Discipleship is a Team Sport
If any of you are sports fans, you may be paying close attention to the FIFA World Cup, and all the drama surrounding it. I am old enough to remember the year England won the world cup. I was fourteen and I recall how the whole country held its breath in the final minutes of the game. I can even remember the names of the whole team, such was the power of that event. But I digress!
As I reflected on today’s readings, particularly the Gospel, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that discipleship is a team sport. Jesus formed a community of disciples to follow him and learn from him. Later he sent them out in pairs to carry on his mission.
As the baptized people of God, we have a collective call to compassionate discipleship, to alleviate human suffering. It is not the prerogative of leaders: God builds the Christian community through interdependence. The call to interdependent discipleship is intended to keep the power dynamic in balance and to live this way, we have to grow in our own trust in God and in one another.
As disciples we will experience hardships, harassment, failure, frustration and helplessness. Jesus tells us that we will not finish meeting the needs of all those in need of compassion before he returns because we will always be in need of transformation, both individually and collectively.
Unless we allow the Holy Spirit to heal us and guide us into living interdependently with others, we may be contributing more to human suffering than human healing. We are to look for the suffering and look to give support in the way of God.
What if you were asked by God to go and cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. Would you accept the call, or would you refuse because you know that you could not fulfill this responsibility?
But let me ask you this: how could these twelve men: fishermen, tradesmen, a tax collector, and even the one who would betray Jesus, be capable of accepting the commission that Jesus gave to them?
The answer is that of course, none of them was capable on their own of doing these things but because Jesus had called them and the Holy Spirit had empowered them, they were able to be part of Christ’s Holy ministry. And this is how it has been since the early church. God has chosen unlikely people to do impossible tasks and has called ordinary people to be his presence in the world, and they were able to do it because they responded to Christ’s call and to his teaching. They didn’t rely on their own power.
So, the question before us is this: how can we be partners in God’s saving plan? And the answer is that God is only asking us to do our small share of the task. We are not asked to do it all. This is very important. We are also asked to be patient with ourselves, to be aware of our limitations, and forgive ourselves when we fail.
In a garden, our part is to plant the seeds, water, weed and till. God provides the miracle contained in the seed, rain, sunshine, and the nutrients in the soil that are needed for the plants to grow. And that is how it is with the commission that Jesus gives to those who follow him. Jesus simply asks us to be faithful and to do our part, and assures us that he will provide the ‘nutrients’ for his people to grow. Jesus doesn’t call us always to be successful but always to be faithful.
Our mission happens outside of church walls. What happens here empowers us for that mission. Our mission is to seek the common good and the time is now.
In our time, we are aware on a real-time basis of what is happening in the world, 24-7, in great detail. Through satellite pictures we know exactly what our big, beautiful planet looks like. We are living in a time when all news is reported with a strong bias, and when the goal of so many is wealth and success. Billionaires hold the balance of power and there is a clear need for communities of faith to collectively live in witness to the Gospel.
Jesus heals individuals but always calls us to community. In his Nobel laureate acceptance speech, Martin Luther King Jr. told the story of a famous author who had passed away. Among the papers he left behind were several ideas for future novels. One of them involved a scattered and disconnected family who collectively inherited a large, luxury house. The inheritance stipulated that they could not sell it and had to live in it together!
The church is a bit like that. We find ourselves praying, paying, ministering, and maintaining buildings, often with people we would not necessarily connect with beyond the church walls. The one thing we all share in common is the call to follow Jesus Christ and to carry out his mission in the world, and we take that seriously. And that brings me to Pride month and the call to be inclusive: of LGBTQ2+people, yes, but of everyone. old, young, all nationalities, the sick, the imprisoned, the addicted, people whose political position is vastly different to our own, yes, even billionaires!!! It doesn’t mean we have to agree with each other, but we need to be aware that God is the God of everyone, no exceptions. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. There is no redemption for only some of us…. only for all of us. We are in this together; a team, empowered by the Holy Spirit to carry out the tasks assigned to us day by day. Amen.