Gods People Together
The Swahili proverb Waendao wawili hukumbushana means "Two walking together cause each other to remember".
Our lives have intertwined and grown together for many years. Our engagements have often been different, yet deeply connected. This is the theme of our past, and of our future. It is our journey. It is also has been your journey with us for many years. As we walk together in the future, we want to “cause you remember” God’s work, His plan, His hope in a broken world. And we need you to “cause us remember” our greatest goal.
A tree grows up into the Light. It provides a habitat for creatures including people, and it is part of the natural renewing of the earth. As our regular ministry with MTW comes to a conclusion by December, we are transitioning to a ministry focused on writing and consulting. Our somewhat regular ministry newsletter of the last 50 years transitions now into a regular family post. But this global post in intended to let you think through global issues with us. We invite you to invite others to sign up for either of them
as well. Let us walk together, grow together, remind together of God’s hope for broken people in a broken world. We need to see the light, share the light, and grow toward the light.
The goal of our global posts is to help you think about and respond to issues critical to our contemporary world that God loves, grieves for, has redeemed, and has said that He will dwell with, together. Like the trees of our logo, “together” is not “sameness”. It is not “easiness”. Instead, see it as being connected and reaching to the Light”.
Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Home
We live in an age of massive people movement—refugees, internally displaced peoples, and migrations. All of these people are actually in transition from one home to another. One of my PhD students in Australia is doing her research on how the church creates a welcome of shalom for refugees. Her first attempt to get refugees to fill in a questionnaire on their experience found no one willing to answer. Why? It turned out that they did not consider themselves refugees, they had already landed and were being incorporated into a new home. Once they had left a home, then became homeless, and finally found a new home. So in their eyes they were not refugees, not migrants, not displaced. They had become “re-rooted”, and distanced themselves from the moniker “refugee”.
History has always seen people and peoples move around. The Bible is actually in many ways, a text book on migration and movement. Adam and Eve…Abraham…Moses…the many captivities…Jesus’ flight to Egypt as a baby, and relocation to a new town…the Jewish diaspora after the Roman/Jewish wars and destruction of the second Temple. It doesn’t just describe the change of location, but more pointedly what God was doing in the midst of the movement. Always the story is about understanding God’s redemption.
One current people movement in the US is the wave of international students. At the International House, Baltimore, we provide a “home” for the time that international scholars are at their post mostly at Johns Hopkins University, although now we have one scholar from Kenya who is in a program at St Mary’s Seminary. We now have scholars from China, Palestine, Turkey, Kenya, Brazil, and next month possibly Afghanistan. We gather with them for a “family meal” every month and now have to travel across the city from our “home for life” as our senior living facility is called. Our home too has moved. So what is home?
The important reason that the International House, Baltimore exists, is so that residents from around the world might come to find a home—a place of welcome. That home needs not just to make them comfortable, but whole. Shalom-whole. Several weeks ago a woman came up to me smiling to thank me. She had lived for several months in the International House. As a Chinese scholar she studied psychology. She helped us untangle some deeply-rooted conflicts in the household. Her point of appreciation was that in coming to receive a PhD, she had actually found her fulfillment of life in knowing Jesus as her redeemer. So, she left a home and came to another home, in order to fully find a home. Last week she introduced her mother to me—I was part of her new family.
We expected to have been in Beirut for a conference on reconciliation when the current war broke out. (More on that at another time—we hope to get there still in January). My colleague there shared that his home, and the seminary compound, has become home to many displaced Shiite Muslims from the southern part of the city. The bombs not only dropped in the south, but blocks from his house in the “safe zone”. Several months ago as things were already heating up, his prayer request was, “…don’t pray that we will be safe, but that we will be faithful”. His heart is to provide a place and be a source of God’s rest. Shalom-home.
Imagine what would happen in our world today if all God’s people, the people who belong to His family, would have that heart? What would happen in Europe and Africa and Asia and America? There would not only be a place for scholars and refugees and migrants to find housing, but there would be hearts of reception. Imagine if we all prayed that we would be faithful rather than worry about what might or might not be safe? Imagine what would happen if we as God’s people took our fears and sat at the feet of Jesus? Jesus took His disciples on an outing through Samaria where they stayed for days so that they might know what it meant to be outcasts, travelers, migrants. There they were received, ate, and believed together with those they had despised. The redemption of their attitudes began at the Sychar well (John 4:1-43). Jesus brings deeply divided people together. It starts with me and you.
Perfect Love casts out fear.
1 John 4:18.19