The Engine that Drives Discipleship

Jesus tells a parable about a rich man who pathologically accumulates grain and dies before he has the opportunity to benefit from his work.

The rich man's fault is not immorality.  We are not told if the rich man is morally virtuous or vicious.  The rich man's fault is a lack of wisdom.  The rich man is in denial of life's transience.  He will never be able to benefit from all of the grain that he has accumulated.  He has wasted his life because he has allowed the wrong engine (i.e. accumulation of wealth) to drive him.

The rich man is drive to accumulate out of fear.  And there are plenty of things for the rich man to be afraid of, as there are plenty of things for us to be afraid of.  And there is nothing to keep any of those things from happening.  Even discipleship; being Christian is not a shield from tragedy.  Jesus said that rain falls on both the righteous and unrighteous

Discipleship is a calling to set aside our fear so that we are driven by another engine; being holy.  God needs holiness to be the engine that drives us because there are tasks that God needs us to complete in our time and place.  Our lives can only be driven by one engine.  If our lives are driven by fear we cannot be God's instruments.  We seek the intercession of God's grace not to shield us from the things that we fear, but that we might face our fears, be holy, and be God's instruments so that the Kingdom of God would be revealed on earth as it is in heaven.

Paul's Conversion and the Collapse of the Sacred

Paul's conversion did more than change Paul's religion from Judaism to Christianity.  It changed Paul's underlying theological orientation of who God was and how God acts.  Prior to his conversion, Paul believed that God's purposes were achieved through persecution and domination of those who proclaimed false beliefs.  In persecuting Christians, Paul believed that he was mirroring God's intention to bring about holiness in the world through the extermination of the unholy.

In his conversion experience, God in Christ tells Paul that in persecuting Christians, Paul was persecuting God.  This is typically interpreted to mean that Paul was impeding the spread of the Christian message.  Paul's theology in his epistles suggests a much broader reading.  In the act of persecution itself, Paul's methodology itself was contrary to God's purposes.  Who Paul was persecuting was incidental; the very act of persecution prevented Paul from carrying out God's intention for the world.

Paul makes this explicit in his letter to the Colossians.  Paul says that God has brought peace through the blood of the cross.  Rome's ideology was that peace was brought through crucifying.  Paul was converted to an understanding that God brought peace by being crucified; through self-giving love in dying for the world.

Paul's conversion experience represented a collapse of everything that he thought was sacred and holy.  It brought Paul to a greater and deeper understanding of who God was.