Those of you who know me know that I am a curriculum nerd. I love scope and sequence. I will happily read syllabi. So I’ve been thinking a lot, for the past nine months, about the overall shape and direction of this fellowship - the Newbigin Fellowship - we have all just completed. What’s the internal logic? Where are we going? What are we hoping to achieve together? And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually not unlike Dante’s journey in the Inferno. Yes: I just compared the Newbigin Fellowship to going to hell.
I know it’s not super fashionable to be into books about hell these days, but I used to teach the Inferno to twelfth-graders, and it was maybe one of my favorite books of the year. I love it in part because it’s just really fun to read — there’s scatological humor, three-headed dogs, really terrible people getting what they deserve, and a few surprise popes in some rotten situations — but, more seriously, because it’s not actually a book about hell. If you take the entire Divine Comedy all together, I think what you see is actually a portrait of someone who is discovering what it means to be in Christ. The journey to that discovery is a painful one that involves descent, reorientation, and an ultimate rest in the love that is the absolute foundation of all of reality. Again: not unlike what we have been doing together this year.
For those of you who haven’t read the Inferno (or who haven’t read it since you underlined the gross parts in high school): the poem opens with Dante waking up, lost, in a dark wood. He writes:
When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was, that savage forest, dense and difficult which even in recall renews my fear: so bitter — death is hardly more severe! But to retell the good discovered there, I’ll also tell the other things I saw. I cannot clearly say how I had entered the wood; I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path.
Dante is telling the story of the human condition: of how we fall asleep to ourselves, to God, and to the world around us. By the time he wakes up and realizes his predicament, he has simply wandered too far. He tries to escape, only to find his way blocked on every side. The only way out is by going down; the only way to wake up is to open his eyes and heart to the very worst of himself and the human condition, and then travel through to the other side in search of some hope. He doesn’t do it alone, though: a guide is sent, who becomes, as they travel, his friend. Virgil leads Dante down into hell, protects him, teaches him, and ushers him safely out and back into the light.
Along the way, something interesting happens. He encounters the worst of humankind and what we can do to one another, in descending order. Nearest the top of hell — closest, in his cosmology, to heaven — are the sins that come out of disordered love. As he travels deeper down, he encounters those who committed violence, and then at the very bottom of the abyss are those whose sins were rooted in malice. Thought we may think of it as simple mean-spiritedness, in Dante’s understanding malice is a way of being that undermines the very ties that hold people and creation together. It undoes the bonds of love and community, and creates the conditions for their impossibility. It is, I think, the 13th century Italian word for “systemic” sin. Dante has to look each of these sins in the face, understand their wrecking power for the communal life of the city he loves (Florence), and then walk bravely past in the hope that he can come out on the other side.
As he travels, Dante also encounters his own fear, complicity, resistance, and despair. This isn’t a voyeuristic journey that glories in the punishment of others; it is an honest description of the only true path to genuine deliverance and life in Christ. In the Inferno, Dante is literally following in Jesus’ footsteps; in the process, his heart and mind are slowly conformed to Christ’s. He only gets to the final encounter of Paradise, where he is held by the “Love that moves the sun and other stars” by following where Jesus leads: into death and out again, until he realizes that he has been held in Christ’s love all along. I don’t think this is actually all that different from what we’ve been doing this year.
We’ve spent the year being ushered by our own guides into some dark places. James Cone and Austin Channing Brown refuse to let us shut our eyes to the American church’s complicity with the sin of white supremacy. Ivone Gebara asks us to explore the connections between our faith’s patriarchal history and the environmental depredations visited upon the poor. Randy Woodley calls out clearly how the silencing of Native American voices and their traditions of the Harmony Way have impoverished Christian theology and practice. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Lisa Sharon Harper, and Christian Smith have all challenged the ease with which we bring cultural assumptions to our Bible reading, and the harm those can do when unexamined. And the Enneagram! We’ve all gotten to spend some time exploring why we do all the right things for all the wrong reasons — and then had to stop hiding and start sharing it with one another. We’ve had challenging readings, difficult (and sometimes painful) conversations, had to sit in silence with ourselves, and traveled into the darkness in our world and in our own hearts.
For that reason, I think we’re especially well situated to hear these words this morning from Paul, and from Jesus. What we’ve been doing together this year, whether consciously or not, has been a period of intentional practice — an apprenticeship even — of being “in Christ.” I’d like to explore together briefly three things that this fellowship has hopefully helped us embody: we have been pushed into waking up to the notes of sin, death, and disorder in the church, the world around us, and ourselves; we have been given the gift of time and one another to practice reorienting our hearts and minds; and now we are sent out, as Paul says, as “ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.”
