BY HUNTER GREENE
I want to begin my last column entry by thanking each of you for your support and encouragement the past three years. Regretfully, I will not be able to continue contributing to the Solution Column as I will be moving to Durham, N.C., tomorrow morning to attend Duke Divinity School in pursuit of my Master of Divinity. I have thoroughly enjoyed writing and thinking alongside you, and I hope and pray that my thoughts and perspectives have blessed you in some way. I also apologize for the length of this column…I wanted to save the best for last! I desire your prayers in this upcoming chapter in my life, and I promise to continue praying for the growth and healing of Carter County and its people.
Perhaps if the churches in our area are to have a hand in this growth and healing, we should be reminded that we will need a childlike faith. Jesus taught that those who are unwilling to become as little children will not be able to enter God’s Kingdom. If I am being honest, this presents a great challenge because I’ve never been too interested in becoming a child again since I have tasted the freedom and “wisdom” of adulthood. Due to their ignorance, dependency, and naivety, caring for kids is no easy task … especially when we adults try to force them into seeing and internalizing the social norms and standards that reinforce our status quo. But I think this is exactly the point that Jesus is trying to make. Jesus realizes that most people grow into adulthood having replaced their vibrant imagination with rigid structures, standards, and rules because being an adult means that you live in the world based on how it’s supposed to be.
Assuming the world is all about winning, power, and control is exactly the problem that we find in the book of Genesis. Genesis 11:1-9 reads, “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”
We find that as people gathered together after the flood that they had big plans to make a name for themselves. They were building for the sake of glory, honor, and prestige … not all that different than the world we live in today. People for millennia have been placing their faith and trust in their own abilities and visions rather than in God’s. As Walter Brueggemann states, “Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger.” Imagination is a danger because it threatens the status quo in which we all find ourselves comfortable. We don’t want to imagine a different world where we aren’t the powerful and the privileged because being the winners means we aren’t the losers. Therefore, we have given our most creative minds the task of building and implementing a social order where our power and privilege are protected at all costs. We have figured out how to build a bomb so big and so powerful that we can annihilate entire cities, but we have yet to figure out how to feed and clothe entire cities, including here in one of the richest countries in the world. We have figured out how to help one man become worth $160 billion dollars, but we have yet to figure out how to help 3.4 billion people earn more than $5.50 a day. We have figured out how to build churches, buildings, and skyscrapers that touch the sky, but we have yet to figure out who to provide shelter and a home for every human being. It seems to me we are still trying to make “names for ourselves.” Perhaps our Tower of Babel, our building project of vain glory, comes today in the form of inequality, oppression, subjugation, and manipulation.
While the world furies around us trying to touch the glory of the Heavens, we should be reminded that our God “came down.” We may use our politics and economics to make ourselves gods, but the God still rules and reigns in the universe. Given the language in Genesis, I couldn’t help but think about another time in Scripture when God came down amongst us to prove that His power will always confound our own. We find that God has come down in the personhood of Jesus Christ. Thus, when we see the life of Christ, we can see God’s desires for the human life being enfleshed, and we see that true power comes through the giving away of one’s self to others. We only live in God’s will when we relinquish our power over others, which I would argue is what the Holy Spirit has come to help us do. God’s Spirit helps us live in the world by resurrecting our childlike imaginations that we may live according to God’s Kingdom rather than by the rules and assumptions of our own governments and societies. Author and theologian, John McIntyre puts it this way, “The Holy Spirit is God’s imagination let loose on the world.” And if we have the living, breathing imagination of God residing in us then surely we should be the most creative people in the entire world. There should be no problem too big nor too hard that we aren’t willing and ready to attack with the creativity and love of our God.
We do this by trusting God’s resurrection power. We find in verse 7 that God takes action to save the people from themselves by bringing newness, and this is exactly what God has done in Christ and through the Spirit. God has entered into our world so that God may remake the world in His dreams and desires. Isaiah 43:18-19 reads, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” It is time that we forget the former things. I am afraid that if we continue to dwell in the past of what “church” used to look like, we will miss that God is wanting to do a “new thing” in our communities. This certainly doesn’t mean that we forget all those precious Saints who have went before us. If anything, I think it means that we can best honor them by living as citizens of God’s Kingdom. If we are willing to live into God’s imagination and vision for the world rather than our own, then God’s words in verse 6 best encompass our potential: “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” We must be sure and confident in the Kingdom that most do not see because when we live into God’s Kingdom, God brings newness and healing into the world. For example, in a 1955 publication, The American Friends Service Committee tell the story of Thomas Garrett, a Delaware Quaker, who helped slaves escape in the Underground railroad. Regarding his life, they write, “Men’s judgment was in error then (referring to slavery), as we believe it to be in error today, for it neglected to calculate the impact of stirring example. It is precisely the demonstration of this kind of unlimited faith that shakes men’s souls, and when this happens, the impossible moves nearer to the possible.” We have the power to shake men’s souls by living lives that embody a Kingdom which the world has rejected. Don’t be a thermometer which assesses the world’s temperature and trends, but rather, may we shake the world’s soul by being thermostats putting forth God’s agenda of love, justice, and equality before cold hearts.
So my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I bless you in my last column with the ending of a Franciscan Prayer I came across this past year: “May God bless you with enough foolishness…to believe that you can make a difference in this world… so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.”
(The Solution Column is provided by Pastor Brandon Young of Harmony Free Will Baptist Church and his associate.)