17 Don’t obstruct the legal rights of an immigrant or orphan. Don’t take a widow’s coat as pledge for a loan. 18 Remember how you were a slave in Egypt but how the Lord your God saved you from that. That’s why I’m commanding you to do this thing. 19 Whenever you are reaping the harvest of your field and you leave some grain in the field, don’t go back and get it. Let it go to the immigrants, the orphans, and the widows so that the Lord your God blesses you in all that you do. 20 Similarly, when you beat the olives off your olive trees, don’t go back over them twice. Let the leftovers go to the immigrants, the orphans, and the widows. 21 Again, when you pick the grapes of your vineyard, don’t pick them over twice. Let the leftovers go to the immigrants, the orphans, and the widows. 22 Remember how you were a slave in Egypt. That’s why I am commanding you to do this thing. (CEB)
“Behold a New Thing: The Tribal Church,”
Week Three
The
face of the 99-year-old woman ran like a map, with gentle wrinkles and creases
diving and folding to create something that I imagined the flow of a river must
look like if put to a human face. And
while you or I might not know her from Adam, that face tells a story.
This
woman was the last of her kind—an ethnic Armenian living in the town of
Chunkush in southeastern Turkey, where over 10,000 Armenians once lived before
the purges of the Armenian Holocaust during the First World War, nearly 100
years ago. She is also what writer Chris
Bohjalian calls a “hidden Armenian.” As
he writes:
She…had grown up and grown old aware of
who and what she (is)—Armenian—but forced to conform and remain silent. That was the price of survival in the days
after the genocide, and it’s a custom that, in small villages such as Chunkush,
endures today…whenever we asked Asiya about being Armenian, she would shake her
head ruefully and grow silent. One time,
her daughter chimed in: “No. We can’t
talk about that.”
No. We can’t talk about that.
It
is a refrain that I rarely hear, in all honesty, and only in very specific
circumstances, like if I’m counseling someone through a past spiritual trauma,
or if someone asks me about the rapture.
But
I also hear it from Christians. A
lot. About any number of things, but
especially about the things that tend to divide us, like marriage equality, or
the theological worth of eggplants. And
so we remain silent for fear of having our welcome revoked. And how I wish that weren’t so.
We
tell ourselves churches must look a certain way and beat ourselves up when they
don’t. But the church is what I imagine
a child must be like—as Tina Fey puts it in her memoir Bossypants, yes, you can teach a child manners and dress her up in
embarrassing little sailor outfits, but at some point, that child is going to
be whatever she is going to be (and, ironically or no, that very line reflects
the wonder and splendor of the divine name itself from Exodus 3: I Am Who I
Am).
And
that’s kind of what it is like for us, you know? Lots of people would say they know what we
should look like—they want to tell us which little sailor outfits to dress up
in—but at some point, this church is going to be whatever this church is. And after being here as your pastor for
nearly two years, I have found the closest thing possible to describing what
this church is, and what we can become: a so-called tribal church, ministering
to a missing generation of believers.
This
term comes from a 2007 book of the same name by Carol Howard Merritt, a
Generation X evangelically-raised Presbyterian pastor and author. And we will be basing this new six-week
sermon series on this book, as we look at what exactly a tribal church is, and
what it can truly do. We kicked off the
series by examining one of the initial tenets of the book: “fostering
intergenerational relationships,” followed by “encouraging economic
understanding.” This week, we see the
theme of “cultivating unambiguous inclusion.”
Carol writes in this chapter:
The law of Jesus was a relationship; it
did not factor in the object of the action, it only mattered how the subject
responded...in contrast, our mainline denominational churches endlessly debate
who’s on and who’s off our lists… (but) the majority of young adults in our
country…see their duty as spiritual people as being to treat others as they
would like to be treated, and that means that they don’t tolerate intolerance.
Throughout the exchanges over the
doctrine of salvation and acceptable views of sexuality, as our denominations
stand with their clipboards (like bouncers –E.A.), negotiating who is good
enough to be on our list, they frequently leave those under forty on the wrong
side of the ropes.
When I hear arguments in the church, I
am told that the church needs to stand up against the evil of a diverse
culture, and not allow the world to taint the pure message of the Gospel. Yet, as a part of an age group which welcomes
diversity, it feels like the church is fighting against the very richness and
difference of my generation, my friends, and me—a richness and difference that
it perceives as somehow tainted and sinful.
