Making history from the margins

Preaching text: Genesis 18:1-15

            God is not the kind of God to do things in stereotypical, boring ways. So often when God enters the picture the rules of the universe bend; sometimes they are altogether shattered. And when God decides to do something radical—and I don’t mean sort of, kind of, just a little radical—but truly radical—when God changes the rules of the game and turns the world upside down—when God puts the divine foot down and makes a single moment in time into a game-changer for the history of the world; in those moments, God looks for strange people to get the work done. Have you ever noticed that? If any of us were going to go about altering the course of history our natural inclination would be to look for help from the important people—people who have money, influence, political power, fame. These are our game-changers, but that’s not how God does it.

            In fact, whenever God enters into history to really change the world’s priorities he does so from the margins. Sometimes it’s the poor, the outcast, the oppressed, the racial or cultural minority. Always it’s the apparent loser. Robert Farrar Capon has said that God is interested in “the least, the last, the lost, the lowly, the little, and the dead.” That’s it. It’s not that God doesn’t care about you if you don’t fit into those categories; it’s just that for the world-changing moments of history he’s going to look for somebody else, somebody forgotten, belittled and seemingly unimportant. The world changes from the margins.

            Look at Moses, a member of the oppressed with a fear of public speaking.

            Or Esther, forced to hide her identity to help save the Jewish people.

            Or Daniel, Elijah, countless other prophets; David, the least likely of many brothers; then there’s John the Baptist (eating locusts is a pretty good indication of living at the margins); Jesus, born in a stable; the woman at the well; the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet who is labeled only a “sinner”… it goes on and on.

            The margins are where history is made.

            And nobody lives as close to the margins as Abraham.

            Think about it. For ninety-nine years the only important thing that happened in Abraham’s life is that he saved his nephew, Lot, from some warring eastern kings and he fooled around with Sarah’s slave-girl, Hagar. If that were the end of the story, Abraham would fade into obscurity with a rather unremarkable legacy.

That’s when God snaps him up.

            Abraham wasn’t marginal in the way we often recognize. When I say “marginal” we tend to think people who are poor, or poor, or poor. We have a pretty small idea of the margins, which is pretty much exclusively concerned with wealth. That’s human beings for you. God uses people from all sorts of margins, and Abraham was marginal in two critical ways: he was old and he was childless. God could have picked anybody to be heir to the covenant—he could even have picked Abraham at a younger age—and still he waited on the ninety-nine year old, ancient Father Abraham, and he waited on Sarah, at the age of ninety, to bear the child who would be the antecedent of the promised people.

            It makes a person wonder: Either God is incredibly slow, or there’s a secondary moral to this story.

            Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Time and again scripture tells us that age is a human concern. Our fear of getting old is blinding, preventing us from seeing how God works through the old and the young alike. At no time in the history of the world have people tried so desperately to continue to look young as we do now. Age is taboo. Nobody likes to get old. But here we have a God that doesn’t care if you are nine of ninety-nine. God has no regard for how many cycles you have gone around the big ball of gas we call the sun. You are never too young—or too old—to be of use. In fact, God picks out the young and the old—the ones that society has rejected—and to them he gives the opportunity to change the world. It is the young and the old who are on the margins and therefore on the cutting edge of history.

            This kind of thinking is sadly absent from church politics. There’s this myth you hear sometimes that the church needs to get younger or, conversely, that the church will die without the older generation. With that kind of thinking, it’s easy to pit generations against one another. The world is always changing; parents have always experienced the world differently from their children, and those different experiences make it easy to fracture. No one generation has ever been better at being the church than others, though every generation has thought they have had the key to the kingdom. Yet, remember that God’s work comes from the margins. God changes us not through the dominant culture that thinks we have it right; rather, God speaks to us through those who have no voice—the ones we glossed over in our haste down the “right” path. That’s the strange way that the kingdom of God works. It’s also frightening to a people of comfort; because the moment you feel at ease is the moment you can be certain that God is working not through you but through somebody else.

            Nevertheless, there is something reassuring about God’s methodology. The oppressed of this world are uplifted again and again by a promise: they are the ones with the Gospel on their lips. Whether the least and the lost are the poor or the elderly, or the young or the forgotten, God not only remembers them; they are also the hands and feet of God’s work in the world.

This has some pretty awesome ramifications for our church. It means that God’s church is always progressing. It can never stay the same, since the forgotten and the lost are reforming it every day. The Reformed tradition got it right when it says that the church is “semper reformanda” (always reforming). We can give up the idea of looking backward at some idyllic age. A church impacted by the margins is in some sense never stable; it has to embrace chaos because, out of that chaos, comes new prophetic voices.

