Is the world a problem to be fixed?

Most people who are supportive of CBM’s line of work (i.e. sharing God’s love in word and deed through the local church in the world’s most broken places) are driven by noble impulses:  the desire to help, to make a difference, to bring healing, to share love.  These are good impulses.  But they have a shadow-side, in that they can objectify and diminish the dignity of the person/location being helped.  In other words, it becomes easy to see the “helper” as the one with power and ability and the “help-ee” as the one without power and ability.

We sometimes speak of the world as being “broken”.  But, is it?  Is the world a problem to be fixed?  When God looks at the world, does He see it as a problem to be solved?  When He looks at people, does He see them as problems to be fixed?

I doubt it.  God looks on the world with love, and definitely wants to heal it and redeem it and infuse it with shalom.  But in doing so He does not define the world as a problem.

It’s a slippery slope.  We start with a desire to help, but can easily slide into thinking what we have it together and those other guys don’t so we should go over and help them.  It’s a touch Messiah-like — but . . . there’s only one true Messiah.  And we’re not the guy.  Maybe we should leave the God-like “save the world” stuff to God Himself.

This is a great video (only 3:41 long!) by Anne Lamott that addresses our need to “fix” and “save”.  Have a look:

Anne is one of my favourite writers — she’s wild and wooly and does not fully align with traditional expressions of Christian belief — but she’s profound and provocative and reveals God through her writing in powerful ways.

There is so much brilliant stuff in this video.  Anne speaks of how we are called to “bring forward” what is inside us and to seek to help . . . but that we need to be incredibly careful not to turn this into being about ourselves, i.e. it’s not about our need to help.  In other words, we shouldn’t show up with our pre-determined solutions, thinking that we have the answer — finally, after all these years when people couldn’t figure it out!!!! — and shouldn’t these folks be grateful that we’ve arrived!!!  Too much “Western” mission is about cloning and multiplying stock solutions that don’t help and sometimes harm the locale where they are implemented.

My favourite line from the video:  showing up with a clipboard wanting to organize India. 

Not So Random Acts of Kindness

A few years ago a movement swept through North America.  It was called “random acts of kindness”, and it encouraged people to be generous with kindness by expressing it gratuitously and spontaneously whenever and wherever they saw an opportunity.

I liked it.  But, of course, it is woefully inadequate to deal with the deep fractures and pain of our world.  It’s a great start – sort of like “Kindness 101”, but what we really need is sustained faithful intentional lives of kindness.

A few months ago I heard a story from one of our Field Staff in Kenya, Aaron Kenny.  In one of CBM’s partner congregations in Kenya  there was a family where both parents died of AIDS in 2009, leaving three orphans.  The extended family was ashamed at what had happened, unfortunately overcome with the stigma that is still prevalent in parts of the culture.  As a result, rather than embracing and caring for the orphans, they rejected them.  Meanwhile, the wife of one of the pastors heard of the story and grew angry at the thought of those children growing up without adequate care.  Even though she was a grandmother, and had raised 10 children of her own, and even though it would have been easy for her to decide that this was somebody else’s problem, God refused to let her let go of her concern.  She walked 2 kilometres, took a matatu to the bus station, and then took a 3 hour bus ride to the community.  She found the grandparents of the orphans and said “if you’re not going to take care of the children, I will.”  She made arrangements for an official adoption.

On the way back home, it hit her what she had done.  “I’ve already raised my children . . . what am I doing?”  She realized that she hadn’t quite fully informed her husband of her plans.   Her husband pastored in another community and so had not been fully aware of what was going on.

She called him, and he embraced what she has done.

Now it’s 2013.  The oldest boy is meeting with Aaron Kenny, and tell him, “my first family didn’t have faith in Christ . . . but when I came here, I understood faith.  It is God that brought me into this family.”   Meanwhile, their adoptive mother is praying that “these kids can stand on their own” when they grow up.

Wow.  “Wow” is my gut response expressing my awe when I hear of people such as this woman.  It reminds me that God’s image in humanity and God’s call on individuals leads to lives of radical and deep obedience that transform lives and transform our world.

Random acts of kindness are fine.  What this woman did, though, is not random or occasional.  What she was expressing is a sustained intentional faithful life of kindness — and it is these lives that will change the world.   And these are the kinds of lives Jesus intended every time He said, and says, “follow me”.

Gardening Creation

I feel like a bit of a hypocrite writing about how we are to garden Creation, given that, well, um, frankly, I don’t garden.  At least, I don’t in the physical sense.  But of course when God told the first peoples to tend the Garden and to steward Creation, He didn’t just mean its physical aspects.  He was referring to all that humanity would create and develop and invent and cultivate:  societies, arts, relationships, economies, leisure, work, etc.

Today is Earth Day.  It’s a day when Christ-followers remember that “this is my Father’s world” (in the words of the old hymn) and that “the Earth is the Lord’s” (in the words of Psalm 24).

It used to be a novel thought that Christians would be involved in creation care, but that is no longer the case.  Whether it’s A Rocha Canada  or the Evangelical Environmental Network, whether it’s stated in broadly supported consensus statements such as the Lausanne movement’s Cape Town Commitment or it’s stated by individual Christians who are involved in the field, lots and lots of Christians take seriously what God told us at the very beginning:  take care of Creation.

