DISCIPLESHIP AS OBEDIENCE, NOT OBSERVANCE
ROBIN R. MEYERS
When he was saying this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, "Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!" But he said, "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!"
-Luke 11:27-28
In the Mediterranean world of the first century, a woman's greatest achievement was to give birth to a famous son. Not only does Jesus reverse this patriarchal notion, but he shifts blessedness itself away from human objects to divine obedience. In his vision of the reign of God, one could be "blessed" regardless of sex or gender, infertility or maternity. Every obstacle blocking access to God is removed by making discipleship about call and response, not about inheritance or accomplishment.
To be honest, the concept of discipleship today requires little, if any, sacrifice-not to mention submission. Mostly, the church-growth crowd makes joining a church as easy as possible. With so many churches struggling to survive, the process of becoming a member is reduced to a kind of ecclesiastical dating game. Perhaps this is the church you have been looking for? Here are the services we provide (in an attractive physical package no less), and if you will tell us something about your needs, then maybe we can arrive at a mutual decision as to compatibility.
Don't worry, we say, it's not like getting married. If you will agree to fill an empty spot in the pew and make a pledge, we can move in together. Then, after the flush of our initial infatuation has faded and we start quarreling, you can decide whether to keep any of the promises you didn't make. It is all fairly reminiscent of that familiar airline script: "We know that when it comes to church attendance you have a choice, and we appreciate your choosing [your church name here]. It's been our pleasure serving you today, and when your future plans again call for collective worship, we hope to see you again on another [your church] flight."
Just once I wish the script could be real. What if we warned people against joining a church because turbulence in the pews is not "occasional and unexpected," but routine? What if more sermons could move beyond what pilots call "light chop," and more preachers would fly people right into the storm, instead of around it in search of "smooth air"? What if those oxygen masks dropped down almost every Sunday, and people had to grab them gasping, instead of hearing our standard rhetorical charade that advises otherwise terrified people to "continue breathing normally"?
Annie Dillard comes to mind; she advised us all to pray with our eyes open. She not only went into the woods looking for God, like her literary compatriots Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Muir, but she also went to church. "I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. ... There is one church here, so I go to it." The church of which she speaks is a white frame Congregational church on Lummi Island in Puget Sound. On a good Sunday, only twenty others joined her there, and she confessed to feeling as if she was "on an archaeological tour of Soviet Russia."2 She was not looking for perfection and had to stomach what she called the “dancing bear act" that is staged in Christian churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, week after week. Even so, she refused to consider the life of faith to be about convenient parking, calling it instead "an expedition to the Pole." Wherever we go, to the Pole or to church, "there seems to be only one business at hand-that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us."³
Whatever else Annie Dillard thought of going to church or becoming a disciple, she didn't think it should be easy. She went in search of the Mystery, the inaccessible Absolute that compels us even as it eludes us, like those dignified explorers who set out to find the Pole and froze to death clutching backgammon boards and table silver sets. The equivalent to the Pole in worship is based on the metaphysical idea that the Absolute is the most inaccessible point of all, the point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions. Dillard called it the "Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also—I take this as a given— the pole of great price."4 Her way of describing the expedition, however, is priceless:
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?... On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does not one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares: they should lash us to our pews.³
Despite worship services that she considered less polished than most high-school stage plays, Dillard marched off to worship week after week, knowing somehow that one does not get to God alone, any more than one gets to the Pole alone. She is describing the staid pilgrims of my Congregational heritage, what a friend of mine calls "the frozen chosen." But today there is another variety of amateur explorer, packed by the thousands into the metal-sided megachurches on Christian "campuses” in the mall-speckled suburbs. Underneath banners that look like ads for radio stations (the Buzz, the Rock, the Edge), the band is playing, the hands are swaying, and the hymn lyrics sound more like courtship than discipleship.
Worship consists of high-tech, high-volume, effusive praise and tearful thanksgiving for what God has done on behalf of each and every one of us-followed by preaching that circles the wagons of what is falsely assumed to be a besieged and righteous minority doing battle against the forces of secular humanism. The rhetoric is that of a western movie, the "last stand" between the chosen but misunderstood and legions of depraved liberal heathens whose worldly logic has led them to worship false gods (mostly in the temple of the flesh) and who are out to destroy the only true religion by removing it from the public square.