If embracing the margins sounds a bit frightening that’s probably because it is. This is really an awful business model. Large-scale economies are interested in stable growth, but the church economy is looking for something else: it’s not looking for growth or stability or safety; the church economy is looking for resurrection. It’s looking for everything that Isaac embodies: joy, laughter, chaos, and finally promise. Isaac is the big promise embodied.

            Out of the margins comes this word of promise: things will never be the same. Comfort? Overrated. Stability? An illusion. Change? Inevitable. There is nothing scarier than standing at the margins. Abraham knew that. His legacy was nonexistent until he was faced with the most frightening prospect of all: meeting God face-to-face. Then, from the unlikeliest of places grew a promise big enough to encompass the whole world. The margins reframed history; they did for Abraham and they do today. The margins, whether of the church or our society, are where history is made.

Unapologetic nationalism and other great things about the Olympics

In my more idealistic moments I resonate strongly with Eugene Debs' famous quote: "I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world." I tend to think that the things that separate us, especially nationalism in all its various forms, are exactly those things that dehumanize and vilify "others." In the long run, I'm not sure there's much difference between lifting up the virtues of one's nation above all others and lifting up one's race or one's ethnic heritage--with the small distinction that you can sometimes, but not always, choose your national residence. And yet, I am the most single-minded champion of rooting for Team USA in an array of sporting events every time the Olympics come around.

Stephen Colbert's satirical 2010 poster

Count me a hypocrite, I guess.

Sports are certainly not immune to violence in their nationalistic passions, so it's not as if I can excuse my enamorment for team USA on the grounds that nothing significant is on the line. We have to look no further than the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics or the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games to find the real-life cost of sport. And yet, here I am, cheering for the home team, and, perhaps more importantly, cheering against the rest of the world.

In order to rationalize this, we have to start with the essence of competition in sport: the desire to win. There's a rather (in)famous quote from Herm Edwards, in response to a question about his team playing meaningless games, where he lets loose with a punctuated and direct retort, "You play to win the game!" The goal is simple: win. Now, it might be too simple to keep emotions and passions out of that one objective, but at its heart sports is not about demoralizing or dehumanizing the opponent; it is about winning.

Things get more complicated when you introduce fans into the mix. Fans are crazy beasts. They don't know what they are doing and they have less justification still for their beliefs and passions. Some come armed with stats, but in sports everybody has stats and stats alone never won anything. The chasm between statistical evidence and actuality is a gulf we are hardly closer to bridging even in the sabermetric era. Fans try to justify their superiority, they get caught up in prideful arrogance and they lack even a grain of objectivity. It's the reason half the fans in the stadium will yell "Balk!" when an opposing pitcher wheels to throw to second while twiddling their thumbs when their own pitcher does the same thing. Fans are the folks who cause problems; fans are subject to the mob mentality.

That's why it's even more abhorrent that I have this passion for team USA since I am very much a fan. Yet, I'm hopeful that that's where the similarities end. There is something about the Olympics that encompasses more than nationalistic pride. For every controversial moment (including tonight when the USA will almost certainly not dip our flag to the queen), there is something about coming together in an event that rises above nationalism. My pride in team USA has little to do with dislike of other countries--even if there are certain athletes and even teams I cannot stand. The Olympics is a time when we don't need an excuse to root for those of us in our midst. It's not so different from rooting for the home team, except there is a clear sense that every American is in this together.

So I'm OK with rooting on team USA. It's not going to stop me anyway, but I hope the games remain more than that. I hope that even when the Americans lose the humanity of the games wins out. Sports are kind of a silly thing to make such a significant difference in the emotions of people all over the world, and yet, they are in some ways the fairest of grounds to meet one another and discover our common humanity.

Grounded in Abraham

Genesis 17:1-8,15-22 

I have this really beat up Bible that for me has a hugely long story to it. It’s nothing all that special really; it’s not like the Bible stopped a bullet. It’s just a Bible with binding wrapped in duct tape, watermarked pages with curled edges, highlighter and pen marks obscuring things. It’s a Bible that looks probably like Bibles should by the time they are retired to dusty shelves.

 I purchased this particular Bible along with my first school books my first week of college. It lived with me through those college years. Then, it went with me to camp a couple different summers where it was beaten up in every way imaginable by the elements, rambunctious kids and my own propensity for leaving it places it shouldn’t have been. This last week I pulled this old Bible out, having left my newer, crisper Bible at home, and I realized something new about the "old" Bible. My old Bible smells.

