Obedience or Discipleship?

When you come north off the Lewis and Clark Bridges over the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers and turn toward what’s left of downtown Alton, Illinois, before you get to the square where one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was held in 1858, if you look up the hill near where my brother-in-law’s furniture store used to be, you’ll see a huge, 93 foot high white granite column, topped by a 17 feet tall bronze statue of “Winged Victory,” a structure called “The Lovejoy Monument.” It marks the burial place of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the son of a minister in our United Church of Christ predecessor family, the Congregationalists, who was born in 1802 in Albion, Maine. As an adult Lovejoy served the College Avenue Presbyterian Church in Alton, which he helped establish as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and where, much less significantly, I, 140 years later, served my first ever seminary internship.

Lovejoy was more widely known, and reviled, as the editor and publisher of first The St. Louis Observer and then The Alton Observer, abolitionist newspapers calling for an immediate end to the institution of slavery and even more immediate emancipation of all current slaves. On November 7^th, 1837, a mob unhappy with Lovejoy’s abolitionist newspaper, broke into his house, destroyed his 4^th printing press (three other presses had already been destroyed and thrown into the Mississippi by the same or similar mobs) and shot Lovejoy 5 times, killing him, and earning him the title of “the first casualty of the Civil War,” though that conflict wouldn’t start until 14 years later, and making my home town a symbol of the backwater ignorance and mob violence that was typical of the pro slavery mentality outside of the deep, deep South.

When word of Lovejoy’s murder reached the east, followers of firebrand abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, one of Lovejoy’s influences and mentors, were grief stricken and enraged. One of them, Wendell Phillips, a 26 year-old, born-to-privilege Harvard educated lawyer, launched a remarkable career that included tireless advocacy for abolition and emancipation, and, after the Civil War, an even less mainstream advocacy for the rights of Native Americans that continued until his death in 1864.

When responding to Lovejoy’s death, Phillips said something that I think informs not only that old and still resolving conflict, but also the whole nature of how discipleship is something far beyond obedience:

To be as good as, as faithful as our [forebears], we must be better. We must do

more. Imitation, obedience, are not discipleship.

Some think that the way to be a faithful person is to obey God, to follow a list of rules and regs and rituals that others before us of have used, thinking that the best way, or perhaps the easiest way to get things right is to things exactly the way they have always been done.

We in the church have a long record of requesting and settling for obedience, developing lists of minimum requirements for all sorts of things ranging from attendance and participation and financial support to determine whether or not people can worship with us or have communion with us or share our life with us. So the church has promised from time to time heaven and eternity of bliss for those who keep the rules, and eternal damnation for those who break the rules, while at the same time singing Amazing Grace and saying that all those decisions belong to God.

But what if Jesus does not call us to obedience? What if Jesus calls us instead to discipleship?

“Aren’t they the same thing?” you may ask.

Well, though they often, maybe even usually result in the same behavior, obedience and discipleship are not the same thing.

Obedience is easy.

Discipleship is hard.

Obedience is observable, measurable, and it’s easy to tell when you’re being obedient and when you’re not.

Discipleship is tougher, more demanding, requiring both energy and thought.

Obedience may be nothing more than a response to a suggestion or an accommodation that would be easier to just do than to think about.

Discipleship requires constant examination of motives, constant communication,

Obedience does not even require a relationship with the one being obeyed. Someone makes a suggestion, request, or demand, and you do it, and then “poof!” you are done, whether or not you know the one being obeyed.

Discipleship implies, no, discipleship requires a relationship that needs on-going commitment, intention, and attention.

Obedience is easy.

Discipleship is hard.