I Have Called You Friends: An Invitation to Ministry

by Kevin L. Thew Forrester

Overview

I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my father. --John 15:15

These words of Jesus to his disciples teach that the mutuality of friendship is at the heart of a Christian community. When baptized into that community, we accept this mutuality and desire to serve others. Kevin Thew Forrester says, "We can go so far as to say that to be a member of the community entails being a minister. . . Baptism and ministry are two sides of the same coin." This ministry is the responsibility of all baptized members of the church not merely the ordained.

Drawing on experiences of the people in the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan, the author challenges the whole church to seek this mutual ministry as the key to its future health and mission.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780898697582
Publisher:	Church Publishing
Publication date:	08/01/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	140
File size:	465 KB

About the Author

Kevin Thew Forrester has had extensive experience in the reality of mutual ministry in his work in the dioceses of Oregon and Eastern Oregon, as well as in Northern Michigan, where he currently serves as Ministry Development Coordinator. He is also a coordinator of Living Stones, a group of dioceses in Canada and the United States committed to the living out of mutual ministry.

Read an Excerpt

"I HAVE CALLED YOU FRIENDS ..."

AN INVITATION TO MINISTRY

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By Kevin Thew Forrester

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2003 Kevin Thew Forrester
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-758-2

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CHAPTER 1

Listening to Scripture

Over these past several years I have often found myself returning to the gospel story of Jesus' encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark's gospel (7:24- 29). More than likely this story is not a historical depiction of an encounter Jesus actually had, but a story composed by one of the early Jewish-Christian communities trying to figure out how it was to interact with gentiles. They composed the story as it is precisely because they thought it embodied the teaching of Jesus. All of which makes the story a jaw-dropper, because it is Jesus who is the one being taught. The teacher is the learner. The teacher teaches by having the soul of a disciple, the heart of a student. This is not a masquerade. The composers of this story realized that the Spirit of Jesus is the Spirit of humility. All of us are rooted in the same soil. This is a soil needing the waters of wisdom flowing upon us from those about us—especially those whom we have already judged as having little or nothing to offer.

As the story goes, Jesus has just left Gennesaret, where he had a tiring debate with some Pharisees, and perhaps his patience is wearing a little thin with his group of disciples, none of whom seem to be catching the gist of his message. He has come into the territory of Tyre and Sidon and is trying to fade unrecognized into the background. This is when the Syro-Phoenician woman, whose name we are not given, approaches Jesus. She falls at his feet and begs Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus verbally spits in her face. Who is she to approach him? She is no better than a dog. "It is not right," Jesus says in words that cut through this Greek woman's heart, "to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs." Dogs—this woman and her child. Now who is not getting the message?

The woman absorbs Jesus' degrading cut. She prefigures paschal death—being hung out to die in public, as a dog properly humiliated. She has no place to go and so she speaks her heart. "Yes, Rabbi, but even the dogs under the table eat the family scraps." It is as if she is saying, "You want me to be a dog, I can be it. I know who I am. I am my daughter's mother. She matters more than what you and the others could ever think and say."

How long does Jesus wait before replying? How long before his heart breaks open and he sees the destruction wrought by his own ethnic prejudice? How long before the wisdom poured forth from this woman's heart melts the fear surrounding Jesus' heart—before Jesus can trust one who is unlike him in so many ways? We are not told how long. The story ends simply with an astounding reversal: "For saying this, you may go home happy; the demon has left your daughter." You, child of God, are worthy of being fed.

We each have something to learn as well as something to teach. Freedom is born in the awareness that we no longer need fear the other. What they bring, what we each bring, is only a sliver of the larger face of God. We cannot help but be humble and accept the other, for without the other we cannot be whole, we cannot see God, we cannot know God, and we cannot love God. This is the humble soil of mutuality. We need each other to discover our own blindness, our own prejudices, our own beauty, our own way into God. Mark's gospel reveals a story of Jesus' own discovery, written by early followers to help remind them that we are to remain ever open to receive the other. A community of mutuality is a community free and open to receiving wisdom and love from all.

This openness and freedom sums up what many of the earliest followers of Jesus experienced in their new way of life together. Freedom to be treated as an equal, a partner in the new way of this prophet from Nazareth. Freedom to move out from under the shadow of domination that seemed to follow so many of them wherever they went. Liberation, especially from patriarchal structures, is at the heart of Jesus' proclamation of kinship, for now all are kin in the Spirit. As we shall see, the term patriarchy covers a whole host of sins and sufferings. This kinship of God offered hope to the hopeless, by inviting people into a community where never again would they have to be someone else's servant or slave. Jesus proclaimed a new community of kinship that could dissolve the master-servant bond.

