inside the U

In a great electronic to print and back again journey . . . the following article was an expansion of a previous blog that became an article in our church paper, which I am now publishing on my blog for those of you (like me) who paper just confuses. Is that at all clear? No? Good.

I recently wrote the following on my blog (upreacher.blogspot.com): One of my really good friends is in seminary and wrote about our last trip to Rwanda in a paper. She said, “In this otherness, which is someone else’s someplace, someone else’s home, you are left grasping for something familiar until you accept that all familiarity is gone and you must allow the otherness to come in.” This may be one of the most profound theological statements I have ever come across. It cuts to the heart of our faith and what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. As a people called to live in a world not our own this otherness is a place we must seek to find.

Since writing that, I have continued to come back to this “otherness” idea. Although I do think foreign missions allow disciples to more easily surrender to the otherness, I don’t think it is necessary to go to distant shores to discover what it means to be in unfamiliar territory. I often turn on the television or look around the room and discover that I am hopelessly lost. Nothing looks the way it did when I was a child. People speak differently. I can’t get a phone call anymore – I get a text message. I find the otherness of a world that I live in all around me – pressing in and challenging me to stretch and grow in uncomfortable ways. (Big words for a guy in his 30s, I know.) The danger comes when we lose our focus on that which is eternal. We mistake the packaging of eternal truth (“the way it has always been”) for the truth himself. Jesus spoke to farmers in pastoral parables. He quoted the law to Pharisees. Paul used philosophy to convince Romans. Rwandans practice a sacrament of presence. We have a spiffy website and shiny U logo. All of this is done to create access points to a particular people at a particular moment in history. Whether you are in far off places or in your own church home, eternal truth does not change. The power and presence of Jesus Christ is made manifest by those who speak his truth and do his will.

The thing about the otherness is this: if we struggle and fight against it, we are lost. We will grasp ever tighter to a fistful of sand and become bitter as it all disappears. My friend is right when she supposes that the solution is not resistance to the otherness, but surrender. Surrender is not the same thing as resignation. Resignation is tacit consent – apathy of the will that turns quickly to fatalism. Surrender is an active act of your will. It is letting the things of little eternal consequence sink to the shadows. Even as the world and our place in it changes, surrender is knowing that God does not change nor does our place in him change.
Let me speak bluntly lest my point go unsaid. Our church, our culture, our whole world is in a state of rapid change. It could be easy for us to get lost in exciting new websites, new logos, and new buildings and miss that which remains unchanged: Christ Jesus. More than ever, it is essential that we fix our eyes on Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. Let us throw off everything else that so easily entangles us and run with perseverance the race marked out for us.