Exodus

Romans 6

June 29, 2014

I think we need to stipulate that reading Paul is complicated.  For one thing, he wrote many letters, and just like authors of multiple books nowadays, they weren’t all about the same thing, and his ideas likely evolved over time. 

Also, Paul addressed controversial issues, and at any given time he may have been trying to teach, convince, challenge, chastise, or encourage.  His letters cover a lot of ground, and none of it is simple terrain.

Add to that Paul was complicated.  I don’t mean he was a complicated person with issues a therapist could help sort out – though that certainly may be true.  I mean his thinking was complicated … he was up to the task of thinking about the “big” questions and articulating intelligent thoughts about them.  God, Christ, sin, hope, faith, eternal life, the second coming.  We would no more respect Paul if he wrote about these things simplistically than we do Hallmark when they tackle the concept of love.  These things can’t be reduced to greeting cards, and thankfully Paul doesn’t try to do that.

Finally, it’s true that Paul was complicated in his day for his own people, but we are 2,000 years removed from his language, vernacular, contemporary references, culture, and religion, putting us at a serious disadvantage in understanding what he was saying.

All of that means we should always be suspicious of attempts to say exactly what Paul meant (especially in the space of one sermon), and we need to be very careful when we read Paul.  It’s difficult, dense material, meant for very specific audiences, set in a time we have to struggle to understand.  For instance, understanding what Paul is saying about sin, grace, righteousness, etc. in our passage today is challenging…maybe, possibly, just beyond our reach.

But, with all that in mind, I’m going to try – and here’s why:  We don’t talk enough about sin.  By we, I mean liberal Christians.  We leave all the sin talk to those who reduce it to moral codes and purity laws.  Sin is certainly one of those things that needs careful thought and is more complex than most people make it out to be.  Often talk about sin is reduced to whether you do or say the “right” thing in your personal life.  Some people buy into this simplistic definition, but many of us have rejected it because we know it is inadequate to making sense of God and the human experience, not to mention it often leaves little room for compassion and grace. 

So, we stop using the word “sin” because it has come to have a meaning that doesn’t resonate with us, and in fact has become hurtful to many.  But that seems to mean we have lost the concept of sin completely – sin as a theological, complicated, concept.  And the problem with that is when we concede it to the moralists, and even if “sin” is no longer a helpful word, there is suffering and pain that is caused by human brokenness, and part of the task of faith it to understand this suffering and brokenness and our relationship to it.

Paul had no difficulty talking about sin.  Not a problem for him at all.  Happy to do it.  And I’m glad he did, because he did not have a simplistic understanding of it.  He spoke of personal morality, but he went so much further.  And I think his understanding can help us talk about our world and our lives relative to the brokenness we see all around us. 

To get into Paul’s understanding of sin, we need to wade into tricky waters.  In talking about sin, Paul uses the word “slave” – slave of sin, slave of righteousness, even slave of God.  It is awkward for me to talk about being a slave to anything for any reason given our country’s history with slavery, not to mention the appalling existence of slavery in many places of the world today. 

I do not know the experience of being a slave, and I do not know the experience of living with the ramifications of my ancestors having been slaves.  I am the descendent of slave owners, and my position as a white person in the United States means I am probably part of the problem when it comes to current day slavery as well.  To talk about myself as a slave, much less anyone else, is problematic. 

Usually, to get around this, I just avoid using the word when I talk about my faith - maybe I say “servant” instead.  But if we want to understand what Paul meant by sin, not to mention grace, we have to use his word and think about how it applies to us, tricky though that might be.  Because for Paul – for any Jewish person at that time, and really since – the word “slave” had very specific, emotional connotations.  

Slavery was a part of their foundational story – their foundational story of the exodus.  When Paul uses the word “slave,” it cannot be understood apart from the story of the Hebrew people in Egypt.

Sin, for Paul, is something you can do…something you can choose to do.  This is the kind of sin we usually think about.  But for him sin is also an entity that can grab you…enslave you.  “Do not let sin have dominion over you,” Paul writes.  Dominion is a political word.  Sin is Egypt.  Sin is the systems in which we live that we can’t just make go away if we don’t swear or have sex.