The Kinship of God

The parables and miracles of Jesus reveal a healing and redeeming freedom as the heart of God's reign. Again and again, to our surprise, we come upon a Jesus in the Christian scriptures who persistently contrasts life within the community of God's friends with life in the natural family. Why? The answer seems to lie in the kind of family Jesus knew, which was a system structured around a patriarchal father who had the power to control and to dominate the lives of everyone else. This family and cultural system clearly defined who was dominant and who was subordinate. Roles were not fluid, but fixed.

This hierarchy was the backbone that held family and cultural life together. It is a courageous Jesus whom we encounter in Mark 10:2-9, who speaks of marriage as an equal partnership and declares that the woman and man "shall become one flesh." For this reason a man may not simply dismiss his wife as if she were a piece of property to be disposed of at will. In Mark 12 we come upon Jesus remonstrating with the Sadducees, who have asked him a question about the property rights of patriarchal marriage in the form of a story of a woman who is married to seven brothers: "In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?" (12:23) Jesus replies that they have failed to understand, in the words of scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, "either the Scriptures or the power of God, because they do not recognize that 'in the world' of the living God patriarchal marriage does not exist either for men or for women. They neither marry nor are given in marriage but are 'like the angels in heaven.'" They are like the angels not because they are somehow sexless or genderless, but because patriarchal marriage is ended. Jesus' teaching directly opposes a marriage system that favors men at the cost of the full freedom of women, for any system that can only value some by debasing others is clearly not of the will of God.

The presence of Jesus in people's lives, therefore, acts as a sword to sever the ties that tether people to positions and lives of subordination. Once we understand this, we are able to hear the words of Matthew 10:34-36 and Luke 12:51-53 in remarkably fresh and challenging ways. Jesus, they say, has come bearing "a sword." In a similar vein, Mark tells us that on account of Jesus' ministry, "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death." Evidently, the year that ushers in Jesus' life begins with a sword cutting those ties that bind us down and enslave us. Not all ways of being family are evidently equal in the eyes of Jesus. "Without question, the discipleship of Jesus does not respect patriarchal family bonds, and the Jesus movement in Palestine severely intrudes into the peace of the patriarchal household." Jesus extends the offer of peace, but the offer has a definite cost. We are not to gain our power at the expense of another.

When Jesus speaks in Matthew 10:34-36 of families sharply divided from within, son against father and daughter against mother, we might think that he is referring to the strife that will exist between believer and unbeliever: This may not be the case at all: Rather, it is possible to understand Matthew's Jesus as making the same point we find in the Old Testament prophet Micah, who tells us that "the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; your enemies are members of your own household" (Micah 7:6). The thrust of these passages is, as John Dominic Crossan writes, that "the normalcy of familial hierarchy ... is under attack. The strife is not between believers and nonbelievers but quite simply, and as it says, between the generations in both directions. Jesus will tear the hierarchical and patriarchal family in two along the axis of domination and subordination."

A discipleship of equals cannot be based upon a family system in which only the father of the household is free and all the rest are possessed as servants or slaves. The patriarchal family holds out no possibility for becoming the means through which Jesus could reveal what kinship with God might mean. Servants and slaves are not friends, and friendship lies at the heart of life in Jesus. "I do not call you servants any longer," Jesus declares, "because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father" (John 15:15). Instead, Jesus lays an alternative foundation for common life, offering the chance for a new birth from which authentic community can be generated by the Spirit. Within the way of Jesus, kinship and family is now based upon discipleship and not blood.

Even from our own vantage point today, it is hard to conceive of Jesus doing anything more contentious and subversive than challenging the legitimacy of the father's role as a dominant and controlling figure. Yet he does this by inviting followers into a community of friends that allows no place for the traditional patriarchal father. What we must bear in mind, however, is that the reason Jesus rejects the traditional family and father figure is precisely because he is pro- family, affirming all of its members. It is fair to say that Jesus lives and dies on behalf of a community of sisters and brothers who are to relate to one another as a "new 'family' of equal discipleship." Here we have the ancient reason to sing the spiritual, "Free, at last, free, at last. Thank God almighty I am free, at last."

The gift of freedom does come with a price, particularly for the free men in Jesus' company. Will they be able to learn how to relinquish all claims of dominating power? Will those who have been servants and slaves all their lives not be seduced by the allure to become themselves ones who lord their new found power over others? Each and every follower in the way of Jesus is asked to be willing to begin life again as a vulnerable child. What is true for Jesus is now true for them, because they belong to none but the one Jesus called "Abba." Nothing states this fundamental characteristic of community life better than Mark 10:15: "Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it." This is not an invitation to childlike innocence and naiveté but a challenge to relinquish all claims of power and domination over others.

Jesus' proclamation of equality goes to the very heart of the life he knew in first-century Palestine and seeks to reform it. He is not content to tinker at the edges. Either we live in a community where all are free to be friends, or we do not; there does not seem to be a third alternative for Jesus. As Walter Wink writes, "These are the words and deeds, not of a minor reformer, but of an egalitarian prophet who repudiates the very premises on which domination is based: the right of some to lord it over others by means of power, wealth, shaming, or titles."