If this is too sentimental and too electric, what recourse does a Christian progressive have today? For those who would never think to raise their hands in worship (because they sit on them), mainline and liberal churches offer something as tedious as many evangelical services are self-centered: a dull and droning list of politically correct announcements that go on interminably. No detail is too minor and no story is too trivial to escape the sentimental displays of communal therapy. The hymns are often contorted by a preoccupation with inclusion at the expense of meter and particular power, and the sermon continues in the same vein-offering enlightened ways to cope with the aches and pains of daily life, instead of submitting to a vision so compelling as to redeem suffering and death itself.
In a world that is desperate for something real, many mega churches today are like Disney World plus God, while too many mainline churches are serving up bits and pieces of the Great Books Club. One wonders which fiction is most cruel, that all your dreams can come true if you pray the "Prayer of Jabez" or that discipleship is the same thing as enlightenment. Odd as it may sound, we need to recover something as old and dangerous as it is transformative: following Jesus.
If the church is to survive as a place where head and heart are equal partners in faith, then we will need to commit ourselves once again not to the worship of Christ, but to the imitation of Jesus. His invitation was not to believe, but to follow. Since it was once dangerous to be a follower of The Way, the church can rightly assume that it will never be on the right track again until the risks associated with being a follower of Jesus outnumber the comforts of being a fan of Christ. Until we experience Jesus as a "radically disturbing presence," instead of a cosmic comforter, we will not experience him as true disciples. The first question any churchgoer should be asked and expected to answer is: What are you willing to give up to follow Jesus?
To recover this understanding of discipleship, however, we must confront an enormous obstacle in Western culture: the idea that to "obey" is to lose personal identity and become intellectually and spiritually oppressed. Notice what happens in Luke 11. when the woman in the crowd starts praising Jesus as the object of adoration and his mother as blessed? Being made the focus of attention and adoration makes him nervous, perhaps even belligerent. He is the signpost, not the Sign, and so he shifts the notion of "blessedness" from object to objective. "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it."
Notice that he did not say blessed are those who hear the word of God and believe it. Nor did he say blessed are those who hear the word of God and enshrine it as doctrine. Nor did he say blessed are those who hear the word of God and co-opt it for a particular religious or political agenda. He said blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it. That is, blessed are those who give up their old way of being in the world and willingly surrender to a new way. Blessed are those who are willing to take new orders-by marching to the tune of a different drummer and taking the road less traveled.
Can you feel the hair on the back of your Western neck standing up? Obey? Didn't we proudly remove that word from our wedding ceremonies (as in wives "obeying" their husbands)? Don't we seek to abolish all forms of servitude, whether physical, spiritual, or intellectual? Isn't the whole idea of growing up to escape our obligation to obey our parents, and isn't personal freedom about escaping our obligation to obey anyone or anything? This may be the church's ultimate equal-opportunity myth-plaguing liberals and conservatives alike. The way of Christian discipleship conforms to nothing and to no one.
THIS YOKE IS NEITHER EASY NOR LIGHT
Biblical scholars have long been fascinated with Matthew 11:28-30,7 which contains the well-known and very comforting text: "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
When contemporary Christians hear these words, they receive them as a balm for weary souls, an invitation to lay down the cares and stresses of the world and let Christ shoulder them instead. But an intriguing case can be made that this is by no means what Matthew had in mind, and his audience would have gotten a very different message. Some scholars have argued that Jesus speaks here of the yoke of wisdom and equates it with his particular revelation of the Torah. Others contend that he is offering the yoke of himself, the one whose words and deeds reveal God's purposes and demands. Others see the words as referring to the eschatological "rest" that will come at the end of time.
