inquirer, disciple or apostle?

 ¹¹ But I am full of the wrath of the LORD,
       and I cannot hold it in.
       "Pour it out on the children in the street
       and on the young men gathered together;
       both husband and wife will be caught in it,
       and the old, those weighed down with years.

 ¹² Their houses will be turned over to others,
       together with their fields and their wives,
       when I stretch out my hand
       against those who live in the land,"
       declares the LORD.

 ¹³ "From the least to the greatest,
       all are greedy for gain;
       prophets and priests alike,
       all practice deceit.

 ¹⁴ They dress the wound of my people
       as though it were not serious.
       'Peace, peace,' they say,
       when there is no peace.

 ¹⁵ Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct?
       No, they have no shame at all;
       they do not even know how to blush.
       So they will fall among the fallen;
       they will be brought down when I punish them,"
       says the LORD.

Amos 5

¹¹ You trample on the poor
       and force him to give you grain.
       Therefore, though you have built stone mansions,
       you will not live in them;
       though you have planted lush vineyards,
       you will not drink their wine.

 ¹² For I know how many are your offenses
       and how great your sins.
       You oppress the righteous and take bribes
       and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts.

²¹ "I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
       I cannot stand your assemblies.

 ²² Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
       I will not accept them.
       Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, ^[b]
       I will have no regard for them.

 ²³ Away with the noise of your songs!
       I will not listen to the music of your harps.

 ²⁴ But let justice roll on like a river,
       righteousness like a never-failing stream!

The following excerpts are from the book "Peace" (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), by Walter Brueggemann, UCC minister and retired professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta and Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis.

. . . So morality is sorting out the demands and claims that emerge out of the precious moments when life is whole and new.  Consider how we would act if we were to live according to the exodus:

•Exodus people honor the Sabbath, because it is a reminder of the contrast between oppressive work and healing, humane rest.

•Exodus people don't covet, because the tyranny of Pharaoh was in coveting after he had enough. 

•Exodus people don't steal, kill, or commit adultery, because now they know that life is too precious to be abused or perverted. The laws of Israel are informed by exodus. 

There are some things you can count on.  The world will not fall apart.  At the bottom of life are a confidence and buoyancy about the world.  The world will not collapse, and we need not be frantic about the prospect that it will.  This, I believe, is a dimension of reality lost in our time, impressed as we are with our capacity to make and unmake the world . . .  we cannot finally unmake the world because we have not made the world.

. . .God rested!  Think of the boldness of that statement.  God rested.  The One charged supremely with ordering the world was not in a tizzy about making it go.  And the commandment is very clear: We rest because God did (Exodus 20:8-11).  And God rested because the reliability of the world has been ordained by God and is not in doubt . . . The world is whole and faithful enough that we need not be consumed in efforts to secure our own existence.  It has been secured . . . The world is safe, and that calls for wonder, amazement, and gratitude.

People who lack that sense of astonishment are likely to take themselves too seriously, and for them the world may finally become too anxious.

What is it God has promised that the world does not know?  Simply that which separates the followers of Jesus from the slaves of this world – suffering love.  This little, seemingly powerless community (the Church) is ordered and identified by its practice of caring, transforming, empowering love of the towel-and-basin variety. 

. . .this little community consists of those who have gotten themselves untangled from the values of this world.  We are not like the others.  Our perception of the world is different, and because we see differently, we can both act and believe differently.   

The truth into which the church is led by the dying one is that the world is being dismantled, and a new world with a quite different code of operation is at hand.  It is this dismantling that the church knows about and that the world has not yet begun to suspect . . .   

Newness is about to burst into our lives and, indeed, into the world.  But the newness comes not without a price, and the price is death to all present arrangements, death to fear and to small hopes, death to old visions and memories.  And those who are ready for death to all that the world calls 'life' are the ones to whom life can come.  The world that will hate us does not know about joy; it knows about management and security and competence and stability, but none of that can yield joy.

. . . the movement from this world to the next is not made with full hands, but requires empty hands. 

1.  

The following excerpts are from the book "Finding Our Way Again"  by Brian McLaren.  Brian spent 3 days with us here at Fairlawn West in 2004.

First, they may go to church without understanding the potential and purposes of the communal practices they encounter there.  As a result, they may engage in spiritual malpractice instead of spiritual practice, leading to spiritual malformation rather than spiritual formation.  That's why, according to the apostle Paul, gathering in the wrong way can be worse than not gathering at all: "Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse" (1 Corinthians 11:17 NRSV).  The apostle James erupted in a full-fledged rant along similar lines, suggesting that the common practice of "favoritism" (or cliquishness, a failure to properly practice the presence of people) made him wonder whether the so-called Christians to whom he wrote really got the message of Jesus at all (James 2:1-7)

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So our planetary ecology is in trouble.  But isn't that outer disharmony and imbalance integrally related to the disharmony and imbalance in our inner ecology?  If we are controlled by greed or fear or hate or lust internally, won't that inner ecology be expressed in the kind of world we have?  If God wants the outer ecology healed, won't God necessarily want our inner ecology restored to balance and health as well?  So, when we think of spiritual practices, shouldn't we think of practice that form and transform both the outer and inner ecologies of soul and world?

We could also say it like this: Jesus called disciples so he could send them out as apostles.  They were called together to learn so they could be sent out to teach and serve.  When a master musician invites promising young musicians to be her students, her ultimate goal is for them not to be students only, but also to become master musicians with students of their own, so the way, the tradition, of music goes on generation after generation with continuity and creativity—preserving the past but never being restricted to replaying it.  Jesus calls disciples for the purpose of forming them into apostles, whom he will send out to form disciples and apostles, and so on, across all social boundaries and generations, so the "good news revolution" he launched in his little corner of the world will spread to all creation.

The church ... cannot be content to play the part of a nurse looking after the casualties of the system. It must play an active part both in challenging the present unjust structures and in pioneering alternatives. - Donald Dorr Catholic missionary priest