Goldfish crackers and broccoli

As often happens these days, I tired quickly and went to wait in the car for Robert to finish his shopping at our local thrift store. There were lots of people out in our small town--three young girls walking by all in black summer wear (is that an oxymoron?), a dressed up Asian couple, a black guy cruising on a stretched out motorcycle, an older lady under a denim jungle hat. It made me wonder, as I am sure you have wondered, surrounded by people from diverse groups, how do you introduce God into this shifting  kaleidoscope? How do you bring God to people who live in settings pretty different from yours? Maybe they know God better than you do. How would you know?

I once watched a psychology experiment with two kids, a one-year old and a two-year old. The psychologist put two plates of food in front of the one-year old, one piled with goldfish crackers, the other with broccoli. The psychologist took a goldfish cracker in her hand and made a big fuss about not liking the cracker. She was shaking her head and wagging her finger and saying, “Yuk! Ugh! Gross! No cracker for me!” Then she took the broccoli and started rubbing her tummy and smiling and nodding and saying, “Yum! Yum!” Next the scientist put her hand out to the one-year old and asked, “Can I have some food, please?” The one-year old didn’t miss a beat. She grabbed a goldfish and handed it placidly to the scientist. I mean, that’s what she would eat. Who would want that broccoli stuff? 

With the two-year old things went a bit differently. After the scientist made her preferences known and held out her hand for a cracker or a broccoli stick, this youngster cocked her head to one side, pursed her lips, scrunched her eyebrows together, and reached for the broccoli. But all the time you could see the thought bubble over her head, “You’re crazy, Lady, but here’s what you want.” Sometime between year one and year two of life, most humans learn that other people do things differently.  Other people like different things. This doesn’t make sense, but by age two, we gather it’s true.

Sometime later we also learn that groups do things differently, too. “We Joneses do it like this.” Or, “We Canadians do it like this.” Or, “We Baptists don’t do that.” What we do in our own group makes sense, and what other groups do doesn’t. This is how we are wired, and it takes a great amount of listening to understand that other groups really do want the broccoli.

I heard a great story on TED from an outgoing Italian NGO worker trying to help a Zambian community build its economy. The soil along the river where they lived was excellent for growing tomatoes, but the community never grew tomatoes there. In fact, they didn’t grow anything there. The land was wasted. So the Italian busily planted row and row of lovely Italian tomatoes and showed them off to the Zambians. The tomatoes grew. The tomatoes were a success. Until 200 hippos came up out of the river and devoured everything. “My God! What about the hippos?” exclaimed the Italian. “You never asked,” replied the Zambians. That other group wanted the broccoli, and he kept handing over the goldfish crackers. You know what this Italian titled his talk? Shut up and listen.

We make this mistake in the church, too. Yes, we sidestep the problem by setting out several plates: different worship services; a blend of hymns and contemporary worship songs; a Children’s Moment. The arguments start when there are several groups at the table and only one plate full of goldfish crackers. Then what do you do?

The problem is worse when we start churches in groups different from our own. If we aren’t asking the right questions, if we aren’t listening, they look suspiciously like our own churches back home but not much like the new group, and the hippos come. Christian history is full of hippos.

The very first church ever born had a problem trying to bring a new group to Christ that didn’t do things the same way as the original group. The book of Acts records the struggle. It shows how the Greek widows weren’t getting the same care as the Jewish widows. It explains how the Gentile churches felt pressured to become Jewish. It repeats Peter’s vision where God taught him to accept food from Gentiles, kosher or not. Finally it documents how the leaders of the very first church called a council in Jerusalem to decide once and for all whether Gentiles were bound by the Jewish way of doing things. Their answer was a resounding NO. Broccoli was acceptable.

Easy to say. Hard to do. I think of Peter, the one to whom God repeated that important vision three times, and yet after his own group pressured him, he stopped eating broccoli with his Gentile friends. I think all of us would agree now that God meets people wherever they are, in whatever group they belong to, and He gives them a new life and makes them witnesses to that very group. This is the meaning of the Incarnation: God comes to us. But accepting other groups without wanting them to do things our way does not come natural. It’s hard work and takes intentionality, even for Saint Peter. Our default mode is our own culture, so when we don’t think about it, we automatically go for the crackers (or the kosher food, as the case may be). And the hippos come. Where have you seen hippos lately?

