In an earlier post, I wrote that disciples are quite literally students, learners.
I outlined five primary ways that we engage with Jesus in the life of the church– worship, prayer, study, service, and fellowship.
But what does it mean to view the church primarily as a community of learners? How does that influence the way that we think about what church is and does? To what end are we as Christians gathering to learn?
I think an answer lies in the second chapter of Acts.
If you look at the story of Pentecost in Acts 2, you see this incredible action of the Holy Spirit– a crazy, ecstatic experience of public witness complete with the Spirit descending upon the apostles like tongues of fire. We all remember that part of the story and celebrate it each year at the end of Eastertide.
But what happens right after all of that? Do you remember?
Something far less ecstatic, but just as important.
Acts 2 might begin with the fire of Pentecost and continue with the adding of thousands to the fold through Peter’s impassioned preaching, but do you remember how it ends?
It ends with fellowship, breaking bread, apostolic teaching, and the prayers (Acts 2:44-47). In short, it ends with the rhythm of everyday faith. It ends with church.
In Matthew’s Gospel, we read the Great Commission– to go and make more disciples by baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But what is the life into which we are baptizing these new disciples? It is the disciplined life of learning and faith we see at the end of Acts 2.
In John 13 (the chapter I mentioned in the previous post), Jesus instructs his disciples and washes their feet and gives them a new commandment, or “mandate”: they are to love one another.
It is by this love that they display toward one another that the world will know they are Jesus’s students. It is not their impeccable doctrine or their theories of the atonement or their correct understanding of justification or the hypostatic union of Jesus’s humanity and divinity. (Not that those things aren’t important.) It is far simpler, and far more challenging: it is the love that they display toward one another.
It is not the way they defined themselves against one another– as we tend to do today in so many ways– but by the way in which they serve one another and treat each other with dignity and mutual respect. This is the end two which our learning bends. By following Jesus, we are meant to learn how to love like he first loved us.
As corny as it sounds, all Christians are enrolled in a school of love. However, this love is not a kind of self-indulgent, cloyingly saccharine love, but a selfless, life-giving love that seeks to treat others as we would treat ourselves. We worship and pray and study and serve and fellowship together precisely so that we may learn more deeply how to love like God loves, even as we await his coming again in glory.
By following Jesus, we are meant to learn how to love like he first loved us.
This is a love that transcends divisions and prejudices. It is a love that reaches across lines of difference. It is a love that knows no bounds and challenges our every assumption.
It’s the love of an upside-down kingdom. A kingdom that plays not by our rules, but by God’s.
Perhaps if we in the Episcopal Church recapture this idea that the Church is learning community focused on the inexhaustible depth of the glories of God in Jesus Christ, then perhaps we will be infused with the excitement and wonder that comes from living in a community of rich stimulation, both intellectual and spiritual.
And more importantly, perhaps we will learn to do that one single task: to love.
CAMERON & SURPLICE 