Discipleship Letters 89-90

Discipleship Letter 89                                    May 30^th, 2010

“What many Christians are missing in their lives is a sense of vocation. The word itself means a call or summons, so that having a vocation means more than having a job. It means answering a specific call; it means doing what one is meant to do. In religious language, it means participating in the work of God, something that few lay people believe they do” [Barbara B. Taylor, The Preaching Life (Lanham: Cowley, 1993), p. 28.].

We are responsible for our living and dying. In between living and dying, we’re supposed to live with a sense of direction. It’s not easy and yet necessary to have a vocation in life. We exist to answer a call. We live to fulfill something that is bigger than ourselves. We are created to participate in what has been prepared.

Sometimes I think that we are not happy or satisfied because a sense of vocation is missing. Besides going to school, making money, getting married, having children, getting old, and being buried, is there a call we need to devote our time and energy to answer? Is there a better reason to live before dying? What are we capable of becoming in the work of God?

“For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). We should anticipate what is to come. And we live in the present as if it had already come. To be capable of becoming, we need to be capable of anticipating. However, our anticipation is not without ground. “If the world in its present state, its subjection to evil and suffering, makes God questionable, conversely the God of resurrection, the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, makes the present state of the world questionable. He opens it in hope to a different future…Faith in God is possible only as hope that the world can be different” [Richard Bauckham, The Theology of Jurgen Moltmann (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 37.].

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Discipleship Letter 90                                    June 06^th, 2010

“Faith is a dialogic transaction that refuses closure, but that insists upon serious engagement that has commandment at its center” [Walter Brueggemann, An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), p. 9.].

We constantly engage with God. God never stops engaging with us. God is our dialogic God, for He converses with us through different traditions, like the priestly tradition (e.g. Leviticus), the prophetic tradition (e.g. Jeremiah), and the wisdom tradition (e.g. Job). He engages with us in various modes of communication because He knows that we need to be addressed by different ways of communication. God accommodates Himself so that He can have dialogue with us.

We are God’s dialogic partner because we are the people of the living Word. If the living Word is not the center of our thinking and living, we are no longer in dialogue. We just mutter to ourselves: it is only a monologue. There is no transformation in monologue, for we stick with our own voices that refuse to dialogue with the One who has something different to say to us. We stop growing and start the process of dying when we live in monologue. But we are God’s dialogic partner. As His dialogic partner, we pray, we study and examine, we praise, we complain, we lament, we meditate, we wait, we anticipate, etc… God talks to us in different communication modes in His Word. We can also communicate with Him in different styles.