It's not a bad smell. In fact, it smells like camp--like northern Idaho. I don’t know if it’s the Ponderosa Pine, Lake Coeur d’Alene or something else, but for me the smell of these pages is indistinguishable from Idaho.

Maybe you’ve heard it said before that smell is our sense tied most directly to memory. We've all had smells that cross our paths and cause our minds to drift to a point in time long ago. This Bible does that me. It is  a touch point to a past that has long since gone away. All I need to do is open the pages and memories flood over me whether I want them to or not.

Now, I can't fault you if you don't see the immediate connections to Abraham, so let me help.

Abraham is a story about telos. Telos is a Greek word which means something like "ultimate purpose.: Up until the Abraham there was no telos to the Biblical story and without a telos there was no arc to history. You see, in order for there to be history there needs to be a reason to remember; there needs to be a goal and groundedness. History is not only recounting things that have happened but placing events into the arc and narrative of a purposeful life. For a long time after the Garden of Eden, people wandered over the face of the earth without a telos. We have stories about Cain and Abel, Noah and his sons, the builders of Babel—all of which lack a sense of ultimate purpose. If you’d never heard the story of the Bible before and you started reading in Genesis 1 by the time you would have come to Abraham you would be wondering what God is doing with these people.

There is no redemption until Abraham. Until Abraham there is no purpose-driven life. Life requires a telos; the ground of which is set when God promises Abraham, #1: the land, and #2: descendents.

Still, I’m assuming it’s not exactly clear what my Bible has to do with that.

Well, here goes...

My old Bible recalls experiences that ground me. In the same way, the promise of land and offspring from God to Abraham ground the Biblical story. Ever since we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, the path that we human beings walked was one of landlessness, without a telos. Abraham changes things or, rather, God changes things through Abraham. We have a purpose; a reason to remember. Our memories recall some part of a greater purpose; our lives mean something not just to us but to the history of the world.

You see, from the moment Abraham was given the land, we were given a place in this world and a reason to remember it. You cannot own the land, but you can be a steward of it. It can—and it will—live in your memory. While it may be our sense of smell that triggers memories, those memories reside in particular places in our memory. You can sell the land that you grew up on, but part of you will continue to live there. That can be a sad and difficult thing, or it can be a moment to experience the widening of our roots; it can in fact be joyful.

Each of us has places we hold dear; places with memories we will never forget. The promise God makes to Abraham is one that is evident every day of our lives. Our places matter. Our world matters. There’s a purpose behind all of creation that drives this life forward. We are not merely people who live on the land; we are people of the land. Adam, the first man, is from the Hebrew “out of the ground.” There’s a reason our memories remain so powerful and it’s not so that we are tortured by our past. We are creatures who remember, because memory and history remind us of our telos. God is redeeming this whole world. He’s been at it since the time of Abraham, and just as surely as Sarah was going to give birth to Isaac, so are we in the labor pains of the new creation, so that whenever anything is lost it will be found again, and when death comes life will have the last word.

5 Things Christians should say

One of the latest trends in the mainline Christian blogosphere is to point out things that Christians shouldn't say: for a well-contrived example see here, or for a worse example see here. There's some good catharsis in pointing out the downright silly things that some people say in the name of Christ, but as with many things it is much easier to tear down than to build up. It's easier to suggest what we shouldn't say but harder to put forward positive suggestions. The danger is that we get to point where we're scared to say anything at all.

I don't always know how to say the things I want to say, even as I feel that accurate language is increasingly critical in these discussions, so I'm hardly the final or preeminent authority on things Christians should say. Nevertheless, I want to at least lead the conversation in that direction. I have some ideas of where to begin. I hope this is not the final word but just the beginning.

5 Things Christians should say

#1: My beliefs matter

I suppose it's possible to hear this as a rejoinder against the beliefs of others, but that is baggage that is implicit nowhere in the statement. It's only when we suggest that our beliefs matter over and against others that we run into trouble. My beliefs matter and so do yours. That's the start to a legitimate conversation. It doesn't put a value judgment on others while at the same time lifting up the value of what I hold dear. On some level, being a Christian is a life-or-death identity. That we can follow Christ and not have it impact every facet of our life may be the surest form of blasphemy. For that reason, the conversation has to begin with the gravity of faith. My beliefs matter--not more than yours, I can't answer that--but to me, yes, they matter dearly.