Egypt and Pharaoh were symbols for the idea of a realm dominated by sin.  The ways of Pharaoh were the ways of slavery and human degradation.  The Hebrew people were stuck in that system, and there was nothing they could do to change it.  It literally took an act of God to free them…it was nothing they could have done on their own – no matter how moral they were.

At the heart of Pharaoh’s system was production…it’s why he needed slaves.  His goal was to produce more and more so he could build buildings and monuments as a testimony to his greatness, and so he needed materials, and like any good business person, he needed to get them as cheaply as possible.  The slaves had to make bricks – day and night with no rest, they made bricks to feed the desires of Pharaoh.  Slaves were the necessary outgrowth of that society. 

That is sin: a system that necessitates slaves – or an underclass, or outcasts, or poverty.  And it exercises dominion.  It has power and control over all those who are a part of it.  Everyone, in essence, is a slave to this system – people are driven by the need for more, and people suffer…people die…because of that.

We, Paul would certainly argue, are under the dominion of sin in this world. 

Now it’s a bit of a mental trick to understand how we are slaves to sin, because we are the Pharaohs of the story.  We have to move back and forth between understanding ourselves as metaphorical slaves to a powerful system, and understanding ourselves as part of the problem that creates literal slaves.

In ways we are not even aware of, we are captured in a system that destroys…the wages of sin, Paul says, is death…destruction.  We know this, actually.  We have all felt it.  Our world is messed up.  The powerful ones – including us – feed on the weak and vulnerable.  And too often we feel powerless/helpless to do anything about it.

Sin has power in this world – for whatever reason – and, at least in part, that feels totally outside our control.  It is an entity in and of itself, not just the sum of all of our bad actions.  We are powerless on our own to get out from under the dominion of it.  We are, in Paul’s language, slaves to sin.

Paul believes that God, through grace, can free us from this slavery.  Just as God freed the Hebrew people from Egypt, God can free us from our systems of destruction.  And Jesus – or Christ – plays a starring role in that freedom.  Jesus, for Paul, is the new exodus.  Jesus’ way offers a way out of Egypt.  Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are the parting of the sea. 

And this is where the choice comes in.  We are freed because Jesus / God gives us a way without us having to do anything.  That is grace.  But we have to put one foot in front of the other and follow.  We have to choose which realm, which kingdom, we are going to be a part of.  It is a paradox – the gift of freedom without us having to do anything, and the necessity of us choosing something for sin to longer have dominion.  This is what makes Paul’s understanding of sin so complicated…but that’s because it is that complicated, and we are always trying to live between those two.

But, as Paul points out, that choice is not between being slaves of Pharaoh and being freed to do whatever we want.  In order to be truly free, to escape our systems of destruction, we have to choose the dominion of God.  Or, as Paul puts it, become slaves of God.

Now, again, we move into very uncomfortable territory with the word slave, because we are right to recoil from the idea of God as a slave owner.  It is not a word I would choose. 

But the fact is, Paul believes, we will be slaves to something:  “You are slaves to the one you obey.”  The only thing we can do is choose to whom we submit.  As we know from our own experience, if we are not choosing to live in the realm of God, we are slaves to our own desires, and because of this we often sacrifice justice / righteousness.  We are back in Egypt.

Ours is a society of production.  And while we in the United States don’t have slaves anymore, in the technical sense of that word, we do have a system that depends on people working more and more, for less and less, so people can produce buildings and monuments, houses and airplanes, for themselves.  We produce more, we say, so everyone can have more.  But we know deep down that in a production oriented society, not everyone gets more.  There are those who contribute to the production, but never benefit from it.

I don’t know about you, but I often feel helpless in trying to extricate myself from this system.  I see that it is wrong, but I remain a part of the privileged class whose consumption and desires destroys others and creation.  I try to do little things here and there, but I am firmly planted in this world, and the system holds complete dominion over me.