A less-known, but very plausible argument, however, is made by scholars who argue that words like "labor," "carrying heavy burdens," "rest," and "yoke" are frequently associated with the exercise of power, especially imperial and political rule. Warren Carter, in Matthew and Empire, says: "Jesus, the one who proclaims and demonstrates God's reign or empire, issues an invitation to those who are oppressed by Roman imperial power to encounter God's empire now in his ministry in anticipation of the time when God destroys all empires including Rome's."8
Those who are "weary and are carrying a heavy burden" may well include not just the disciples but all those who struggle to support the wealthy. "Those who labor" may well refer to the 95 percent of the population that is just trying to survive; the verb "labor" comes from a Greek word that is frequently concerned with life under imperial rule, whether Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, or Hellenistic. "Carrying a heavy burden" refers to those who "labor wearily" and are systematically oppressed by those who perpetuate unjust social structures. The rich can never get enough of or enjoy "the fruit of their toil," in which they have "crushed and abandoned the poor, they have seized a house that they did not build" (Job 20:18-19).
The promised "rest" in its most common usage denotes a very political reality, rest from one's enemies (Deut. 12:10), or the absence of war. Although it is most common to assume that the "yoke" is the burden of the Pharisees and their legalism, its historical meaning designates imperial rule imposed by a greater power over a lesser "against the latter's will and for the former's benefit."9 Jesus may have been speaking ironically when he referred to what is “easy” and “light,” or he may have been assuming that the present situation would not last forever because Rome's days were numbered. This is consistent with the idea that the kingdom is immediate, a present reality and a future totality. The rest he promises is not merely physical, but existential. God's reign can be experienced now as an alternative to Roman power.
As for the phrase "learn from me," it is a familiar call to establish a community of alternative commitments and social practices. What is revealing, and for our time critical, is the social and theological challenge of this text to Roman oppression. Serious biblical scholarship reveals a consistent message: the gospel is a stunningly political document buried under centuries of sentimental interpretations. The often-heard lament about mixing religion and politics is a symptom of this complete misunderstanding.
Even so, the call to take on this yoke is the call to service and sacrifice, not domination. This community will be constituted not by wealth, gender, status, or ethnicity, but by a radical egalitarian principle: everyone is a child of God. There will be a new economic order based on need, not oppression in service to conspicuous consumption. Violence is to be totally rejected, not by complete passivity, but by the use of nonviolent resistance, and all social divisions of the imperial world are to be rejected by a God whose love is beyond race, class, creed, and character.
The popular interpretation of this text as a private, apolitical balm for those who are weary and yet still loyal to the empire is but one of many examples of the way the teachings of Jesus have been altered or neutralized by what Crossan calls "the drag of normalcy." Indeed, this "yoke" is neither easy nor light. Before the church was adored and brought like a bride to a marriage of convenience with empire, arranged by Constantine in the fourth century, the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth represented an alternative reality that constituted an unacceptable threat to that very same bridegroom. The very empire that killed him would in short order offer him a place at the banquet of Roman power.
The alternative community he founded was eventually absorbed into the dominant culture, bearing the sword of doctrine. The Galilean sage, who tended to the poor and attacked the abuses of the Temple, was now given "reclining" rights at the feast of all male bishops. They had met in lakeside Nicea to hammer out their theological differences and forge Christianity into the official religion of the empire. The open commensality of Jesus was now formally replaced by the episcopal banquet of Constantine. William Sloane Coffin Jr.'s lament could be that of the whole church:
Law is not as disinterested as our concepts of law pretend; law serves power; law in large measure is a recapitulation of the status quo; confirms a rigid order designed to insulate the beneficiaries of the status quo from the disturbances of change. The painful truth-one with a long history is that police are around in large part to guarantee a peaceful digestion for the rich.10
How, then, are we to be followers of Jesus today, when Christ is reclining at the banquet of the Pax Americana? To be a disciple today requires both a recovery of the original meaning of that word and the capacity to surrender oneself to the path of greater resistance. To "obey" is to recognize that the gulf between concept and capacity is so vast that, left to our own devices, we will almost always do what we feel like doing, even as we espouse noble thoughts about the need to do more. True discipleship is about obedience, because it is about not being in control all the time, but rather trusting that to act under love's obligation is to be more free, not less so.
The alternative is what we have now: the gospel as neutral energy blessing the world as it is. But make no mistake; this is easier than resisting such a world. To resist puts all disciples in the position of being denied the worldly benefits we enjoy. When Martin Luther King Jr. said that "unearned suffering is redemptive," he was talking about the essential wisdom of the gospel. We can suffer because of our own mistakes, of course, and this can produce wisdom as well. But when we suffer because we have submitted ourselves to a cause greater than private ambition or on behalf of someone who has no claim on us except common humanity, then the suffering that comes is charged with a redemptive power that can change the world.
