The sixth Way of Love practice for a Jesus-focused life is Go. Go where God sends you. Go where you hear someone calling for you. Go across boundaries of culture, economics, race, age, gender, experience… Go and bear Christ’s love to people who are different from you. Get out of your safe spot and join Christ on the road. The road is where Jesus spent most of his time – why do we mostly hang out with him in buildings on Sundays?
Many equate being a Christian with going to church. But these days fewer and fewer people go to church, even before Covid hit. So, many churches put their energies into trying to get people to Come. Evangelism becomes synonymous with welcoming, programming, marketing, strategies of attraction. Meanwhile, so many people hungry for God’s word of life are outside our doors, doing other things, on society's margins.
Jesus never invited anyone into a building. He said, “Follow me.” His disciples learned to travel, to live on the road, supported by a group of women who also heard Jesus’ call to Go. He sent them out, saying, “Go. Proclaim the Good News. Heal the sick. And don’t get too comfortable anywhere.”
To Go in Jesus’ name requires us to get out of our comfort zones. Some associate church with comfort, a place of refuge. But Jesus said: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” We do need to gather in community as disciples, in our practice of Worship; church – even on Zoom – is where we recharge and rejoice in what God is doing through us out in the world, are refreshed in God’s Word and renewed at Christ’s Table. But it is not where we are to rest. We come in as Jesus’ disciples; we go apart again as Christ’s apostles, sent out to refresh the world with living water.
One of the most profoundly boundary-crossing encounters in the Gospels took place between Jesus and a woman he met at a well one day at high noon. Here we see a Jewish man, a holy man, talking with a Samaritan woman, an outcast both ethnically and because of her “lifestyle choices.” These two talk across so many barriers, and do their share of sparring; this woman is feisty. But Jesus says that the water in that well will leave her thirsty again; the living water he can give will well up inside her for eternal life. He tells her truth about herself, and about himself, that he is the Messiah she has been awaiting – and she believes. She drops her bucket, runs back to town and says, “Come and see!” Her neighbors do, they meet him for themselves, and the whole town comes to believe in Jesus.
When we go in Jesus’ name, transformation follows. Because we go where he will go (and has already been…). In Luke 10:1 we read, “He sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Jesus is still sending us on ahead, to go, to meet, to listen in humility and grace, building relationships in which we can introduce him easily and naturally as we tell our God-stories and listen for those of others. How exciting it would be if our churches found ways to go out in groups, to offer worship and service among different sorts of people to whom we feel called – single mothers, folks in homeless encampments, citizens returning from incarceration, retired executives, healthcare workers…
To whom do you feel called to go, and where? Have you shared that with anyone?
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