Jesus is always hanging
out in the wrong side of town, but we shouldn’t be surprised—that’s where he’s
from. Always the wrong side of town—hanging out with the wrong people—sinners,
mostly.
The story starts with Jesus
out recruiting disciples one day. He finds Philip and says, “Follow me.” And we
know right away that Philip is a good catch, because the first thing Philip
does is go about recruiting more friends for the party. He really takes that
fisher-of-men thing to heart. So, he finds his friend, Nathanael, and straightaway
tells him that the Messiah has come and he is Jesus of Nazareth. However,
Nathanael, you might recall, is not listed amongst the original twelve
disciples, and the reason for this may soon become obvious, because Nathanael has
his concerns about the origins of this Messiah. Nazareth? “Can anything good
come out of Nazareth?” he asks.
You can substitute every
wrong side of town you can imagine here, if you like. Even for those of us who
try to see the best in all dark places, we can certainly list a few—places with
a negative connotation in our minds—places we wouldn’t want to go—places we
mistrust.
Then again, of course Jesus
came from Nazareth! Of course, Jesus came from a backwater nowhere. I sat at
home over Christmas and caught a bit of the Lutheran worship service from
Bethlehem broadcast on Facebook, which they called “Christ in the rubble.”
Today, Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, is a majority Muslim town in the West
Bank. In those days, it was a quiet place—a nowhere place. Of course, Christ was
born there! Not Jerusalem—not even Nazareth—not New York City—not London or
Tokyo. Nowhere.
“Can anything good come from
Nazareth?” Could anyone good be born in Bethlehem?
Well, here’s the backward,
amazing thing about the Christian faith: Jesus Christ only ever dwells in those
dark places. Jesus Christ only ever shows up on the wrong side of town. Jesus appears
in A.A. meetings and under the rubble of natural disasters and war; Jesus shows
up in dementia wards and children’s oncology units; Jesus is found in
underpasses and in redlight districts and wherever the poor and neglected and
hurting gather. Jesus Christ came into a world of darkness to meet us when it
appears all hope has turned to dust.
The problem for those of us
in the church is a practical one: That backwards, wrong-side-of-town mentality
is not marketable, which is a problem because it means that Jesus is not
marketable. After all, Jesus tells us that in order to be his disciples we must
pick up our crosses and follow—and those crosses are not the kinds of minor
inconveniences that we so often talk about to tone down the enormity of this
calling. Our crosses are not our children or our relatives. Our crosses are our
very lives—that is what Jesus ultimately calls us to give up. As Dietrich
Bonhoeffer said, “When Jesus Christ calls a disciple, he bids them come and
die.” You won’t see that on many billboards: Come, die.
You also won’t see that on
any Ewalu brochures. And, yet… Ewalu is a place where faith is sticky—where
kids depart at the end of the week singing songs—where adults look back on
their time at camp as their deepest experience of faith formation—and I believe
this happens so often at Ewalu because camp is a place where Christ does bid us
to come and die. We die to the self we construct in our life apart from camp.
We forget about the Instagram posts, and whether that one person read our text
or not, and who won that game, and what you scored on that test. All that stuff
dies at the boundaries of camp. At Ewalu, campers encounter this Jesus Christ
who comes from a lowly, unexpected, wrong-side-of-town place kind of like many
of the places they come from. For the first time, many of them experience this
backward faith that seeks after lost sheep and celebrates the wrong sort of
people—Samaritans and women and the poor and the sick—and campers latch onto
that with all their might because so many of them are desperate for it to be
true.
Why?
Because they already know
that they are the lost sheep—they’ve just never had anybody spell it out for
them! Because they know that they were born in the wrong place. They know that
they have the wrong cheek bones and they carry weight in the wrong areas. They
know that they can never be skinny enough or muscly enough. They know that they
are fundamentally imperfect people, and their whole lives have been spent with
adults (who hopefully love them and care for them, telling them that they are
beautiful children of God), but they also know that those adults lie—that those
adults, who we call parents, also aren’t very smart. They know we are faking
it, and most of us are just doing exactly what our parents did (or exactly the
opposite of what our parents did) and our parents didn’t know what they were
doing either.
Our kids know this. Now, don’t get me wrong, you
should be telling your kids you love them; you should be telling your grandkids
you love them. I know many of you come from stoic, Nordic-heritage families
like my own where all feelings are to be treated like a game of charades—where
you act them out but it’s against the rules to actually say anything about
them. Yeah, don’t do that. Do tell your kids you love them, but
don’t be surprised when they run away from that love—and when they don’t
believe you.
The reason the
camp experience sticks with campers is because they discover that Jesus Christ
loves them not because they are good, but because God is good. Better still,
Jesus Christ comes to us from places like Nazareth—places from which reasonable
people like Nathanael can wonder: Can anything good come from there? The
Christian faith is not a reasonable faith. It is a faith that only makes sense
in a broken world—it is a faith that can only be practiced by broken
people. Cross-bearers.
Camp and church
are after the same thing, but camp has an easier time marketing ourselves
because it is temporary. One week of discomfort—full of fun, sure—but
discomfort nonetheless. Nobody is arguing that Foresters village is more
comfortable than your bed at home. Instead, we are saying that there is very
good reason to get out there—to encounter Christ in creation—if only for a
week. I don’t envy your congregation. I was a parish pastor for nine years, and
I struggled with this myself quite often. As Christians we are called to go
into all the backwards wrong-side-of-town places where Jesus is, but in a world
that often feels so mixed up, we often come to church just needing a refuge.
It’s hard to see that the refuge we need is to go deeper into discomfort.
Churches have it hard because this is your calling every single week.
All of this is why
I am glad we are in this work together. Help us help you (and your kids) to
encounter Christ on the wrong side of town. Let us work together to discover
how God shows up through discomfort. Together, we can meet a world of
Nathanaels, who say, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” with an
emphatic, “Yes! Come and see.”
In fact, the best
things only ever come out of the wrong kinds of places. After all, that’s where
God has promised to dwell. In our pain. In our hurt. In our grief. In our
discomfort. This faith will drive you crazy, but it will also save you.
