld's writing in St. Andrews, Scotland.  Anyway, Dr. von Habsburg in his article points out that Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig was the first Reformer to translate the classic work by Thomas à Kempis called Of the Imitation of Christ.  This volume is a very well known one.  It has been translated into more languages than any other Christian literature in the world except, of course, the Bible.  It is a point of rightful pride for us as Schwenkfelders that Caspar Schwenckfeld was the Reformer who translated it first.

Obviously, for Schwenckfeld this was an important work for his understanding of the Christian life.  Having now begun a translation project on Schwenckfeld's Catechism, one cannot translate any work from a particular language.  One has to think that it is an important one if one is going to translate.  Translation, simply, takes a lot of time and effort.  Well, anyway, Schwenckfeld was the first Protestant Reformer to translate Of the Imitation of Christ, and he saw it of importance to translate it.  Interestingly, as I was speaking about this with Andy Anders, the editor of the Schwenkfeldian, he told me that Rev. Harvey K. Heebner, the longtime pastor of 56 years for First Schwenkfelder Church used to read Of the Imitation of Christ regularly from the pulpit regularly.  So, this is an important part of our tradition both at the time of Schwenckfeld in the sixteenth century and also in relatively recent years.

Obviously, with the title dealing with imitating Christ, it should have much to say about WWJD, what would Jesus do?  Interestingly, it, too, is filled with comments regarding the cross and following in its ways.  Consider this one quotation from this work. 

Jesus has many who love His Kingdom in Heaven, but few who bear His Cross.  He has many who desire comfort but few who desire suffering.  He finds many to share His feast but few His fasting.  All desire to rejoice with Him, but few are willing to suffer for His sake.  Many follow Jesus to the Breaking of Bread, but few to the drinking of the Cup of His passion.  Many admire His miracles, but few follow Him in the humiliation of His Cross.  Many love Jesus as long as no hardship touches them.  Many praise and bless Him, as long as they are receiving any comfort from Him.  But if Jesus withdraw Himself, they fall to complaining and utter dejection.

It is the road of the cross that Thomas à Kempis encourages, that Schwenckfeld endorsed by his translation, and Rev. Harvey K. Heebner endorsed with the reading of this work from the pulpit of First Schwenkfelder Church.  It is the road of the cross, doing what is right, and being willing to suffer for it, that is clearly "What Jesus would have us do" from Mk. 8, 2 Cor. 4, and from Schwenkfelder tradition.

Here, let me commend you all tonight for being on that road.  To some degree tonight, or perhaps on a hot night like this many degrees tonight, simply because you were willing to endure the heat at Salford rather than stay at home by a fan or by an air conditioner, you have opted for the way of suffering.  Welcome to being a part of the few and the proud.  But let me see if I can add a word of application here as I think of our Schwenkfelder denomination.  I say this as one who grew up as a Schwenkfelder and now has served for nearly 4 years as a Schwenkfelder pastor.  I think that we need to be tougher like our spiritual ancestors and take the way of the cross more.  Some of us are not willing to take the right and more difficult road because it seems too hard.  I have heard many times that it would be too hard, it would take too much time, or people's feelings might get hurt if we do what is right.  As a result, some do not take that road. Let me challenge some of us, tonight, that these things are all a part of the road to the cross;  it is hard, it takes much time, and people's feelings get hurt, oftentimes our own.  But the right road, the road to the cross is the one we are to take regularly as Luke 9:23 states, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me."

Now with a challenge like this, I think that it is important that we balance that with a few words of encouragement, since it is difficult to follow this road of the cross.  How can the Scriptures and our tradition help us as do what Jesus did and take the road to the cross?  Let's consider the Scriptures first.  From Mark 8, the same passage that spoke of denying ourselves, we read this promise, "those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."  It's a promise from our Savior; those who lose their lives on this road to the cross will save it.  How many of us have been able to identify with this, losing part of our lives for the sake of the Lord and finding more life than what we have experienced beforehand?  I know many from within our denomination have found this to be true, giving their lives for Jesus along the road to the cross, and then finding their lives in the end.  It is a wonderful blessing to follow the road of the cross to find more life in it than we ever had thought possible before.

Let's consider another passage.  Back to 2 Cor. 4, the passage that we read earlier about Paul.  In the same passage where he considers the suffering and heartache of having the death of Christ affecting him, he also balances it with greater life coming as well.  As I reread part of this passage focus on the "so that's" which are found within it.  In 2 Cor. 4:10-12 Paul says he is "always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.  For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.  So death is at work in us, but life in you."  Following the road to the cross according to Paul has a result.  He suffers so that life is produced in other people.  This is one thing that always challenges me with the missionaries that we work with in this denomination.  So many of them are willing to give up personal comforts and go and work in difficult places in Philadelphia or travel to far away countries like Brazil or China.  They suffer in what they do, so that it causes life in those who hear the good news and believe it.  Many are the stories that could be told of the life that has come as a result of their sufferings and hardships.

Let's consider now our Schwenkfelder tradition and back to Caspar Schwenckfeld, Rev. Harvey K. Heebner, and the work Of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.  Even though this work has much to say about following the way of the cross and sacrificing, listen to some of the consolation that is found along the way.  Thomas à Kempis writes this, "when Jesus is present, all is well, and nothing seems difficult, but when Jesus is absent, everything is arduous."  When Jesus is present, and he certainly is along the road to the cross, then all is well.  Nothing seems too difficult when he is around, but boy are things tough and grueling when he is not present.  Obviously, for Thomas à Kempis the key thing was that Jesus was along the pathway, and hence all was well.    "Having Christ, he was not sad," as Schwenckfeld's motto states.  Having Christ we will not be sad even along the road to the cross.

So, how can this help us as we think, "What would Jesus do Schwenkfelder Style?"  It can remind us that as surely as we must do what is right and follow the Lord and follow the road to the cross, a road of suffering and shame, that the presence of Christ in us and to others is far greater still.  Christ, the Lord of glory working in us and through us is greater than the suffering and shame that we endure.  As Corrie ten Boom who suffered during the Nazi holocaust in one of the Nazi death camps, arguably one of the most gruesome crosses that someone has ever had to bear in this world, wrote, "There is no pit where he is not deeper still."  That was one of her crosses, and she found the presence of Christ in her and to the world far deeper than the difficulties she encountered.

So, what can we conclude tonight about this topic "What Would Jesus Do Schwenkfelder Style?"  We can conclude that WWJD Schwenkfelder Style is much greater than bumper stickers, much greater than lapel pins, much greater than coffee mugs, much greater than travel mugs, and much greater than tee shirts.  It is also much older than a book in 1896, even if this book helped to crystallize the acronym WWJD.  WWJD Schwenkfelder Style has always been about taking the road to the cross, the way of suffering and shame.  But at the same time as suffering and hardship is along the way, the Lord's presence and his grace are far greater still.  May God give us grace and strength to take this road more often. 

Rev. Dr. H. Drake Williams III

August 4, 2002