We need to be freed from this – everyone needs to be freed from this…especially those who suffer most.  Yes, it’s good if I refrain from overconsumption, callous cruelty, laziness.  But sin is so much bigger than that.  I have to be willing to let go not just of individual behaviors, but of my entire way of life; I have to step out of the world in which I am enmeshed.  But I can only do that if there is something else to step into.

And there is; there is another realm – an alternative given to us freely by God.  And we see it in the life of Jesus…who came to bring the kingdom of God near that we might step out of our current, sin-dominated realm into a place where human beings and relationships are the center, not production.

This was the call of Jesus to his disciples, right?  We heard it last week:  Follow me, leave what you know behind, bring nothing with you, and give your life over to serving the least and the last – the ones who suffer most in a world dominated by sin. 

We are under the dominion of sin.  We need a mass Exodus.  And those of us who are Pharaohs need to do better than the one of so long ago – we need to follow God into the desert and learn what it means to live completely dependent on God.  I’m not saying it’s easy…I’m not saying it’s clear what it takes from God and what it takes from us.  Neither, I suspect, was Paul.  But we have to take it all on…we have to see sin as something bigger than our private morality and admit we are slaves to systems of destruction.  Only then can we open our eyes to what God offers us in the life of Jesus – freedom from all that destroys.  Then we can choose…then, led by God we can choose to not sin – to not be a part of sin – little by little, step by step, until we have crossed the Red Sea.  Amen.

All or Nothing

Matthew 10:24-39

June 22, 2014

I have a confession:  Sometimes when I’m trying to get someone to do something, I make it sound ever so slightly easier than I suspect it will be.  Not a lot, and I honestly think sometimes I don’t really know I’m doing it.  But sometimes I know better and do it anyway; because, you see… I’m afraid.  I’m afraid the person won’t say “yes” if they know how hard it’s really going to be.

In this – and many other things as well – I am nothing like Jesus.  The disciples couldn’t have said they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.  Well, they could have, but they would be thick-headed numskulls.  Jesus didn’t seem to be at all concerned with making the offer of being a disciple sound attractive.  He didn’t dress it up with hip music and fancy coffee. 

I have a hard time calling him evangelical – if evangelical means going out and doing everything to can to convince people to come join your church.  Yes, he thought all were called.  I suspect he even would have liked to see a large band of disciples.  But his method of invitation was not going to land him a job at a mega church.

This is a harsh passage.  Yes, it contains that wonderful verse about how all the hairs on our heads are counted by God, but surely the sweetness of that gets swallowed up by the severity of what Jesus is saying.

This chapter in Matthew begins with Jesus giving disciples the authority to do everything he does:

The author writes, “Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them the authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.”

This is followed by the verses immediately preceding ours where Jesus sends them out – he gives them their job description.  And I don’t think this would be a winner on Wall Street: 

“Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. ⁹Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, ¹⁰no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff.”

And then there’s my favorite:  “I’m sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves…and you will be hated by all.”

That’s the lead up to our passage.  In other words we are in the midst of Jesus giving instructions on what it looks like to be a disciple and nothing in those verses makes it seem very attractive.  And our passage doesn’t help.  In fact, he pretty much ups the ante.  Not only will you be hated by all, you might lose your family, and, to put it very bluntly, you might die.

What was Jesus doing? Weeding out the faint of heart?  Was he making a prediction about their future – that they would die at the hands of those who oppose this ministry?  Was he trying to motivate them (if so, remind me to not hire Jesus as a motivational speaker any time soon)?

The truth is I don’t think it’s really any of these, and at the same time I think it’s a little bit of all of these.  Because remember that this is Matthew writing a gospel to be heard by the Christian community of his day.  I think Matthew is challenging his contemporaries – and he’s giving them a realistic picture of what they can expect…And I do think he was, in a sense, motivating them.

I’m guessing the early followers of Jesus were a bit beleaguered.  It wasn’t easy being Christian – especially given they were a persecuted minority.  The Roman authorities were no more sympathetic to the message of Jesus at that time than they were when they nailed him to a cross. 