Culture of God

I like borders. Even though they make me nervous, they make the differences easier to see. According to my daughter, when we cross the border from the US into Canada, the houses and roads perk right up in quality, but they turn somber and cautious. Other than the occasional red door, their colors are subdued. She lets her breath out in relief crossing into Mexico where variety and color reign, even riot. Like people, countries have personalities. Margaret Atwood says that at their core, countries have a single symbol that comes out over and over in their literature, movies, music and art. For the US she says it’s The Frontier with its Lone Ranger saving the world. For Canada it’s The Survivor, carving out a life up there in the North. 
 

She didn’t offer a symbol for Mexico, but maybe it would be The Rebel, someone never quite happy with the rules or the status quo. (Feel free to offer something better.) I’m thinking of the iconic legends of Zapata and Pancho Villa, or the name of Mexico’s strongest political party, the Institutional  Revolutionary Party (PRI), or the fact that narcocorridos,  drug ballads like the tribute to Chapo Guzman, are becoming ever more popular, even though they subvert every family value on the planet. “El Chapo” (Shorty) is the drug lord that just escaped from a Mexican maximum security jail (whether through a tunnel or right out the front gate, no one is telling) for the second time. He’s so wealthy that Forbes listed him as a self-made billionaire along with Gates and Buffet, and he’s offed thousands of people. There is a section of society in Mexico that admires Chapo’s ability to thumb his nose at authority. Not all Mexican rebels are as harmless as El Chavo. 

The week spent with my parents and sister, a type of  “border crossing,” reminded me that not only did our own original Patterson clan have its personality (that fortunately included card games I could win), but Angie and I have our own family personalities, or cultures, as well. And all of us are embedded in such different environments: living in a retirement community in Florida; selling houses in a bright Texas economy, and teaching school in southern Mexico. We are all constantly weaving new cultures out of old.

Recently, I have been asking myself how to describe the culture of God’s country. If it’s true that God as Trinity has always been a Family, a Community, a Union, a Pueblo, a Nation, a Country, then His country has its own culture, too, its own way of doing things, and its own unifying symbol. I think God revealed this symbol through Jesus when he taught us to pray, “Our Father...” Only he turned the whole device on its head, because He is The Father, and earthy fathers are symbols of Him, and never the other way around. We are the Bride to the Bridegroom, and earthly marriages are symbols of that, and never the other way around. Jesus showed us that the primary way we relate to God now is as his children. He is our Father, and he wants us back! And not just us; He wants the whole family estate. He wants the land, and he wants the people, and he wants all the ways we relate to each other in groups, too—the ways we govern, educate, work, heal, play, love, worship—everything.  In other words, he wants His Culture to utterly infuse ours. That’s living in God’s kingdom.

We are all embedded in such different cultures when He calls us: Mixtecs, Smithvillians, Oaxacans, Texans, young, old, post-moderns, pre-moderns, dead-on-moderns, don’t-try-to-label-me-whatever-moderns, and He meets us where we are. That’s the meaning of the Incarnation. But then he disciples us. And as more and more of us from any culture follow his lead, together we weave from that culture something truly beautiful, a tapestry made by all our choices together, all our work together, all our creative acts of worship together. May that tapestry be rich and not one culture lost! We kid ourselves if we think this is easy.

Superman

As I travel now, I think of all the homes we've stayed in over an entire hemisphere. It's been an incredible experience of hospitality. When Robert and I went to Mexico for the first time, we explored many Indian towns and villages. Missionaries explained that Indian communities are self-governing, so if you live there, you abide by their rules. Some of them protect their cultural identity by keeping outsiders from moving in, so you have to get permission from the town president to live among them. Some prohibit the preaching of what they consider foreign religions. So we knew that moving into a Mixtec village was not going to be a straight forward affair. To meet Mixtecs, we spent months visiting the migrant labor camps where they worked in Sinaloa (in northern Mexico), and there we developed friendships among one particular group.   Our friends were new believers, barely a year old in following Jesus. They invited us to come live with them in southern Mexico, so after the migrant season was over, we followed them south to their home village.