To be a disciple today requires that we seek the wisdom of Jesus and then transpose that wisdom into metaphors that speak as wisely and as courageously to our time as he did to his. A disciple "obeys" not by literalizing first-century myths but by carrying forward the wisdom of biblical metaphors and creating new metaphors as powerful and as disturbing as those that gave birth to the church. The wisdom of Jesus was a spiritual insurgency in an occupied land. Today, the church itself is occupied by the gospel of the marketplace, and sacred space is increasingly indistinguishable from secular space. To generate sales and attract customers, the church and the mall are now common-law partners. We can listen to a sermon on conspicuous consumption and then shop on the premises right after the benediction.
PULLING THE TEETH OF THE GREAT OFFENSE
It does no good to tell people to follow Jesus if you are not able to explain what this would mean today. You cannot explain what it would mean today if you do not understand what it once meant. The great preacher Joseph Sittler once said that preaching is not about telling people what the Bible said, but fearlessly sharing with the congregation what the Bible has caused you to say.
For this reason, intellectually honest biblical scholarship is not to be feared by the church; neither should the church, however, feel beholden to every scholarly fad. What needs to be addressed without apology, however, is the virulent strain of antiintellectualism that still plagues much of the church. During the first wave of historical Jesus research, German scholars rose with the sun, and on bitterly cold mornings they broke the ice that sealed their ink pots with the point of their quill pens and set about the task of doing exhaustive and meticulous work to reconstruct an honest vision of the most important figure in human history. They did this in service to the church, not to destroy it. The greatest threat to Christian discipleship, then as now, is a supernatural vision of a Jesus that one can only worship, but never follow. Rudolph Bultmann "demythologized" the gospel not to destroy faith but to make the radical message of Jesus even more accessible.
Today's third wave of historical Jesus research has a reputation for complete indifference to the church (which it deserves). But even this is changing, because pastors from Berkeley to Omaha need the fruits of biblical scholarship to counter enormous misconceptions about the message and ministry of Jesus. Writer and activist Jim Wallis describes how, as a young man growing up in an evangelical church, he never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount. All the focus was on the epistles, especially Paul's contention that Christ died for our sins. Barbara Brown Taylor teaches a university course called "Introduction to World Religions" and confesses that her students have heard so much inaccurate information in church that they end up flunking Christianity-because they think they already know their own tradition. One student asked, "If Paul wasn't one of the disciples, where did he get his stuff?"
Even so, a deep and even paranoid suspicion continues to disparage higher criticism of the Bible, as if someone could publish a paper that would unravel God. One of the most gifted evangelicals, N. T. Wright, recently offered this scathing rebuke:
The massive concentration on source and form criticism, the industrial-scale development of criteria for authenticity (or, more often, inauthenticity), and the extraordinary inverted snobbery of preferring gnostic sayings-sources to the canonical documents all stem from, and in turn reinforce, the determination of the Western world and the church to make sure that the four Gospels will not be able to say what they want to say, but will be patronized, muzzled, dismembered and eventually eliminated altogether as a force to be reckoned with.¹¹
Methinks the bishop of Durham doth protest too much. Perhaps in light of both the astonishing reverence for and the equally astonishing ignorance about the Bible in our time, we might at least agree to the wise counsel of the Pharisee Gamaliel, who gave us the original version of "Let It Be": "So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them in that case you may even be found fighting against God!" (Acts 5:38-39).
Scholars are not about the business of bringing people to faith, nor can their work, by definition, take faith away. At the very least, however, it can keep faith from being based on false premises or formed around an uncritical and oblivious intellectual dishonesty. Uneducated clergy can be as dangerous as quack physicians, and for this reason my spiritual forebears founded Harvard and Yale for the sole purpose of training pastors to think. Even so, not a single one of them would have presumed that their thinking alone could save people.
Today the edgy and even offensive work of historical Jesus scholars can help us to understand, for example, how the process of softening and altering the words of Jesus began as soon as the church began to market the messiah. Knowing this means that we can reverse the process and begin to recover what was, and still is, both astonishing and dangerous about that message.
