Walking the Talk

Living Faith 8.1

Living Faith notes that discipleship is a way of being and doing, which calls for obedience to Christ’s commandment to love God and one’s neighbour. Clearly, this is not a way for persons and groups motivated solely by self-interest.

In this matter, the initiative is with God. God is the One who first loves (1 John: 4:19). God takes the initiative. By the power of God’s love in Christ, namely, by God’s grace, our love toward God and neighbour is evoked. Such love is not self-generated. God’s love for us brings to birth our love for God. (In this sense we are born again—and again). It also sets us free to love God and freely obey the commandment to love our neighbour. We can say “freely” because the love is not coerced. Can any love worth the name be coerced? No. We respond freely and in kind to the enduring and all-embracing good will (benevolence) of God, and by willing and “doing the truth” of this love in care and compassion toward our neighbour. The teacher’s first lesson to his disciples? That the God he called Father wills nothing other than the good of all things in heaven and on earth.

The first disciples heard Christ’s voice as a calling out or a calling away. Matthew tells us that when Jesus called Simon Peter and Andrew “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” In the same way, Matthew continues, James and his brother John left their boat and their father (Matthew 4:18-22). The ekklesia (those called out) of four was soon to become the ekklesia of 12, the infant church. Today, in a similar way, Christ’s call is mediated to us. It comes to us in and through the community of those called out, in and through the church’s worship and practices (Living Faith 8.1.2).

Consider the sacrament of baptism. This sacrament is also an act of discipleship (Living Faith 7.6.4). It is the sign and seal of dying to sin and rising to the new life in Christ, and of our being called out and away from that twilit far country into the welcoming fellowship of the household of God. It is the sacrament in and through which by the power of God’s grace we make the transition from the old way of being to the new. It marks the public beginning of a lifelong process of learning to be Christ’s followers; namely, of “learning to know whose child you are” (Book of Praise 521).

Sometimes we wonder about Simon Peter, Andrew, and the long succession of disciples who also consented to be called away. Did Jesus not care that they may have had families to clothe and feed, mothers and fathers to honour, boats to be maintained and kept seaworthy? Of course he cared. He does not disparage the family as such, nor possessions as such. Rather, the calling of the disciples involves learning that they belong from first to last not to one’s possessions, not to one’s spouse, not even to one’s family or clan or nation, but to the God whose children we truly are and to whom we belong in life and in death. Martin Luther caught the essence of the matter when with characteristic vigour he defined God’s call to discipleship as “the summons that rings above all earthly goods, all earthly love” (Book of Praise 315). This hymn is one of powerful support and encouragement to Christ’s followers. We may ask ourselves whether we too have “let go” and therefore can sing it with anything like the same conviction as its author.

The disciples were not prepared for the suffering and death of their teacher. They lost their nerve. Jesus was betrayed, denied and left abandoned and alone by his erstwhile companions to endure a cruel death. But surely they were much less prepared for a love infinitely stronger than death, a love that raised him to leave a tomb empty and to empower them to press on. Having been called and having learned to walk the talk, the disciples now continue their journey as those sent out to teach and baptize. Sent forth as his apostles in the light of Jesus’ promise: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age,” they have a mission to fulfil (Matthew 28:18-20). So, the journey continues in the power of this risen love, the love of Christ their teacher who had been their travelling companion from the very beginning.

Today we also have a mission. Churches engage in this mission to love God and our neighbour in various practical ways: by supporting Out of the Cold programs, and donating and distributing food and clothing to people in need. They support many kinds of local and international relief organizations. Their mission is both local and global. It also involves resistance to those evil powers that conspire to frustrate and destroy the peace, justice and joy of God’s reign that is both present among us and to come. Having learned to pray, Christ’s disciples have the audacity to resist such powers not by adopting the policy of “an eye for an eye” but by “doing the truth” in “bringing good news to the oppressed, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, and releasing the prisoners” (Isaiah 61:1; Matthew 25:31-46). And when his disciples even have the audacity to pray for evildoers and persecutors they take on the whole world. Such labours of love as these are never lost.

Abiding in the love that sets Christ’s disciples free to love, may they do justice and bring hope, healing and peace. And for the love that is “new every morning,” (Book of Praise 815) may God keep us alert, prepared, faithful and loving as we walk the talk.