We took public transport, a one ton stake truck (this is Robert’s definition—for the longest time I was thinking of “steak truck,” and I still haven’t seen any stakes anywhere) and five hours later stepped down from the truck onto the road next to a village where our Mixtec friends lived. Fortunately for us, one of the believing families lived right on the road, and as soon as they saw us (hard to miss, these white folk, possibly the first gringos to visit the village), they hurried down the mountainside to welcome us. Of course there was no way to tell them we were coming, and I doubt they took our assurances of a visit seriously in Sinaloa. So there we were, a couple of gringos, carrying backpacks, needing a place to stay. If this had been the village up the road, we would have spent the night in the square, without food or lodging. And the village was 7000 feet up in the air, so cold. I was wearing a skirt and open shoes, so I remember that. There were nothing but people’s own adobe homes and wooden kitchens in the village, so nowhere for strangers to eat or sleep. The truck driver who had brought us would spend the night on the side of the road in his cab and head out at 4 am, eating breakfast in some other town with more amenities.

Lydia (not her real name) was our hostess. She opened up the door of her home and set us up there. We lived with the whole family, mom, three kids and two grandchildren, in one room, and we cooked on an open fire on an adobe platform in the corner and ate around the fire. Our furniture consisted of bamboo stick beds (ours was behind the front door) and a few child-sized chairs.  There was no bathroom until Robert dug a hole in the ground, covered it with a wobbly board, and built up cardboard walls around that. We were newly married, so this arrangement was…interesting…but for Lydia, it was a natural act of hospitality. As fellow believers, we were her family. Lydia’s job each day was to make the family tortillas, weave cloth on a backloom, and bring in firewood. We did what we could to help out, but we weren’t much use.

Robert’s closest friend in this village was Alberto, (not his real name) father of seven, farmer, seller of dried fish, and shoes, and clothes, and whatever else he could think of. Eventually Robert taught him carpentry, and he sold doors, and windows, and beds, and tables, and chairs, but he never had much. Yet when we no longer lived in the village, and Robert returned for a visit, there was never any question that Robert would stay with Alberto. At night everyone would share the one family room, and the two men would talk in the dark, and Alberto would ask endless questions: “Brother, is it true people have walked on the moon? Is it really made of cheese? Does Superman exist? Star trek? Do we come from monkeys? Is there a hole in a place called Russia that reaches all the way to hell, so that if you lower a microphone, you can hear the screams?” Alberto had watched TV, and seen strange things, and who do you trust to ask about what is real and what is not? Alberto's endless curiosity was inspiring.

Alberto’s brother, Ronaldo, was one of the two martyrs of the Mixtec church. He was shot while shepherding out in the fields one day. Shot for his faith in Jesus. He probably couldn’t read. I don’t know. I know that he wouldn’t have gotten right any fine points of theology. He knew one thing: Jesus loved him as a Mixtec, had forgiven him his past life and given him a new one, and would welcome him home one day as part of God’s family. And that is about all Ronaldo would have known when he died. Alberto and the rest of the Mixtec believers never knew if one of them would be the next martyr. They stayed indoors after dark and warned us to do the same. But Alberto never wavered. He taught himself to read the Bible, as best he could in a language he didn’t own, and he led the church. We learned a lot about faith from him. And we were honored to be his family and share his home. He fulfilled that promise of Jesus that when you leave home and family behind, he gives you new homes, new families.

Family Tree

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Aboriginal Australian woman

The friend I was visiting in Chicago is a genius researcher. She researches family genealogies and then prints the family story as a gorgeous coffee-table book. She has spent days helping me trace my own family back as far as I could go. I found I'm a mix of Irish and English and German. I also found out I am a Daughter of the Revolution. My great…Irish grandfather, Henry, the revolutionary soldier, was stationed in Pennsylvania, where he met Eva, a German immigrant. The two of them were married in a Lutheran church and managed to do do something to get themselves in trouble, because the church records show an official reprimand for them (hmm).  Later the couple was given refuge by the Moravians after their settlement was attacked by Indian folk. The records say the brothers gave them stockings. Cool. But I’ve got older family history yet. And this stuff is BIG and also involves an Eva.
When we look at God’s family history, we have to go much further back to tell the story. If we think back, way back, farther back, until we are at the beginning of time, when the world was being shaped and spun into space, what image do we see in our minds? A spirit hovering? If we go back even further, back even before the creation of the universe, what do we see? Maybe angels worshipping? Myriads of creatures surrounding the God of heaven? What about back further yet? What image do we hold of a “time” before angels? Anything? Of course eyes can’t see what we are imagining, but that never stopped anyone before. Do we have some image of God? And how do we imagine him back then, before all else was created? I’m asking the impossible, but that first image may tell us something.

