The Way

Disciples. 12. That number worked on many levels, so to keep it simple, I will align with tradition and also say there were 12.

Were they “the little rag-tag army” that Martin Bell spoke of in The Way of the Wolf? He describes a silly group of people, so happy and dancing in a big circle holding hands. It makes us smile and feel good. However, if we look from another perspective, the closed circle means leaving the others out. Bell also described the bunny (Barrington Bunny) who could find no one else like himself and was excluded by all the other animals because they were having their own parties, you know, the squirrels and chipmunks and whoever else. The bunny makes and in the dark of night, delivers gifts to each home, describing it as “a gift, a free gift, with no strings attached”. He finishes delivering the gifts and comes across a lost mouse who will freeze to death. So the bunny invites the mouse to cuddle close. In the morning, when the snow has stopped and the sun has come out, all these little families find their gifts and the family of the mouse find him quite well, under the carcass of a dead bunny.

Hey, I’m not trying to blow the socks off of a pagan recognition of new life in the spring, the Easter bunny, I’m only musing on what Easter has become to so many Americans, most of whom, when asked their religious preference, now say “none”. Yet we still celebrate.

If, in ministry, we followed The Way, like the bunny, we are led to believe we have to give it all. All of it. As if we are strip searched upon ordination and have to relinquish the heirlooms, the treasured photos, the families we were born to. In leaving all this behind and giving all we have we end up dead. Dead as doorknobs. Cold, hardened, with nothing to say and incapable of working in this world as corpses.

That is not Christ-like. But the story was  told as a model of the faith at summer camp.

Count the number of times it is written in the Gospels, how frequently Jesus went away by himself to pray. He needed re-fueling too. Going our “all in all” does not excuse ourselves.

In the Church (and I mean traditional modern Christianity) we have sort of expected this kind of commitment to those in the pulpit. For those in the pews Easter is, well, from Facebook postings, mostly kids in new pastel clothes getting their pictures made for generations to come. It’s sweet.

A contemporary Christian tune that ironically has a child begin it is titled “You Are My All in All” and it praises the Lord for taking all of our “sin, our guilt, our shame”. For many, especially those of us with a penchant toward depression, we do not hear the “good news” because all of the long forgotten and forgiven sins, even past tense, get dragged out again and our own spirits get bruised in the process.

There were more than 12. Several times in the Gospel of Mark, the phrase “because of the crowds” is used. They didn’t arrest him when he cleared the temple, they didn’t arrest him when he came riding into town on a donkey (while at the same time, Pilate was on a stallion, prancing into the city himself). Even when Jesus is arrested, Judas had to tell them where and they went at night. At his arrest Jesus asks why they didn’t arrest him when they had seen him and their fear was “the crowds”. There were more than 12.

These followers were being taught about an entirely different perspective. They were taught to use their ears and mouth and eyes. They knew that The Way was not a “personal relationship” in order to receive the goodie basket when they die. The Way was and is, a direction to live your life, not as a bystander, but as a Christian.

The Way is not a mental exercise, not a psychosocial perspective nor is it a theological discourse.  It is not a doctrine, a credo, a series of answers to all of life’s questions. The Way is life transformed.

The Way is living as the risen dead

Now. Today