Walking Together

By Bishop Brian Maas
In the Nebraska Synod, we have long made much of the word “synod”* meaning “walking together.” It’s not a direct translation; more of an interpretation. And a description. We have embraced—together—the notion that our identity is not something static but is dynamic, active. A verb, not a noun. With an adverb to boot. We are walking, moving, progressing toward a destination. And we are doing it together.



Truth is, this has been our heritage since just about the beginning of the story. Sure, Adam and Eve seem to have been settled in the garden, but ever since they fell for the world’s first fake news (“you will not die…”), it’s been our lot to be on the move. The Bible is full of people on a journey. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul and the Apostles. One of God’s fundamental commands was to welcome strangers, “for you yourselves were strangers,” travelers through a land not our own.

I believe “walking together” is not only our identity, but our mission and our witness. Too much of what is held out as Christianity in our culture is a noun at best. It’s a static, dead thing left on a shelf until it’s wielded as a weapon against those who are different, or a fig leaf to excuse behavior that surely makes God weep.

Christians are called to be different. Jesus Christ became flesh, lived and died so that we would be different. And He rose again to show us the outcome of living differently.

Today, walking together looks different to the world all the time. We focus on what separates us and turn in on ourselves (Luther’s very definition of sin). And we don’t really even walk—we just sit in what we’re comfortable with, resisting change with unbelievable tenacity.

So it’s a choice to walk together. We won’t walk alike, we won’t walk the same, we won’t walk uniformly, but by God—and at God’s command and invitation—we will walk together. On our journey to God’s future, to the Kingdom whose witnesses we are already, we will walk. Forward. Together.

We’ll support and encourage one another, challenge and disagree with one another, help one another up when we stumble or fall, remind one another of the promise that God also walks with us, and refuse to let ourselves sit too long in one spot or pine away for the idealized past we’ve left behind.

It takes discipline to keep moving, and even more discipline to keep moving together. That’s why it’s called discipleship. Yet we do it not only because it’s God’s command but because it’s God’s gift. Walking together generates more richness, more life, more spilling over the gospel into lives and communities beyond our own, than we could ever hope to experience walking alone, or simply resting in place. “Follow me,” Jesus said, and says daily still.

Now, by way of confession—a wise person once said that every preacher preaches what she or he most needs to hear. I’ve been sitting too long. I need to take a walk.
Would you like to come along?


*(from Greek ‘syn’ (together) + ‘odos’ (way, or road))

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