Travellers All
To follow Jesus is to wander….wander from the preconceptions of safe lives, where we take in our society’s programme, unquestioningly believing that what we are told to do with our lives is right and proper, taking our place as a cog in the wheels of the powerful, unconsciously doing their bidding and turning blind eyes to exploitations of the poor, the weak and the powerless. We must be made homeless to such lives.
True discipleship is not in the cosiness of conformity but in putting the vision of God’s kingdom first, before all the rest, before work, home, rest, play, saving up, winding down, before neighbourhood or belonging, even before family. It is putting the kingdom of God before our own little private empire, be that physicality or fantasy.
Jesus calls us to travel away from all that holds us back. The familiar. The sterile. He is to be found in the uncertainty of the travel away and the traveller herself. He is in the places where it hurts. He is in Syria today and in all the places where children and mothers and fathers are having their lives ripped apart by chemicals, bombs, drugs, alcohol, mental, physical or sexual abuse and every other evil known to man or woman.
Jesus is in the travelling from the church as we have known it to the church that is to be Christ’s bride, the church that travels to the heart of human kind and brings her out of chaos into the light. We are called to get up and go out with the waking church of Christ into the wilderness to be tested and on, into humanity to be her Truth-teller.
We meet God, all of us, in the homelessness it is necessary for us to know…
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 