Matthew, by putting these words in Jesus’ mouth was, I think, reminding them that they were fighting the good fight.  He was reminding them of the purpose of what they were doing…connecting their lives directly to the resurrected one.

Jesus says, though we wish he didn’t, I came not to bring peace to the earth, but a sword.  I so dislike this verse – in fact I spent a fair amount of time looking at the Greek words hoping it didn’t mean what it seems like it means.  Unfortunately, I found that our English translators low-balled it.  It really says something like, “I came not to cast peace, but to cast swords – scatter them without caring where they fall.”  Bringing swords is bad enough, but casting them about…throwing them around…blanketing the world with them, these are not words I want to hear coming from Jesus’ mouth.

The sword, of course, is metaphorical.  It indicates that Jesus’ presence, his message, his actions will be welcomed by some and seen as threatening by others.  Jesus’ life was not benign.  He didn’t try to please everyone.  In order to free the oppressed, he challenged those in authority – in order to lift those in poverty, he called out those who claimed to love God but hurt the poor and ailing.  He had incredibly high expectations.  Jesus was not benign, and responses to him were rarely neutral. 

The point is – it’s hard to be a disciple.  And not just hard, it is scary.  And when things are hard, scary, when you are threatened, persecuted, ridiculed…any of those things…you start to question whether you have made a mistake.  As one of my bosses said to me a long time ago, “You may see the sky as green, but if everyone else is calling it blue you might want to reevaluate your opinion.”

I remember when I was in my last year of college.  I was an RA in one of the biggest dorms on campus.  In talking to another RA I learned that the men on his floor were, as he put it, “playing a game.”  The way it worked was that when you had sex with a woman, you got one point for every pound she weighed.  When he told me, I was appalled.  In fact, I assumed he was appalled.  I assumed he was telling me so we could talk about how to address it.  I was wrong.

I went to our boss and told her about what was going on.  She asked me, “What do you want me to do about it?”  I said, at the very least, let’s sit these boys down in a room and tell them how wrong this is.  The more I tried to get people to respond, the more I was seen as an over-reactive, moralistic do-gooder by everyone else.  People begged me to let it drop.  “The women don’t know they are part of a game,” they would tell me. 

I thought the other female RAs would see things the way I did, but they were good friends with the RA on that floor and they didn’t want to loose him as a friend.  I can tell you I lost good friends.  I felt humiliated and isolated.  I began to question whether I was overreacting.  Finally, to my disgrace, I just let it go. 

This was relatively minor compared to what Jesus was asking of his disciples.  He was asking them to go up against the Romans.  I was confronting 20-year-old RAs.  Certainly my life was not in danger…which makes it all the worse.  If I failed when the stakes were relatively low, how can I ever hope to be a disciple when the risk is death?

I can imagine the people in Matthew’s day were wondering if it really made sense to follow Jesus.  What reward were they getting?  People were ridiculing them, persecuting them.  They must have known that the original apostles were all martyred.  They had to be wondering if they’d made a big mistake…if they had thrown their lot in with a crazy man from Galilee.

This Jesus that Matthew presents makes it clear that being a disciple will, in fact, bring divisions.  It will likely invite humiliation.  You will be hated.  That is what happened to Jesus, Matthew reminds them. 

I’ve spent the last week wondering whether discipleship was an all or nothing kind of thing, or if we could take baby steps towards being a follower of Jesus.  We generally live as if it’s the latter.  And we are content with our steps much of the time.  But I think we stop in our tracks as soon as we get any pushback from other people.  I think we tend to slow down when things get hard, or conflicted, or our friends start to question us or dislike us, or our lifestyle starts to change. 

Now, I stand here as a full-fledged baby stepper, and I honestly think as human beings we are probably always taking baby steps – certainly a few steps forward and a couple steps back.  But Jesus did not seem to take baby steps.  The one we follow went where he believed he needed to go, did what he believed he needed to do, and endured the ridicule of others, false accusations, betrayal by his friends, and ultimately torture and death.  It was a radical life, and so our lives should probably be at least a little bit radical.  Jesus says in order to gain your life – meaning your life as God intends, you must lose your life – meaning your life as it is.  That’s not a baby step.  It’s an exchange. 

