Exiled for the Gospel

From my talk at BU IV:

I have been given to understand that this semester you are talking about Cultural Engagement and Identity in Christ. This is a topic very close to my heart. As I always like to say, although it is less and less believable, I’m not from here. I am what they call a Missionary Kid, or, its more modern name, A Third Culture Kid. A kid no longer, sadly, the third cultural part is still very much alive and well in my mind and soul even as I live here in New York.

A Third Culture person is someone whose passport says one thing, like American, but who spends most of their formative years outside of their passport country, and who then, for the most part, returns back to the passport country. You can see that someone like this might have a lot of angsty feelings about identity. Anytime this person is asked, even very kindly, Where are you from, they will fall into a morass of emotional issues.

I grew up in Mali, West Africa. Mali is the best country in the world, I can tell you. America is pretty nice, but it has nothing on Mali. Mali is dry, and hot, the landscape, the food, the people, everything is perfect. I grew up in a mud house away off from the main road next to a tiny, old fashioned, mud-walled village. My parents were there to learn Senefo and ultimately to translate the scriptures into that language. That meant getting a good alphabet in place, a dictionary, a grammar, and then finally the bible itself. I was the only white kid for miles and miles and miles. Sometimes, if I happened to be outside of my house at night, when I was really small, I would be mistaken for a jinn, a spirit. During the day I played with Malian kids in the sand and dirt. When I was fourteen, while I was away at boarding school, my best friend got married. A decade later, when I’d finally managed to find myself a husband, the whole village was shocked that anyone would have me, as old as I was. Imagine their relief when I had children.

Mali is really the home of my heart. But English is my language, with a smattering of French. And airports are my place of rest. In the going and the coming, the transitions between one place and another, I am most psychically at peace. Imagine, then, the richness of the scriptures for me.

The bible is all about leaving home and having to live somewhere you don’t really find all that comfortable. The stranger, the exile, the person trying to make their vines grow in a place they would rather not be. Jesus is the Main Exile in the bible. He leaves his Father’s house and goes into a far country where the people don’t want to listen to him and don’t want to know who he is, and don’t want to know his name, and finally kill him. He is Abraham traveling to the promised land, Joseph being sold to strangers by his own family for a pittance, Moses growing up in Pharaoh’s house, returning to his people, taking them into the wilderness to hear and be shaped by the law of God, he is David fleeing from Saul, he is the Samaritan crossing over the boundary of ethnicity to help the one in need. All of the bible is showing us pictures of who he is and how far he has come to rescue us, to communicate with us, to show us what kind of God he is.

But if the bible is a record, a catalogue, of God’s exiling of himself to come get us, it is equally a catalogue of our failure to see what he is doing and accept him as a stranger in our midst. We are fixed in the imaginations of our own hearts, we take for granted the goodness of our own ways, and we elevate our cultural worldview into the heavens. We try to make everyone and everything, including God, like us. And all of us do this. Even the really good Christian person, can’t help doing it.

When I was a teenager, home from school for the holiday, a group of Americans came to our village to put a roof on the school. They were so enthusiastic to be there. They dressed appropriately, they ate the food, they took a ton of pictures. Their eyes were wide open, trying to see and experience every moment to the full. We were pretty happy with their visit. It seemed like they had had a good taste of what our village had to offer. A week later, though, a friend came in sat in the cool of our living room and said, in Senefo, ‘Eh, those strangers. Their eyes are wide open, but they don’t see anything.’ My dad’s jaw dropped open. One, because it was the first time he hadn’t been lumped into the category of stranger, which was kind of a big deal. And two, because, really, what a perfect way to describe the human condition. Our eyes are wide open but we don’t see anything. Isaiah says that we “walk in darkness” and that is true even in the heat of the day.

Is there any hope, then? Can our eyes ever be opened? Can we understand and enter into another culture with the gospel? Can we even a little approximate what Jesus did, coming to earth to be with us and reveal himself? Can we go somewhere else with the gospel and relate it to a person so different in language and world view?

