I had an Amazon package stolen from my front door the other day. It was annoying to be sure - I don’t know what someone is going to do with 100 little communion cups with tasteless wafers adhered to the top; I suppose they might get a modicum of nourishment out of it, or they may be inspired to start a new church! One reason I wasn’t more distraught was because I knew Amazon would just replace it. No problem. Everything is expendable, write it off and start over. A perfect picture of the consuming society we inhabit without much second thought.
We’ve also just emerged from the most consumer focused stretch of the calendar year: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas presents and feasting. As we sit under the inescapable barrage of consumer messaging it’s not hard to concede that many of us have mistaken the life of following in the way of Jesus as something we consume. It is being packaged in many places as a product delivered or made available to us for our own personal development, and when it doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves, when it doesn’t matchup to retail therapy, we lose interest. In my mind, there is a direct correlation to the Late Covidtide reality, which is that Christians are not choosing to participate in the life of the church any longer; our lack of apprenticeship has been exposed in our inward turn to the consuming life.
This bears no resemblance to what biblical and historical apprenticeship to Jesus looks like. The followers of Jesus and the Way do begin by receiving something, what John’s gospel calls ‘grace upon grace’ (John 1:16), but its purpose is not for self-gratification; it is to free us to live for the world and God’s kingdom. Apprentices of Jesus live as those whose instinctive practices are to generate and release this grace and all other resources for the other - the neighbour, the stranger, and the enemy. That is the opposite of purchasing and hoarding resources, experiences, knowledge, and relationships for our own self-gratification. The move from consumers to apprentices of Jesus and his way is a lifelong journey with lots of speed bumps and sometimes a slide into the ditch along the way. That’s okay - there is grace upon grace upon grace for all - but, let’s at least make sure we know what direction we are heading in!
Glen Soderholm