Is it lonely? Is it of a God alone in all the unborn universe? Or is it something quite different? Is it a society, a community, a culture, a family? Because this is where we start. With the fact that God has never been alone, never been lonely, never been one single Person. God, as Trinity, as Three Persons so united in love that they are eternally Inseparable, has always been One Community. The relationships that we have in this world are but pale reflections of His. God doesn’t merely love. God, in His very nature, lives out love as the union of perfectly bonded Persons. God truly is love. It is the essence of His existence. And out of this love comes such an exuberance of Joy that it cannot be contained. Love wants to share itself. Give itself away. Grow. Why else do married couples, perfectly in love, risk it all, and bring babies into their harmony?

God, then, risked it all and brought babies into his harmony. Out of the joy of his existence he created a beautiful universe and called it good. He created a solar system and called it good. He created the earth with its verdant growth and lush ecosystems and called them good. At the end there, he created man. And what a man. Adam stood before God in perfect male-ness: an intellect prepared to manage the world; a body balanced and muscular. And Adam’s relationship with God was not tainted. He was perfect. But God looked at Adam, and for the first time in the story, God did not say that this thing He had done was good. No, in fact, He said it was not good. Adam was perfect, but because he was alone, something was off.

If you take one second to think about it, it makes sense. Adam was sentient, aware of God and himself, but he was alone, and no One had ever existed alone in God’s culture. It just didn’t fit. So God took some bones from Adam’s side, fashioned Eve, a woman, and history’s first Match Maker introduced them to one another, arranging for them a marriage made in heaven. I’m sure He had a twinkle in His eye. When God put the first people into a relationship, He didn’t just bring Adam a friend. No. He brought Adam a wife. Just imagine poor Adam seeing Eve for the first time: that smooth, soft, voluptuous body, that voice that warmed, that face that smiled. What choice did he have but to fall madly in love with this first woman? And Eve in her very body represented all that had to do with human relationships. She could be Adam’s soulmate and lover. She could have babies. She could reflect the aspect of God’s nature that makes love grow and reproduce, which had been missing. In fact, the whole femaleness of God had been missing so that his image was not well reflected yet. When that first couple, holding hands as they walked, joined God in His afternoon garden stroll, He could finally say that things were good.

Knowing where you come from can make a difference. I am glad to know that I am child of soldiers and immigrants and pioneers. I hope they were brave and good. Best of all, I'm glad to know that ultimately I come from a love story. I am a descendant of an expression of love, an outburst of love. I suppose this is my Big Bang Theory of Love.

News

Monday my family was supposed to arrive here in Canada. They had bought tickets. I was thrilled. (My whole family has never come to visit since my wedding.) I had Janey’s house booked and the week planned. What could go wrong? Even if I ended up in ER, at least they could come see me there. But it wasn’t anything on my end that went wrong this time. My dad had a retinal stroke, and his doctor cancelled the trip. Sigh.

So this is what is supposed to happen next. Since I am determined (hmmm) to check on Dad, today, if all goes well with Monday’s treatment, Robert and I will take Tiny Tin across the border (uh huh, hopefully), exchange him for reportedly well-behaved Rejected Car, and drive to Chicago to see Philip and (other) friends. From there I will fly to Florida to see my parents. My sister will be flying in from Texas, so for the first time in thirty years, the four of us will be together without spouses and kids. We are all looking forward to it (the being together part, not the without spouses and kids part).

Oops. News flash. Angie is driving from Texas with my two nieces. Which is wonderful, too. Hopefully our trips are uneventful!

What I gave you there was news. News is different from scientific fact. Scientific fact you can verify for yourself (bodies go haywire when you poison them), but news you can’t verify like that. Your only choice is to react or not, depending on how much you trust the newscaster.  If your husband yells, “FIRE!” you jump out of your chair. If your teenage son says it with a smirk on April 1, you keep on reading. I love that Christianity is the kind of truth called news. You don’t work it on your own; you hear it and jump out of your chair.

After God’s creation of a good earth, he started giving news to people, starting with Adam and Eve, Noah, and Abraham. He told them things that they could not verify except by obeying, so they had to make decisions about the credentials of the newscaster (this voice insisting on Death, a Flood, a Destiny.) Adam and Eve did not believe. There were effects. The other two did. There were effects. Our story derives from how these four and others responded to God’s news, which always was about how to live with him, and then, about how to get back to him.

