For almost a year and a half now my son and I have been pursuing samurai swordsmanship. Finally, next month my son and I will undergo our first testing, aiming for our first “rank.” It’s taken a year and a half of tutelage for our sensei — our sword teacher — to think we’re decent enough to show in public.

From our first class to the time we were allowed to handle sharp swords and cut tatami (reed floor mats rolled up, rubberbanded, and soaked), it was six months. Six months of tutelage in how to take a dull sword out of its sheath and put it back in without losing a finger. Six months of trying to do “forms” that require our bodies to move in stylized, ritualistic, awkwardly Japanese ways. And then another year before being deemed ready to try to earn our first rank. In all, eighteen months of waiting to do “the good stuff.”

Our sensei’s attitude? “We’re not interested in students of the sword who are not students of ‘the way.’” He’s made it clear that if you’re going to be exasperated at “a long obedience in the same direction,” you’d be better off elsewhere.

Really, though, it’s been remarkably easy to submit to a man who himself has submitted to another.

Our sword teacher doesn’t come by his finesse with the samurai sword any more naturally than my son and I do. We share our sensei’s Scottish descent, as well as his deference-deprived Florida upbringing. For heaven’s sake, our sword master hails from the Conch Republic (Key West, to non-Floridians), which makes my Miami Vice South Florida seem positively Stepfordesque.

But he recognized that when his (Japanese) sensei came into his life sixteen years ago, the man’s claims on him were total. The Japanese sensei knew everything, the American student knew nothing. As obvious as that was on the first day, now that the student has himself become a sensei, he believes and acts and teaches as though it were still true that he knows nothing. That’s why his teaching is so commanding, his bearing so arresting.

I ask myself, “Isn’t this the power of Another who taught “as with authority”? What penetrating insight into the true state of things there is in the first-century Roman centurion’s words, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Only say the word and my servant will be healed. For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it” (Mt 8:8-9; see also Lk 7:6-8). This representative of an occupying power recognized that in this lowly rabbi he was dealing with Someone who himself had learned an obedience unto lordship.

A little while back — and well enough into our apprenticeship to appreciate what we were seeing — my son and I got to help out at a competition meet. There we watched various sensei and their students from all over the country. The difference between groups where teaching and learning had been done out of a posture of submission and those where “self” was in charge was palpable.

It was at that event that my sensei was promoted to some preposterously high rank in the Japanese version of our U.S. sword association. It was a big deal (though the ceremony was sort of hard to follow, since it was conducted, appropriately enough, in Japanese). During the proceedings, one of our senior students whispered to me: “You know what this means, don’t you? They now count him one of them — they consider him Japanese.”

Here’s to the day when everything about me breathes the atmosphere of the City of God. Here’s to the day when people will look at my life and see nothing but the Master who has mastered me. It all seems so far off — still, I count on the promise of the “Son who learned obedience through what he suffered, and being made perfect became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5:8-9). And I’m grateful for such a vivid picture of that promise in as unexpected a place as a samurai sword class.

What I wish for each of those who come into the orb of my life and ministry, perhaps especially for those who come to my seminary to train to do ministry, is a “coming under” someone like my sensei. All these aspiring servants of that other Kingdom are as much citizens of our submission-bereft, obedience-challenged world as I am. What I covet for them is the chance to be shaped by the power of a self-abnegation like my sword master’s. Everybody could use a sensei.

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(This post first appeared at Common Grounds Online)