Those first disciples who had been forever changed by their encounter with Jesus did not set out to domesticate it. But with the passage of time and the inherent pressure to market the message for a larger audience, the second and third generations of disciples felt compelled to turn the Galilean sage into the Son of God. Like advertisers today who must "break through the clutter," the early church wanted and needed to get the world's attention. The audience was largely Jewish, and the message was so counterintuitive as to appear ludicrous-especially the notion that God's power is "made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).
After several decades in which no written records are produced, the writings of Paul and his imitators begin to shift the focus from "the vision that mesmerized Jesus to Jesus the visionary."¹2 By the time Mark writes the world's first gospel and Matthew and Luke follow suit a decade or so later, the marks of redaction have become obvious. The most offensive passages are softened to appeal to a broader audience. To "propagate," after all, is the root of "propaganda," and this was missionary propaganda.
Perhaps the most obvious change is a change in tense. The kingdom was an immediate and luminous reality to Jesus, even though it had a future dimension as well. But gospel writings began to segregate present and future tense again, projecting the kingdom once more into the future, rather than celebrating it as a fact of the present. An apocalyptic mentality returned, as surely to explain the continued existence of evil and the delay in the second coming as to cover what appeared to critics to be Jesus' naive sense of time.
The rhetorical strategies of Jesus are altered as well, so that their ambiguity and tension are reduced, and redactors begin "helping" listeners to get the "point" by adding material in front of and at the end of otherwise baffling parables. In Luke's account of the Beatitudes, drawn from the Q gospel, the poor are congratulated for possessing the kingdom (6:20), but this makes no sense. So Matthew adapts the same material to make it a more spiritual, less literal statement: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (5:3, emphasis added).
When Jesus prays in Matthew, "Give us this day our daily bread” (6:11), he displays absolute confidence that God will provide for our immediate needs. But Luke is unsettled by this and wants to portray God as providing on the installment plan, so he changes it to "Give us each day our daily bread" (11:3).
When Matthew's Jesus teaches that parents may be expected to give their children bread rather than a stone, it is real bread he is talking about (7:9, 11). But when Luke seeks a broader audience, one that is not so concerned about where its next meal is coming from, he changes the emphasis to a more spiritual one: "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (11:13, emphasis added).
By the time John's gospel is written, the daily bread that can be depended on has morphed into eternal bread and a permanent end to hunger: "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty" (6:35, emphasis added). Now the allegorical spiritualization of Jesus is complete, and his trust in the daily providence of God to provide bread one day at a time has evolved into a community that regards faith in Christ as a substitute for bread. Last, the bread becomes a symbol for the sacrificial body of Christ that, when eaten, will save us not from daily hunger but from our sins for all eternity.
Countless examples of how the early sayings of Jesus were softened and changed are available in the detailed work of New Testament scholars. But just a few examples will make the point and shed light on what it might mean to be a disciple of Jesus today. Take the simple and completely unambiguous command. in the Sermon on the Mount: "Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you" (Matt. 5:42).
I know of no one who follows this command. I have yet to attend a conference for clergy at which, walking down the street with my colleagues, ministers of the gospel emptied their pockets for every beggar. And further, I know of no one who would agree to make a loan to anyone who asked. To the contrary, even the prohibition against charging interest has long since ceased to be a Christian imperative.
A second example involves a familiar text that is all but absent from today's prosperity gospel pulpits: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25). This seems fairly straightforward, but what about the church budget? As an institution, the church depends on the generosity of its wealthy contributors, and they find this teaching to be another example of "soaking the rich." Instead of being honest about the Jesus message, that wealth is not a sin but can be spiritually debilitating, exegetical apologists go to work doing creative reinterpretations until they find what they went looking for something that will pull the teeth of this inconvenient truth:
Fabric softeners have been applied. Some, for example, have imagined a narrow pass called the needle's eye, where it is difficult but not impossible for a loaded camel to pass through. Other compromisers have suggested a gate in the walls of Jerusalem called the needle's eye: at this gate a camel was required to squat down and wriggle through. Still others have argued that "camel" is a misunderstanding of a similar-sounding word meaning "rope." All such softening ploys are uncharacteristic of Jesus and subvert both the style and content of his wisdom.13
And so it goes. Riddles are moralized, and radical parables are softened or reversed. It is strenuously argued that the oral tradition allowed for countless changes that can never be tracked and that the original utterances of Jesus cannot be known with certainty-only as more likely or less likely. This is no reason to give up, however, because we are still obligated to pursue the "more likely." The leap of faith is still required, but we should only leap after reason has taken us as far as it can. The clues are always the same. Earlier material should be considered more trustworthy than later redactions, and when there are multiple sources, inside the church and out, and the offense has remained mostly intact, then we may be "getting warm" with regard to authenticity.
