I’ve been thinking a lot about discipleship lately – as my recent posts indicate – and have been wondering what it truly means to BE a disciple of Jesus Christ. Most of my Christian training has taught me that all questions have easy, direct answers. In a world of doctrinal statements and prophecy charts, it was easy to put a period behind every position. This made it easy to determine who was “in” and who was “out.” Being a disciple of Jesus Christ was defined largely by agreeing with and maintaining those statements. This produces “cookie cutter” Christians where everyone is a little carbon copy of everyone else.
Over the years I have become less exact. I no longer have a neatly packaged systematic theology that presumes to know it all. I don’t understand everything about God or the scriptures, and I am very distrustful of those who claim they do. Christianity cannot be reduced down to an acrostic, or a few neatly packaged statements.
God simply cannot be boxed in like that.
It seems the more I continue in my own spiritual journey the more I realize there is so much that I have not learned about faith, about God, and the universe we live in. In fact, some days I feel like I don’t know anything at all.
But this much I do know – I have exchanged my neatly-packaged cookie-cutter version of Christianity for something more like a community – and at the center of that community is my rabbi, Jesus.