Other religions begin their stories in other ways. Hinduism tells the story that our particular universe (there are many out there, and we are only one in a series) was born when the sound “Ohm” awakened Vishnu, asleep in the coils of a cobra, making a giant lotus flower grow from his navel. Inside the flower was Vishnu’s servant Brahma, who broke off its petals to create the world. Eternal souls descend into this creation but are trying to return to the pure spirit from which they came. They are misled and trapped by the material world, and their ignorance causes much suffering, from which they must make every effort to escape.

All religions try to explain suffering. Hinduism teaches that people’s ignorance and selfishness in trying to hold onto the material world has consequences. Buddhism also teaches that suffering comes from selfishness, wanting material things for yourself. Both Hinduism and Buddhism then say (basically), “The material world is a trap. Escape! Try harder.” Stonehenge shows the ancients trying to work out solutions from the movements of the heavens. But Christianity adds something wonderful. Christianity, which agrees that suffering comes from selfishness, answers the problem not with “try harder” but with a news flash from God: “NEWS FLASH! The world is a good place gone wrong, but I’ve done something about it. React! Get out of your chair! Repent, and I will take care of both the urge to be selfish and its eternal consequences!” That is why we talk so much about faith. We can try to reason the thing out and fix it on our own, or we can trust the newscaster and jump out of our chair.

Me? I got a news flash. I and my sister are headed to Florida.

Feng Shui

This week Janey and her family are in England for a holiday. A certain member of the family is insisting on no museums, yet Stonehenge tops the list for sight-seeing. It’s fascinating how big stones put up by the ancients according to some pattern intrigues everybody.

Reminded me of the cheerful painting of flowers I have in my bedroom now. It’s bright, like I like things these days.  Hostess Mom saw it somewhere, realized it was a perfect fit for the room, and brought it home for Robert to put up (he’d been decorating the basement walls with all of Mom’s paintings that we’ve had in storage for 25 years). On the corners of the new painting were pieces of protective cardboard with the title Flowers (very original) and with advice on how to place the painting in order to achieve any number of good things--take your pick here: You could enhance Love and Romance in a Relationship (I wonder how one would have romance outside a relationship; that takes some thinking), you could Bring Positive Energy into your Home & Office (bosses should pay for this stuff), you could Attract Wealth & Love (now there’s a topic of discussion all in itself), Health & Longevity (I’ll have one of those, please)! or you could…Excellent for Family Luck & Personal Success! Right. (I should offer these guys my red hunting dogs for a price to bring in some positive energy into their editing.) All of this could be mine if I put this painting up on the south wall. Sounds like some tv evangelists.

This is Feng Shui Art, a 3500 year old practice of placing man-made things in spots with good energy, (which combines positive and negative life forces), orienting them so that they fit just right with their physical and chronological environment (I bet Stonehenge held the same purpose, more or less). Originally Feng Shui relied on astrolabes, taking into consideration the placement of stars. Originally, all ancients took into consideration the placement of stars. If you think about it, what else did they have? The movement of the sun and moon and stars looked like the movement of gods to them, and the very first pyramids, which were located in Ur and called ziggurats, had names like House of the Platform between Heaven and Earth. In Ur, up until the time of Abraham, all people could do was try to decipher and imitate the timing of the gods, hoping to catch some of their “positive energy” by timing human activities with the activities of the stars. The gods just did their thing, and we watched and took notes, hoping for some clues on how to live. The endless cycles of the heavens became the endless cycles of ancient history. The gods did not interfere.

Until God showed up. In sending Abraham away to a land he’d never seen and telling him he had a purpose, to bless all nations, God straightened out the endless circle of history and made it possible for humans to have a destiny, to hope for progress and change. The stars become created things to be counted, not gods to be copied. God became a Person who showed up for dinner and made bargains about the destruction of cities.

The ancient Chinese had some things right when they tried to make things fit into just the right spot. There is a plan. There is such a thing as good timing and good placement. That painting went up in my room in just the right spot (probably not the south wall; I wouldn’t know.  Never give me directions involving poles unless Robert is around), at just the right time. The difference it makes to be in relationship with the Creator is that we know his plan and feel cut loose from star-copying.