Such serious Bible study can no longer be confined to the academy or debated at conferences to which only hyperintellectuals are invited for tedious debates that often seem like much ado about nothing. Bible study has become essential to our survival, just as thoughtful, candid, and informed Christian education is essential to the future of the church. We live on a planet that is only a turn or two away from oblivion, and nuclear weapons are soon to be in the hands of everyone-those who are deluded as well as those who have deluded themselves into thinking that they are not.
Fundamentalism of every kind is surging, and its goal is nothing short of a return to a pre-Enlightenment world where everyone knows his or her place and stays in it-especially women, minorities, gays, and scientists. No amount of Madison Avenue magic can hide the bitter truth any longer. As much as we might like the idea of a gated world, fortified by private security contractors and dedicated to the idea that might makes right, the rope of civilization is now frayed to the breaking point. Paradoxically, this is, quite literally, a "come to Jesus moment."
MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD
To be a disciple is to "obey" something that requires more than the life of obligatory religious observances ranging from those guilt-laden trips to church on Christmas and Easter to the annual charity baskets providing the illusion that the church is practicing year-round compassion. Disciples today are called to rebel against the rampant individualism of American culture and to reconstitute and then empower communities of "dignified indignance."14
These are communities not of the saved and the unsaved but of those learning how to be Jesus-wise and not Roman-foolish. They are beloved communities, where the strong support the weak and the healthy sacrifice to cure the sick. Their members care for the earth, for the life of the spirit, and for each other. Because they refuse to make ostentatious displays of wealth or form hierarchies, they will appear positively "peculiar," as we say in Oklahoma. As they grow in numbers and influence, they will be labeled "un-American." Some will even take the American flag out of their sanctuary, proclaiming it a "house of prayer for all people."
To be a disciple now requires not the embrace of a particular ideology but the resolve necessary to live by a new ethic. Jesus certainly made this much clear: ritual observances are not to be confused with living faithfully. For Israel, the most important questions were never theological, but always ethical. How goes it in the land with the widow, the orphan, the stranger? What would a just society look like, and how would the earth's resources be distributed? What does it matter if you keep every Sabbath law but neglect to care for your neighbor? It is not what you believe that matters ultimately, but what you do.
The Church of the Followers of Jesus will teach Jesus wisdom, not doctrine. It will focus on ethics, not theology. It will prosper only to the extent that it becomes the beloved community again, bound to Jesus as the reflected face of God and to all other wise ones. It will seek the truth wherever it may be found and practice faith as the most radical kind of freedom-the freedom to serve something higher and more important than oneself.
It seems only fair, for example, to ask that the members of the body of Christ look and act differently from those who are not part of the beloved community. They should seem like "resident aliens,” according to authors Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, a part of a "colony" more than a congregation.¹5 The Christian community should not feel at home in the world, as if it is a “voluntary organization of like-minded individuals."
Willimon once described the true meaning of "countercultural" behavior as going to see someone in a nursing home. You can't do anything more radical than that, he said. The response of the audience to his comment was a bit underwhelming, as if perhaps they were hoping for something a little more Hollywood something that might turn into a documentary starring each one of them as a mad prophet decrying the hypocrisies of our time.
I hate going to nursing homes. I hate the way they smell. I hate to hear the Muzak of crazy babbling, the mad soliloquies of demented souls reliving their childhoods or insisting that I speak to the brown bear at the foot of their bed. The common dining area is the worst. All those wheelchairs pushed together and then abandoned, forming a circle of cloudy eyes and trembling hands. Everyone seems to be looking far off, as if dementia makes everything part of the background and nothing a part of the foreground. Ambulances arrive daily to pick up the dead, and the only thing that changes is the color of the Jell-O.
