I am a pastor, and it is my habit to reserve Fridays to prepare for Sundays. I look forward to Fridays. On Fridays, I clear my desk of all the mail and the coffee cups and the meeting minutes and the three-ring binders and the sticky notes that provide archeological evidence of my work throughout the week.

I make space for my Bible, for articles that I’ve picked up along the way, for new sticky notes. (I love sticky notes.) This has become a kind of ritual for me, a way to prepare for Sunday’s sermon. I don’t want clutter when I’m thinking and praying and meditating on God’s Word. My desk has to be clean so I can concentrate.

That’s why, after rereading the Scripture for my sermon on Sunday, I abandoned my clean desk for Starbucks. There the music of guitar-strumming singer-songwriters plays through the speakers. Baristas mix mochas and frothing cappuccinos and blend fruit smoothies. People sit around tables talking, laughing, working, smoking and drinking drinks such as tall-nonfat-pumpkin-spice-extra whip-decaf-double-shot lattes.

“Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ ” (Mark 8:27). And they they told him what they had been hearing. “But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked. And Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah” (v. 29). And he was right on that but wrong on what that meant.

Jesus taught them that he would undergo great suffering, that he would be rejected by the powerful people—the elders, the chief priests, the scribes—that he would be killed and would rise again in three days. But when Peter would have none of this dying talk, Jesus rebuked him. “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (v. 33).

It’s here that Jesus called the crowd together with his disciples. Jesus said, “If anyone wants to become my follower, let them deny themselves, pick up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (vv. 34-35). Being a disciple, a follower of Jesus, does not mean clearing out a space so Jesus fits in. Being a follower of Jesus means putting your entire self in the space that Jesus fits you.

On that Friday, for me, that space was Starbucks. I spent over four hours there, and I went up to 15 people and asked them for help in preparing a project I was working on. My “project” was Sunday’s sermon. This was awkward, I admit, both for me and for them. I tried to be careful about how I presented myself.

I talked with a young couple smoking cigarettes outside; a group of three women supporting each other after their children went off to college; a business owner taking a break; an older couple silently sucking down large frappaccinos; a woman who had brought trip photos to show her good friend; a man and a woman with accents originating from I-have-no-idea-where; a young man with pierced ears, his feet up on the table and his nose inside a book; a teenager doing homework while listening to her iPod; and a man and women with tattooed arms who identified themselves as Wiccans (I had the best conversation with them.) This was completely opposite of the way I normally prepare for Sundays. This was not my safe, quiet office with the clean desk.
I asked these people two questions, and I was surprised at the conversations I had. My questions were these: First, who is Jesus; and second, how can you tell who is a follower of Jesus?

Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” The people at Starbucks that Friday afternoon said many things. They said Jesus is a God-man, a great moral teacher, the Savior, the second person in the Trinity, the Son of God and “a pretty cool guy.” Four of them said, “I don’t know.” “It’s spiritual,” one explained.

As for the second question, about how you can tell whether someone is a follower of Jesus, I got a wide variety of responses. Everyone agreed that you can’t usually tell at first glance. And beyond that, it’s still hard. The businessman said you can really only tell by how the person responds to stress. He emphasized that you can’t tell by who goes to church. The older woman said she knew people were Christians because they prayed before their meals. Most people aren’t outward about it, said another.

Sometimes, it’s just intuitive, two women agreed. Others said you can pick out followers of Jesus because they don’t lie, they live a joyful life, they do good, they love others.

The young man with his feet up on the table said that here, in these parts, being a Christian is just assumed, understood. It wasn’t that way when he lived in L.A. and Chicago. Here, you just look at someone and you assume they are a Christian, especially if they are white and have a certain look. (I thought he was talking about me, and I felt the urge to mess up my hair a bit.) “Also,” he said, “they sometimes preach at you.” I moved on.

The Wiccan couple said you certainly can’t tell who’s a Christian by what they say. The woman believed that basically all religions teach the same thing about not harming your neighbor. But to her, Christians need to relearn that basic rule because their golden rule of “love thy neighbor” has become “judge thy neighbor.”

When they asked about me, I mentioned that I was a Mennonite pastor. The man said his ex-wife was a Mennonite from Kansas. For a second, I thought I was about to play the “Mennonite game” with a Wiccan drinking an iced café latte at Starbucks. But he went on to tell a story about how, during the Vietnam War, he asked his wife’s church whether they would provide him sanctuary if he was drafted. They refused because he wasn’t a member. This was one of the reasons he turned his back on Christianity.
How can you tell if someone is a follower of Jesus? Well, based on what the coffee-loving people of Starbucks said that Friday, it’s hard to tell. But whatever it is, it didn’t sound to me like it’s the way of Jesus.

Jesus said, “If anyone wants to become my follower, let them deny themselves, pick up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”

Being a follower of Jesus does not mean carving out a space in our lives for the presence of God. It means making our lives a space carved out for the presence of God.
That means we don’t need to declutter first, at least in the sense of putting aside the things that take up our time and attention for most of the week. No, following Jesus means giving our “clutter” to God—our time, our work, our thoughts, our everyday tasks, whether they are at home, at work, in grocery stores or at Starbucks. God wants it all, because God wants all of us.

The life of a disciple is not limited to special religious times or places, the spaces we carve out to give. No, Jesus asks his disciples for their lives. That’s because our God is much greater than the gaps we create for him.

At Starbucks, amid the din, I think I heard Jesus echoing back to me the questions I had posed to others.

“What about you? Who do you say that I am? How will people know if you are
my disciple?”