Jesus is a Jew from Nazareth who seems to think that kinship with God is open to nobodies like women, children, the poor, the deformed, and the ill. Crossan describes all Jesus' sayings that pertain to children, the poor, and the wealthy as sayings "actually talking about power and rule." Jesus overturns the power of the traditional family by proclaiming that with God it is the humble children and the destitute poor who have equal access to power and rule. Jesus does not mean literally that children rule, but that kinship with God is open to children as well as adults. Jesus' embrace of children symbolizes that God's love excludes no one. If children have place and voice, then everyone does. Jesus effectively lowers the bar into God's community so that anyone might step in.

Nor does Jesus restrict his rejection of patriarchal power to the traditional family father figure, but extends it into the heart of the teacher-student relationship as well. Jesus is a teacher, yes, but he is no ordinary first- century rabbi, nor are his followers, his friends, to take on the trappings of conventional rabbis. In Matthew 23:8-9, Jesus instructs his followers that they are not to be like their own religious leaders who have people call them rabbi: "But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven." We are not only children, but students: the followers of Jesus are to be vulnerable and anxious to learn. What is at stake here for Jesus is the way his followers are to exercise leadership. The teacher is not a god who lords his knowledge over others. Jesus' followers are to lead by including others in the circle of learning. Before God, all are listeners and learners. "The discipleship of equals," writes Schüssler Fiorenza, "rejects teachers because it is constituted and taught by one, and only one, teacher. Similarly, the kinship relationship in the discipleship of equals does not admit of 'any father' because it is sustained by the gracious goodness of God whom the disciples and Jesus call 'father.'"

We can find a similar sentiment in Luke 22:24-27, where the gospel portrays a dispute among the disciples as to which of them is to be "the greatest." Jesus tells them that unlike "the kings of the gentiles, ... the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table?" The purpose of Jesus here is to reject neither ambition nor power. He seeks to transform the value system itself within which we desire and seek ambition and power.

To sum things up, at the heart of Jesus' teaching about God lies an alternative foundation for community life. One way to describe this way of life is to say that his friends are to care for each other in a spirit of mutuality. Mutuality will guide how they minister to one another. This community of mutual ministry offers the people a chance to start over again, a chance to loose the ties that bind and to trust the regenerative power of God's Spirit. To embrace such a way of life is indeed to be born anew. This rebirth is a redeeming passage from domination into equality, and as such it offers a taste of the fullness of life with God. God's followers will receive new eyes to see the family about them—a community of friends rooted in freedom. Freedom was the ancient promise of the God of the Hebrews who delivered the people from the foreign hand of Pharaoh and anyone other than God who might lay claim to own them.

I think it is now clear that the freedom offered by Jesus is not peripheral to his proclamation. Not only does Jesus explicitly call us into the freedom of equality and mutuality, this call is at the heart of our new life in kinship with God.

Table Companionship

I have spoken repeatedly of the words and deeds of Jesus calling us into the freedom of relationships of equality and mutuality. One of the central ways Jesus' own deeds expressed this call was through the practice of table companionship. There is good evidence to claim that Jesus ate indiscriminately with everyone. He was not choosy. Or, to put it another way, he chose a place for everyone at his table. We find a description of such table practice in Luke 14:12-14.

He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind."

What are the implications of such a practice? As scholar John Dominic Crossan reminds us,

To invite the outcasts for a special meal is a less socially radical act than to invite anyone found on the streets. It is that "anyone" that negates the very social function of table, namely, to establish a social ranking by what one eats, how one eats, and with whom one eats. It is the random and open commensality of the parable's meal that is its most startling element.

We hear this simultaneous threat and hope for equality in the sayings that have to do with the source of defilement in our lives. In Mark 7:14-15, Jesus says, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." Jesus presses the same point on the Pharisees in Luke 11:39-41 when he tells them, "Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? So give for alms those things that are within; and see, everything will be clean for you."
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from "I HAVE CALLED YOU FRIENDS ..." by Kevin Thew Forrester. Copyright © 2003 Kevin Thew Forrester. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface          

Acknowledgments          

Introduction          

Part One—Baptism: Equality and Freedom          

Chapter One: Listening to Scripture          

Chapter Two: Baptism: A Passage into Freedom          

Chapter Three: Listening to Science          

Chapter Four: Leadership          

Part Two—A People Transformed through Mutual Ministry          

Chapter Five: How to Set a Table in the Wilderness          

Chapter Six: The Strength of That Center          

Chapter Seven: Leadership and the Gifts of Ministry          

Chapter Eight: "Local": The Place of Call, Formation, and Service          

Chapter Nine: Sending Forth          

Bibliography