Someone visiting me when the little cardboard covers were still hugging Flowers commented, “I’d want to take those off,” which I did. But it reminded me of our wariness, sometimes even fear, of other religions’ solutions to age-old human problems. All of us know that things require just the right fit. All of us know that when things go wrong, it takes sacrifice to put them right. All of us know that mediators help straighten out bad relationships. Chinese feng shui, English  stonehenges, Canadian horoscopes, Mixe chicken sacrifices, and Mixtec sorcerer/priests are all responses to true problems. We can welcome finding such common ground while also recognizing that by grace we have found a much more effective and liberating solution. Paul even found common ground through a pagan altar, and that same Unknown god, that Treasure, as he pointed out, can be found Everywhere! Just look!

Subversive

I like posting when I first wake, whatever the time, because my best ideas seem to come when I’ve had rest, either sleep, or a long walk. But at this point the 3 am posting may come and go, either because I’m too tired now to write then, or because the initial urgency has worn off—I’m not sure. Either way, I write as I can. One thing I want to do is add pieces of something else I’m working on. I guess most of us want to finish a work and hand it over polished and complete, like Athena sprung full-grown and armored, straight out of a split in her father Zeus’ mighty skull (giving him, yes, a splitting headache), but I’m realizing that it’s the blog format that got me writing in the first place, where every day I have to present just one complete idea at a time, a full essay, each post. And although the blog has a theme, which you may or may not have caught by now (I’m not going to analyze anything for you), I don’t have to know quite where it’s going yet. It’s an adventure, this finding out together. The Spanish song says, “You make the path by walking.”

This might help me on my other project, which is supposed to be a simple compilation of a course I give about helping people start a church in a culture where the church has never stepped foot before. I actually have a transcript of the course, sent by my friend

Monica, which should make this task easy. Yet I have not looked at it. Instead, I started writing from memory, which seemed a more interesting task. Yes, it’s still about helping people respond to Jesus in a place where this has never happened purposefully before. But it also seems to be about how human cultures respond when God’s culture shows up.

When Jesus walked around on earth, he insisted that God’s culture had already shown up right among them. He claimed it couldn’t be seen, wasn’t obvious, was like a wind in the trees, but that it made a difference from the inside out and would eventually turn the world upside down.  Jesus was the world’s greatest Subversive. He lasted three years before the government (both governments over him, in fact) shut him down. Well, tried to. We carry the DNA of that divine culture that God promised through Abraham, sketched as from a blueprint through Moses, set to music through David, purged through prophets and exile, and lived out himself, perfectly, through Jesus. Now we are the world’s Subversives, with the Spirit of Revolution coursing through our veins. We are the light of the world, the salt of the earth, the ambassadors of God. We have a job to do.

After Jesus conquered Death, he stood on a mountain and gave us his job. He said, “I’ve won. Not even death can stop me now. So go, and as you go, bring people into the family of God, the culture of God, the kingdom of God, my new kingdom. Bring them in from all the cultures of the earth. Breathe my new community-life into them through baptism, and teach them the family culture. And don’t worry, I’ll be there with you, getting the job done through you, until the very end of time. I WILL NEVER GIVE UP.” (Subversives don’t, you know. Give up. Especially not when they’re GOD.) Then he rose up in the air and disappeared, leaving us all open-mouthed and hungry. Clouds, move away! Let him come back!

So here we are, trying to catch up to this man, this guy, this…god. Trying to love him. Trying to obey him. Trying to know him, to catch the nuances of his words in those texts we have, that he never wrote, but his friends did. Texts that are copies of copies, translations of translations, printings of printings, yet still they move us to the core of our being. Those words. That live and open a window on his soul, and so turn our world upside down.

And we carry our passion for this man everywhere we go. Into grocery store lines, and to the dinner table with our kids, and onto the highway behind crazy drivers, and into the chemo lounge where the tiny lady in front of us is trying to tell us she is having a heart attack. And we fail. We fail. We hide his soul from people with our bumbling. And we forget. And we aim, and we miss, in the loving and forgiving, and being humble, and being unselfish, and being One that would transform our world. People are dying for causes all over the world, and here we are, sitting on the greatest one of them all, and we fail. Sigh.

But… But.

A subversive just doesn’t give up. Especially when the Subversive is God. He’s got this scenario covered. He does! And we pull each other up from the ground, and we coach each other, and it takes all our breath and skill and perseverance to keep going, but He’s put his DNA in us, all of us, put his Spirit of Revolution right in our lungs and pores and brain cells, and…

That’s the story, isn’t it?

