|
"Unexpected Allies: Seeking Security in a Time of Fear"
During my term as the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) from 2004 to 2006, I had the opportunity to travel all over the United States and around the world and experience both the great challenges confronting the Christian church and our interfaith partners and to see our best expressions of faithfulness as well. Among the most memorable of those experiences was a visit I made to Tek Tung Presbyterian Church in a small, rural community about halfway down the west side of the island of Taiwan.
The pastor of Tek Tung was about my age – around forty or so – and he had been there ever since graduating from seminary eighteen years before. In the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan, pastors are assigned to their first parish, and the pastor, who was among the most energetic and creative pastors I met during my term, described his initial disappointment at being assigned to Tek Tung. When he arrived, he discovered that the small congregation, numbering only about twenty-five people, had been dying for some time. There was a feeling of isolation and even fearfulness as the little group of Christians confronted what they saw as a hostile culture, more than 97% Buddhist, and not particularly welcoming to the small Christian church in their community. The most obvious sign of the way the members of the church saw themselves in their community was that there was a six foot high brick wall surrounding the church property and turning it into a compound that could not be seen from the outside. The pastor told me that he knew no creative ministry could happen there so long as the congregation was acting from a place of fear. After being there a year or so, he pushed the members to tear down the wall that surrounded the property. Though such a bold suggestion would have probably led to asking the pastor to leave in many churches that I’ve visited, in this case, perhaps because it was obvious that the church would die without bold action, the congregants agreed. Little by little they tore down the wall on the street side of their property, eventually replacing it with a low, decorative wall to mark their boundaries. Then they followed their pastor’s lead to try to make their worship life as transparent as possible to others in their community:
Shortly after making the physical changes to the church itself, the pastor approached a carpenter in the congregation and asked him to build what eventually became a three story, Swiss-Family Robinson style treehouse in a large tree on the property, which of course became a magnet for children in their community. Then, in a similar effort to make the property inviting for teenagers, he installed a climbing wall on the side of his house, which stood next to the church, and several days a week he invited young people to come and learn the skills of technical rock climbing. Within a couple of years, the property had been converted from a walled compound of mystery to a place of welcome and a beehive of activity. Next, that small band of followers of Jesus decided to go out into the community themselves. They began a program providing meals for elderly folks who lived on their own. They opened a daycare program for children of parents who both had to work all day, which was becoming increasingly common there as it has around the world. They opened a computer lab to teach adults how to use the internet, and eventually they struck a deal with the government to begin a school for problem teenagers who had dropped out of school or been kicked out because of their behavior. I’ve thought a lot about that small community in Taiwan as I’ve wrestled with the challenges confronting our own church here in the United States. We live in a time of fear. The fears have changed some since the end of the Cold War that defined my childhood. Do you remember, as I do, bomb shelter signs in the church fellowship hall and drills in our elementary schools where we practiced hiding under our desks in case of nuclear attack? Thirty-five years later, in a post September 11, 2001 world, the enemy has changed but the fear that drives us remains much the same. My own son began first grade in the fall of 2001, and just as my childhood was defined by a Cold War culture of fear that I didn’t even notice because it was so pervasive – it was the water in which we all swam – I’m aware that his has been defined by a similar culture of fear proscribed by the War on Terror. Security alerts, travel restrictions, daily reports of death and carnage from Iraq and Afghanistan are all noticeable – at least at some level – to a bright twelve year-old, but less noticeable to a child are our slipping standards on torture, the steady removal of fundamental civil rights that have been our country’s hallmark, gated communities that many Americans now take for granted, and ever bigger walls and greater levels of technology to "control the border" where I live in southern AZ. In a country defined by fear, more and more we fall into the pattern of naming insiders and outsiders, those who are friends and those who are enemies, those who have God’s favor and those who don’t. These are the signs that the culture of fear – "the water in which we swim" – defines our lives in ways just as it did for my parents’ generation during the decades of the cold war. Luke’s Jesus had a lot to say about responding to those who are bound up in a culture of creating insiders and outsiders, enemies and friends, those who had access to God and those who were to be excluded from that experience of God. Much of the conversation had to do with Jewish law and religious practice, two things that could not easily be separated in first century Palestine, and it centered around who was clean and who was unclean, and who would be granted entree to the temple and the religious community. I would suggest that the gospel is the story of a Jesus who constantly surprises the Jewish people with his demands that those boundaries be thrown out. Over and over, he chooses the most surprising of cast of characters and activities to demonstrate how God’s favor can be found among the most excluded and reviled of first century Palestine. For instance, Mark’s Jesus has the disciples getting into a boat to cross over to the other side, to the unclean, as one of their earliest challenges as a community of followers, and they’re immediately greeted by the Gerasene Demoniac, their worst fears confirmed, as they get out of the boat. From there, Mark seems to intentionally move the action back and forth between the land of the Jews and the land of the Gentiles, insisting that Jesus’ miracles were equally available to both peoples. Matthew shocks his listeners with Jesus’ notions of family in the 25th chapter – I tell you that insofar as you have cared for one of the least of these – the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, you have done it to me. Luke tells the story of the Good Samaritan in the tenth chapter, and then cements his notions of a community defined by who is welcome rather than who is excluded with his actions in the story the morning. Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, and is met by ten lepers, who shout to him from a distance away – make us clean! His response is deeply political, in the sense that he sends them to present themselves to the priests at the temple, those who would exclude the lepers from all access to the religious community. He places the responsibility for their healing, in other words, on those who have kept them out. On the way, we are told, they are healed, and one reading of the story suggests that the one who returned did so not because he was the only one who was faithful, but because he was the one who had other, ethnic reasons to fear that he would be excluded, in addition to being excluded for reasons of his leprosy. If he was a gentile, from the hated Samaria, he was not only an outcast as a leper, but an outcast among the outcasts as an outsider to the Jewish tradition. His return to Jesus recognizes a re-ordering of the Jewish story, a new game, a different way of understanding and giving praise to God. Jesus’ response to him seems an affirmation of this way of understanding the text. He comments on the fact that the other nine seem not to have understood that God is working a new thing, and then he suggests that the man is not only made clean, but has been made well. He welcomes him, in a sense, into community, and restores him to wholeness. There’s a similarly surprising notion of security underlying our Old Testament text this morning as well. Jeremiah’s God is speaking to the people of Israel at a time when they are at the greatest possible risk. They are a people who have been militarily defeated and taken into exile in Babylon. What does God have to say to God’s people at this moment of fear? Build houses, plant gardens and eat what you grow, take wives and husbands and have children, CARE FOR THE WELFARE OF YOUR CAPTORS, FOR THERE YOU WILL FIND YOUR WELFARE AS WELL. My friends, what would such a radical reorientation of who is in and who is out look like in our own time? In a post 9/11 world, the lines have been drawn fairly clearly. Whatever we may choose to believe about the reasons or justification for our invasion and ongoing military occupation of the country of Iraq, what is clear to others around the world is that this is a battle that has been waged intentionally by a Christian President and a Christian Congress who use their faith to justify their actions. Though it makes us squirm uncomfortably to be held to account, Muslims around the world are clear that in the new world order being imposed by the most powerful nation on earth, Christians will claim the right to determine who is "in" and who is "out." In our own world view, Muslim extremists are the problem (though we appear to be incapable of defining the difference between any practicing Muslim and a Muslim extremist), and our "pre-emptive strike," "shock and awe" and ongoing occupation of Iraq are simply legitimate attempts to create security for the United States. Isn’t that what we mean when we say, "if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them here?" And so, Jesus, in his silly, Pollyanna, "he doesn’t really understand the threat against us" kind of way, does it once again this morning. He chooses the very symbol of the excluded and the most hated in Jewish society to make his point. Even a leper is welcome in the reign of God. Even a Samaritan leper will be made welcome in this new community. In fact, it may be that the most hated among us are the ones whose faith will show us the way. On Monday I participated in an Interfaith Fast to end the war in Iraq. Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, people of all religious traditions, across the United States, fasted together for a day as a way to witness together to our conviction that there is, in fact, another way to find security. The solution in our world today is not, as we have been encouraged to believe, a never-ending war on terror between we who are good and those who are evil, but a new notion of community that breaks down barriers of hate and mistrust. Friends, what if Jesus is right? What is the only way to genuine security is through building right relationships with our enemies and those who hate us. Imagine how different our lives would be today if we had responded to the terrorist attacks that tore at the very soul of our people on September 11, 2001 not with a never-ending war on terror but instead with a never ending commitment to development and justice for all of the people of God’s world. Imagine how we would be seen in the world today if, instead of spending five hundred billion dollars on the war on terror we had chosen to spend one hundred billion dollars on basic security in our ports and our airports and four hundred billion on access to clean water, education, dignified housing, and economic opportunity for two-thirds of the world’s population currently living in misery and with greater insecurity than you and I could ever imagine. What if no one could connect the hungry cries of their children with the over-abundance of mine? What would it feel like to live in a world where no one, here in the U.S. or anywhere in the world, is afraid of a terrorist bomb when they put their children on the bus to go to school or when they go to the store? Can we imagine a world in which people who live in a U.S. or Israeli military occupation in Baghdad or in Hebron don’t live in fear of a violent house search that will take away their loved ones with neither explanation nor just cause? Perhaps more concretely for many of us, can we imagine a time when we ourselves will not be so afraid that we feel we must cower behind more and more security gates and walls and borders and checkpoints? I think Jesus had it exactly right. We will never find security at the point of a gun or a missile or as a result of a military occupation or a never-ending war on terror. Real security will come only when we trust that the basic goodness of all people, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, those of other religious persuasion or no religious persuasion, can prevail. Real security and a future of hope will come for us, like it did for the members of Tek Tung Presbyterian Church, when we choose to tear down the walls that divide us, to turn out when every instinct tells us we should turn in, and to take the boldest of all steps we could imagine, to love those of whom we are most afraid. No one has put the challenge of our time more poetically than Christopher Fry, in his play "A Sleep of Prisoners." The human heart can go the lengths of God. Preached at Second Presbyterian Church, Lexington,
Kentucky, October 14, 2007 |
Rick Ufford-Chase