Sometimes we ask, “What is the measure of a Christian life?”  And I wonder if the measure of a Christian life is how much we are angering powerful people, or how much we are being ridiculed, even hated, for our beliefs.  I wonder if the measure is how different our lives look than our neighbors’.  These are not the measures I want.  I want the measure to be how many people say, “What an amazing Christian she is…she’s so nice to everyone and takes such good care of her lawn.” (which I don’t, actually) 

When Jesus sends his disciples out, he knows that healing the outcast, welcoming the despised, preaching the Good news that we don’t have to give our allegiance to earthly governments will draw ire.  He doesn’t suggest that it might.  He knows it will.  There is something about the kingdom of God that is antithetical to the kingdoms of this world.  Not just different, but antithetical. 

Three times Jesus tells the disciples to not be afraid.  I’m going to take that as an indication that the disciples – in both Jesus and Matthew’s days – were afraid.  We probably are as well – afraid to jump in all the way.  Afraid to press on when it gets difficult.  And why would we?  Why would we choose the life Jesus describes?!  That’s crazy.  I am certainly no glutton for punishment.

Well, our lives are not just our own.  We have been created by the God who champions the underdog.  When we turn our backs we give up our true life.  We also give up our freedom – we become beholden to, ensnared in, the systems of destruction.  And that, as Jesus points out, destroys not only those who are suffering, it destroys our souls. 

If we want them back, if we want true life, if we want to help heal this broken world, then we have to throw our lot in with the crazy man from Galilee…regardless of the cost.  Amen.

Disciples

Matthew 28:16-20

Trinity Sunday:  June 15, 2014

Today is Trinity Sunday.  This passage, the conclusion to the gospel of Matthew, is often cited as evidence that there was a doctrine of the Trinity in the earliest churches.  Jesus commands the disciples to go “baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”  Those are, of course, the traditional three parts of the Trinity that the church continues to talk about today – though I admit we at 1^st Pres don’t talk about it a lot!  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – the trinity…God as three persons in one.

The only time this passage shows up in our lectionary cycle is on Trinity Sunday – so the focus tends to be on that part of the passage. But, if we use this passage to always talk about the Trinity, I think the rest of it gets short shrift.  And the rest of the passage is pretty important, Trinitarian formula or not.  So with apologies to the larger Christian religion – and probably with the joyful consent of all of you – I want to step back from the doctrine of the Trinity and look at another part of the passage.

The tag line for this passage is “The Great Commission.”  It’s the last passage in the gospel of Matthew.  The risen Jesus has met the disciples on the mountain, because Jesus had directed the women at the empty tomb to tell the disciples to meet him there.  And Jesus gives them parting instructions.  Among them he says, “Go and make disciples of all nations.”  That is quite a request!  And one those of us sitting here would probably have to admit we don’t spend a lot of time doing.

I have been aware lately that we humans don’t deal well with spectrums.  Let me give you an example.  Many people would agree that, at least in the narrative of the United States, capitalism and socialism, stand at the far, opposite ends of the spectrum of economic systems.  And I often see two mistakes made when dealing with this spectrum  - and many others as well.  The first is that any suggested move, no matter how small, toward the opposite end of the spectrum is seen as an extreme suggestion.  Any move away from the capitalist end makes us socialists when really it’s a small move on the very long spectrum. 

The second problem is related.  We fail to recognize where we currently sit on the spectrum.  Any move toward socialism in our current environment still puts us centimeters away from the capitalism extreme.  In one way we mean this to be the case – we call ourselves a capitalist society.  But when someone suggests a move away from some of the problematic elements of capitalism, they are called socialists – even though the move would keep us squarely in the capitalist realm…and then some.  We are so afraid of being even a little bit socialist…because we’ve seen the horrors of that extreme... we cling ever more tightly to our own extreme. It would take a heck of a lot from where we currently sit on the spectrum for our society to be socialist, but our fear pushes us as far away from the other side as we can get.