Book Smart

On one of these Sundays in church, our mission rep told us about a young woman who is called to be a missionary. I love this. He also casually added the fact that she is getting a Masters degree. That is fine. I have no problem with that. But in our culture, this casual addition to the young missionary’s pedigree might just give the impression that higher degree equals better missionary. I know the speaker didn’t mean this. I’m just saying. Let me explain.

In my extended family, some of us are book smart and some of us have other kinds of smarts. There are the idea people who devour books and love intellectual conversations. Then there are the ones who buckle down and get their degrees but have to work at it. Then there are those like my sister Angie, who are smart at what they do and know their stuff backwards and forwards, but they aren’t drawn to theology texts. To be honest, in my experience, sometimes the Church is hard on people in this last category, the ones that don’t necessarily have book smarts. In fact, the Church seems to be hard on two kinds of people: quiet ones and non-literary ones. Like they just don’t cut it somehow. I already wrote about how I didn’t feel I measured up as an introvert. I mean, if God wants us to go out and win everyone to Christ, why in the world does he insist on making quiet people? Why doesn’t he make us all really gifted, really extroverted evangelists? I have wrestled with this question a lot. I’ve come to terms with it, more or less, so what I’m writing about today is the other group of people that gets sidelined by the church. Those who don’t LOVE books.

So let me tell you a story. Two, in fact. When Robert and I first went to Mexico, we lived among Mixtec Indians in their mountain village.  They are oral people. This means they rely on information coming to them out of other people’s mouths, not information that comes on paper. This is because they don’t read in their own language (there are translators working on that, but it’s SLOW going), and though they are taught to read Spanish in school, they don’t own many books and tend to distrust what they see on paper. Some of the believers can read the Spanish Bible. But that can be tough when they use the standard 500 year old version with thee’s and thou’s, because in Spanish, it’s you’s and we’s, and the you’s (vosotros) sound very much like the we’s (nosotros), so sometimes the sermons, which include much translating of Spanish into Mixtec, can get a bit…interesting.

When the first church was born in this area, it was in response to one man’s testimony about the power of Jesus. That was it. There wasn’t a Bible in sight. And half the village came to Jesus and made a commitment to follow Him, all in one day. And they decided to stop doing the things that they knew were really wrong: they stopped getting drunk and beating their wives; they stopped taking money in exchange for marrying off (they call it selling) their daughters, and they stopped taking interest for loans (the going rate is 50-100% interest--a month!). We are talking about Pentecost, Holy Spirit transformation in this village. And one of them, a musician, started writing songs about Jesus: “People here say I will die. And if I do, I am going straight to heaven with Jesus.” And the founder of the church did die--was shot in broad daylight in the middle of town for it. And so was one of his relatives, another leader. And all this faith and obedience without reading the Bible! These people loved Jesus, and that is what mattered. I saw this.

Story number two. Robert was in Panama, meeting with leaders from the Wounan church there. They were talking about how their culture was oral, too, like the Mixtecs. (the Wounan call Robert el Mixteco). But their churches depend for their spiritual growth mainly on reading. And most visiting speakers spend all their time insisting that people read the Bible. On one such occasion, an old man stood up to speak. His words were forthright and cut to the quick: “I think I need to die now. I cannot read. I cannot even see well. I will never read. So I can never be nourished by the Word of God on my own. I think I should die now.”

Do we need to learn to read the Scriptures? OF COURSE! But we are a body. And those with the gifts of reading and analyzing can help those who don’t have these gifts. And those without those gifts can show their faith and love for Jesus to those who sometimes lose perspective and get proud of sheer book-learning, keeping them connected to the real world. Some people in our churches here in North America could feel like that Wounan man. They love Jesus, but they might not do private devos well. They might find it hard to read, to make long prayers, or to analyze sermons. But this means nothing. The only thing that Jesus is looking at is their heart, and Jesus is the only one who can see what is happening there. It’s never about what we know, but about how we respond in love. And God is the only Judge of that.

I’ve seen people (including members of my family) get judged for what knowledge they lacked, or what degrees they’d failed to earn, or what natural book smarts they’d never been given. When I was growing up, my dad, who mentored semi-literate Honduran pastors, drilled this sentence into my head: “Just because they can’t read well does not mean they cannot grasp and apply the deepest truths of God.” I’m glad he kept insisting because it’s easy to forget.