I ask myself this a lot, living as I do, a long way from the home of my heart. I was surprised and horrified when God decided to bring me here, to Binghamton, the land of the gray and brown ice. A lot of times I have felt like Israel leaving her home to go to Babylon, sitting down to weep by the road, exiled and forlorn. My eyes weren’t open to the culture and people here. Unlike those nice kids that came to Africa, who were smiling and who were trying to open their eyes, I was pretty sure there was no use trying to understand anyone here. For heaven’s sake, it’s so cold. The greatest culinary boast is the spiedie.

I lacked an essential element of the gospel itself.
I bet you can guess what it was. Humility.
By way of an illustration, you might member that preeminent prophet of the bible, Jonah. Jonah was supposed to go to another land and bring the good news that the whole city of Nineveh was so wicked that God was going to destroy it in three days. Jonah didn’t want to go for the single, ugly reason that he knew that if he preached this message, the people would repent, and God would have mercy, and he didn’t want God to have mercy. He wanted all those people to die forever. Now, in our modern day, we don’t admit to ourselves when we really despise other people, whether it’s our neighbor down the hall, or someone a world away. We have tolerance for each other. That’s what we call it, it’s called Tolerance. But consider how much we are like Jonah. Anytime we go out into the world, but withhold the good news about Jesus, we are really hating the Ninevites, despising the Other. Because God uses the gospel to open the eye and the ear, to cure the blindness of the human condition. But you, the Christian, have to admit to yourself that you are blind, and that the other person is more deserving even than you. You have to consider them as better than you.

In a time when Division is kind of the big defining cultural Trend, even in contradistinction to the Tolerance we are all supposed to exercise–where who you are individually is supposed to be the thing upon which all your rights and dreams and potential are grounded, where your life experience is supposed to be precious and the measure of all things, where you must never feel shame or guilt or discomfort and everyone must respect you and honor you–as you go out into the world to try to meet with the person who feels that way about himself or herself, your identity has to be surely fixed in the God who Goes Out, who endures shame and suffering, who doesn’t have to feel at home because heaven is his home and yours will be too some day.

That might sound pretty bleak, so let me encourage you. Jesus didn’t just come to earth to live, die, rise again, and then go back to the Father–even though he did all those things–he came to live in you. Your very flesh and heart are supposed to be his home. Where you are, is where he is. Where you go, is where he goes. Where you live, is where he makes himself comfortable. The incarnation of Jesus into the world was the picture of the Holy Spirit living in you. Where are you from? Where are you going? He is in both those places.

So cultural engagement is not about you getting it perfectly right, understanding and bridging the differences in language and anthropology by the power of your will and your intellect–although, if you’re going to be an actual missionary, please do study hard, please don’t slack off, please develop and train in a skill, please spend the vast majority of your studies gaining that hefty dose of humility–it’s about God himself, living in you, driving you out, manifesting his power in your weakness, proclaiming the Good News of Jesus through your lips, himself going through you out into every corner of the world. You may go with your eyes wide open, not seeing anything, but the more you cling to him, And, the more Time You Spend, the more your eyes will gradually gather in the light, your gaze will adjust, you will see what you didn’t see before, even the thing that’s right in front of you. Because Jesus isn’t just living in you through the power of the Holy Spirit, he has embedded himself, he has planted a kernel of truth, in every culture and language, that can only be brought into maturity and harvest through the light of the gospel. My favorite example of this, from Senefo Land, is when my father discovered that people said of a fetish, a sort of demon possessed mask, that it was their “shepherd”. Imagine the grace, for the people of Farakala, to discover the true Shepherd, who doesn’t demand a blood sacrifice from you, but himself goes out to find the lost sheep, who spares no effort to find the one who has wandered away, and who lays down his own life, whose blood is sufficient for the forgiveness of every sin, every blindness, every pride.

At the end of our church services, at Church of the Good Shepherd, or COGS, before anyone can go away and on to the rest of their Sunday, there is a sort of a proclamation cried out. Matt, the pastor, says, “Let us go forth into the world by the power of the Spirit” and everyone responds, “Thanks be to God.” You have to go out. You can’t sit here in your chair all night. You have to talk to people and go from one class to another. You have to eat food. You have to try to understand the people around you, whoever they are. But when you do that, when you go out, you do it in the power of the Spirit, who went a long way to find you and know you. Thanks be to God for that.