Skip to main content

Growing Up

Perhaps one of the most unsettling realizations for disciples is that being a disciple does not require much of the trappings we have come to associate with being a disciple.

Structure and objective, concrete rules provide psychological safety and their stripping away causes confusion and anxiety. And so we cling to them and assign them value and gravity for their own sake, crafting intricate explanations for their existence and the critical places they fill in our personal and common lives.

We come to believe that these are constituent parts of being a disciple and so perpetuate their existence and necessity, defending them against detractors of all sorts.

If we could let go of them without going crazy, we could see and live the true simplicity of being a disciple. We could learn and experience life as a disciple, coming to realize that discipling is about life; real life lived day by day.

Comments

  1. Amazing blog and very interesting stuff you got here! I definitely learned a lot from reading through some of your earlier posts as well and decided to drop a comment on this one!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wineskins II

       In chapter 16 of Matthew, Peter ‘makes the great confession’ - Jesus he says is the Son of the Living God. At Covenant, when someone wants to become a member or to be baptized, we ask them who Jesus is and we expect this response. Peter is correct when he says this, but it is not clear that Peter (or the other disciples) understood the ramifications of his statement. Following Peter’s statement we find a series of incidents that make us wonder just how much Peters actually believed what he had said.      In the first instance, Jesus compares Peter to Satan. Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem and there he will die. Peter exclaims that he will not let that happen; Jesus will not be killed. Peter is expecting great things from Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God on behalf of Israel and he cannot fit Jesus dying into his hope for a greater Israel under this Messiah. This cannot happen, he reasons. Jesus’s response is a harsh re...

Naaman's Dipping and Requests

The familiar story of Naaman dipping in the Jordan is a story with more than a few twists. Let's review the story first. Naaman we are told had been used by YHWH to punish Israel and our story describes him as a man of valor in high regard by his boss, the King of Syria the current thorn in the side of Israel. It turns out though that Naaman suffers from some sort of leprosy.  On one of Syria's raids into Israel, the Syrians captured an Jewish girl who had found her way into Naaman's household as a servant for his wife. Knowing of Naaman's illness, she suggests to her matron that there is a prophet in Israel who could help him. This message gets transmitted to Naaman who takes it to his boss. The boss - the king of Syria, tells Naaman to travel to Israel and gives him a letter to Israel's king directing that Naaman be healed. Upon Naaman's arrival in Israel he gives the letter to Israel's king who reacts in a panic. He does not even consider finding t...

Freewheeling

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...