Presentation

The Public Face of Discipleship

Larry Rasmussen

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(continued)

Yet even a new society joyously defiant of the principalities and powers by virtue of the structure and disciplines of its life together is not all that baptism is.  So I add this note, now in anticipation of a green discipleship for our time.  Often discipleship means improvisation and the development of ancillary practices.  Presently, we must of needs discern anew what the waters of life in the font or the tank or the river of baptism mean for a planet in jeopardy at human hands.  I can’t do the needed survey of the waters of life in Scripture, from Eden to the wilderness and desert narratives to Jordan and New Jerusalem, where crystalline waters flow from the throne of God, with trees of life flourishing along the banks.  Simply trust me that water is more than a handy metaphor for those writers and their people.  Nor, for that matter, would we consider baptizing with a handful of lint or dust. 

What is shocking is that we seldom connect the waters of life of baptism to the waters of life on which absolutely all life depends.  To dramatize this connection, I once proposed that we either call a moratorium on all baptisms until we have safe water for all children, or that, alternatively, we consciously baptize with toxic water.  (Neither got any takers.)

In sum, the focal practice of discipleship named “baptism” can be a powerful moral guidance system for the public expression and deliberation of societal and environmental life-and-death issues.  Baptism is about creating a new human world in Christ, from difference and on the home turf of enmity, and it is about planetary care of a creation element on which all life literally depends utterly. 

A fuller account, had we world enough and time, would take up other focal practices.  Eucharist and the hungers of the world, for example; or “binding and loosing,” (or “forgiveness and reconciliation,” or “nonviolent conflict resolution,” or whatever name you wish to give Jesus’ instruction to his disciples in Matthew 18—and can you think of a more important moral imperative today than a working ethic of enemy love?)  There is hospitality, feasting, fasting and foot-washing, all a far cry from fast foods and hardly even the family eating together, much less welcoming the stranger next door or across town.  There is saying “yes” and saying “no” in a simple life, discipleship’s stand-up answer to a global consumerism that is killing us spiritually and the planet literally.  There is testimony and witness, i.e., the power of proclamation and example.  The power of living testimony (martyrion) is the power to change the world.  Think of your own exemplars—their witness shaped you.   And there are, of course, certain fundamentals that are stated in straightforward moral terms: the Words of Life of the Ten Commandments and the “but I say unto you” instruction of Jesus (on the Mount or on the Plain, depending on your altitude).  All these shape our public living, they form a community of discipleship morally, and they provide a guidance system for the discernment we need to address day-to-day issues, small and large, old and new.

I have a coda of sorts, if you will grant a couple minutes more.  Presbyterians and Lutherans and others schooled in the tradition of faith-as-belief and revelation as creedal knowledge need to pay particular attention to how discipleship practices do their formation work.  Beliefs mean nothing apart from practices.  What sense would it make to have a richly articulated theology of baptism if the faith community never gathered around the font, never made the vows, and never took week-by-week responsibility for the life of the child?  What sense would it make if Christians claimed a rich, cognitive understanding of the eucharist as the real presence of Jesus Christ in the tangible touch and taste of bread and wine, but never broke bread together or shared the cup of blessing?  Apart from their practices, beliefs, creeds, and theology are utterly empty.

But we must go further.  Practices shape belief and give rise to theology and creed.  They are the “doing” that provokes reflection and gives rise to meanings that can reorder our ways.  As the practices change and develop, so, too, does the faith.  (I must say I missed this vital insight about discipleship in the Task Force work on peace, unity, and purity, where revelation is propositional and creedal.)  

I provide but one example of the power of practices to shape belief.  The African Association of Earthkeeping Churches in Zimbabwe is a network of 2 million Shona farmers whose churches are African-initiated churches (rather than the missionary-planted churches of European church bodies).  Chiefly for reasons of survival, their expression of Christian faith became focused on “earthkeeping”—reforestation, prevention of further erosion, improved soils, animal husbandry, village nurseries.  The cycles of the life of these farming peoples were all gathered up into the church year—tree-planting, seedtime and harvest became liturgical events, etc.  Waters of baptism were linked to the waters of life for themselves, their crops, and the animals.  Planting trees was done as part of a very long eucharist service carried out on the prepared soil, and was linked to the Tree of Life and the picture of trees as symbols of steadfast faithfulness in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Psalms and in Isaiah.  Some of the tree-planters have even been given tree names as their nicknames, when there is a match-up of the qualities of the tree and the personality of the farmer.  Earthkeeping, via improvisation on core practices, became the shape of these farmers’ Christianity.  So I was along on Theological Education by Extension and listened to the questions of the faculty to the students.  “What did we used to believe?” asked the professor.  “We used to believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins.”  “What do we now believe?”  “We now believe that Jesus Christ died for all creation.”  Earthkeeping practices yielded new theology and new dimensions of an old creed about the atoning work of Jesus.

The same kind of transformation happened for both ecclesiology and theology when slavery was finally abolished and the struggle continued in Civil Rights and Human Rights campaigns.  It happened again when ordination practices came to include women.  And it is happening, and will happen, when baptized “glbt” Christian are joyously draped in ordination stoles at the altar and take vows of marriage at that same altar.  Discipleship practices, including exacting deliberation as a “process practice,” live into the new reality and folks go from there, humbly and with tenacity until peace, unity and purity come together.

“Tempus” has “fugited” yet again and I must simply close.  We have surveyed some basics of discipleship—the Way, the Call, the Disciplines—to find them all profoundly public as well as deeply personal.  Indeed, even the conclusive test of personal piety is a public one.  The canvassers asked, “Are you a Christian?”  The queried reached for their pad and pencil, wrote his name, and said, “Go up this side of the street and down that, and ask the neighbors.  They will have the answer to your question.”

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