Second Tuesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Church Undone: God So Loved the Egyptians
by Peter Schuurman
I teach World Religions at a Christian university in Ontario, and the course material often disrupts the Christianized world of some of the students. For many, taken-for-granted notions about other religions and their adherents are shaken up, and mostly in a good way. I often hear testimonies from students who are surprised at the deep convictions of others. Just yesterday one student said to me, “I believe that Christianity is the One True Way. But having met some Muslim women on the mosque visit, I now realize they believe Islam is the One True Way. In fact, I bet most religious people think their faith is the One True Way.”
She looked at me, consternated. “I’m not sure how to prove I’m right.”
She was coming Undone. When we shift from “my faith is reality” to “my faith is my way of seeing reality” something has been shaken loose.
This is where our book Blessed are the Undone starts. Our interviewees shared a common trajectory, and it echoes what others have shared of their experience in some church traditions. We grow up in church, or we come to church as converts, and we see the church as God’s House, and the minister as God’s Leader, and fellow members as God’s People. Outside, is the World, and we don’t mean Creation, but some churches would say the Lost, Unbelievers, and Non-Christians. Inside, we speak of love, truth, goodness, and beauty, and figure we have a special pass to God’s heart that others do not have.
While Jesus Christ is certainly the Way to God’s new community, we can easily mistake the Church as the Way, the Truth and Life, and overlook the uncomfortable fact that the church is riddled with miserable people who get moody, disguise their broken family life, and compete with each other. The doctrine of sin’s pervasiveness and the reality of the LONG road of sanctification get overshadowed in the praise and worship and sometimes unspoken self-congratulation of the pew.
This is not everyone, but it was the general mindset of those we interviewed for our book.
Conversely, our consciousness of what some theologians have called, God’s common grace, is weak. Common grace states that God preserves the entire world by his providence and allows for truth, beauty, and goodness to appear all over his good but fallen creation. This often gets lost on us. So we are surprised by the lectionary readings when we read:
“And the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians and the Egyptians will know the Lord… and he will listen to their pleas for mercy and heal them.” (Isaiah 19:21,22).
Recall who Egyptians were for Isaiah’s audience. The memories of slavery do not fade easily. This passage must rattle some deep resentments, not to mention the idea of being God’s chosen people.
Consider this: two things may lead to our undoing, for good. First, we start to see the graciousness and hospitality of our Muslim or Hindu neighbour and suspect that God may actually be present to them in some way. We testify that God is everywhere, and we know they bear God’s image, but it still startles us to consider this divine breach of our presupposed boundaries to his operations.
Secondly, we may be rudely awakened to the dark side of the church by any number of disruptions: gossip, cliques, closed-mindedness, or even abuse by a member of the clergy. Our pristine view of God’s Leader guiding God’s People in God’s House is shattered. Instead, we hear the humble words earlier Isaiah in chapter 6, and we say, “Woe! I am undone! Because I am a man of polluted lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of polluted lips…” (GNV).
Soon, we start to see sin where we did not expect it, and we start to see goodness where we assumed it was absent. No less as we near Christmas. We hear the angel say to the shepherds, “I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.” As good news and joy spread we hear the “all people” with a different ear now. God’s borders are not our borders.
Then in Epiphany, when we hear about the Wise Men from the East, and know them to be uncircumcised astrologers who see God revealed to them in the stars, what we call general revelation, it makes sense. Of course. God is bigger than we assumed. Creation speaks of him even at night.
This Advent, we can be inspired to partake more deeply in “the divine nature” and thus “make every effort to supplement our faith with virtue” (2 Peter 1:4,5). The virtue in question here may be a keener discernment of God’s operations and a disregard for our easy categories. If this virtue spreads through our faith community, we can more truly become what God intended the church to be — a foretaste of his kingdom of grace and truth.
The Psalm for today states that “Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy” (26:6). Becoming Undone is a disturbing unravelling of our precious misconceptions of God’s presence and passion for his world. The stories Angela and I heard in preparation for the book involved tears, tears that sometimes returned as they recounted what was most often a form of church hurt.
That they will all reap “with shouts of joy” was not obvious. Having your taken-for-granted worldview dismantled is unpleasant at best. Wilderness remains the most common metaphor for those who describe their faith deconstruction. But there can be a sense of liberation that comes with leaving erroneous, unhelpful, and restrictive notions of God’s operations behind. There can be “streams in the Negeb desert!” (Psalm 126:4) The student mentioned at the top of this page stood on the verge of an epiphany, and epiphany is an experience we might have in common with the Wise Men through this Advent. God is here.
Jesus Christ is Good News that can be great joy for all people. God is not far off: he has come close to us in the human mirror of Jesus of Nazareth. He comes for the religious types, for wise people of all colours, and to launch his church to carry on the Message: he so loved the world, that he came for the Egyptians, too.
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