#2: The greatest power in the world is self-sacrifice


At the heart of the Gospel is this very simple ideology. This is made specific in Christ (which is appropriate since a philosophy alone without a lived reality has no saving power), but unfortunately even the person of Jesus is nowadays an arena of conflict. So, instead of arguing about historical aspects of Jesus--which tend to come down to matters of faith--one practical place to start is with the ultimate value of self-sacrifice. Jesus is crucial (pun intended) to our faith because we believe that he is the son of God. However, my experience is that most people already know that; they might not believe it but they at least know that it is an intrinsic matter of faith to Christians everywhere. What they don't understand is why we would believe that simply on the testimony of the Gospels. They couldn't tell you a single difference between Christian philosophy and Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam. It all seems the same. No doubt people have all kinds of reasons for their Christian faith so to sum it up as a matter of philosophy is no doubt oversimplifying and in most cases wrong, but I want to suggest that behind all the glitz and glamour there is a simple notion of self-sacrifice that pervades Christianity. It is not unique to the Christian faith, but Christianity more than any other religion or philosophy demonstrates how a reality drenched in altruism can look and impact the lives of believers. Self-sacrifice is the one power that the world does not understand.

#3: God will redeem all of creation

There's plenty in the Bible about those who will inherit the Kingdom of God and those that won't, which feeds directly into the who's in and who's out debates that make a mockery of the promise of salvation. Yet, for every instance where the Bible seems concerned with "individual salvation" there are countless examples of God moving toward fixing the whole picture; e.g. Romans 8:22-23, "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies."

This is not to say that it is unimportant that Christ died for you specifically--in fact, it is somewhere near the heart of the faith--but it is also important that salvation is not only a one way street between you and God distinct from the tree of life from which you were conceived. Whether you want to admit it or not we are all tangled in a web of inter-relationship that extends from our physical self into the lives of others and the natural world. We are impacted both positively and negatively by those who have gone before; not to mention those who have taught and influenced us from birth up through today. We are also impacted by the weather and disease, astronomical features, technological innovation and pollution. The idea that God's redemption stops at the outer edge of my soul is ultimately limiting because it denies the relationships that make me who I am. This wider view of salvation also keeps us from asking impossibly banal questions like, "What happens to a villager in Africa who dies never hearing the Gospel?" We desperately need an expansive vision of God's saving grace that nonetheless refrains from falling into the trap of sweeping generalizations and instead offers redemption that we can experience in our person. Salvation must be both specific and wide-reaching.

#4: Truth is Jesus

Our world is undergoing a philosophical clash perhaps greater than any the past three hundred years. The actors in the debate are modernists and postmodernists, and the nature of the conflict is truth. Modernism asks "What is true?" to which postmodernism replies, "There is no absolute truth." End of discussion. Postmodernists in particular have a problem with the idea of overarching narratives describing the nature of reality, so it should be little surprise that they have a problem with Jesus making the radical claim that he is "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6). Catering to a postmodern world tends to bring Christians down an ever-widening tunnel toward meaninglessness. If a person has decided that there is nothing knit into the fabric of creation that unites our stories, then there really is not much more to say. In the face of nihilism Christians ought to stand up and own truth. What is truth? Not a concept, but a person. What is true? Jesus. Not just in some historical sense but as the very fabric of creation. You see, as Christians we don't simply believe that Jesus is real, but rather we believe something more fascinating and more foundational than that: we believe that Jesus is the key to everything--truly the way to God, the ultimate truth, and in fact life itself. It's a big thing. Seriously. When we talk about truth like it's only a list of historical happenings we limit Jesus. He is truth; the very groundwork of everything we experience in this life. Let's own that.

#5: Tell me about yourself

With all of the above said, it behooves us to remember to listen. I believe we should hold strongly to the convictions we have as if they are the most important things in the universe, but that is no excuse to assert my beliefs as if my point of view is the only one that matters. Listening is a lost art. I find that when I'm confronted with people with whom I disagree--even strongly disagree--I learn far more by listening than I ever do from walking away or talking over them. It's not that they bring me over to their point of view--from my experience that is rare--but I tend to find the reasons why I believe the way that I do in their arguments to the contrary. It's much easier to surround myself with like-minded ideologues who puff me up in the assurance that I know what I'm talking about, but this same crowd tends to discourage critical thinking. How will I ever dive deeper if I know I'm already right? My hope is that you think that you're wrong... or at least acknowledge the possibility. It will not lead you away from faith nearly as often as it will lead you deeper into it. That is a promise.

