The etymology of the term radical (from the Latin radix, "root") is the best reason not to concede it to nostalgia. If we want to get to the root of anything we must be radical. No wonder the word has been demonized by our masters and co-opted by marketing hucksters, and no wonder no one in conventional politics dares use the word favorably--much less track any problem to its root.

It is both curious and revealing that the notion of discipleship, in turn, is so marginal in our churches. Curious, because discipleship is unarguably the central theme of the gospels. Revealing, because it shows how wide the gulf between seminaries, sanctuaries and the streets has become in North America. The prevailing expressions of faith among Protestant churches—evangelical decisionism, mainline denominationalism and fundamentalist dogmatism—are each deeply problematic in a society that is mired in dysfunctional politics, delusional economics and a distractive culture. Faith as discipleship remains the “road rarely taken” here at the heart of empire. We have yet truly to reckon with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous warning, delivered under the shadow of fascism, that “cheap grace is grace without discipleship.”

Radical Discipleship is about nothing more and nothing less than laying bare the roots of the personal and socio-political pathologies of our imperial society and its dead-end history, even as we seek to recover the roots of our deep biblical tradition: namely, the messianic movement of rebellion and restoration, of repentance and renewal, a “Way out of no way” that has been going on since the dawn of resistance to the dusk of empire.

Which strange lacuna spawned a Pentecost insurrection of multicultural restoration and economic redistribution, a strange unleashing of tongues and pocketbooks that spilled out of a safe house attic into the streets in a popular theater of protest and proclamation just a few blocks from where Jesus had been lynched. These shenanigans of course earned official backlash, which only spawned a smackdown of restorative payback, in which the murderous chief head of security charged with strangling this inconvenient movement in its crib broke down in the middle lane of the Damascus Road, struck blind with visions of his victims. This chief prosecutor ended up defecting to the movement he sought to destroy, such that he had to be smuggled out of town in a basket like baby Moses, the hunter become the hunted. This unlikely turnabout spawned little ecclesial communities of nonconformity, bread breaking and discipleship to Jesus throughout the empire, which we know about only through the tattered fragments of correspondence and liturgy and catechism that survive in what we call the Second Testament, today every bit as misunderstood and abused as the First.

These little communities spawned martyrs who rendered to God everything and to Caesar not much at all, and monastics who returned to the wilderness in the waning days of a decadent Roman empire in order to rediscover the evangelical disciplines of fidelity and poverty. The movement was remembered by Franciscan nuns and friars, who bound themselves to nature and to the poorest of medieval society; and by 14th century communitarians who defied feudal canons of hierarchy and vengeance; and by 16th century radical Anabaptists who refused to participate in the bloody religious wars of Christendom. It was invoked by Baptist radicals and Methodist reformers, by Quaker abolitionists and Anglican visionaries in Europe and the New World, against the grain of colonial plunder and genocide. It was the ground on which 18th century “Levelers” stood in their struggle against the privatization of the Commons--“Since then this Jubilee, Sets all at Liberty, Let us be glad!”—as did Luddites resisting factory culture in early industrial England, as did immigrant Wobbly and Jewish labor organizers a century later in Guilded Age America.

It is all this that we refer to in shorthand as the struggle for “radical discipleship.” This conspiracy of life, hatched in a distant Sinai past, has ebbed and flowed ever since, right down to our time and place. It lives among gay bishops and lesbian evangelists; Christian Peacemaker Teams accompanying those under Occupation in Baghdad or Bethlehem; Catholic Workers sharing life with the homeless; immigrant rights organizers celebrating Posadas sin Fronteras at the US Mexico border; and tree sitters defying pipelines. It is embodied by every addict who walks the Twelve Steps to recovery, by every sinner who makes that long march up to the altar of repentance, and by every activist who seeks to bring comfort to the afflicted with gospel compassion, and to afflict the comfortable with gospel justice. Because only those who know their captivity can carry on this Freedom story.

So do we gather in these Bartimaeus Institutes from the Four Directions, to remember, to celebrate, and to incubate another round of this long tradition of soul searching and struggle. “Since we are surrounded by so great a Cloud of Witnesses,” as the writer to the Hebrews exhorts us, “let us too lay aside every weight and sin that restricts us, so that we too might run this race” (Heb 12:1).

For us—most of us persons of relative privilege and mobility—Radical Discipleship is a call on our lives that disrupts the chronos timetables of empire with a divine kairos moment for transformation. This summons from the undomesticated God originates outside of civilization, but also from deep within a groaning creation and groaning communities of struggle. It challenges the entitlements and conveniences of the religion business-as-usual. And the disturbing, animating thing about this call is that it always is before us, like Mark’s Risen Christ who can only be seen on the Way in Galilee. No matter how long we’ve been in this or at this, we can never presume to have “arrived,” or known or done enough to be off the hook of this challenge, lest we think we “got this,” or worse, have “grown out of it.” We are ever invited to encounter Messiah afresh on the Way. But let us be clear, this One is almost always in disguise.