A
richness perceived as somehow tainted.
It
is why a lot of younger Christians have had to “come out of the closet,” as it
were, about views they have that may not tow the line that their church or
denomination preaches: that they are accepting of gays and lesbians, or that
they don’t believe that members of other churches or denominations are
necessarily bound for hell. It is a
difficult thing to swim upstream like that, when you are already seen as naïve
because of your age, or a heretic because of your conscience.
And
so people—young people and new people especially—in the church may remain in
silence, fearful of upsetting the delicate status quo.
Not
unlike the foreigner whom Deuteronomy 24 tries to protect.
Among
the 613 laws the Torah hands down, I have to admit that this is one of my
favorites. I know I am not supposed to
play favorites with the Word of God—that the entirety of Scripture is
God-breathed, inspired, and useful for teaching. But we all have our favorite verses and
passages, and this is one of mine.
Because
for most of my childhood, I was one of those “hidden Armenians.” My great-grandparents fled Armenia in 1915,
at great personal risk and expense, for Russia.
Except a few years later, the Bolsheviks came a-knocking, and Russia
wasn’t such a great place to be either.
And so my family fled illegally to the United States, where we have
lived and died ever since. We still have
the fake passports my great-grandparents used.
And
I tell that story because it is not unlike some of the stories I hear from all
of you—making quiet exoduses from your previous church homes, whether because
you had to relocate for a job, or because you felt or were told you were no
longer welcome at the church you once were at.
And on a personal level as your pastor, I am so sorry for the pain that
this causes you.
Part
of coping with the pain means remembering where it came from. It is why God is quick to remind the
Israelites of why, exactly, they must provide for and care for the foreigner (in addition to the orphans and widows, who were similarly vulnerable populations in Biblical times): because
they themselves were foreigners not so long ago, when they were slaves in
Egypt.
When
they were slaves. It is a shameful
memory that, being far removed from it ourselves, we would probably just as
soon assume someone would want to forget.
So shameful, though, that it actually convinces me of the truth in this
statement behind the law. After all, if
the Exodus hadn’t happened like that, who on earth would make up an origin
story of their people being enslaved and let free through no great insurrection
or rebellion of their own?
To
admit, “we were slaves” is something that is—and should be—profoundly
humbling. And it is something we can and
must admit to ourselves when we come to church.
Because
for many of us, this is a church that we have grown to love. We have worshiped here for weeks, months,
years, sometimes decades. And somewhere
within that fabric of time, we are apt to forget what it was like to worship
here for the first time, unsure of everything that was going on, not knowing
what to expect, hesitant about sitting anywhere lest it be “someone else’s
pew.” Even for the most seasoned
Christian, a church was once a foreign land for them as well.
And
so we are charged to remember that once upon a time, we, too, were the
foreigners in this church that welcomed us in.
We, too, were the strangers. We
too, came from the humble places.
Part
of being in church might mean feeling like you are privileged—after all, we
have this beautiful sanctuary in which to worship, we have these wonderful
friends and family with whom to worship, and most of all, we have this God who
came to earth and gave everything for us.
With
that sort of array of gifts, we are liable to feel privileged, for the church
is indeed a blessing. But it is a
paradoxical privilege—it is privilege that must humble us as well, for we
cannot forget our pasts. We cannot
forget that there was a time in our lives—however long ago it may be, even if
it was as a little child—when we did not know how to be a part of the church.
Within
the scope and scale of our privileged habitat of the church, we have trained
our ears to hear the name of Jesus proclaimed, to listen to his teachings
interpreted, and to know His Word.
But
it was not always thus. Just as it was
for the Israelites that they did not always have a home of their own. In this way, we are very much alike. We did not always have a church home of our
own, whether because we were too young to remember it, or we did not have one
that accepted us for who we are, or for any other reason. Yet, part of having a home now means not only
opening it up to anyone who might perchance stumble across it, but by
proactively loving as ourselves that anyone who does find themselves drawn into
the worship and fellowship and discipleship that takes place within these
walls. Because in the end, these walls
have doors, not gates. Let us keep those
doors open.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
June
16, 2013
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