First a confession: I know that phrase may be awkward or even a little tacky for some of us. I don’t know about you, but having grown up in the church I’ve mostly heard the Scripture passages we just read as active exhortations: you are an ambassador for Christ! Go represent Christ in everything you do! I always vaguely visualized this as a sort of diplomat-for-Jesus: when I hear “we are ambassadors for Christ,” my free association immediately goes to ambassadorial suits and ties, which makes me think of the Mormon missionaries who used to come to our door, which makes me think of door-to-door proselytizing and Evangelism Explosion!, which makes me run in the other direction. I was never a very good ambassador for Christ: I did have a t-shirt in junior high which showed Jesus slam-dunking the devil, which is probably a diplomatic fail. And I did go to See You at the Pole once in high school, but it was mostly because I hoped a boy I liked on the basketball team would be there.
I actually don’t think that’s what Paul is talking about here. Let’s back up and look at the beginning of the passage, starting at verse 14: “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.” We can only be ambassadors for Christ if we are in Christ. And to be in Christ means to be united to Jesus in his death and resurrection.
Christians of a certain stripe like to harp on the first clause of that sentence: “we are convinced that one has died for all.” But I’m more interested in the second: “therefore, all have died.” What Jesus did for us, Paul is saying, is more than some representative transaction in the sky where God put Jesus in one accounting box, put all of humanity in the other, and found that Jesus’ death somehow cancelled all the red ink on the other side. We’re all in the same box together: because Jesus is fully God and fully human, each and every one of us is included in and has passed through his death and resurrection.
What does that mean? Robert Farrar Capon, in his essay on the parable of the Prodigal and his brother, puts a great line into the father’s mouth. You remember the parable: the younger son wishes his father dead so that he can come into his inheritance, which he promptly squanders. The younger son returns home, dead now as a son and wishing only to subsist on his father’s land as a servant, but the father completes his undignified self-abnegation by gathering up his skirts and running as fast as he can to embrace and reinstitute his son to his place in the family. When the older son complains to his father about the party and the fatted calf, Capon imagines the father responding: “Look. We’re all dead here and we’re having a terrific time.” I have died, he imagines the father saying, at the very beginning of this story! And your brother certainly threw his life away. The only one pretending he has anything to defend and maintain is you. Knock it off!
Capon continues:
“The classic parable of grace, therefore, turns out by anticipation to be a classic parable of judgment as well. It proclaims clearly that grace operates only by raising the dead: those who think they can make their lives the basis of their acceptance by God need not apply. But it proclaims just as clearly that the judgment finally pronounced will be based only on our acceptance or rejection of our resurrection from the dead. The last judgment will vindicate everybody, for the simple reason that all are dead and risen in Jesus. Nobody will be kicked out for having a rotten life, because nobody there will have any life but the life of Jesus. God will say to everybody, “You were dead and are alive again; you were lost and are found: put on a funny hat and step inside.”
(For those who find this disquieting, Capon goes on to observe, “If, at that happy point, some dumbbell wants to try proving he really isn’t dead…well, there is a place for such party poopers. God thinks of everything.”)
If this is true, we have a terrible and beautiful sort of safety. If Jesus really is fully God and fully human, and if he really did die and carry our humanity safely through into new and eternal life, then we can wade into deep water. We can enter into an honest reckoning with ourselves, our world, and our complicity in the brokenness all around without fear or despair. I think we tasted a little bit of that this year, in some of our readings, practices, and conversations. If we’re all dead — if none of us has anything to prove or justify — then we have remarkable freedom to create space for honesty, exploration, conviction, repentance. There’s nothing we’ll discover that can undo us. We’re all dead, and we’re having a terrific time. I wonder if that is a glimpse of what Paul means in verse 17 when he writes, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” If we are dead and risen in Christ, then we have a new way of being that can hold space without fear, that can converse without retreating into self-protection, that can accept challenge, correction, and previously unheard voices with grace, curiosity, and hope. I hope at least once this year each of us has tasted a moment of this new possibility, this new creation.
And this, I think, is where we can pick up with verses 18 and 19: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.”
Reconciliation is a word that Christians love, and with good reason. But I’m not sure we always use it well. Sometimes we positively misuse it, like when we envision reconciliation as simply bringing opposing voices together as equals or treat alienated parties — as in racial reconciliation — as sharing the blame when it really falls squarely on the shoulders of those in power. In a blog post about five years back, Austin Channing Brown wrote about racial reconciliation:
“Here’s what many think reconciliation looks like: 1. Having friends of color. 2. Having diverse congregations. 3. Serving in justice ministries. 4. Hiring a person of color. I know this is going to be a little disheartening, so I am just going to say it. None of these things fall under the umbrella of reconciliation without one very large precondition: justice. That’s right. You could have an Asian friend, attend a diverse church, read to Latino children after school, and hire a Black speaker for the conference you’re planning — and still you may not actually be practicing reconciliation in your life. Why? Because none of these things require the presence of justice, equality, shared power.”