These are problems, of course, because we know what’s it’s called when you stand teetering off the end of a spectrum refusing to move even an inch:  Extremism.  And we know being an extremist generally has costs…often high costs.  You have a dictatorial world with no freedom, or you have a world where it’s every person for themselves and the weak are eaten up by the powerful.  But we’re afraid to live on the spectrum, rather than the extremes, and so we tend to downplay the costs…or, more often, we justify them.  We refuse to loosen our grip even a little, even though movement might mitigate some of the costs or suffering.

Jesus calls on the 11 to make disciples of all the nations.  For some of us, this is an uncomfortable instruction.  We know the history of Christian missions in other countries.  We know the destruction done in the name of baptizing all nations.  We would never suggest going in to a Muslim country and attempting to baptize all Muslims into Christianity.  In other words, we have learned our lesson.  And we’ve learned it well.  That is an extreme we would like to avoid at all costs – and we should.

In service of that, these days we are very concerned with being welcoming.  With not judging.  With accepting everyone.  With not expecting conversion and conformity.  This is good.  This is, in fact, very good.  This is not an end of a spectrum that I would ever want to move too far from.  It comes from knowing the pain and suffering of people who have been judged by the church, or coerced, or hurt by moralistic codes enforced by authorities.  We have seen, and may know, people who have been ostracized by a Christian community because they didn’t meet the community’s standards and requirements.  We rightfully respond by being a loving, nonjudgmental, welcoming community.

I, probably like many of you, believe this is the Christian thing to do.  It fits with what we know of Jesus and his life:  Love others…that sounds pretty clear.  And because I am so afraid of the evils of the other end of the spectrum, I cling as tightly as I can to this end – to the welcoming, affirming, unconditional acceptance end.  When something starts pulling me toward the other end, I get terrified, and cling more tightly, even though I am nowhere in the vicinity of being a Christian who demands certain moral behaviors of others in the name of “making disciples.”

Such it was this week when I read an article by Stanley Hauerwas.  Hauerwas is a professor of ethics at Duke University Divinity School.  I have a long history with Hauerwas…not personal, but through his many writings.  Now reading Stanley Hauerwas is something of a spiritual discipline for me.  I don’t do it because I necessarily like it; I do it because I know it is good for me and my faith development. 

He’s brilliant, irreverent, and subversive, often in harsh and in-your-face kinds of ways.  When I read him, I always feel challenged, often convicted, and sometimes even feel caught in a shameful act.  Obviously I wouldn’t feel this way if I didn’t respect him and, on some level, trust him.  We don’t tend to feel convicted by people we don’t like or respect – we just ignore what they say.  Bottom line:  I can’t ignore Hauerwas, as much as he upsets me sometimes.

So, this week I read an article by him that challenges Christian communities like ours that, he argues, have gone to an extreme at the expense of, well, being Christian communities.  Make disciples, Jesus says.  We each, individually, tend to believe we should be disciples, but we’re not so good at making disciples of others.  We’re certainly not very good at being made into a disciple by some authority other than ourselves. 

Making disciples requires , as Hauerwas reminds us, discipline.  Not spank a child discipline, but run 5 miles a day kind of discipline.  This discipline, in our tradition, is telling people to pray regularly, read the bible daily, volunteer with the poor often.  We are uncomfortable with this.  Very uncomfortable with this.  We are happy to encourage people to do this, but we definitely don’t expect or, God forbid, require, them to. We generally think we fulfill the command to make disciples if someone comes into our church and joins. Now they are Christian, or at least they really like this community, so job done.  All that’s left is to be nice to them.

Hauerwas is concerned that our liberal, protestant churches do not have a community of discipline that is necessary for making disciples.  He writes, “The called church has become the voluntary church, whose primary characteristic is that the congregation is friendly.  Of course, that is a kind of discipline, because you cannot belong to the church unless you are friendly, but it’s very unclear how such friendliness contributes to the growth of God’s church, which is meant to witness to the kingdom of God.” 