Once I went to a nursing home to visit a man I'd never met and lost his room number. Knowing that I wouldn't recognize him, I decided to stick my head into room after room while calling out his name. If there was a man in the bed, and he was not asleep, I would ask, “Are you Jack Burns?" On just my third try, a gentleman with a great shock of snow-white hair pulled himself up off the bed and looked at me smiling. My question had brightened his face, so I repeated it. "Are you Jack Burns?"
He said, "I am if you want me to be."
What followed was a conversation that would never have happened if I had not reluctantly “obeyed" my own job description. Likewise, we should tell anyone who joins a church that they have just entered into a strange and bewildering covenant of blessed inconvenience. We are all, of course, too busy to sit on another committee. They meet at inconvenient times, but we go because we are under orders. Yet time and time again we come home feeling that it was worth it, that we are better for having shared time with friends in the work of something more important than ourselves.
To be honest, we almost always try to think of reasons not to do something collective and "other-oriented." But invariably we come home from those experiences believing that we have done a good thing—a new program for the kids or an organized effort to meet with the city council about a living wage. It turns out to be a good way to spend Tuesday evening-even better than TV. We look one another in the eye, ask about our children, laugh, and toss a small stone of hope in the ocean of misery that is the world. Someone has to take minutes, of course, because "they also serve" who sit and take minutes.
To be a disciple is to submit to something uncertain and impractical, like not doing exactly what one feels like doing at any given moment. We are not called together in church to remind ourselves, one more time, what we "believe." It is a strange and peculiar American spectacle, this standing up, week after week, to proclaim, "This is my belief." Even stranger is the postmodern zeal with which we pretend that this is a God-given right, that others must respect our belief, and that it need not make sense to be legitimate. It must only be "sincere." This passes for the orthodoxy of pluralism, while constituting, in fact, the ultimate heresy: that we can be religious in isolation from one another, sacrificing nothing.
Instead of reflecting on the meaning of being a "beloved community under new orders," as I have grown fond of describing the church, Americans prefer, as one writer put it, "to be left alone, warmed by our beliefs-that-make-no-sense, whether they are the quotidian platitudes of ordinary Americans, the magical thinking of evangelicals, the mystical thinking of New Age Gnostics, the teary-eyed patriotism of social conservatives, or the perfervid loyalty of the rich to their free-market Mammon. We are thus the congregation of the Church of the Infinitely Fractured, splendidly alone together."16
Sacred covenants, on the other hand, actually make us all less free at least when freedom is narrowly and selfishly defined. We don't have the luxury of pretending that we can live and act in isolation from one another. Marriage restricts us when it comes to having other sexual partners. Parenthood nearly obliterates personal time and lays waste to a lifetime of energy. Agreeing to the role of a citizen in a democracy shackles the voter with such unpleasant and time-consuming tasks as knowing the voting record of candidates and where they stand on the issues.
A woman approached me one day to talk about joining my church. "What brought you here?" I asked.
"I want to be less free," she responded.
Another man in his late fifties began attending regularly, always sitting in the back and listening intently to the sermons. For months he came, listened, scratched notes on the bulletin, and then left without speaking to anyone. Finally, he began to engage me in theological conversations over coffee, and he seemed remarkably informed about church doctrine, Christian practice, and the requirements of the life of faith. He was exceptionally well read, and I began to anticipate that he would join-delighted by the thought.
I was surprised, therefore, when he approached me after the service one Sunday and informed me that he had decided not to join the church. Obviously disappointed, I sought to encourage him by complimenting his remarkable knowledge of the gospel and the teachings of Jesus. "You probably understand the Christian faith better than 99 percent of the people who join this church. What's holding you back?"
He stared at the floor, and after an awkward silence he responded, “I'm a military man, and I know how to take orders. Therefore, my level of understanding is not an advantage. It might even be grounds for a court martial."
I must have still looked confused. That's when he made it as plain as possible.
"Reverend, I get it. I just can't do it.“