Our youth are not Babel-ers

One language. One people. One focus. The Tower of Babel starts out sounding like a kind of utopia: everybody working together for a common goal. It seems like an image of the Kingdom of God.

We like the idea of unity. We like coming together to get things done. The idea that we can create something great as a single unified people impacts our politics, our social movements and certainly our churches. Take the Olympics. A couple weeks from now the Summer Olympics will be starting up in London with some 190 countries and thousands of athletes. The event, as always, will be described as a great unifier. We come from one world with one distinct goal in mind. For the Olympics it's to win a medal or simply to represent your country. For political and social movements it may be some concept of world peace. For everyone, it is something bigger than ourselves that achieves greater meaning because of unity of purpose.

There's nothing wrong with world peace or for that matter the idea that we should be a united people, but there is something wrong with the Babel picture. We might not be able to quite put our fingers on it at first because the Babel builders share some of our misconceptions. Our idea of unity is so often not about lifting up the lowly, bringing justice for the oppressed, hope for the hopeless, or peace to the war-torn. Our idealism of unity does not match our expressions of it. We have a Babel problem. We want to climb a tower to heaven to demonstrate our righteousness. We want, in short, to be God.

This might seem like quite a leap, so allow me to illustrate with an example courtesy of our youth. Fifteen of our young people just returned yesterday from a mission trip to Cortez, Colorado where we spent a week working in one of the poorest areas of the United States. Over the course of our time there we encountered heartbreaking situations: kids whose only meal is from the church once a day, homes that looked more like dilapidated trailers, and people impacted by violence, absent families and inadequate education. This was, in every way, a long way from the experiences we have on a daily basis here in the northwest corner of Minnesota.

I found myself wondering what unity looks like in light of that trip and the Tower of Babel. What does it mean to be united with people whose life experiences are so drastically different from our own? What does unity look like between the youth of Kittson County and the kids we met in Cortez?

With hugely apparent social and cultural divides, let me start with what unity does not look like. True unity is not the Tower of Babel. You see, the Tower of Babel starts out looking like a story about uniting together for a common purpose; the exact kind of story that speaks to our inner idealism, but unity without a deeper purpose is finally just shallow. Babel unity looks like trying to become like God--perhaps the shallowest of any endeavor. It is unity in name only, not in purpose.

Babel demonstrates that there is a difference between unity and group-think. To say that we are united does not mean that we think the same way, act the same way, speak the same languages, or have the same or similar life experiences. If so, then our youth and the kids of Cortez would have no hope for unity; a chasm separates our life experience and theirs. But if unity is more than group-think, if it's more than believing the same things or speaking the same language--in short, if unity not only tolerates disagreement but embraces it--then we can be united with people who bear no resemblance to us.

What I saw this past week taught me that this kind of unity is not only possible, in fact it is necessary to embrace one another across those things that divide us. Our youth walked in to a situation they could not have been prepared for and they did the most remarkable of things: they treated kids who looked and sounded nothing like them as if they were the most important people in their lives. They showed love without regard for their own well-being or for what they would get out of it. Our youth had no Babel problem--they had no God complex. Maybe this is why Jesus was adamant that to enter the kingdom of heaven we  would have to become like children. We have to give up our desires for the sake of someone else, and that is something that children excel at far better than the rest of us.

One example: One day at snack time before the kids returned home one of our youth had a young girl on his lap as she was eating her sandwich. The girl was five years old, though she looked more like three and seemed half-likely to be blown away by the first swift breeze. It was obvious enough that she was going without food on a regular basis. So it was important for her, more than anyone else, to have that snack--a peanut butter and jelly sandwich--before heading home. But something remarkable happened during that snack time, something that just doesn't square with our innate sense of self-preservation. That girl, closer to starvation than is fathomable in the developed world, turned to our young man and said, "I'm really hungry but you can have some if you want."

That is the kingdom of God. That is what Jesus would have us see in one another. It looks nothing like Babel, because it is selfless, its intentions are pure. True power is not found in reaching for God. It is not achieved by building a towering city to heaven. It is not becoming more like God. It is not even about doing what is right. True power is giving up your desires for the sake of somebody else, even when your desires are for something as basic as food that would otherwise leave you starving.

This kind of power also flows both ways. Everybody who has ever done mission work knows that often the most profound change happens not in the communities we go into but in us when we depart. That is grace in action. It is why Jesus puts such a high price on humility. It's not about us. It's never been about us. Sometimes it's only when we head off to a strange and distant place that this message is brought home. Our own towers of Babel suddenly start to look just a little self-righteous, and it changes us.