What I take him to be saying is that witnessing to the kingdom of God requires a life that looks a lot like Jesus’, and being friendly was not the primary quality of his life.  It was probably one, but he stood up against convention, status quo, and power, and very few people, especially those who are a part of the status quo…read, us…find that welcoming and friendly. 

When we make friendliness our primary purpose – hang on to that end of the spectrum because we are so afraid of being a tyrannical, moralistic church – the cost is we are less capable of helping each other live like Jesus.  That capacity – to live a life as counter-cultural and courageous as Jesus – is not in-born.  It’s hard. And requires sacrifice.  We have to be taught and we need lots of practice, and it takes discipline.

We do some of this.  We practice by coming to worship every week.  We listen to the bible and study Jesus’ life, and we call him master, teacher and try to learn from him.  We do good works in the community and world.  Probably where Hauerwas would say we fall short is in challenging each other on the ways we live that do not reflect the kingdom of God.  The ways we live that reflect the Roman Empire.  Because that challenging doesn’t always feel nice, or friendly, or nonjudgmental.   But without it, we compromise our ability to live as disciples.

One big albatross around our necks in this day and age is our dependence on “things” to feel comfortable and secure.  Churches probably should be places where people are asked to bring their checkbooks and share with each other how much we made last month and what we spent it on, then evaluate that against what we think the Christian faith would have us do.  Pretty uncomfortable, no?

Now, Hauerwas likes to push the extreme – he does so often.  But I think it’s in service of pulling us just a little bit away from where we are toward a more balanced way.  He wants to loosen our grip a little and help us reclaim that which we have lost because of our fears.  We have to recognize where we are on the spectrum and realize that one small move doesn’t make us tyrants. 

Hauerwas knows what we all know – at each extreme you have sacrificed the other end completely.  And each extreme, while always carried too far, has elements of truth and good…they have something to offer, and sacrificing the whole thing is almost never good. 

I think we need to ask whether we have lost our sense of responsibility for holding each other accountable for being disciples in the name of being “friendly.”

I don’t know where we are to sit on this spectrum.  I am apt to think the goal is not always to sit in the middle.  The middle of the spectrum is not always a nice balance between two equally good ends.  I’m always going to believe we should err on the side of love and acceptance every time.  But we have to recognize where we currently sit: when we are all the way at one end, moving just a little ways back isn’t going to make us harsh disciplinarians that require strict behaviors of members of the church.  In fact, I feel secure knowing we will probably always land well toward the welcoming end.  Thank God.

But what would those small steps be?  I’m not sure.  I’m doing that unfair thing where I ask you to just sit with me in a question that haunts me without any clear answer as to where to go next.   But I wonder, what could we do for each other to help shape us into better disciples of the one we follow?  I wonder if we’re willing to be a little uncomfortable in service of living the very uncomfortable life Jesus did?  I wonder, when someone comes through our doors, can they expect anything other than friends?  Can they expect to be trained as a disciple?  Can they expect a community that will teach them the language, customs, disciplines necessary to lead a life transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit?

Jesus certainly doesn’t let us off the hook.  Not only are we to make disciples of those of us in this church, and those who come into the church, we are to go out and make disciples of all the nations.  Shudder.  I’m more drawn to the model of making of ourselves disciples and then going out into the world and living accordingly.  Our behaviors will be a witness to the kingdom of God – to the good news of resurrection and hope.  But we don’t have to make people be like us.  I certainly think we need to figure out the disciple thing here before we try to make anyone else one.  The question is, “How might we here fulfill this great commission in new and creative ways?”

This world needs disciples – it needs us to be the best disciples we can be.  It needs that more than one more, particularly nice, voluntary association.  There are a lot of poor who need to hear good news; there are prisoners who need to be released; there are oppressed who need to be freed; and there are enemies who need to be loved.  Ours is not an easy call, but nobody said it would be easy…certainly not the guy who hung on the cross.  And so we need training, the right tools, practice, and of course a community willing to go the distance together.  Amen.