A long time ago, I learnt about vicarious liability: how employers could be held responsible for the misdeeds of their employees. This meant studying the important legal distinction between a servant and an independent contractor. You told a contractor what to do, but a servant was someone you could instruct not only what to do, but how to do it.
Remember the story of Naaman? He wanted to be an independent contractor. He was suffering from leprosy. A combination of circumstances had led him to make contact with Elisha to seek a cure. Elisha sent word that Naaman should wash seven times in the Jordan. Naaman was not amused. They had better rivers in Syria, and if he was to wash in a foreign river, at least Elisha should come out and recite some mumbo-jumbo to make the occasion special! (2 Kings 5 tells the story.)
Don't we all want to be like Naaman? To have things our way, to expect God's help in carrying on according to our own ideas, our own aims, our own desires? Some of the more successful movements, religious and non-religious, in our part of the world have been those which allow us to carry on as before, to make no changes in our own behaviour. These movements have promised health, wealth and happiness, as well as respectability and status, without the need to do anything about the pain and evil all around us.
Jesus and his disciples turned their back on whatever status they had. True, they had contacts who could lend them a boat, or the use of a donkey or an upper room, and a circle of friends to turn to for food and lodging. But it made no difference to Jesus whether "the crowds flocked to hear him" (Matthew's Gospel makes this point 26 times!), or whether his presence met with rejection, as in the synagogue in Nazareth (Matt 13:57), or in the Temple (John 10:31), or in those comfortless last hours before his crucifixion.
Our God is not a God of the healthy, and still less a God of the wealthy. Health and wealth can even put up barriers between us and God - the healthy may not see any need for a doctor, and camels can be threaded through needles more easily than those tied up in their riches can enter heaven's gate! Our God turns "the standards of the wise" upside down (1 Cor 1:19).
So let us beware of carrying on with our old attitudes in the world for which God in Christ gave everything. We are born again in Christ, but not born again to sit around all the time gazing at ourselves, crooning holy songs and sitting in holy huddles. We are born again to bring Christ to others, and to see Christ in others. We are to be lights set on barrels, showing others what is truly God's way.
We live in a world where there are numerous sets of "accepted values". Think of the diverse forms of family structure, the diverse attitudes to sexual orientation, to the treatment of human embryos, to genetic engineering. Think of the diverse ideas of justice, where terrorism for one is seen as liberation by another, and where people are praised or condemned not for the rightness or wrongness of what they do, but because of the political climate. God's way in all this is not necessarily what our own upbringing has led us to believe!
God accepts us as we are, but God wants to change us too. None of us is perfect. We need to be thankful for our calling, but at the same time, we need to give ourselves in God's service. Not in our way, but in God's way.
HD