Throughout the afternoon I had been meeting people, going in and out of stores, fulfilling routine tasks with a name tag stuck to my shirt. I had attended a seminar in the morning at which every participant was required to use one and had forgotten to remove it after the meeting. Name tags with adhesive on the back are really very handy--especially when you need to remember someone's name. But one of my children was kind of embarrassed by the fact that I was walking around advertising who I was to everyone close enough to read my name tag. All it took was, "Dad, will you please take off that name tag" to get me to quickly remove it from my shirt. That's the other great thing about name tags--when you don't need or want them anymore, they peel off very easily and no one would ever know you had one on.
Unfortunately, it's very easy to fall into a "name tag" Christianity. On Sunday mornings we're happy to put on that name tag. When we're with other Christians discussing the woes of our world it comes out again. But when we're at work and the conversation turns to those "hypocritical, narrow minded Christians" or someone makes the comment, "I don't know how an intelligent person could be a Christian," then we have the tendency to quickly take off our Christian name tag and remain inconspicuously quiet. Or, it may happen that we're at a get together and we start having a little more "fun" than we know we ought to be having and again we just conveniently ignore the "Christian" part of our life.
One of the first things Jesus did when he started his ministry was to call disciples. The word disciple means "learner" or "follower" and it was used not only for the 12 disciples we hear about in the Gospel accounts, but for anyone who believed Jesus to be the Promised Savior, the Son of God. This Sunday we are going to study the kind of life Jesus intended for those he calls his disciples. To be sure, it's totally different from the "name tag" Christianity which some people find attractive today. But, it is different in all the right ways!
Hawaii Lutheran Church (WELS)
- Community Lutheran Church
- Honolulu, HI
- Community Lutheran Church holds protestant chapel services in Honolulu, Hawaii near Pearl Harbor, HI. We are next to the USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hickam Air Force Base, and Fort Shafter Hawaii. Look for us directly behind the Salt Lake, Hawaii, Target.