BLOG 7/23/19. RECLAIMING OUR PRIMARY (INTER)NATIONALITY AS CHRIST’S DISCIPLES

Just maybe too many of us identify ourselves as followers of Christ a bit mindlessly? Maybe we join Christian communities and make Christian profession without realizing that it might just cost us our reputations, or lives. Jesus was quite candid when he told his audience that unless a person forsook all that he had, he could not be his disciple. Jesus never sugar-coated the cost of being his disciple. The apostle put discipleship and baptism in terms of dying to a former way of life and rising to a radical way of new life in which our whole lives were given to him as instruments of righteousness.

Ah! But it gets more interesting. The apostle Peter explained to his listeners that they would always be outsiders, i.e., “aliens and exiles”, those who march to a different drummer, … they were a “holy nation” which doesn’t ever, really fit in, or conform to the power structures of this age. But keep going: our roots in the calling of Israel all those centuries ago make it plain that God’s people (our Old testament ancestors) are called to incarnate his own character: “What does the Lord require of thee, O man, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8) Or, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness (what is right) like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24).

Even when the Israelites were captives in a pagan empire, God told them to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord in its behalf …” (Jeremiah 29:7). Those of us who identify ourselves as followers of Christ, do in fact have a nationality in one of the numerous nations of the world, and a responsibility to be God’s agents of light in what is often a context of darkness and inhumane power structures. But, primarily, we are part of God’s holy nation which is composed of those out of “every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9).

The world in which we live, and the nation in which we are currently citizens, is one blighted and torn by all kinds of distressing expressions of violence, prejudice, inhumanity, hate-mongering, and expressions of destructive talk and behavior. Yet, in the midst of all of these nations, in the vast number of refugees who have no national home any longer, in nations that are under oppressive regimes, … God has his holy nation (often tiny, and persecuted) which is bound together with those of us in other nations as children of the light. But, … it can be costly. Discipleship is not cheap, but it has consequences of blessing wherever it is faithfully lived out.

These are troublesome days for us nationally and internationally. Yet it is in this context of darkness, what with so much deception, corruption, and unrighteousness, that we are called to b salt and light. It has always been such for God’s new creation people. We simply need to remember, and embrace more deeply, what being Christ’s disciples requires of us, and how we are to express the Light, today, and where we are It requires a death to all that is of the dominion of darkness, and a daily embracing our role as instruments of righteousness, i.e., the incarnation of God’s new humanity, his international community of disciples.

May grace and peace abound to you in this calling.

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