Hello, Friends!

       On Sunday morning we explored ways to claim Christ’s promise of “blessedness,” a way of being that is peace-full, and fosters peace-making in our world.   In the current issue of Circuit Rider, a publication for United Methodist clergy, the theme is “People on the Margins.”Over the next two  weeks in this column, I will be sharing segments of “The Craft of Discipleship,”  a piece by Tex Sample, who was guest editor of this issue, and has long been a leading thinker in our tradition about how we put our beliefs into practice.

         I believe his wise words can provide some useful food for thought, as we continue focusing  our energies and determining our priorities in this exciting time of our faith community’s life.  There is work involved, in becoming able and willing followers of Christ’s life-giving way.  There is also great reward, and deep joy, in the learning.  So take these ideas to your own times of prayer and discernment, and  l look forward to growing in craftsmanship with you this Sunday, and all our days to come.

Shalom,

  Sarah

(Tex had a humbling experience, years ago as a college student,  during a summer job laying pipe for an oil company.  Ridiculed by the roughnecks for his ineptitude and ignorance, he found out how little his “book learning” served him, and how much of the craft he had yet to learn.)

       This remains my most vivid experience with the craft tradition of knowing.  The longer I live the more important it has become, not only in connecting pipe and things of a laboring kind but in academic thought as well.  It is a wonderful critique of notions that we must first get our ideas together and then go and apply them.  The craft tradition takes a radically different approach.

      Perhaps the first thing to be said is that if you are going to lay pipe, you do not start with your opinion or some universal notion of reason or some general kind of knowledge.  While no one begins to lay pipe “from scratch,” nevertheless, to lay pipe you have to pay attention to pipe.  You have to know weight and balance and aim.  You have to have the feel and the practiced use of wrenches, and so on.   As Alasdair McIntyre has said, in the craft tradition of knowing, our minds are not adequate to the task until we have conformed ourselves to the objects on which we are focused.

     So iit is also that in the life of the church, one does not begin with generalized notions of religious knowledge.  Karl Barth rigorously argued that God made Self a Subject in Jesus Christ as a revelation of the character of God.  Any true knowledge we have comes as the gift of God in Jesus Christ.  Indeed, it is the free act of God making Self known as  Subject in Christ.  We do not know how to know God conceptually on our own terms.  Knowledge we have of God in human terms is knowledge from the world in Barth’s understanding.  Hence, I argue that in the working class church we “begin” with Christ and his centrality for the church and for our life together.  To be the church, the central focus of our attention is Jesus Christ.  To know Christ is to be formed by him.  In the language of craft, Christ is our “mentor”; to know Christ is to apprentice with and for him.

     The second thing to be said about a craft tradition is that the stress is not on knowing about but rather on knowing how to do things.  Again, this is an approach to knowing that makes enormous connections with working class jobs.  Marie Dudley in her study of autoworkers found that a person’s value had little to do with their “position” or educational achievements, but rather that “individual ability is demonstrated by what people do—by their actions rather than by words, by deeds rather than fancy degrees, and most important, by the tangible results of their labor.”  Furthermore, the fact that one must be formed by pipe in order to lay it has fascinating connections to Barth’s understanding that if we are to know Christ, we must be formed by him.  It is a connection open to a wide range of narrative witness with working people.”

Next week, in Part Two:  Tex explores how we can approach faith as learning a craft, in acquiring skills and equipment for living in the spirit, and how we can cultivate our understanding of apprenticeship under Christ, with each other in community.   Tex Sample is the Kathleen Rogers Professor Emeritus of Church and Society at St. Paul School of Theology and author of several books.  His most recent book is Blue Collar Resistance and the Politics of Jesus (Abingdon Press, 2006).