25/1/26
How To Make a Disciple.
Some of my favourite ‘I don’t have to think about television shows are actually cooking shows. Nigella Lawson, Rick Stein, Adam Liaw, and Canadian bakeoff to name but a few.
The scenery is exotic, the food looks scrumptious, and we are always reassured that it smells enticing and tastes terrific. Recipes are available on the website, and the dishes never fail.
Today’s gospel is a recipe on how to make a disciple. It looks easy; any crazy fisherman could do it, and we are even given a pattern of a recipe.
Cure the sick, proclaim the good news, cast out a few skanky demons and say the mantra ‘Follow me’ often enough and… ta da! Here’s one that was prepared earlier. Well, this seems simple enough.
But what is not immediately apparent is that there is a lot of hard work that goes into making a disciple, and just as we don’t get to see the slicing and dicing, the gathering of the ingredients and the waiting, so there is much that lies hidden from us in the gospel. On a quick, cursory reading of the call of that first motley crew, we are only given the skimpiest of recipes.
So today I want to go behind the scenes with the camera crew, the research editors and the sound techies and offer a few little insights into some of the hard slog, laborious, unglamorous work in making a disciple.
The first ingredient you need, and this might sound really odd, is you start with several large dollops of silence. You simply just place yourself in The Master's presence and listen to what He has to say. Still yourself and learn again, for the umpteenth time, this whole exercise is not about you. It must always first and foremost be, about the one who calls and the one who he is calling.
You might find this silence thing easy to do, but I never have. Yet I know it to be an essential and vital ingredient in our recipe. Silence before your encounter, silence during your encounter and silence after. Just as our master chefs on the screen liberally slosh and splash wine into the pan, so too be generous and uninhibited with the amount of silence you use.
You get better results that way, and you’ll be a better chef for it.
The next step in the recipe is reorientation. The disciples had their sights set on the next great catch of fish, and they had to have their focus shifted from lots of mackerel and tuna to the calling of the vulnerable, the grubby and the undesirable. This is what you will be catching from now on, gentleman. You will be catching people. Flawed, fallible, hard-wired for sin and mortality, human beings.
Reorientation is hard, and it is hard because it is not a simple, straightforward one-off forever and ever action, but a continuous, consistent, conscious turning and focusing away from the past and its ick, to the future and the joy of walking with Him. Looking forward together. All Disciples, no matter how long they’ve been trying to follow the Master, are sorely tempted to look back to the past. Guilt is a great head turner.
The next ingredient is light. Bright some light, shed some light, BE the light. Many of us, I suspect, have been in a social setting where there has been at least one person in the room who has been glowing. They are not usually the noisy ones, the gregarious ones, or the extroverted. They are the ones who you know you can trust, who have an inner calm and confidence, whose faith and inner strength you just know that you can rely on. These are the fisher people who give off His light, and others are drawn to it. Be this light. Be his light.
What else is in the recipe?
Healing.. this is both easy and difficult. The method is easy. Just sit with the would-be disciple and listen. You might have to sit in silence for a long time, many times, but this willingness to sit alongside and listen, not condemn or offer shonky advice, but to ask questions and wait…. Is far more effective and beneficial than the sling, antibiotics, or blood test. There’s outward healing with Band-Aids and IV drips, and you rightly go to the right appropriate places for that sort of healing.
For everything else, the really important healing, use the instruments of an attentive ear and a pastoral heart.
It occurred to me as I wrote about all these ingredients, silence, reorientation, light, and healing, that these are not just for newly minted disciples. These are all things that the well-seasoned, much-experienced disciples strive for and continuously aspire to. So perhaps I should simply say this.
That in order to make a disciple,… first… become one yourself.