After all, the Earth still belongs to God.  He’s lent it to us for a while, to take care of it, to garden it and cultivate it, as an act of worship to Him.  Today may be called Earth Day.  But really, it’s Creation Day.

Is it a small world, after all?

The world is getting smaller.  The world is getting flatter.  These are phrases we hear; they are phrases I’ve used.

But, is it true?

In many ways, it is.  But in other ways, it isn’t.

How it’s smaller: a revolution in Tahrir Square in Cairo is live-streamed to my computer as I sit at a Starbucks in Toronto; lower economic growth in China results in lower stock markets in North America which means that people hang onto their jobs longer which means that youth unemployment is a problem; a SARS outbreak in southeast Asia results in the wearing of face-masks in Canada; PSY, a Korean vocalist, achieves overnight worldwide fame through YouTube instead of the good old-fashioned way of traveling all over the world and having concerts.

However, in other ways the world is not a lot smaller than it used to be.  All of the examples of a smaller world that I can think of have to do with speed of information flow and speed of travel.  They have little to do with culture:  with its norms, values, expectations, and worldview.   I realise that the velocity of information flow does shape culture, and that there is a convergence of culture happening worldwide in urban centres as increasing numbers of people participate in the global economy and in global pop culture.  At the same time, deep-rooted differences remain, and the fact that everyone’s using smart phones doesn’t meant that they’re all thinking the same.

That’s why I am so glad that we (CBM) have full-time staff leaders who are from the cultures in which we work.  Their big advantage is that they don’t have to cross cultures in order to be effective.  They act as bridges between those of us who are Canadian, with our particular cultural idiosyncrasies, and those with whom we work, with their idiosyncrasies.  Their innate knowledge of the nuances of their culture allows CBM’s work to be much more effective than it would be otherwise.  We call them “National Field Staff” — for us, they do make the world a lot smaller, and easier to work in.  Click here for more information on our “National Field Staff”. 

Was the resurrection incomplete?

Now, before you post comments about how heretical I am, here’s why I ask the question.  This morning at our senior leadership team meeting at CBM, we looked at Jesus’ appearance to his disciples after his resurrection, first to all of them except for Thomas, and then to all of them with Thomas.  (You can find this here in John 20:19-31)

Usually when we read this story we focus on “doubting” Thomas, which is a patently unfair moniker — Thomas was just normal — I mean, the other disciples didn’t even have a chance to doubt, because Jesus just showed up and they saw Him.  But that’s a topic for another blog post.

What grabs me about this story is that Jesus still had His wounds.  He was resurrected all right, and had conquered death, but the completely unexpected thing is that the resurrection didn’t totally erase the wounds of the crucifixion.

Do we realise how powerfully that reality changes how we approach life?  Too often we think that our job is to “erase” darkness or “erase” evil, while in reality we are called to “redeem” it, i.e. let it be crucified and resurrected into a New Creation.  Unexpectedly, however, this process doesn’t completely erase the reality that the evil occurred:  Jesus still had his wounds, but they were no longer killing Him.

To be honest, I really have little idea what to do with this reality.  I’m still trying to figure it out.  But for sure it points me in certain directions.  It tells me that I am too focussed on an easy and happy life that is devoid of the bad stuff.  It tells me that my understanding of God’s mission purposes on the planet tries to detour around evil instead of journeying through it.  And it tells me that I need to get a lot better at dwelling with those who suffer instead of trying to “fix” them.

Yuck.

But that is the pathway Jesus took.  And so, for those of us who claim to be His followers, we gotta follow Him on that pathway.  Lord, help us to do that.  Amen.

What happens when you have no keys in your pocket?

I’ve never been homeless.  At least, not for long.  Technically for a few days in September 2001 I was homeless — my wife and I were moving to England for a year and we had sold our house in Canada and were planning to rent a student flat in London.  In the days of transition, for a short time, I had no place to live.  I remember how odd it felt to put my right hand in the pocket of my trousers and to not feel any keys there.   The absence highlighted what was until then a subconscious familiarity:  for my entire adult life, I had walked around with keys in my pocket . . . because I had a place to live.  I had a home.

I have been blessed.  There are many people who don’t have a home, because the home they had was destroyed or they were forced to leave or it became unsafe to stay.  These are the world’s refugees.

Not having a home doesn’t make you less of a human being.  Or, at least, it shouldn’t make you less of a human being.  And yet, it is bothersome how often refugees are treated with less than full human dignity.  It is atrocious.  I try to imagine how dislocated I would feel if my home was stripped away from me — that would be the time I would need more support and help than ever before, not less.  Dis-located people need lots of help, not our leftover table scraps of help.  I realise that processes need to be in place to discern true refugee claimants from others, but, that said, this still should not dehumanize the people.

Tomorrow, April 4th, is Refugee Rights Day in Canada.  In 1985 the Supreme Court ruled that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the rights of refugee claimants in Canada.  Being homeless doesn’t make you less human.

CBM has worked with refugees in many parts of the world in our history.  Right now we are helping Syrian refugees in Lebanon.  We also organize a gathering of leaders of  refugee ministries based in Canada, to share learnings, best practices, and for mutual encouragement.  Solutions aren’t always obvious nor are they simple, but as followers of Jesus we can journey with those who have lost their homes so that step-by-step they can put together the new pattern of their future lives.

Seven Stanzas at Easter, by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.