She goes on to say, “Reconciliation requires far more than hugs, small talk, and coffee dates. Being nice is well…nice, but it is not reconciliation. Reconciliation is what we do as we listen to hard truths from the marginalized among us. As our friends point out how troubling our words have been, how hurtful our actions have been, it’s our reaction that determines whether or not we are practicing reconciliation. Drinking in the words. Sitting in the pain. Committing to understanding. Committing to doing better. Desiring the hard truths because they lead to growth. These are sign posts on the path of reconciliation. It’s spending time in each other’s spaces - physical space, head space, heart space. And it’s creating shared space where both can breathe freely.”
Brown’s words actually call to mind Paul’s words in Philippians 2: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” This, of course, is right before he goes on to quote an early hymn that praises Jesus for emptying himself and pouring himself out for us. When God is reconciling the world to himself, in Jesus, he is doing something very much like what Austin Channing Brown describes: Jesus spent time in our physical space, our head space, and our heart space, then created a shared space — his body — where humans and God can exist freely and in unity forever.
For the past nine months, we have been given the gift of time, of space, and of one another to practice this as well. We haven’t shared our stories or read a grouping of diverse voices merely as an academic exercise; this has been a practice in discipleship, in following in the way of Jesus. Some days we may have done it well; others we may have resisted listening or understanding. But this fellowship has been an opportunity to create spaces where we practice reconciliation with the authors we have read, with one another as we bring our whole selves and stories to the conversations, with ourselves as we have sat in silence and contemplation, and with God who has been holding us in love every moment of the way. We’ve practiced, and failed, and practiced again. This is the beginning of a ministry of reconciliation, and the risks are real: opening and making space for others is really hard and exhausting. It’s an invitation to be at best unsettled and at worst undone. But our shared faith confesses that the foundation of reality is a reconciling, other-regarding, self-emptying love — so in our own small movements, on couches and in living rooms with (my) noisy cat, we have begun to step out of the delusion of self-preservation and into real, eternal life.
And now we get to go out of those shared spaces and into the many, many places where God has called us to be. We get to be ambassadors for Christ, and here is where that word begins to make more sense to me.
When an ambassador goes to a foreign country, she goes as a representative of her homeland. Some of that representing happens in formal settings, where she advocates for her home — like when she protests an unjust detention of one of her citizens in that foreign country, or meets to negotiate treaties. And some of us are called to that sort of “ambassadorial” work: to stand and speak publicly on behalf of our homeland, of Jesus’ kingdom and his ways of peace and justice. But the ambassador isn’t just an ambassador when she’s wearing her suit jacket and in front of a camera. She is the embodiment of her country wherever she goes in that foreign land. She carries its customs and ways with her into restaurants, into the homes of the locals, into the schools where her children are educated and the conversations she has with her neighbors. Her tie to her home is a part of her; she is, in a way, its physical embodiment in a faraway land.
All that we have done together this year has been practice for this work. The Newbigin Fellowship isn’t an evangelism program; it isn’t even a “training” or “leadership” program. At its best, it is an intensive practice in learning to live in Jesus’ country so that we can carry his customs and habits with us into every space we inhabit. Much of our work this year has been, quite simply, a practice in love: we have shared our stories with one another, and attempted to make space for everyone else’s stories as well. We have tried to listen charitably to one another, to voices that have been new and challenging, to ourselves, and to God. Hopefully we’ve practiced a little intellectual humility, and found ourselves surprised and renewed by the result.
The question now is, how do we take the posture and practices we have been cultivating for the past nine months into the rest of our lives? Because I firmly believe that if we show up quick to listen, curious, open-handed, always searching for genuine reconciliation especially when it will cost us, then we are living as the ambassadors of Jesus of Nazareth, whether we’re comfortable with that label or not. I’m also still evangelical enough to believe that that is how the gospel makes its way through the world and invites people in to know and love Jesus — not through an explosion of evangelism, but more like slowly rising yeast or scattered seeds. It’s our job to not kill the yeast with boiling water, or stuff the seeds under our beds and leave them to rot — but God’s life and God’s love will do the work when we let them move through our hands.
In one of the very first books we read this year, Lesslie Newbigin wrote that “the missionary act of the church is the exegesis of the gospel.” In other words, the call of those who gather around the Lord’s table isn’t to announce information but to explore the meaning of their story together. In the same passage, Newbigin says, “We have to name the name and tell the story. But we do not yet know all that it means to say that Jesus is Lord.” And so we begin with humble, optimistic curiosity in every corner of our lives, asking, “how is Jesus the Lord here? What is he asking of me? How can I show up, rooted in and holding out his grace and love (in this place where he already is)?”
This is going to look different for each of us. Since I started our time together with a poem, I thought I’d end it that way too — though this one is much different from old Dante. It’s a poem, but for me it’s also a prayer: my prayer for all of us, that in the days and years to come we too will “act in God’s eye what in God’s eye” we are: beloved, in Christ, and in our unique belovedness each a note of grace and beauty in the world.
The poem is “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself, it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me; for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.