Terms of Engagement

I.        Vows of Affirmation

“We devote our daily life to God, and to serving our neighbors as images of God”

6. I will daily read the Scriptures and meditate on the witness of Jesus Christ.

Why this messy holy book? So many different voices, so many different genres, so many different pictures of God. For Christian people who believe Jesus calls us to a peacemaking discipleship that is always nonviolent, the Bible doesn’t always seem to yield a message in line with that calling. So why search for God in this messy book (anthology, really)?

Pastor Barbara Brown Taylor describes untidy scripture,  “God’s story has its own twists and turns, its own chapters of rage and repentance along with some magnificent cruelties, but it is above all the story of a God who does not break promises, a God who entered into covenant with humankind and who remains loyal to that bond, no matter what we may think of its terms…That is the God who walks toward me in the Bible…The Bible is the book in which the terms of that relationship are explored” (The Preaching Life, 53)

Our central confession is that Jesus—not anyone or anything else—is our Lord, our ruling authority. And when we see that Jesus himself was profoundly shaped by the Hebrew scriptures and that the earliest Christians searched those same texts trying to figure out what God had done through Jesus and how to order their lives accordingly, we are compelled to do likewise. In their example we see the pages of the Bible as the best way to discover God’s reconciling ways shown in Jesus. 

Anonymous

I.        Vows of Affirmation

“We devote our daily life to God, and to serving our neighbors as images of God”

5. I will daily seek to do good for someone without reward or recognition.

Heard about guerilla goodness, anonymous or random acts of kindness, paying-it-forward?  People voluntarily giving up their right to be recognized, to be thanked, to be pleased with themselves, to receive some kind of gain from their good actions? Most Western economic thinkers who trust the “invisible hand” of self-interest see giving it up as unlikely human behavior—and they are right. Yet this is exactly what Christ calls his followers to and models the same himself.  One of the earliest Christian confessions about Jesus, Philippians 2:6-11, makes clear that he gave up his right to gain from his privileged status and obedient actions—willing to suffer for doing good rather than receiving his deserved reward for it!

God’s ironic way left Jesus with far more reward and recognition than if he had initially demanded what he deserved for his status and good works, “regarding equality with God as something to be exploited.” Jesus gave up his privilege and rights for recognition and suffered for doing good, but in the end “God highly exalted him” because of it.

In Christ Alone

I.        Vows of Affirmation

“We devote our daily life to God, and to serving our neighbors as images of God” 

("Agnus Dei" by Trish Steel, CC)

   
1. I will daily offer my life to God with reverence and a living faith; I will daily pray to be used as a servant by God for the good of my neighbors near and far. 

Making—and keeping—a discipleship covenant is no easy thing, especially one with twenty different vows! But this Covenant of Christian Nonviolence  is not mostly about individual moral heroics and rigid perfectionism. We will follow it incompletely (the Covenant itself is incomplete), we will miss the mark. Yet the main focus is not simply on our getting it exactly right, but in serving God and neighbor with as much of our being as possible. Love of God and neighbor is at the true center of our peacemaking, not some outside ethical principle of pacifism.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer says much the same in the following paragraph from The Cost of Discipleship:

Pledged to Whom?

III.    Vows of Nonviolent Witness

“We pledge to act in allegiance to God alone, and to resist injustice with goodness”

by Dorothy Lange via Wikimedia

13. I will make no oath of allegiance to any nation or government of this world, nor will I salute any flag; I will honor and respect legitimate authority, but I will love and worship God alone, sovereign and judge of all nations

John of Patmos’ letter, what we call Revelation, has been variously understood as a horrific end-times scenario. But the letter is not nearly so cryptic and fantastical as we might imagine. At its heart, John’s Revelation is about our allegiances, or rather, our one proper allegiance to only One: the lamb of God who was willingly slain. The final book of the Bible is primarily about who we worship and why (and thus, implicitly who/what we don’t worship).

In our contemporary Christianity, we casually throw around a loaded phrase: “Jesus is Lord.” We may not realize it or use it as such, but this is a statement of total allegiance, of worship. It is the earliest confession of Christian faith appearing earliest in 1 Corinthians 12:3 and seems to be an overturning of the then common proclamation, “Caesar is Lord.”

The Words and Witness

 I.        Vows of Affirmation

“We devote our daily life to God, and to serving our neighbors as images of God”

6. I will daily read the Scriptures and meditate on the witness of Jesus Christ.

(by Luz Bratcher via Flickr)

There are many ways by which we seek to discover new things and model new habits. We peruse books and talk shows and magazine articles drawing on social science and psychology and economics and health sciences and counseling and trade guilds and sports or political analysis. We reflect on our own experience or draw on conventional wisdom and tradition. Sometimes we watch or read maestros and imitate their work. When it comes to being the church as a community of disciples, though, these sources of knowledge and formation and practice take at least a secondary role. We trust—even though we sometimes doubt—that God’s way of peace in the world is shown in the full life of Jesus, depicted in Christian scriptures.

In our hyper-modern world where nonviolence and conflict can be studied from so many helpful  and necessary angles beyond the apparent treatment of the Bible, what makes it important for you to ground your discipleship-peacemaking in Christian scripture? [No, today’s reflections are not meant to be easy!]