Being a Disciple

When you give a pastor a chance to slow down and do some reflecting, I believe you will always end up at some point reflecting on being a disciple. We talk about discipleship and use all those churchy words like being justified and being sanctified, but I rather like the image I came across a few years ago, the image of walking so closely behind Jesus that you get covered by the dust he kicks up as he walks along. The idea is that you stay so close to him in order to hear every word he says, you stay so close so that you can see everything he does and how he reacts to life so that you can learn to imitate him exactly. The whole goal is to start to look and act so much like Jesus that when people look at you and get to know you, they say, "You really remind me of someone else, you remind me of Jesus."
This means that being a disciple means you get dirty. You get covered by Jesus' dust, but you also get dirty because you follow Jesus into all the messiness of the world and the chaos of people's lives. The more I study Jesus' life and teaching, the more I'm struck by how he noticed the chaos in people's life and how he stopped and entered into their chaos to bring forgiveness, acceptance, healing, and hope. Jesus deliberately made himself unclean time and again so the people he touched could be made clean and whole again. As Jesus made them clean and took their uncleanness in himself, their uncleanness wasn't able to stick to Jesus because of his holiness and purity.
I've been thinking about this and how it relates to what the church has often become today and who we are as the church. Jesus waded into the mess of religious legalism in his day and simplified the mess into two laws that revolve around love: "Love God with everything you have and are, and love your neighbour as yourself." The problem is that we are then forced leave the clean places of our sanctuary walls and worship places and walk deliberately into the greater mess of life so we can practice loving God and our neighbours. It's safe and easy to be a disciple when you're in a place where everyone is pretending that life is all good and God is blessing us, a place where we pretend that life isn't messy and dirty and that we're all clean and good.
I believe we misunderstand purity. We are pure, or clean because of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done. He became human, entering this messed up world filled with dirt and filth to take it on his shoulders to the cross so that we might become clean or pure again. This allows us to be in this messy dirty world because we are washed clean by Jesus and as we follow him into the world out of our safe sanctuaries and worship places so closely that we get covered by the dust of his feet. We are able to enter into the chaos and uncleanness and bring forgiveness, acceptance, healing and hope as Jesus did knowing that because of Jesus we too can touch people and bring wholeness and cleanness in Jesus' name while remaining pure because our focus is all on Jesus and we know Jesus' blood and body keeps us clean. We follow Jesus into the messiness because we are loved by Jesus and we are working hard at our love for God and our neighbours, putting God's love for us into action towards others.
Jesus told us to go out into the world, not separate ourselves from the world, all so that we can make disciples of all nations. Being a disciple is all about making disciples; inviting others to follow Jesus with us so closely they too get covered by the dust of Jesus' feet.