Frodo and Following Jesus

A friend sent me a link via Facebook to another pastor's blog.  In the post in question, he [Matthew Johnson] was commenting on a recent company's Super Bowl commercial.  Those comments were interesting and passionate, but what caught me was the end of the post:

Each day that goes by, I more and more convinced that Jesus has turned me into a lunatic. Stark raving mad. I care about things now that have nothing to do with me, about people I will never meet, about places I will never go and about issues I will never solve. But I still care. A lot. It is changing the way I live and work. Even as a pastor. It is changing the way I move and where I'm moving. It changes what I do with my time, and what value I place upon it. I care. I care so much that many people don’t know what to say to me anymore. They just don’t see the world that I do, I say to myself - justifying the barriers with them that are erected via the rubble of those that grace tore down. 
I often wish I could be blissfully ignorant again. I often pray that I scales could grow back on my eyes and that amnesia would lobotomize the Jesus part of my brain. I want to care about 50% off sales without wondering who made the clothes. I want to eat food without wondering where it came from and what impact it had on the land which grew and processed it. I want to care only about myself, to put my family first, to go to sports contests and pray that God would allow my team to win, to believe it is God’s will for me to be happy and have all the crap I want and not apologize for it. I want to, but I’m beginning to think that is impossible. I’m being rewired; assimilated into a collective Spirit that I cannot escape from even in death.
I worry that I might become like Frodo - too different - and unable to ever live in the places I love and with the people I love because of it. And then I think it may have already happened.

His allusion is to Frodo Baggins of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  In it, Frodo is called to a life-changing, death-defying mission that changes his life.  He had never been out of his homeland.  He'd never been part of something so risky or dangerous.  After his epic journey, he eventually has to withdraw from his community (eventually to another land).

Johnson's passion is undeniable, and I think he's more or less right.  Follow Jesus changes us.  At the end of this coming Sunday's gospel passage (Mt. 5:38-48) Jesus tells the multitudes surrounding him that they are to "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."  What a change that is.  Certainly, following Jesus changes us.    The Spirit continually works in and on us.  We start to care about the things and people God cares about, and  inversely, less about ourselves, our stuff, and our lives.  This can have a devastating effect on relationships.

But, while I see the connection to Frodo Baggins, I don't think it's completely right.  God's goal in or transformation as Jesus-followers is not that we become so different from others that we must exile ourselves, as Frodo did.  God's purpose is that our transformation might be as yeast for dough - an agent of transformation for others.  I don't suspect Johnson intends anything different, but it's a good reminder that, as Jesus said elsewhere, "A prophet is not accepted in his own town."  Perhaps some of us are called to be so starkly different as to incite questions and debates before moving on.  Others of us are called to be "in our town" so-to-speak, with others.  The challenge then is how to hold being in town in tension with the other-worldly nature of witnessing to the kingdom of God.  Perhaps in this tension is where the yeast works.