Until Further Notice

For almost eight years now, Bishop Sally Dyck has asked the pastors and leaders of our United Methodist churches in Minnesota to meditate on one text: the full chapter of Romans 12. The idea behind the study of this text is that the people of God can only be transformed by God’s love and grace expressed in Christ Jesus, and therefore, can only become people who actively show their faith if they have learned and imagined what an authentic Christian-life looks like.

The Bishop enjoys Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase from The Message. Who can help being inspired or encouraged by a fresh reading of Paul’s words? "So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your every day, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

The Bishop's instructions were that this should be read daily "until further notice." I don't recall that she ever lifted that instruction. The point was that the way of the Christian life requires steady, disciplined, dailiness and practice "until further notice."

Steve Manskar, a discipleship leader in our denomination, has written that practicing our faith is like any other skill or practice; it requires repetition, and going back to basics often. A baseball fan, he noticed that Sports Illustrated recently published a story on the radio communications among players and coaches during baseball games. The magazine discovered that the most frequent communications between coaches and players were not big, strategic plans, but reminders from the coaches to their players to keep doing the basics properly.

For us, this means using the means of grace: regular worship, regular Communion, personal and family devotions, searching the Scriptures, conferring with and supporting other Christians, forgiving and seeking forgiveness, fasting, and serving the poor of the earth, and so on.

The Desert Fathers tell the story of a younger monk who came to an Elder in his community. The young monk had been faltering in his practice of his faith, losing heart and hope to a point where he was no longer keeping any of the promises that he had made about the way he would live. Every time that he tried to pray, or read the Scriptures, or fast, he just lost heart and quit.

The Elder, listening generously to the younger monk, told this man the story of a father who sent his son out to farm a piece of property with the promise that the land and its fruits would be his when he had cleared the land. When the son arrived at the land, it was so full of thickets, brambles and thorns that he just despaired, and, rather than work, he just lay down and wept, and then he slept. When his father came by to see what was happening, the son told him, “Look at this land! I've done nothing here because this ground is impossible. Just look at it!” The father patiently told his son, “You’re right. This ground cannot all be cleared all at once. What you must do, then, is to pull out the brambles and thorns a little at a time, each day. If you will do this, a little each day, then in the end the field will be yours.” Then the Elder told the younger man, “The same thing is true in matters of the Spirit. Only begin to practice as much as you can each day, and in the end you will have the fruits of your effort.”

So that’s Christian renewal: gratitude, imagination and daily practice—until further notice.